Jerry Large / Times staff columnist
Hispanics and racial identity

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I had written about census statistics for non-Hispanic whites, and the caller, who is white, didn't like being defined by what he isn't.

I understand. Racial classifications are troublesome — a legacy of determined efforts to assign people a place in an economic and social hierarchy.

The reality of people's identity is always more complicated than the words suggest. We struggle with being defined by race.

White people were just white people before the explosion of the Latino population. But a fast-growing Latino population has both complicated and shed light on the meanings of race in the United States.

A few days ago, the Pew Hispanic Center published a study on how Hispanics dealt with race in the 2000 census.

Asian, black, white and Native Americans are defined by race, but Hispanics can be of any race. The center examined how people who marked Hispanic on the census form classified themselves.

Forty-eight percent of Hispanics said they are white and 42 percent said they are of some other race. Two percent chose black and a small number chose either American Indian or Asian American. About 6 percent said they were multiracial.

I'd expect more people to choose black and certainly a lot more to pick two or more races because mixtures of Indian, European and African are so much a part of Latin America.

The Pew Hispanic Center tried to figure out the story behind those percentages and compared other information about people who chose "white" and those who chose "some other race." The findings say as much about the United States as they do about the people in the study.

Latinos who called themselves white generally came out ahead on most social-status measures. They had more education, lower unemployment levels, higher salaries than the others.
 
They also felt less discrimination and were more likely to consider themselves Republicans than the rest. They were more likely to have white American wives and less likely to speak Spanish, more likely to be registered to vote.

Some characteristics varied by region or by the country a person or his immediate family came from. Cubans were far more likely to choose white (85 percent) than other groups.

Latinos of Mexican descent were about evenly divided, though where they live makes a difference. In Texas, 63 percent say they are white while only 45 percent who live elsewhere say they are white.

Skin color didn't seem to make a difference. (In Latin America people as dark as I am sometimes say they are white. White is the top of the heap there as well, but money and power can trump color there if you have enough of either. You don't need either to be white if your skin is light.)

In the United States what seemed to make a difference for Latinos was experience, history and location.

In follow-up discussions, one Cuban-origin respondent said Hispanics are accepted in Miami, New York and California, but, "If I apply somewhere else, Tennessee, and the application says are you Hispanic or white, I put white because I want to at least have an interview."

Hmm, your name might give you away, though. That's why the French government is considering a law that would require large companies to accept résumés free of any information that could be used to discriminate against an applicant: name, religion, age, gender, race and so forth.

A potential employer would see all that stuff only after the initial screening for interviews. Before, they only see qualifications.

Discrimination by classification is an old problem. A couple of days ago I saw a story about people in New Mexico discovering that they are Jewish. Their DNA indicates their ancestors were Spanish Jews (who converted to Catholicism to save their lives). Many of them kept up their Jewish faith in private, but knowledge of the secret was lost in many families with the passage of time. In fact, the guy who first discovered his ancestry is a Catholic priest.

We've come a long way since the Inquisition. You probably won't be tortured for being different from the majority, you just won't necessarily get that job you wanted.

The Latinos who chose white as their identity either feel accepted or hope choosing white will help make them more acceptable.

Pew's study concluded, "The Latino experience demonstrates that whiteness remains an important measure of belonging, stature and acceptance. And, Hispanic views of race also show that half of this ever larger segment of the U.S. population is feeling left out."

It isn't the words that are the problem, it's the hierarchy built around it that matters. Tear that down, and the labels won't have any power.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com. His column runs Thursdays and Sundays and is found at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.