America’s surging politics of victimhood and identitarian division did not emerge organically or inevitably

In my college years, soon after my return to the States after having grown up overseas, I was surprised to see Hispanics designated as a race and it has continued to seem a barbarous abstraction ever since. Having lived in Venezuela and having a relatively large network of childhood friends from these various countries, it seemed obvious to me that from racial, cultural, ethnic, and historical perspectives, there really wasn't all that much commonality among the various groups lumped into "Hispanic."

My different friends from Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Philippines, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, etc. did not see themselves as a collective group. Quite the opposite. They saw themselves as distinct and, as so often happens, each subjectively cultivated hierarchies of cultural valuation, with their own nationality at or towards the top.

So why on earth were they being lumped together in the US? Their immigrant histories and experiences were distinctly different. Their language traditions were different. Their class and social conditions were different. Their religious traditions were different.

But academic racism was of little interest to me and I parked it to the side as a puzzling topic.

Over the years, a number of experiences provided more depth and context to the perplexity.

One engineering professional I knew well moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s or so. She was three or four generations from German immigrant farmers who had immigrated from czarist Russia in order to open up the Great Plains to cultivation. She was raised, I think I recall, in Oklahoma in a middle class agricultural family. Los Angeles was unknown territory to her.

She joined groups to integrate into the community, including some professional business women networking and support groups.

She relayed the experience of attending a meeting of one such women's business group and hearing a presentation from an Hispanic woman which focused on the various EEOC opportunities, set asides, government programs etc. for Hispanic business owners and professionals. Interlaced was a diatribe on ethnic subjugation.

My friend was puzzled in a quintessentially pragmatic engineering way. Her comment was something along the lines of "Maria (or whatever the woman's name was) is from a prominent land-owning family who trace their roots back nine generations in New Mexico, and have been long involved as leaders in the business community there as well as in State politics. She got her MBA from Harvard. Why on earth is the federal government creating preferential programs for her?"

Why indeed? How did such a privileged person, through identity sleight-of-hand become a protected minority? My friend was not so focused on the racial aspect of the talk as she was simply outraged that a privileged class individual was feathering her own nest by exploiting programs which were intended for the truly suffering. And yes, there was a lot of that going around in the early 1990s, including at Harvard Law.

Another experience was closer to home. My niece and nephews were born in England, raised in England and fit without distinction of appearance into the English population. But their father is from Gibraltar and they have a traditional Spanish last name. If they were to come to the US, would they be considered Hispanic? When they were younger, I wondered if they might wish to do part of their studies in the US and I wondered whether they would be counted as Hispanic.

The answered would have been yes, but only if they chose to so self-identify. They could be identified as White or Hispanic based solely on their own choice. From Who is Hispanic? by Mark Hugo Lopez, Jens Manuel Krogstad, and Jeffrey S. Passel at Pew.

So, who is considered Hispanic in the United States? And how are they counted in public opinion surveys, voter exit polls and government surveys like the upcoming 2020 census?

The most common approach to answering these questions is straightforward: Who is Hispanic? Anyone who says they are. And nobody who says they aren’t.

The U.S. Census Bureau uses this approach, as does Pew Research Center and most other research organizations that conduct public opinion surveys. By this way of counting, the Census Bureau estimates there were roughly 59.9 million Hispanics in the United States as of July 1, 2018, making up 18% of the total national population.

[snip]

Hispanic self-identification varies across immigrant generations. Among the foreign born from Latin America, nearly all self-identify as Hispanic. But by the fourth generation, only half of people with Hispanic heritage in the U.S. self-identify as Hispanic.

[snip]

In 1976, the U.S. Congress passed the only law in this country’s history that mandated the collection and analysis of data for a specific ethnic group: “Americans of Spanish origin or descent.” The language of that legislation described this group as “Americans who identify themselves as being of Spanish-speaking background and trace their origin or descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish-speaking countries.” This includes 20 Spanish-speaking nations from Latin America and Spain itself, but not Portugal or Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Standards for collecting data on Hispanics were developed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 1977 and revised in 1997. Using these standards, schools, public health facilities and other government entities and agencies keep track of how many Hispanics they serve – the primary goal of the 1976 law.

