OrangePhilosophy

Hispanic is Western!
I agree with you on the main points and I quote one key passage from the start:
the African philosophical tradition or the Chinese philosophical tradition had approaches to these questions that we don't have in the western tradition

But one has to understand that among the sources of Western thought there are the nations of the Mediterranean, Spain being one of the major contributors. And this is not limited to the time when Spain was the greatest power of Europe. Even the Hispanic Philiosophers of the Arabian period, such as Averroes, Ibn Gabirol and Maimonides, who are related to Eastern thought traditions, also played an important role in the shaping Western traditions and themes.

In the case of ethics, how can one ignore Barolome de Las Casas, born in Seville, who as probably the first White thinker to denounce racism as an evil, and the first human rights advocate? Montaigned was influenced by him.

Or what would be the recent history of Europe without José Ortega y Gasset?

The examples of the central role of Hispanic tradition in the West are abundant.

Right. I didn't want to detail the difference between Hispanic and Latino, but I suspect the person who said this actually meant the latter, which doesn't include the Spanish.

Let me ask you similar things to the questions I asked Matthew at Prosblogion: do you think there is a difference in how Nietzsche does metaphysics from how Hegel does metaphysics? What characterizes these differences—what is it about Nietzsche, or being Nietzschean, that makes metaphysics for a Nietzschean (anti-?)philosophy different from how Hegel, or a Hegelian, approaches metaphysics?

Could one's life experiences influence whether one adopts a characteristically Nietzschean or Hegelian metaphysic? And, would the range of one's life experiences be conditioned by the cultural experiences one has?

Sure, Latino, which is Latin has a broader sense, and includes countries that speak any Latin Language, such as French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc. So, talking about Latins include the French Philosopher Descartes, the most influential thinker among those who shaped the intellectual traditions of the United States. And, you are right, one cannot claim that only those who speak a Latin Language would understand Descartes.

I am new around here, so I might not understand all of the little, understood in-jokes, but you're being facetious, right, Tony?

Well, different philosophical views might influence what philosophical approaches you might take. I'm not sure what that has to do with the idea that one philosophical approach is tied to ethnicity. Maybe Kant would have supported such an idea, but I can't see how anyone nowadays could.

Life experiences, which aren't the same as philosophical views, might also affect what one is inclined to think, as I said in the post. That's not the same as tying it to ethnicity. I would never assume someone has any particular circumstances merely because of ethnicity. Anyone's experiences will be shaped by factors that go well beyond ethnicity, even if many people of any given ethnicity will have similar experiences. In the case of any given ethnicity, I think it's extremely likely that someone of that ethnicity raised across the world by parents of another ethnicity will have similar enough experiences that they'll end up with the same philosophical views as the predominant view among their ethnic group. Ethnicity and life experiences won't always line up. It's thus not ethnicity, therefore, but life experiences that might make the difference here.

I'm not even sure how life experiences would shape metaphysics in most issues anyway. Sure, religious views might. Certain views might be more attractive to someone in a theistic religion. Philosophers who have pretended a political philosophy ties to metaphysics might confuse people and therefore lead them to a Hegelian metaphysics because of political views, but it turns out you don't need those metaphysical views for those political views, so I don't see why even that should have to lead to any particular metaphysical view.

Well, although I like good humour and people with good humour, I do not know what I said that could be taken as a joke. At least, as far as what everyone knows about History is that the roots of the Western civilisation are Greco-Latino or simply Greek-Latin. Analytic Philosophy, which is dear to me and is sometimes called Anglo-American, comes exactly from the kind of Philosophy the Greeks (like Aristotle) and the Romans (the ones who created the Latin world) made. The notions of Republic and Democracy that framed the US political system come from these Greco-Latino roots.

And how can we forget that before the English colonosed North-America, the British Islands were colonised by the Romans. Hadrian's wall is one monument of old Roman Britannia.

Even these characters we are now using to type are letters of the Latin Alphabet. By the way, modern English itself was born out of the fibring of old Saxon and Norman French.

So, of course, if there is something called Latino Metaphysics, Ethics or Philosophy, it is exactly the Metaphysics, Ethics or Philosophy that is at the core of the intellectual traditions of the US and of Europe.

Tony, in the context of ethnic groups, the word 'Latino' unambiguously refers to people descended from the native peoples of Mexico, Central America, and South America. That's a linguistic fact.

Well, I know that there are people in the US who make such confusions, which are a reflex of misinformation. But, being a South American and a linguist myself (although not Hispanic), I know what the word means, and what does not.

Ascendancy is not a good criterion. For instance, about 95% of the population of Argentina are White, descendant from Europeans. While in Peru the majority of the population are Indians or half-Indians. Haiti, on the other hand, have almost 100% of African descendants. But they are all considered Latin American countries, for their official languages are Spanish and French.

Being descendant from a Native American People only means that one has Indian blood. For instance, Aztecan and Mayan are not Latins, although they are originally native peoples of the Americas.

Geography also does not mean much. Suriname is in South America and it is not a Latin American country. Belize is a country of Central America and is not a Latin American country. So the only criterion is linguistic.

It is good to make these things clear to general audiences who might be reading this. Of course, I know you know those things for you are a person with higher level of education, and by no means you would endorse ignorance or prejudice. But, unfortunately, due to racist propaganda there are those who confuse such terms with particular skin colour or race. You know, if one asks to a South American are you Black, White, or Hispanic one is already insulting such person, for it entails the false and extermely racist idea that Hispanics cannot be White or Black, or Mixed.

The important thing isn't the exact delineation of who counts as Latino. Every ethnic category has some problems with that sort of thing. That doesn't mean there aren't clear cases that we all recognize as clear cases.

The word simply refers to an ethnic group and not to anything inflenced by the Latin language. Use determines meaning, not etymology. I agree with you that the etymology makes no sense. Romanians would thus be Latino too. Latin music should include Adeste Fidelis but not Ricky Martin. Still, it's fallacious to derive a word's meaning from its etymology rather than its use.

Anyone who's ever had to fill out a U.S. census form knows that the U.S. government distinguishes between white and black Hispanics. It's not that hidden an idea. I don't see how it would be racist at all to be misinformed about this, though. It's certainly not propaganda to confuse being Hispanic and Latino. Those who do that aren't thinking carefully. Propaganda means they've thought it through well and want to mislead people.

Also, I wouldn't assume people with a lot of education have thought carefully about race and ethnicity. Some have, but I think many who even work in the area of race studies have extremely harmful attitudes about race. Some even recognize this about themselves and have to work hard to try to overcome it. Others are happy simply to point it out in others but ignore it in themselves. I don't think there's anyone in the U.S. (and maybe no one in the world besides those who haven't encountered other groups) who doesn't have at least some unconscious level of something like racism.

Jeremy,

I am jumping into your discussion, but follow this advice from one Brazilian: you have to correct the wrong use of terms. In Math there is something called set theory. Hispanic and Latin American are two subsets within the set of Latins, and Latin is not a subset of Hispanic or Latin American.
If you did not know that, it is ok, because nobody can know everything. But if someone explains that to you, you must stop using the word in the wrong way, because you are offending the other persons.
Would you like if someone said that Californians are only people who live in Beverly Hills? Or that if you are from New York you are not from the US?
This sort of ignorance only irritates the others. Don´t you realize that this is precisely why you Americans and Mexicans have fights all the time?

