[JManc]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

Would it be preferable if instead of worrying about culture or ethnicity, one just went by direct ancestry -- e.g. If a survey asked as far as you can tell... do you have African, Asian, European, Native American heritage etc. (check all those that apply)? So that a mestizo Mexican or Central American would be "white and Native American" and a Puerto Rican might be of mixed European, African, and Native American (if they knew this info and was willing to check the box)?

So if all the Hispanics then got partitioned into whatever non-Hispanic group or ancestry they thought their "race" matched (e.g. the Italian Argentine gets put in with the Italian American, the Afro-Colombian gets put with Black or African Americans, and Jamaicans of the same ancestry)?

Would it be an improvement?

On the one hand, people don't want to ignore the Spanish-speaking (or at least influenced by a Spanish speaking nation's background) cultural element of it (you could also get this directly from asking languages known/spoken/mother tongue), but on the other hand feel that how people treat others based on racial appearance still is a factor in what the "race" question was meant to get at (i.e. someone will still judge a white person as white if they speak Spanish or a black person as black if they do too).

I think we are obsessed with race/ identity and try so hard to shove square pegs into round holes. It's all arbitrary at this point.