¡Este Güey/Tío!

bakethatlinguist:

And I quote, a white person is “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as “White” or report entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian.”

I find this to be quite interesting, as (1) this means that our government is currently bombing “white” nations full of “white” people and (2) the Middle East is just a Euro-centric definition of a geographical point where the continents of Africa, Asia and Europe meet, and (3) it wasn’t that long ago that the Irish, Germans, Italians, Polish, Ashkenazi Jews, etc.—all European immigrants that are considered to be white today—were (legally) considered to be black. The social construction of whiteness is ever changing, no?

Thoughts?

I’ve always been irked, perhaps irrationally, when various hispanic people I know say “ugh, those white people” when sometimes they themselves are white.  It seems they use the term more to mean Anglo-American society, and separate it from their Mexican-American (Cuban-American… etc.) culture.  Of course, I realize that different groups use different words, and it isn’t a “wrong” use of the term… but I guess it proves this point—that the concept is changing, and indeed, at any given point, even other people have a different definition for its use than I do.