Caipora, you must be addressing the wrong person. I didn't say Latins are a subset or superset of any other set, because I didn't talk about Latins. Show me where I used the word in the wrong way. The only places I used the word 'Latin' were in the term 'Latin American' and to talk about the Latin language. So if you want to correct me, please correct something I actually said and not something you're imagining I said.

Californians are the only people who live in Beverly Hills, assuming by 'Californians' you don't mean native Californians but simply people who live in California. I can't think of any way to live in Beverly Hills without living in California.

Sure, Jeremy, nothing could be more misleading than confusion between ethnic group, language, nationality, skin colour and religion. Those things must not be packed together, stereotypes and misconceptions must not be reinforced. The repetitive insistence in the inaccurate use of certain terms, to perpetuate confusion, is certainly one form of propaganda against human groups.

The issues here are Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics and Science in general. If I understand your initial post, you were committed to the view that the aforementioned factors do not in principle create essentially different Philosophies. So you were committed to dispel some myths. That is good. And I think you should stick to the idea till the limit and encourage belief reviews.

My immediate reply to you was that not only I agree with you, but I also add that if there is something like Latino or Hispanic Philosophy it is Western Philosophy itself. And the Peoples of the Americas you label Latino, who are not the only Latinos around, apply such term to themselves in reference to their linguistic background, which, without doubt includes, Romanians, Frenchmen, Italians etc. (By the way Italians, Lusos French and Romanians everywhere consider themselves Latinos/Latins/Latines too). And when Hispanic Americans refer to their Latino heritage they mean the very Greco-Latino/ Greek-Latin heritage that is the core of the Western Civilisation. After all, the Countries of the Americas are still part of the West, albeit the constant economic penury of the majority of their population.

However the term 'Latino' in other languages might be used, we're talking about the English word. The usage in the U.S. pretty clearly excludes Romanians, Italians, and any other Europeans who don't have some origin in the Americas. That's a linguistic fact. Maybe its etymology involves bad motivations, ignorance, or some other morally negative component, but so do most terms about racial groups. That doesn't mean they don't refer to the groups people use them to describe.

Do you really think the entirety of what's called Latin culture in Latin America is from the Spanish and Portuguese cultures? There's clearly that influence there, but I'd be very surprised if that was the only influence. Barbados is as influenced by slave traditions as it is by English culture, and the same is likely to be true of any culture that formed at the meeting point of two very different cultures.

The usage in the US by whom? By Latinos themselves? Or by People who have prejudice against them? Latinos themselves do not think only Spanish speaking immigrants are Latinos. Those who do not understand what they mean, who do not listen to them or who hate them use the term in any other way.

In Latin America as in the US there are many cultural influences, but the main cultural influence in the whole Western hemisphere is the centuries old Greek-Latin heritage. Even in New Hamburg they know that.

By Latinos themselves? Or by People who have prejudice against them?

That's a false dilemma if I've ever seen one.

By no means that is a false dilemma.

Let me just add this. The countries of the Americas are all multi-racial/ multi-ethnic. It is completely false to say that the persons from one particular country are one ethnic group. And, as such, it is impossible to say that persons from different countries form one ethnic group. But even different ethnic groups may share some things in common, which do not make them the same ethnic group.

Latin-Americans know that the Greek-Latin core of Western heritage is greatly admired, and when they refer to their common linguistic background and their common cultural roots they convey one simple message: that they by no means come from lesser or minor cultures, that, on the contrary, they partake of the most admired cultural origins of the Western world.

When one tries by any means to severe them from their Classic Western roots, one not only make the word Latino senseless, one is trying to deprive them from what they consider their pride, one wants to remove their glories.

The only way it's not a false dilemma is if every single person who is not Latino has prejudice against Latinos. That's the sort of thing you can't prove. There's no way you could establish it empirically, so it is clearly an a priori assumption, one with consequences that I think are incredibly harmful.

I do believe that there are ways everyone is influenced by racist narratives and unconscious influences against someone or other, but I don't think there's any reason to think of every person that they will have biases against every other group, and I certainly don't think we can say of any group that everyone else has a bias against them.

The idea that Latino or Latin is a race or ethnic group is the most absurd idea I heard in my life. I never believed that there could be somebody who could think it. I do not know how can somebody even consider discussing it. That is why Americans and Mexicans never get along with each other.

It is better to play counter-strike than discussing it.

I never said anything about Latinos as a racial group, though many Latinos do think of themselves as a race (or, more accurately, The Race: La Raza).

Lots of empirical facts about language usage might seem absurd to someone doing armchair linguistics. For instance, people call someone addicted to work a workaholic based on someone's being addicted to alcohol being called an alcoholic, but there's nothing about the root '-holic' that should mean "addicted to". That's pretty absurd, but it's a linguistic fact, and the word means what it means despite the absurdity.

Jeremy,

I would not say bias necessarily, rather perhaps common misconceptions and historical inaccuracy behind misunderstood terminology. (1)

Back to the main point of this thread, the whole issue of whether the aforementioned factors shape philosophical views may have to do with more institutional and collective practices than with individual characteristics. According to those who associate different points of view with cross-cultural variation,there are alleged differences in the manner distinct traditions perceive Philosophy and the disciplines directly related to it, such as Metaphysics, Logic and Ethics. For instance, it has been noted that in Japanese tradition Logic and Ethics had been the same thing, i.e., Japanese Philosophers used not to distinguish them. In the Greek Latin tradition due to Aristotle, Plato and others, Ethics is something distinct from Logic. After WWII Japan became more influenced by the West and Japanese scholars started doing a kind of Logic that is akin to our own.

Now, it may be argued that perhaps the whole issue is about these two vital differences between some Sino-Nipponic schools of Philosophy and the Greek-Latin ones may be just due to an unfortunate mistranslation of terms. But, what do Westerners do in analytic Philosophy when they apply Logical formalism to the study of Ethics? Can we say that the method Japanese Philosophers employed in their work had absolutely nothing to do with maieutics? In one or another, all these traditions find points of convergence. And if we can find features of a particular culture in the work of some Philosopher, we also often find that his thought transcended the prevailing mentality of his time and place and even introduced innovations.

(1)At least, I would not accuse you in particular of intended bias.

Caipora,

The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges once said that he "never saw a South-American", that he "only knew Europeans". Brazilians do not accept such simplist view. We Brazilians say that the only true South-Americans are the Indians that live like Indians, the rest of the population are the product of European colonization and mixture of cultures.

I say that at least the Sciences and the Philosophies we have in Brazil and in the rest of Latin-America were brought from Europe. So the Latin-American scientific community is still a part of the European scientific community.

But you cannot expect Americans to understand this state of affairs. Americans do not know much about the geography, history or social sciences, they simply do not understand we in our continent are all former colonies, that in the American continent we are all mixture of cultures.

Well, in the case of Latin-American urban cultures, the convergence with Europe in fields like Technology, Science and Philosophy is mainly (but not only) due to the Greek-Latin heritage that was implanted into the American Hemisphere throughout colonisation. Which is to say, in our case we can talk about influence by the former metropolis. But this cannot be the only reason for convergence and divergence in specific or philosophical issues.

