Thinkies on race
Or rather, the perception of it. I work on a multitude of biological and medical journals. Different articles on everything under the sun coming through the system, all of which I skim for formatting errors. However, what's interesting? Occasionally we get articles that have to do with race (tied up in money or living conditions) with statistics attached. Or they're genetics-based. That kind of thing. We have journals on every aspect of medicine and biology under the sun here, coming in from every corner of the globe. From bioinformatics to geriatrics to cancer to environmental health and harm reduction (that one's about drugs, though we'll often get articles about AIDS in there) and equity in health. So we'll get statistics on black vs white vs asian, or inuit fishing village pregnancies vs Norwegian fishing village pregnancies to compare diet and living conditions or stress.
However, we get a lot of articles in from the US. Which is the only place I've seen that has the label 'hispanic' applied as a marker of race/genetic difference. Seriously. is there really that much genetic difference between the spanish speakers and those of italian descent? What does the whole hispanic label mean, anyway? Is what the US calls hispanic actually Latin American, which is a mix of black, european and native american? The whole concept that you can distinguish between 'white' (ie northern) european descent and spanish descent is completely ridiculous in Europe itself. We don't have the label of hispanic. You might get Meditteranean, which is more a geographical label, more applied to cookery and holidays, which involves spain, portugal, malta, morocco, italy, greece and cyprus, with turkey at a pinch. The idea that you could label any of them as a genetically distinct tribe from, say, the french or finns would get you laughed out of most places.
So can someone explain the distinction between white and hispanic?
However, we get a lot of articles in from the US. Which is the only place I've seen that has the label 'hispanic' applied as a marker of race/genetic difference. Seriously. is there really that much genetic difference between the spanish speakers and those of italian descent? What does the whole hispanic label mean, anyway? Is what the US calls hispanic actually Latin American, which is a mix of black, european and native american? The whole concept that you can distinguish between 'white' (ie northern) european descent and spanish descent is completely ridiculous in Europe itself. We don't have the label of hispanic. You might get Meditteranean, which is more a geographical label, more applied to cookery and holidays, which involves spain, portugal, malta, morocco, italy, greece and cyprus, with turkey at a pinch. The idea that you could label any of them as a genetically distinct tribe from, say, the french or finns would get you laughed out of most places.
So can someone explain the distinction between white and hispanic?