Diva Princess (Laurmani / DC3)

Latino or Hispanic is NOT a Race

As someone who minored in sociology and loves to read about anthropology, I like discussing topics such as culture, race, and ethnicity. However, to be honest, I am getting tired of having to explain what is in my stories. I thought putting these topics in my stories would be a fun way of educating people, but it often leads to confused comments. Therefore, I'm going to have to be more direct.

Firstly, when you ask an anthropologist or sociologist what is race, they will tell you that race is a social construct. There is not a hard line differentiating the races. However, historically, the main races used were Sub-Saharan African (formerly known as Negroid), Caucasian (formerly known as Caucasoid), Asian (formerly known as Mongoloid) and sometimes Australoid. DNA tests can very accurately pinpoint whether or not someone is Caucasian, Sub-Saharan African, or Asian. Native Americans (also known as First Nations, Inuits, American Indians, etc.) are usually classified with Asians because they came from Asia and not enough time has passed for them to be very genetically different from Asians. As a matter of fact, geneticists admit that there is a lot of error in trying to differentiate between East Asian DNA and Native American DNA. 

If you were to take a DNA test to determine your ancestry (I've taken them from two different companies), you will usually see Sub-Saharan African, North African/Middle Eastern, European, East Asian/Native American, and South Asian as the major categories. Under those categories, you might see sub-regions such as West African or Northern European. Under those sub-regions, even though these can't be determined very accurately, you will see some ethnic groups such as Fulani and Scottish/Irish. What you will not see is Latino or Hispanic because there is not a single genetic basis for being Latino or Hispanic. These are ethnic groups based on a common language. In all honesty, these are artificial ethnic groups because the terms were created by the U.S. government as a lazy attempt to categorize all of the peoples of Latin America despite them being of various races and cultures. This is why the U.S. Census and most applications asking for demographics have Hispanic listed under ethnicity rather than race. Unlike Latino/Hispanic, most other ethnic groups share a common ancestry. 

So, let me make this clear, Latino or Hispanic is not a race. Latino refers to people who are from the Spanish-speaking countries in Central, South, or North America or have origins in those countries. That is it. For tens of thousands of years, Native Americans have inhabited the Americas. The Spanish coming to conquer their lands did not magically change their race. Let's look at it from a different perspective. If the Spanish taking over most of South and Central America made Native Americans part of the Latino "race," then the British, French, and other Europeans moving into the U.S. and Canada would magically turn Native Americans into the European race, French race, British race, or some other race. By the way, French and British are not races in the modern sense. They are ethnic groups that fall under the Caucasian race. 

On to Africans. Millions of West Africans were brought as slaves to Central and South America and even to Mexico in North America. If the Spanish owning them as slaves magically turned them into the Latino "race," then African Americans would magically turn into British people because they were owned by people of British descent. But, we all know this is not the case. Just because a black person speaks Spanish and lives in Latin America does not mean that the black person is no longer West African or genetically related to the West Africans in the U.S. and non-Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean. A black person in the Dominican Republic is more genetically related to an African American than a white Argentinian. 

Spanish people are Caucasian just like other Europeans. They are closely-related to other Southern Europeans, such as the Italians. They do have some ancestry from white North Africans and some populations might even have a very tiny amount of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. There are a lot of white people in the U.S. with some Native American ancestry. There are even a lot of white people in the southern part of the U.S. with a small amount of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. However, we don't say that these people are not white or Caucasian, so why should it be any different for the Spanish? People who are almost completely of Spanish descent in Latin America are Caucasian. Moving to Latin America did not magically change their race.