Take for instance one major topic in all Philosophical and Scientific traditions, that has even had repercussions in Cosmology, Metaphysics and Theology: the origin of the Universe. In the book called The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang, Marcelo Gleiser (from Dartmouth) shows that very different cultures, which had been separated from each other for centuries, have developed similar myths respecting the origin of the Universe. Curiously, in the same book, he makes a comparison between scientific theories and shows that the several scientific theories bear much resemblance with such myths. And mind that such theories were proposed many centuries after such myths have been told, and the scientists that advanced these theories had probably never been in touch with the respective similar myths. In such cases, one cannot think that convergence of ideas is due solely to historical influence. There is more than that.

First of all on the 'what does latino mean' debate it isn't like we don't have evidence at our fingertips. Go do a search for latino on CNN and find me a usage that doesn't mean someone from the America's south of the US or their descendents (there is a little ambiguity in the term). Or take a look at the following result from define:latino on google

All persons having their origins in the people of Mexico, Central or South America, or the islands of the Caribbean. Although the literature tends to address Latinos as a homogeneous population, this group includes people from very diverse backgrounds, cultures, and traditions. The Census Bureau continues to use the term Hispanic, but Latino is the more accurately descriptive term of choice within the northeastern area of the United States. Latino does not include persons whose origins are in Spain.

Or this one

Latino refers to people living in the US of Latin American nationality and their US-born descendants. Latin America refers to countries in South America and North America (including Central America and the islands of the Caribbean) whose inhabitants mostly speak Romance languages, although Native American languages are also spoken there. Most frequently the term Latino is restricted to immigrants from either Spanish or Portuguese speaking countries and their descendants, but the French-speaking

Apparently the term is slightly ambigous but probably has an ideal exemplar in a hispanic spanish speaker. In any case it clearly refers to some subset of people descendent from American's living south of the US. You can dislike this usage and even rail against it but you can't claim it does not exist and unless you somehow believe it is possible for a word to be consistantly used to mean X but really mean something else this is what it means.

Well, prejudice starts with stereotypes, misconception and ignorance and is perpetuated by them. Stereotypes misconception and ignorance must be fought in order to end prejudice. The way CNN in most cases makes confusion with words reflects the will of the establishment to reinforce stereotypes and leave the public uninformed.

I fight these misconceptions with true information and insist in uncovering the misconception and ignorance behind the use of the term.

In this particular case, I had a duty to speak out loud. In denying that the term 'Latino' or 'Latin' comes from the heritage of the colonisers, French, Portuguese and Spanish, to say that these Countries have nothing to do or do not share with Western Philosophical thought and Scientific knowledge is the same to say that these persons are all ignorant and culturally inferior.

In this thread, whose discussion started with the idea of whether there is a Latino Philosophy, my intervention is to say that the Philosophy you think is American is inhereted from those who you call Latinos.

What if I said that the word 'Anglo' means only People from the Nort-east of the US and does not refer to the British, to the Australians, New Zealanders and others? The same idiotic inaccuracy exists when you try to restrict the term Latino to one subset of the whole. As someone said above, to say that Latino are only those who come from Hispanic Countries of the Americas is exactly the same as saying that only those from Beverly Hills are Californians.

If you like comparisons, here is another: do you think it would be accurate or fair to say that Jews and Jewish traditions have nothing to do with the Old Testament? The Old Testament is the core of Jewish tradition.
In the same manner the Greek-Roman roots of Western Philosophy, Science, Arts and Culture are the core of the traditions of those Peoples of the Americas who are Latinos. You cannot take it from them. Descartes, Pavarotti, Da Vinci, Cervantes, Virgil, Dante, Cicero, and others are their pride, and none can take it from them. Denying this evident connection is disrespecting them deeply.

For what it's worth, I couldn't agree more with what Tony is saying.

I'm french, I deeply agree too with Tony. I discovered recently what was the meaning of "latin/latino" in USA. For us, Europeans, there is no doubt, the latin culture is the culture that comes from the romance-speaking countries of Europe, and the countries that had a cultural heritage from them.
I read the civilisations model of huttington, and was deeply shoked to see that latin american countries were not part of western civilisation in his classification, and very very racist. English speaking countries only would be part of western in America ??! What arrogancy ! There is non-european influences in latin-america of course, but it is also the case of USA ! Or, in this case we should say that jazz, rock'n roll, rap, Rn'B, blues, etc.. are not western music because they have african roots !.. And that black Americans are not westerners because they are not from Europe... it would be very racist.
In latin america, almost all people speak a european language (a romance one), practice a European religion, and the majority of them are from Sounth european origins (mixed or not with others)... What is not westerner in them ?

When we hear that USA people don't recongnise latins as part of western culture, we laugh about such ignorance. Because western civilisation is born from latin and greek culture, and was later spread to northern Europeans people and their hears (USA, Australia, etc..)

If you have a doubt of the meaning of latin/latino (latino is just the spanish for latin); you can come and see the latin union website
www.unilat.org

You also seem to be misunderstanding my claim. I'm saying first that words mean what people mean by them. Regardless of whether a practice of fixing the reference of a term is immoral, the words still mean what they mean. In American usage, the word 'Latino' and the word 'western' get their reference from how people use them. The fact that there are more reasonable ways of using such words given their etymology is simply irrelevant.

Second, I do think there are immoral elements to how certain words have come to mean what they mean and how certain concepts have come to include what they include and what they exclude. For instance, in the mouths of some African Americans being black and being of western culture are mutually exclusive, even though American culture is highly influence by black American culture. To them, it's white culture. I think there's an element of immorality and an element of racism in why they have that attitude, and some of it is from immoral practices of whites and some from responses from black people that I think are immoral.

I'm fully open to there being such elements whether other groups are immorally seen to be in or out of some group or classification. None of that changes the reference of a term in U.S. linguistic practice. It just would mean the origins of that practice are immoral, and it might mean we have some obligation to seek to do something about that (but you can't just change the meaning of a word by fiat).

So, what could means "western" for you ?
And what is not western in latin peoples ?!

Take a look at the Wikipedia entry "Western world". It gives a pretty good sense of the semantic range of this term in the different contexts in which it's been used and the criteria involved. Sometimes it has to do with wealth and influence or power. Sometimes it has to do with the language or cultural background of a society. Sometimes it has to do with ethnic makeup. Sometimes it's primarily about geography. Take a look at how Foucault uses the term. For him it's synonymous with the social forces behind hegemonic rule over marginalized people in white, heavily European-influence countries. Is that racist arrogance on his part, or was it racist arrogance that he wanted to oppose?

Jeremy in face of all responses you got, the only attitude you can have is to stop talking like ignorant People. You are not ignorant, so you do not repeat their practice.

jeremy,

it doesn't explain why you don't consider latin-american countries as being part of western civilisation (and of what "civilisation" they would be part of)

You speak about the different rang of meanings that could be given to th term "western", but but don't say in what meaning YOU, you use it...

I never said anything even remotely related to Latin American countries not being part of western civilization. I'm not sure why you want me to defend a claim I didn't make. The only time I have talked about western philosophy was in contrast with African and Asian philosophy, both of which are clearly non-western in almost any sense.

I linked to the Wikipedia entry to show the semantic range of the term due to the fact that most commenters were talking about the term, to show that it has a wider semantic range than some of the commenters have assumed. If you want to know how I would use the term, the answer would be according to its semantic range. I'd use the word in ways consistent with its meaning, according to context. I'm not going to pretend that there's only one meaning of it, and therefore I'm not going to be picking one of the various meanings as the one I'll use.