However, the Census Bureau does not apply this definition when counting Hispanics. Rather, it relies entirely on self-reporting and lets each person identify as Hispanic or not.

[snip]

Q. What about Brazilians, Portuguese and Filipinos? Are they Hispanic?

A. They are in the eyes of the Census Bureau if they say they are, even though these countries do not fit the federal government’s official definition of “Hispanic” because they are not Spanish-speaking. For the most part, people who trace their ancestry to these countries do not self-identify as Hispanic when they fill out their census forms. Only about 2% of immigrants from Brazil do so, as do 2% of immigrants from Portugal and 1% from the Philippines, according to Pew Research Center tabulations of the 2017 American Community Survey.

The third piece came from when one of my sons was working in the construction industry and working with hispanic crews in the field. It was great for bringing his schoolboy Spanish into the real world. But one of the things he discovered was that a sizable number of "Hispanic" workers from Mexico were Amerindian. Spanish was a second language for them as well.

Were they born in the US, they would have been considered Native American, as they ethnically were. But being here illegally, for government counting purposes, they would be counted as Hispanic even though Spanish was not their native language.

This is about as quixotic a bureaucratic kluge as one can imagine. And for what purpose? We have created a racial classification system with a non-racial category and then created positive inducements for people to self-identify as part of that category and then have created a non-definition definition which entirely self-determined.

Only a Soviet bureaucrat could be happy with that sort of nonsense. And yet it is now our common, and divisive, framing.

How did this come about? The Invention of Hispanics: What It Says About the Politics of Race by Mike Gonzalez. For such a misbegotten concept, it is, unsurprisingly, the product of ideology and political exploitation. Gonzalez begins:

America’s surging politics of victimhood and identitarian division did not emerge organically or inevitably, as many believe. Nor are these practices the result of irrepressible demands by minorities for recognition, or for redress of past wrongs, as we are constantly told. Those explanations are myths, spread by the activists, intellectuals, and philanthropists who set out deliberately, beginning at mid-century, to redefine our country. Their goal was mass mobilization for political ends, and one of their earliest targets was the Mexican-American community. These activists strived purposefully to turn Americans of this community (who mostly resided in the Southwestern states) against their countrymen, teaching them first to see themselves as a racial minority and then to think of themselves as the core of a pan-ethnic victim group of “Hispanics”—a fabricated term with no basis in ethnicity, culture, or race.

This transformation took effort—because many Mexican Americans had traditionally seen themselves as white. When the 1930 Census classified “Mexican American” as a race, leaders of the community protested vehemently and had the classification changed back to white in the very next census. The most prominent Mexican-American organization at the time—the patriotic, pro-assimilationist League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)—complained that declassifying Mexicans as white had been an attempt to “discriminate between the Mexicans themselves and other members of the white race, when in truth and fact we are not only a part and parcel but as well the sum and substance of the white race.” Tracing their ancestry in part to the Spanish who conquered South and Central America, they regarded themselves as offshoots of white Europeans.

And he ends with:

Grievance-mongering created for a vast array of American institutions what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning call Victimhood Culture—the title of their 2018 book on America’s current oppression fetish. Victimization, they write, becomes “a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization…. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance.”

This paradigm is predicated on a collectivist understanding of society, rather than the individualist striving that Alexis de Tocqueville identified as the hallmark of early America. Had these groupthink tactics not been so effective, we might not have identity politics today. There was a different path available, and Mexican Americans seemed eager to follow it. As Mora stresses: “It did not have to happen.”

Those of us who believe that individual responsibility is a far better route to success than racialization can still reverse what Ylvisaker, Samora, Alinsky, and the rest have wrought. Our first enemy is ignorance. The radicals who victimized America have done their best to cover their tracks: general unawareness of how, and why, the U.S. today is mired in identity politics makes the victimhood narrative harder to defeat. That is the reason the myths still exist, and why we must dismantle them.

Those bookends are a little incendiary but between those end points there is a lot of solidly researched history. Fundamentally, much of the perceived racial tensions have been manufactured out of thin air and for transparently destructive ideological purposes by academics, ideological activists, and a wannabe moral progressive mainstream media: all advancing their own self-interests at the expense of everyone else and helping virtually no one.

It is a chimerical effort to divide and distress and has no beneficial purpose.