[ACC24011]

Some US Latino civil rights groups like LULAC lobbied for Latinos to be counted as ‘white’ as far back as the 1920s because they wanted to try and avoid as much institutional racism as possible for their people. The census forms still count Latino/Hispanic as ‘white’ even though an overwhelming majority of us have nonwhite ancestry. But most US Latinos know that’s a fiction. We know Latino and Hispanic are cultural terms, not racial. We know that the great majority of Mexicans are predominantly Indian and most Latinos from the Caribbean have black ancestry. You hear Latinos calling themselves ‘brown and proud’ all the time in the US. Yet most whites in the US have an either/or way of thinking about ‘race’. Anyone who is darker than Stallone is considered ‘not white’. The really strange thing is that many whites will consider a light-skinned Latino ‘not white’ if they have ‘ethnic’ accents, but consider them ‘white just like us’ if they lose the accent. That is slowly changing and some are starting to accept that people can consider themselves multiracial, a way of thinking closer to the Latino notion of mestizaje.

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Name : ACC24011, Race : Mexican and American Indian, City : W Lafayette, State : IN, Country : United States, Occupation : Grad student, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, 

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