A general information: the USA population is composed of persons whose ancestors either were Native Americans or came from Africa, Asia and Europe. The same is true of Mexico, Canada, Colombia, Venezuela and other Countries of the hemesphere.

Now, the double standards:

International Football Star Pelé has been included in the Hall of fame of all sports and is counted among African-American (i.e.) legendary athletes. In such cases, we all share a common link to Africa, don't we?

Years ago there were some folks in the USA, concerned with the under-representation of Whites among the Basketball Stars, were looking for South-American players, such as Brazilian player Israel, to hire and take them to the States, in order to balance the picture. In the same manner, Brazilian, Uruguayan and Chilean orphans are targeted by organised crime in the Children market, to meet the demands of White couples in North-American and Europe, who are desperate to have Children and want White children. And now some say that Brazilian movie star Rodrigo Santoro may become the new symbol of the American (US) male. When it is convenient, we all have our roots in these Celtic tribes of Western Europe (Gaul, Britannia, Lusitania and Hispania). When it is not, some of us receive a vague and undefined stamp on the forehead.

Anglo-Saxons like Brooke Shields, George Clooney, Terry Hatcher, Phoebe Cates, Rowan Atkinson and others are so Blond that make José Feliciano, Cameron Diaz, Luis Miguel and Julio Eglesias almost look like Somalians. That is why one may draw the conclusion that Fidel Castro and Celia Cruz have the same colour and do belong to the same Cuban race.

Rock and roll and Blues are probably of Scandinavian background.

Please, I do not have to use more ironies.

Claudemir, Edison, Bernard, Caipora and Tony,

This discussion is not very normal. But if Americans want to think that latino is a race, they have to invent other new races too:

Taxi-drivers, this race you do not know where they come from;

Top-models, the principal characteristic of this race is that the women are all slim and seem to be hunger;

Bikini girls, they are part of a people that do not use many clothes;

etc.

It all depends on the illusions that your Philosophy accepts.

You might include bodybuilders and Democrats in the list above. Sooner or later, some Ronald Reagan is my hero guys will start asking nonse questions like:
Which race/ethnicity best describes you?

1. White Christian


2. Black Rapper/ Pop Star


3. Liberal/ Leftist/ Atheist/ Gay


4. Other

I never said we should endorse the practices that led to the current racial classifications. I never said the current racial classifications are good. I never said we should simply accept the current racial classifications as permanent. I simply said we have to acknowledge those classifications as the ones people do in fact use, or we won't be able to address the problems that have become tied up with those classifications. You seem to want to go eliminativist about racial categories, but that's the kind of thing that makes it impossible to deal with real social practices that are evil.

I'm not going to respond to any more straw man portrayals of anything I've said. This immature, trollish behavior isn't worthy of response. Throughout this whole thread you've ignored what I've actually said and pretended it was something completely different. You've decided to turn any post I write about race on my own blog, even ones that have nothing to do with Hispanics or Latinos/Latinas into a tangential comment thread on your pet issue. I'm not going to bite anymore. I didn't want to take it to this, but this is getting out of hand. I think six weeks of this has been enough. If you want to discuss specific issues, go ahead, but this general ranting, calling me names, and treating my position as this idiotic caricature you've come up with is simply unacceptable.

Beto, since you're new to this I'll assume your ignorance isn't culpable. Do you really think some highly contingent property such as being a taxi driver is anything like some much less contingent thing like belonging to a common heritage and ethnic background? It's only if you think of ethnic backgrounds as essentialist that you can talk as if being Latino is merely a mixing of ethnicities (though it involves that, among other things). If you take the ethnic backgrounds as they were hundreds of years ago when colonization took place and then assume that those ethnicities are what's still there in Latin America, it would be like saying the mixing couldn't have created a new ethnicity the same way all the mixing of Normans, Germanics, Celts, and everyone else who formed the origins of the English ethnicity really did form a new ethnicity.

Now there is the issue that different ethnicities are involved in different parts of Latin America, which is why if you really wanted to separate different ethnicities you'd need to do it in a more fine-grained way, but U.S. practice is to take the Latin American motto as it stands, to think of Latin Americans as La Raza, as many Latin Americans have insisted on.

There is no greater immaturity than ignoring that you offend someone and when someone asks you not to offend, you insist in the offence. It was you who started by saying that Latino is something of the same sort as being White or Black, and putting them out of the Western heritage. A lot of People are asking to stop and drop it, and you do not drop it.

Tony, I challenge you to tell me where I said being Latino is outside the Western heritage. I have searched up and down this page, and I just can't think of what is giving people this impression. Whatever it was had nothing to do with anything I said.

What I have said is that there are common elements to being black in the U.S. and being Latino in the U.S. Anyone with any experience in U.S. race relations knows that. I never said they're equivalent or perfectly analogous, just that there are some common elements. I'm not going to let people make false accusations about me in a public forum without correcting them. If that counts as not dropping it, then it's silly to expect me to drop it.

I think everything is a matter of Logic or absence of Logic.

If I say a sequence like "Football, Basketball, Volleyball...", the next item cannot be "ice cream". "Ice cream" is not a sport.

If you say races in a sequence like "White, Black..", the next item can be something like "Yellow" or "Indian". It cannot be "latino". I do not see the logic in your thinking.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the main judicial mark that shapes social reality worldwide. The Declaration states clearly that everyone has a right to a Nationality. This right, as any other rights ensured by the Declaration, is irrespective of Race or Colour. So, within the framework of Human Rights there is a clear cut distinction between National and Race. Those things cannot be confused.

The Declaration also makes the access to Culture a right and this is also independent of race. So Cultural Heritage, Nationality or National background, and Race or ethnicity are completely different and distinct things under Human Rights. To confuse such things in any manner for any purpose is not agreeable to the principles of Human Rights.

Having said this, I end my contribution to this discussion.

Beto, what is your account of what races are? Perhaps we just disagree about what it is to be a race.

Who has confused nation and color or culture and race? My wife and I are as different in color as two people can be, but we're both citizens of the same nation. We're from different cultural backgrounds as well, but I know people of different cultures raised in the same family and thus of the same culture. I had a friend in junior high and high school who was born in Colombia and raised by white parents. He's Latino, isn't he? I'm pretty sure he considers himself Latino and Hispanic. That would show that it's not simply a matter of culture.

I'm still trying to figure out what your complaint is. I know full well the distinctions between these things, and I insist on them. That shows me that whatever it is you're complaining about is not this or it's not something I've done, one or the other. Whenever I ask you, you refuse to answer but just say that I'm acting ignorant. You never say how except to accuse me of saying things I never said. Then people chime in and agree with you that people shouldn't say the things I didn't say. Then you say that that's evidence that I've said it, but the evidence is right before your eyes above, and I can't find myself saying the things you keep claiming I've said.

It is difficult to follow your thinking. You initially talk about things that are very common and then say that something that I do not understand. Let´s see:

You say you and another guy went to the same School. Many persons go to School. This is common nowadays.
The guy was born in Colombia.
Many persons are born in Colombia. Nothing special about this.
The guy was born in Colombia and was raised by white parents. Many persons born in Colombia are raised by white parents. This is because some Colombians are white. Nothing special about this.
Being white and Colombian is something as normal as being black and Colombian. Nothing special about these things.

