There’s a growing concern among Democrats after Trump’s strong showing in the Rio Grande Valley that Latinos might not hate whites enough. So something must be done to make them less White Adjacent.
The current federal system of categorizing Hispanics was set up a half century ago in order to entitle Latinos to have their own race-like category in government statistics but also to self-identify as white, because as everybody south of the border knows, “El blanco es mejor.”
But white non-Hispanic liberals can’t remember that because it’s too amusing and they can only remember boring stuff.
Also, they don’t have any vocabulary to describe the various racial combinations found in the Latin America. Latin Americans have lots of helpful terms like mestizo, mulatto, and pardo, but white people can’t really fit it into their anti-racist skulls that Latins have these words.
So now the Nice White People at Pew are vaguely agitated about the current system of asking people for both their race and their ethnicity (but only their Hispanic ethnicity, everybody else gets lumped into Non-Hispanic ethnicity, but that’s not racist for reasons). So Pew has come up with ten pictures of right hands ranked from fairest to darkest and asked Hispanics which one most closely matches them. (Note that this is subjective self-ranking rather than objective interviewer-ranking.)
Not surprisingly, 88% of Latinos say they rank from 1 to 5 rather than from 6 to 10, with the modal choice the second fairest. (For unexplained reasons, Pew considers 1 to 4 to be “lighter skin” and 5 to 10 to be “darker skin”—“I mean, just look at them” I guess must be Pew’s explanation.)
Now, of course, the back of your hand can get tanned, so who knows what kind of adjustment respondents are applying to their own skin tone in answering this question.
