America is an Anglo country, right? After being founded by Brits of predominantly English, aka Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock, it seemed like the cultural and linguistic legacy of the country was set in stone, as although they later opened up their borders to other European immigrants such as Germans, Italians, and Russians, and even later on to people from all over the world, the dominant culture has always remained Anglo-centric, with the English being the original ethnic core of the US. After the results will be released for this year's census for the United States of America, you might be hearing from some sources that Hispanics have now become the largest ethnicity in the United States.
But is this true? The United States and Canada don't enumerate ethnicity in the same way that many other countries do. As trying to pin down different ethnic groups in all of the American continents are extremely difficult due to the extensive history of intermixing and assimilation, not only between different ancestry groups from the same race, but also between extremely disparate groups of people. people, such as between Europeans and Africans, Europeans and Native Americans, or sometimes all three. Instead, these countries differentiate foremost by larger racial makeup and then allow you to say your specific ancestry.
But in order to look at this more in depth, we need to look at the differences between terms such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and ancestry, which actually all mean quite different things. I did an entire video over this topic before, which I actually think was pretty good, so go check it out. But essentially, race is simply a large genetic grouping of people who share a significant amount of DNA and can be accurately placed together into genetic clusters, more or less.
Although there are aspects of physical appearance and culture in the race. this classification as well, while ethnicity is the smaller groupings of people who can be grouped together into smaller genetic clusters due to endogamy or selective intermixing within the group and share aspects of language, culture, and often religion as well, with these latter traits being described as the heritage of an individual, which all people of the same ethnicity may or may not share. Nationality is often used simply to describe someone's citizenship or birthplace, simple enough, and ancestors are often used to describe their birthplace.
Ancestry is used to describe all of one's ancestors, and hence someone could be of the American nationality, may identify as ethnically English of the European race, but may have Irish or Scottish ancestry as well. So let's look at your typical Hispanic American, generally around 60% European in origin, speaking the Spanish language, practicing Catholicism with a distinct culture, so we could say that someone who is born in Mexico but raised in the United States is of a Mexican American nationality. of mixed race and has Spanish and Native American ancestry, but what is their ethnicity?
We can't say Mexican because Mexicans aren't even close to having a homogenous genetic, cultural, or ancestral makeup, with there being extreme diversity not only between the mixed race mestizos that predominate the country, but also between different Native American tribes. It'd be the equivalent of a white American moving to Brazil, and when someone asks their ethnicity, they just say, uh, American. Keep in mind, I'm not ignorant of the history.
I realize that part of the reason that all Mexicans and even all Latin Americans are grouped together in the United States is because of the historic attitudes and viewpoints perpetuated by society and the media in the United States. But at the year 2020, there really is no excuse for this, although it should be noted that some groups often aim at painting a homogenous picture of Latin Americans for political purposes, just as many such as those who wish to unite Latin America. as a single race or people against outside powers such as the United States, a sentiment which became especially strong in the mid-1800s, or groups opposed to Latino immigration to the U.S. and wished to portray the entire community as the other.
You might have heard it said, even by myself in the past, that Hispanics are a mix of Spaniards and Native Americans, which, yeah, on its surface is a somewhat accurate simplification, but it's much more complicated than this. As I discussed in many videos, the genetic makeup of Hispanic Americans largely depends on region and racial identity, with many Cuban Americans being almost entirely European in origin, many Dominicans being largely African, many Peruvians being mostly Amerindian, and many immigrants from throughout Latin America may be of Middle Eastern, Chinese, Japanese, or other Asian descent, or may have any combination of these, just like in America. If Hispanic America were a country, they'd be the third largest in Latin America, behind Mexico, Mexico, and Brazil, now numbering over 60 million people nationwide.