Then you say: "He's Latino, isn't he? I'm pretty sure he considers himself Latino and Hispanic." And you conclude: "That would show that it's not simply a matter of culture." How do you draw this conclusion from the previous statement?

More: what does the color of the Colombian parents have to do with the second reasoning?

Oh, my friend's skin tone was definitely not within the range most people would count as white. My kids have a black mother whose skin is pretty dark, and their skin is much, much lighter than my friend's. People have looked at them and wondered if they are Italian or Hispanic/Latino (I'm simply reporting their judgments and their terms). He wasn't black either. His skin tone was more like the average Indian (from India, not Indian as in native American).

I was assuming that my pointing out that he was raised by white parents would carry the implicature that he himself was not white (or at least significantly non-white if one can be both white and significantly non-white, as some controversially believe). It wouldn't be worth mentioning that his parents were white if he were also white in the full sense. This guy is of Colombian origin, not white, and American by adoption to white parents. His culture is hardly Latino or Hispanic. He was raised in rural New England. Is he Latino? If so, then it's not simply a matter of culture. If not, how do you classify him racially in his American setting? Calling him Latino seems to me to be the best way to label his ethnic background.

You didn't answer my question. What is race?

I do not know your friend, I did not see him. So I cannot say what is his culture or his race.

Your thinking is this:
Take Angelina Jolie. Everybody knows her. Angelina Jolie has a skin tone that you may consider "not within the range most people would count as white". So you would say that she is not white. But you would say that is not black. So you conclude that Angelina Jolie is Hispanic. I do not understand this kind of thinking. It does not make sense.

It is the same as if you thought this:
I do not know what kind of name Pierce is. It is not English to me. It is not German. So I conclude that Pierce is a Catholic name?

I do not know if you are tall. I do not know if you are short. Then I conclude that you play piano?

This sort of thinking does not make sense at all!

I'm having trouble figuring out why anyone would think the way you present someone (i.e. me) thinking about Angelina Jolie. That looks to me like pretty muddled thinking. It doesn't make any sense. Wait, you already said that. So now I'm wondering what you're saying, because again I can't figure out where we disagree. You've accused me of saying things I didn't say. That doesn't tell me where we disagree. You've presented me giving arguments I wouldn't give. That doesn't tell me where we disagree. I just want you to state a thesis that you agree with that I disagree with (or vice versa) so I know what it is we're supposed to be talking about. Why is that so difficult?

Pierce is an English name, by the way. It's descended from the old Percy family. It's also a common verb in the English language.

So you think it's impossible to tell what race or culture is when I already explained what his ancestry is, what his cultural upbringing is, and what he looks like? I find that hard to believe. I think you're just dodging the question. I want to know if someone with the mainstream American culture of most white Americans can be Latino because of ethnicity.

Although I am not discussing the issue anymore, I can answer your last question:

In the case of your friend, the only thing that would make him a Latino would be his Colombian naturality, i.e., the fact that his place of birth is Colombia, regardless of his skin colour. If he was born of Colombian parents in the US and raised in the manner you said he was raised, and if he had no cultural ties with Colombia, whatsoever and he did not want to recover such ties, then by no means he can be considered Latino. He is a plain Yankee or North-Englander, whatever his colour is.

Now, I shall excuse myself from taking a look into this prolongued thread again.

I don't understand why American people are always callin Jenifer Lopez "Bomba latina". She's from United States, a country of anglosaxon culture. Her mother language is English, a germanic language (her spanish is very bad). Her parents are mulatos (miwed race people) from puerto Rico (a US territory). She has no links to no one mediterranean country...
Ella no es una "bomba" latina.

So Puerto Ricans can't be Latino simply because it's a U.S. territory? I guess the Latino population in the U.S. is 0%, then. Surely if anyone is Latino, the people of Puerto Rico would be among them!

The answer to your question is actually quite simple. In the context you're referring to, being Latino has to do with ethnic heritage. She has that. It's pretty silly to pretend that a word can't have a meaning simply because it doesn't have that meaning in your dialect (or in a completely different language, as is the case with some of this). This whole discussion reminds me of the people who debate whether you should call carbonated soft drinks 'coke', 'soda', 'pop', etc., as if one of those is the right term and the others are all wrong, and what's most shocking of all is that it was started by a linguist who should know better.

Jeremy,

I guess you are tired by now, and probably cannot argue with folks in a coherent way. But I read the things above, and I see what your general difficulty is:

You do not separate popular beliefs and misconceptions from genuine academic knowledge. There is an enormous difference between these things.

As a College student and researcher, you need to improve your argumentation, which is weak. But you also need to acquire solid knowledge in Humanities if you want to pursue something like a PhD.

In Humanities you cannot work with fictional figures, even if there is a strong vulgar belief in them. For instance, a scholar cannot talk about the sociology of old Atlantis, as if Atlantis was a civilization, because there was not any Atlantis. There are persons who believe in this story, but what they believe is not acceptable at academic level.

You have to improve not only your vocabulary, you do need to know more about the issues you want to investigate. You are in one University not in a bar around the corner.

It's kind of sad to see someone completely ignorant of my philosophical background talking in an obviously demeaning and condescending manner by telling me I don't know anything about things I've spent the last eight years of my life doing in a fairly rigorous program. What's worse is telling me I need to learn some basic critical thinking skills and then presenting an argument that exemplifies a pretty obvious fallacy of reasoning.

Your analogy fails because it doesn't acknowledge an important distinction. The Atlantis example has to do with getting the facts wrong. Someone can give a theory about the sociology of Atlantis and get the facts wrong because there never was any such place. I've been dealing with what words mean. Words get their meaning by how they're used. In different contexts, words can mean different things. One word can have a different semantic range in the usage of different speakers because different speakers have learned the word in different contexts from each other, and different usages of the word by the same speaker can also have different contextual senses. I might notice that one word's usage in one place doesn't match up with how it is used somewhere else. That's not getting the facts wrong, though. That's just not using the word the same way.

These are just facts about language. It's possible to use a word in a way that's not in accordance with what the word means. That requires using it in a way that's non-standard in the context of one's usage, but the way people in the U.S. use the word 'Latino' is the standard usage in the U.S. context.

The analogy with Atlantis is a good one, but not for the reasons you suggest. Those who try to do sociology of Atlantis, which never existed, are doing the same sort of thing as those who pretend that their own contextually determined meaning for the word 'Latino' is the only legitimate one. That pretended univocal meaning that the term has is a fiction. Therefore, it's silly to pretend that people in the United States don't know what the word means. The word doesn't mean the same thing in the U.S. as it means in some other places.

I repeat: this is not a theory about the origins, ethnic background, cultural patterns, or language similarities of any group of people. It's a statement about how a word is used. You might complain that a way a word is used in a dialect is not the same as how it's historically been used or is not the same as how it's used in the majority of the world, but that doesn't mean that usage is wrong in that dialect. In the U.S. you would never use the word 'torch' to describe what I call a flashlight, but in the U.K. it's fairly standard. The word 'torch' just doesn't mean that in the English I learned. It does mean that in the U.K. Why is it so hard to believe that the same thing isn't going on with the word 'Latino', especially when I've already acknowledged that the reasons behind this practice involved ignorance at one point. That doesn't negate what the word actually means. It just means the way it came to mean this doesn't make much sense.

