re: #222 Backwoods_Sleuth

Demographic categories tend to break down upon close analysis anyway.

Let’s take this one currently popular among pollsters: Non-hispanic white.

What does that mean?

As I noted before, “hispanic” comes from the Latin term for the Iberian peninsula.

So does “hispanic” mean someone who speaks Spanish as their first language? Or maybe their parents spoke Spanish but they don’t?

Even worse is the term “white”. This is a substitute for “European”.

But most people from the Spanish speaking portions of the Americas have dominantly Native American or Sub-Saharan African ancestry, if one maps their DNA to populations (e.g., 23andMe.)

If one was really into this idea of categorizing stuff, if only minor (less than 50%) percentage of ancestry of an American happens to be from Sub-Saharan they can still identify as “black”. However a “hispanic” may have actually a larger share of Sub-Saharan ancestors. So when speaking of “Hispanics” how come we don’t have a category “Non-Hispanic Black” instead of “non-Hispanic White”???