“Are These People White?”
28th December 2017
Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.
My guess is that law enforcement’s aversion to listing Hispanics as different from whites goes back to LULAC’s campaign in the post-War era to get Latinos declared to be just plain white, which is why there was no separate category for Hispanics on the 1950 and 1960 Censuses.
Plus, eye-witness reports can be vague. To witnesses, the fundamental racial categories tend to be Black and Not Black. Thus, Joseph Wambaugh’s LAPD novels always have a Problematically Latino character: a guy whose mom is Mexican but his dad is Swedish so he doesn’t look mestizo, or a guy who kind of looks Latino but is actually half Arab, or maybe a Filipino with a Spanish surname who looks mostly Oriental but maybe could be the kind of Latino the other Latinos call “Chino,” and so forth and so on.