See, this is something you do not know either. In many social sciences departments there are introductory courses in modern linguistics and joint seminars for anthropologists and linguists.
If you took any of such courses, you would know that usage is different from use in context and that usage does not determine the meaning of words, which linguists call lexemes and lexical items. The idea that usage somehow shapes meaning comes from old philology and has been discarded since structuralism (Saussure and others).

You have to ask a linguist about what other schools think, but linguists that work with anthropologists consider language a social-cultural and historical entity and say that lexemes have "historicity", something completely different from "usage".

Moreover, different conotations of the same lexical items are not only a matter of region of the persons. They are a matter of social status, level of education and ideology. In the case relevant to this discussion, it is clear that the person, who uses the terms "Hispanic" or "Latino" to refer to a race or skin tone, is uneducated or has a prejudice against Hispanics or both.

I am not condescending. I am just showing to you that at academic level you cannot reason and write just like one more newspaper columnist. The analyzis and the reasoning must be of a superior quality.

I'm not doing social science. I'm doing philosophy. I'm not doing structuralist stuff either. I've never read that stuff and don't find it interesting. I'm trained in the analytic tradition and have little tolerance for continental approaches in general (though I see some good in them but don't think it's worth the awful writing and terrible stuff mixed in with the good). So there's no way that I'm basing anything on structuralism, which is as far from my tradition as anything can be without being post-structuralist. Both post-structuralism and structuralism are the bad guys to an analytic philosopher.

I'll present the theoretical background I'm assuming, and if you have any idea what I'm talking about perhaps we can continue talking. Since this is a philosophy blog, it makes sense to assume readers know a little philosophy, so I will.

I think some sort of causal theory of reference along Kripke-Putnam lines is at least on the right track, and I'm firmly convinced about some high degree of externalism about content.

Racial and ethnic categories are, I believe, socially-determined categories that find their reference based on historical practices, including language practices, that I consider to include immoral practices. That doesn't stop them from referring to categories of people, even if there are borderline cases that don't fit the categories well. It also doesn't stop the terms from referring to groups that are largely picked out by skin color, bone structure, and hair type, which the social practices that are relevant based the classifications on. These are largely biological categories, therefore, though there are cultural elements as well, that are picked out by criteria derived from immoral practices. None of that changes the fact that they are real categories.

Now when you apply this to the U.S. situation with regard to the term 'Latino', it's pretty easy to see what falls out. Practices that were insensitive to the realities you people keep insisting on (that I've acknowledge multiple times now) formed a reference for the term in the U.S. That reference is a category that's classed as racial and that treats someone as Latino for being descended from darker-skinned Latin American locales, with some native ancestry enough to have darker skin than the average Spaniard.

You may point out that the social practices that led to this language phenomenon were immoral, as I've been saying from early in this conversation. You may point out that it's a good idea to try to change people's thinking so that their linguistic practices will change, but that's what I've been admitting all along.

You might say that most of the people who engage in the practice that fixed this particular reference of 'Latino' as ethnic or racial are uneducated and/or prejudiced. If that's so, it doesn't mean the term doesn't mean that in that dialect. It just means that someone from a working class background has a different dialect, and that's what the word means in that dialect. It's elitist to claim that that's wrong therefore.

I would dispute your elitist claim anyway, though. It's not just working class and/or prejudiced people that I know who speak this way, and it's certainly not just white people. My wife is black, and she's not from the U.S. She's from the Caribbean. She thinks the word means the same thing I think it means. She's run in all the multi-cultural/ethnic groups on college campuses, and she knows how people who consider themselves Latino in the U.S. use the term. They consider being Latino an ethnic category. All my students who consider themselves Latino or Latina have said the same thing about themselves. They consider their ethnicity Latino or Latina.

[The same is not true of 'Hispanic', and I never said it was. That designation in U.S. linguistic practice, particularly among those who lay claim to the label or to the label 'Latino/a', applies to those descended from Spanish-speakers, regardless of their race, and the U.S. Census forms reflect this by distinguishing between white Hispanics and non-white Hispanics.]

If you have any idea what I mean by this philosophical framework, perhaps we can continue. Otherwise, I just think we're going to talk past each other. I'm getting pretty sick of the elitism that seems to me to be driving this and the charges that someone who has a linguistic practice other than your own must be uneducated or racist. It would be different if I saw an argument against my position, but every time I see an argument it assumes I hold some thesis that I don't hold at all.

For what it's worth, the philosopher I learned the most from in terms of philosophy of race is Latina, was born in Panama, spoke Spanish at home, and is well-versed in the academic study of race, ethnicity, and culture. She's also well-versed in structuralism and post-structuralism, which I'm not well-versed in, and she accepts a modified form of post-structuralism without the complete lack of ability to criticize that she thinks results from Foucault's version of relativism. She learned analytic philosophy from analytic philosophers and has taught in a largely analytic department most of her career, with continental-friendly scholars joining her only recently, but her primarily publishing has been among continental-styled philosophers and cultural studies types, much in women's studies and race and ethnicity studies. She happens to agree with my general perspective on racial categories and sees her being classified as Latina as a simple fact of social practice in the U.S. that she can't change and shouldn't try to change. Because of the many social realities that come with being treated as Latina because of those practices, there are in fact some social realities she wants to resist. That can't be addressed without using the categories people in the U.S. use, so she insists that we use them.

I should point out that I once held the view all of you have been expressing, through college even. It was my further study of philosophy that led me to believe it was childish to insist that the word 'Latin' and its cognates could only refer to an ancient dead language for the same reasons that it would be childish to insist that 'butterfly' could only refer to a genuine fly that had some relation to butter. Now I realize that that's a bad analogy, because it would only work if there were some group that did use the word 'butterfly' in that way. A better analogy would be those in the U.S. who think the term 'midwest' can include Ohio and those who think it doesn't go that far. What settles that issue has nothing to do with being informed or ignorant. It has to do with different dialects.

If it does not bother you to add something to this discussion, I would like if you tried to understand how the Latin-Americans who read your post feel about the things you say or presuppose.

I give you one example: in Brazil there are some stereotypes about Protestantism. Some non-Protestants think that all Protestants belong to some ultra-conservative and fanatic sects, who do not watch tv, do not go to doctors when they are sick and do not read books other than the Bible.

Suppose that someone wrote something like this: "It does not matter whether John is Protestant or a Doctor". Then, in the middle of the discussion, he told you that Protestants are not Doctors, because Protestants do not accept Doctors or Medicine in general. What would you feel?

Then, mr. Jeremy Pierce and other Protestants patiently explain to that person that there are Protestant physicians and there are Protestants who go to doctors, because not all Protestants belong to the same sect. Surprisingly, this person instead of correcting her mistake simply tell you that in Brazil and other Countries "Protestant" means "fanatic people that do such and such things". How would you feel?

Then, others come and explain what Protestantism is, and this person refutes saying things like: that is etimology. And then she argues that she knows Protestants who told her that Protestants are those persons who do not watch tv, do not go to doctors when they are sick and do not read books other than the Bible, etc. How would you feel?

