people of color & Hispanic & so forth

Lynne Murphy lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK
Wed Feb 7 21:05:02 UTC 2001


--On Wednesday, February 7, 2001 12:44 pm -0800 Indigo Som
<indigo at WELL.COM> wrote:

> By popular demand:
> Hispanic is offensive because it identifies the people with their
> colonizers, the imperialist Spanish.

But this makes it sound like the people referred to as 'Hispanic' are of
Native American ancestry.  The imperialist Spanish didn't go back to
Spain--they stayed in the Americas and had kids with the indigenous peoples
of that part of the world, and they came to be called 'Hispanic'.  People
of primarily Native-Central/South-American ancestry are not usually called
'Hispanic'.  (No one would call the Aymara 'Hispanic', that I know of.  And
there are all those words like 'Mestizo' to differentiate people with mixed
heritage.)  I don't see why, on this understanding, it's any worse for a
Spanish-heritaged person from the Americans to be 'Hispanic' as it is for
me to be called 'Euro-American' (or for a person with some Native American
ancestors to be called 'Euro-American' etc.).

I'm not saying people should be called 'Hispanic'.  People should be called
what they want to be called, and the only reason one needs for wanting to
be called something is that they like it (or don't like the alternative).
Of course, the problem is that one needs to check these preferences on an
individual basis and one often uses these words to refer to larger groups
which will be heterogenous in their preferences.  I often avoid the whole
situation by saying 'Spanish-surnamed', but that's pretty sexist--assuming
that people have their father's names and only the father counts toward
assessing your ethnicity.

Lynne



M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320



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