people of color & Hispanic & so forth

[Indigo Som]

By popular demand:
Hispanic is offensive because it identifies the people with their
colonizers, the imperialist Spanish. By this logic Filipinos would also be
Hispanic. Also then people from Spain get lumped in with Latinos, which
makes no sense when viewing things through the lens of racism, privilege,
&c. Hispanic is also inaccurate because it relies heavily upon the concept
of "Spanish-speaking", & of course not all Latinos speak Spanish,
especially in the US context. Although I personally think Latino presents
its own problems (as someone else pointed out), I think it is accepted (&
acceptable) because it comes out of the culture(s) it defines.

Further comments:

>>        In apparent contrast to Indigo's views, I notice that members of
some groups (African-Americans and gays in particular) often find it
offensive to discuss the name of their group.  I suppose it is the
objectification that is offensive, the implicit message that "I am not
thinking of you as Ellen, but just as one more gay/lesbian/homosexual."

There will always be people who want to believe their demographic is not an
issue. Then there are those of us who would call that "deep denial", racism
& homophobia (&c.) being all too real -- & we may be offended by
suggestions that they are not real. The trick, then, if you are trying to
avoid offending, is to be able to suss out pretty quickly which people are
which! :)

>>Various members and various sub-groups of the various groups may have
various ideas about membership requirements and about whether they want to
be members. In all cases, I think, there is some correlation with "racial
type" but it's imperfect to large or small degree.

Race is purely a social construct, so there will never be accurate/perfect
racial categories and names. e.g. Indians (not the Native American ones!)
were considered white (or "Caucasian") for a while; now they are considered
Asian.

Ethnicity, on the other hand, being more "real", or should I say authentic
(though still w/ sometimes fuzzy edges) is a lot easier to define. e.g. a
Hakka is pretty much always a Hakka.
Or so I learned in school, & haven't yet found reason to think otherwise. :)

Also, regarding "PC": we (PC folks) were using PC as an inside joke, very
tongue in cheek, before the media got ahold (a hold?!) of it & made it
sound like we had no sense of humor about it, were rigidly obsessed w/ the
names for things, &c. &c. But y'all probably knew that already.

Speaking of "Caucasian" -- that word drives me insane! I wish (in vain,
obviously) that people would stop using it.

Correctly yours,
Indigo