Nobody and no social group likes to be reduced to one stereotype that is based on just a part of that group. Specially, when the stereotype is an intentional charicature.

yes, the American US meaning of latin/latino tend to exclude the latin-European countries and peoples of the concept, while the concept precisely refers to those countries...
It limits the concept to stereotipical ideas like "tacos, salsa, hot beaches, brown non-white people", when, in fact most latin peoples (in Europe or in America are in the majority white mediterranean peoples, of romance language and catholic religions... All the exotic stereotypes that USA have about latin america are in fact limited to places like Mexico or the caribean, and completely foreign to latin origns (salsa is african, mexican food is mainly indian, etc...), and do not exist in most of latin american countries. what is called "latin music" in USA, is completly foreign of argentinean, chilean, Italian, portuguese or spanish cultures...

It would be the same if I said that english people are not anglo-saxons because they are not Americans.. And that because in my country the anglo-saxon culture is ONLY the culture from US..
I answere you that english are anglo-saxon only in a etimological way, what would think the English people, to who the anglo-saxon concept firslty refers ?

I think Beto and Latin European have pointed out crucial topics.

Beto,

The stereotype against Protestants in Brazil was even worse in the old days. Many assumed that if somebody was Protestant he was not Brazilian, and if he was Brazilian he was not Protestant. Pastors were often defined as "just Priests from the United States". It was an evident misconception, because being Protestant has nothing to do with being a national or a foreigner in a multi-religious Country.

So the sentence in the initial message:
"I cannot imagin what being Hispanic or African adds to ones analysis of material constitution"

Bears the premise that being Hispanic is being of a different race rather than white or black. It is a prejudice against Hispanics.

It could be re-written as
"I cannot imagin what being Brazilian or Protestant adds to ones analysis of material constitution", which would imply that being Protestant is a nationality different from Brazilian, which would be a prejudice againts Protestants.

There are people who are mixed of black and white and of white and indian and indian and black in the USA. Those persons also exist in Latin-America. Being mixed has nothing to do with being Latin-American or Anglo-American. Just like there are Protestants and Catholics in Latin-America and in the USA and Canada. I agree with you all guys:

Mass media and the internet do have the moral obligation to unmask and unmake such stereotypes, wherever they exist.

Beto, these cases aren't anything alike except superficially. What your case would require to be analogous would be that every person in Brazil and whevever else this were to take place who fits under everyone else's defintion of Protestant will deny being a Protestant the same way evangelicals in the U.S. will often not count themselves as fundamentalists even though some definitions of that term would count them so. If you were to claim such a thing without that being true (and it's not true) would sound silly, because it wouldn't reflect the actual language use in Brazil and whatever other unnamed countries engage in this practice.

If you genuinely had a situation like that, then yes there would be this weird pocket group among a very small population of people who simply engage in a different linguistic practice. In their language, the term 'Protestant' doesn't refer to the same group it refers to it most people's language. Then it would just be a matter of people realizing that this is a strange practice that hardly anyone follows, and maybe they'll acknowledge that how most people use the term it refers to a different group.

When the linguistic practice has diverged to the point of the largest country that speaks a particular language pretty much universally treats the word in a way out of step with its etymology, you don't count it the way you would when it's a small group using language idiosyncratically. The word has simply taken on a new meaning. It doesn't mean the old meaning is gone, but it has taken on a new reference class in addition in the mouths of the largest group of people speaking the English language. You may regret that. When I was in college I considered it stupid. It may have been thoroughly immoral practices that brought it about. What you can't do is expect people to pretend the word doesn't mean what it does in the U.S. simply because you don't like how it came about.

Also, it's not a caricature. Applying a word to one group rather than another is not caricaturing the other group because the word that other people apply it to are not all like the group it's applied to in the other setting. In the Protestant case, if it worked out as I said rather than as you said, the same would be true. People saying Protestants don't use doctors aren't caricaturing the people I refer to when I talk of Protestants. They're accurately describing the group they refer to by the term. What you're saying would be true if the way you described it were to happen, because the people who consider themselves Protestants in those regions don't accept that way the term is used, but that's not the case with the people who call themselves Latinos and Latinas in the U.S. They see it as an ethnic classification, even if many of them recognize (as I do) that it's somewhat arbitrary and lumps together a hugely diverse group of people (as do the labels 'black' and 'white', as does the label 'WASP' -- see below, as does the label 'Asian').

There are plenty of problems with attempts to classify people ethnically, and every system will fail in some important ways, but we're stuck with the labels people have used until we can work our way toward another system. This is the system we currently have in the U.S., and using those terms in a way that doesn't fit with the system just leads to sentences no one will understand. If people will treat all those they call Latino or all those they call Hispanic (which I realize are not the same, even in U.S. usage), then there's something in common to all the people called Latino or all the people called Hispanic. That's being treated in a certain way, and thus there's something that does lump such a diverse group together.

The anglo-Saxon analogy has the same things to say about it. If people were to use the anglo-Saxon term to describe an ethnic group of people who had mixed to the point of not being traced very carefully back to anglo-Saxon roots, then that would be what the word means. In this case, though, that's just about happened. In U.S. linguistic practice, WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) simply means white American of mostly European descent with enough English ancestry that one is not seen as primarily some other ethnic group, with some connection with Protestantism even if one is an atheist. That's a nice parallel case, then. When linguists or anthropologists are tracing out cultural or language roots, they have a more careful, technical definition, but ordinary use doesn't correspond to that. With Latinate culture and language, you'll see the same thing among linguists and anthropologists. The same is true of many terms like that. The racial classification Black connects people of widely disparate backgrounds, including those of African origin in the Americas, Africa, and Europe but also aboriginal Australians. The popular meaning of terms won't always match up with the technical academic tersm in some fields. I don't see the problem with that. It just seems like a linguistic fact.

Claudemir, the other arguments were faulty but at least based on arguments from analogy. I'm having trouble seeing why yours is anything but a non-starter.

The sentence you're quoting is my response to a claim I was disagreeing with. Someone had claimed that being African or being Hispanic might lead to an African metaphysics or epistemology or a Hispanic metaphysics or epistemology. Saying that that's false does not amount to treating being Hispanic as being a of any particular race. It's simply a response to the claim.

Besides, you're treating being African as a race, which it's not. I know more than one white African, and I know lots of people who are black who are not African. The race of most Africans is the same race as those black people, but the race is not African. Those are simply two adjectives that can describe someone, and all I said is that belonging to neither group guarantees that you'll take any particular metaphysical or epistemological view. Claiming I said anything other than that is reading into it your own presuppositions about what I must mean. If I said that being a rock or being a tree does not give something moral rights, does that mean I don't think trees are alive simply because rocks aren't? Then why would saying Africans and Hispanics don't necessarily have some monolithic view mean I'm treating those two categories as the same type of category?

Your example is a good one to illustrate this: "I cannot imagine what being Brazilian or Protestant adds to ones analysis of material constitution." Indeed, I cannot. Being Brazilian or Protestant isn't going to guarantee any particular view on material constitution. I do think being Christian does affect what one should say, because it should mean one would need a view that allows resurrection, but many of the views of material constitution allow that, so this sentence just seems true. In no way does it give the connotation that being Protestant has anything to do with nationality. The only thing tying the two together is that a charge has been made that being in either group would affect one's metaphysics and epistemology, and that sentence denies such a thing.

There are even Africans who are Hispanic too, since Spain had colonies in Africa.

It is obvious from the start that "African" is used in the sense of "black", just like it is obvious that "Hispanic" is used to mean "too dark to be white, too light to be black". You yourself made this claim explicit in the following answers, especially when you described your friend from Colombia. And your argumentation was that the words "Hispanic" and/or "Latino" are used in this sense in the USA.

Well, the semantics of your terminology is clear and everyone understood it. You did not need to make it clearer. But the argumentation you use does not make valid the assumption that Hispanic is a race. It is not because you have a word for "unicorn" that there are unicorns in the real world.

The assumption is not only wrong, it is offensive to Latin-Americans, who are a multi-racial and multi-ethnic group. You can only show respect for Hispanics or Latinos if you accept them as a multi-racial and multi-ethnic group. If you try by any manner to define them as one race or one ethny, you are already disrespecting all Latin-Americans.

And it is a Latin-American who is telling you that. Besides the academic aspects of your insufficient argumentation, you could try to show minimal consideration for others.

Let us not blame Jeremy. It is the whole champaign against Latin-Americans that makes all Latin-Americans fed up with the "cliches", and the stereotypes. You cannot describe Jews as a physical type anymore, because Jews have enough influence in the media to abolish the stereotypes about them. Hispanics and Latin Americans have no political or economical force to counter-attack the stereotypes about them. So, others think it is natural to describe them as certain physical types. It is difficult and irritating...

I wouldn't actually have thought of my friend as Hispanic. I don't and never did think of being Hispanic as in any way racial, certainly nothing to do with color. That's something that I think the U.S, census form doesn't get right in terms of capturing the general sense in which people use that term. That's in fact the crucial difference between being Hispanic and Latino. If you can be Hispanic and white, then it's not racial, as most people would see it.

I can see that you are accepting the same racial essentialist line that Tony was accepting. If any racial groups go into the composition of a community, at no point does it become its own ethnic reality and must continue to be a mix of the previous and no longer relevant racial groups. The conclusion of your argument about Latin Americans requires that we think of the English as multi-ethnic, because they've got Norman, Anglo, Saxon, and Celtic all in there. We'll also have to think of African Americans as multi-ethnic because they have all the various tribal backgrounds that slaves came from (in addition to the genetic material from the white people whose position in those family trees is also well known but hardly ever talked about). That doesn't stop African Americans from counting as a united racial group, because what makes them that way is the fact that everyone treats them that way. Why can't the same be true of Latinos/as? The only reason I can think of is that you're inconsistently applying racial essentialism to Latin Americans but not to blacks.

All your arguments against what I've said have either misunderstood my statements or simply called for a conclusion that the argument didn't support, and I've explained why in each case. You're claiming that it's insensitive for me to state that racial categories can be created by linguistic practices. I can see that you are offended by this, but I haven't seen any reason why you should be offended by my claim. I see why you might be offended by the practice that makes my claim true, but it's not my claim that is offensive. It's that practice. You seem unwilling to recognize that distinction. I can see that you're offended, but I can't see any rational justification of being so offended.

"A guide to the Latinamericans"

So-called Latin-Americans are a strange bunch. They are the bane of Historians, Anthropogists, Sociologists and Economists alike, who have never been able to arrive at a sensible explanation - or should I say decipherment? - of these people's predicament. But that's due to their sterile approach and academic hair-splitting. I'm happy to announce, however, that the time of darkness and ignorance has come to an end, for the answers are out there, in front of us, almost biting our noses. You just have to be alert to find them, and keep your eyes open. Please step out of your Ivory Tower, if you happen to be a student. That's what I did, and so can proudly say that my search has culminated in success.

Thus I hereby present you with the results of my research on the nature of Latin Americans, compiled in this very brief guide, small enough to be carried in your pocket the next time you go to South America, the Caribbean, or the bathroom. I must confess, though, that my search wasn't that hard. As a matter of fact, you can compile your own guide for your particular convenience. My data, as I suggested earlier, came from pretty accesible sources, mainly mass mediatic, but also from conversations in the cafeteria and other public places.

Ethno-geographical profile

.- They are exhaustively divided in Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, and some Cubans.

.-Also, they are all of the same ethnicity (they are "Latinos", after all).

.-They all look pretty much the same, either like George Lopez or like Sammy Sosa.

.-They all live in the Southern hemisphere. Both Colombia and Venezuela, to cite a couple of examples, lie under the Equator, since they are in South America, for everything that is prefixed with 'South" is in the austral side of the world, as are, among others: South America, South Africa, South Carolina, South Dakota and South Korea.

.- They are carnavalesque people who are always in a festive mood. There are serious regulations against their being serious.Tangos are European aberrations.

.- They all speak Spanish, down there in Brazil.

.- Carmen Miranda was Mexican (or Cuban).

Cultural profile, so to say.

.- Their common gastronomical heritage is comprised exclusively of tacos and burritos. These were given their most consumate expression by the team of anthropologists, culinary curators and chefs in Taco Bell.

- They all dance salsa. And also flamenco, which is practically the same, as can be gleaned from J-Lo's videos.

.-The two immediatly preceding features exhaust the catalog of their cultural achievements.

.-Such a culture cannot give rise to novelists, poets and writers of short stories, and if it did, their works should be called "picturesque" or "ethnic".

.- There are no Latin-American painters, unless they are naïf.

.- There have never been Latin American thinkers, for they are too busy perfecting their Salsa skills.

Miscellaneous facts.

.- Historically, they all come from the Latium, a historical region in the Italic peninsula, wherefrom the Latin language arose. That's why they are called "Latin", just as Ovidius and Cicero were.

.- Another story as to their origins, this time mythological in nature, has it that they all descend from the inhabitants of a mysterious land called "Latinia", hence, again, the strange name "Latin".

.-You might otherwise call them "Latinos", which is not a patronizing etiquette, as you might prima facie believe if you are in a cynical mood. To be called by such a name warms their hearts, especially if they weren't born in the U.S.A.

.-Another approach as to why they're sometimes called Latin-Americans (this expression is too long to bother ourselves with it, isn't it?) is because they were born in the Americas, and the Language they speak (Spanish, never bother with Portuguese, has anyone heard about it?) comes from Latin, as do French, all of the varieties of Italian, Provençal, Catalan, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian and Dalmatian, among many others. This has the Pan-Americanist consequence that all Francophones in the Americas are willy-nilly Latin-Americans, too (and also Latin, because we like being brief), and this includes les Quebecois, Haitians and, with respect to other criteria: many Italian, Portuguese and Romanian immigrants in the States, among many others. Quite a motley group, isn't it? Les Latinamericains sont morts, vive les Latinos, vive le burrito! .

Edison, as I've said before, I agree that some people in the U.S. have huge gaps in their understanding of these things, and the examples you're pointing to just scratch the surface. I don't think most people I know exhibit most of these, but maybe I'm wrong. I have seen them evidenced in people I know, particularly older people. As I've said before, aside from the issue about the use of the term 'Latino' I agree with pretty much everything else you're trying to say about how people in the U.S. can be pretty ignorant about these things. I just think the issue of what 'Latino' means in the U.S. is a very different sort of issue.

I think everything that needs to be said here has already been said, so I'm going to close the comments on this post. Mark and I made the decision this afternoon before I saw your comment. Your comment had nothing to do with the decision. I'm glad you got to have your say, though I'm still not sure how most of your comment counts as a disagreement with anything I've said. I'd be happy to talk with you about it in person, but Mark and I think this conversation has gone on way too long on this post, and we both agree that it would be best for the blog if we stopped it now.