Hispanics are no longer simply a demographic curiosity and are quickly getting into the forefront of many states such as Texas, California, New Mexico, and Mexico. or Florida, where keep in mind Spanish settlements stretch back hundreds of years since before the U.S. was even a country. Because the initial Hispanic population of the United States was quite small until the mid-20th century, Americans never really knew what to think of them or how to classify them, often going back and forth between considering them Caucasian or non-Caucasian, and it's true that most of them never really fit in any of the neat boxes for the country's historical conception of race and ethnicity. most Hispanics be considered ethnically Spanish then since that is the dominant ancestry for the most part?
Well, a lot of people kind of already do this, referring to the entire community as simply Latin or Spanish, but when comparing to someone who's actually from Spain, the differences in culture, language, and often appearance becomes pretty glaringly obvious. This is where culture really becomes apparent in racial classifications in the US, since if a Spaniard were to immigrate to the country and assimilate into the English speaking white community, it would likely just be considered white by the bulk of the population, but if they were to assimilate into the Colombian or Mexican or Venezuelan communities, it would appear that their white card gets revoked, which goes to show the cultural impact on racial identification in America, even if it makes no logical sense whatsoever. If all Spanish speakers in the United States are considered to be a single ethnic group just out of convenience sake, then we should also consider all English speakers in the United States to be a single ethnic group. single ethnic group as well.
Which hey, the census actually kind of does, but instead of differentiating between all linguistic groups in the U.S., the census groups all non-Hispanics together, which makes even less sense. Not to mention that the difference between different Hispanic countries stretching from Mexico to the Caribbean to Central and South America are easily just as large as the cultural differences between different countries of the Anglosphere, such as the United States and New Zealand. As I discussed in a past video, I would consider Hispanic Americans in the U.S. not to be an ethnicity, but a pseudo-ethnicity, meaning they only act like an ethnic group in very specific circumstances, as due to these shared historic struggles and general cultural, linguistic, and religious similarities, many people of Hispanic or Latino origin in the United States found themselves having more in common with each other than the majority Anglophone population, even if they did have extreme differences in appearance or ancestry.
Now, as to what percentage of Hispanic Americans actually have some non-Spanish European ancestry? I'm not exactly sure because I haven't seen statistics on the matter, but I have met many Mexicans with partial Italian or Basque ancestry or Brazilians with German ancestry, so I'd hazard a guess that it's a fairly significant number. At around 19% of the U.S. population and growing fast, the diversity of the Hispanic population is quickly growing apparent to the general public, and even if we considered each Hispanic nationality to be a single ethnicity, Mexicans... making up around 12% of the population, are still lower than German, English, or Black Americans.
So, do people need to be of the same race in order to belong to the same ethnicity? Not necessarily. In the Arabian Peninsula, historically, those of mixed race born to an Arab man and a Sub-Saharan African woman were generally considered to be fully Arab, although some social discrimination and differentiation did exist, and of course, there will almost always be genetic differences in any ethnic group, no matter how isolated or vigorously homogenized, but the situation is different in Latin America due to the social stratification brought on by the casta system, the historical system of governance that divided, or attempted to divide, the colonial Latin American population into certain classes based on ancestry, with European-born Spaniards on top, which led to a strong resentment by the mestizos and criollos, or native-born whites, leading to the independence movements of the early 19th century. Although some have argued that the casta system wasn't actually as rigorously enforced as many may think, its effects can still be seen throughout the descendants, with Latin America simultaneously being the world's biggest melting pot, yet highly ethnically and racially conscious at the same time, and I've surmised in a past video that in the future, Latin America will essentially start to look a lot more like South Asia, meaning the population will slowly begin to homogenize with all groups being intermixed and connected to a certain extent.
So, in my opinion, the Latino American population is simply too diverse at the moment to consider a single ethnic group, but this could change in the future. And if we're talking about pure ancestral components, it does seem likely that the percentage of the U.S. that could be traced back genetically to Spain will eventually surpass the English, German, or any other ethnic component of the country in upcoming years. As Northwest European groups in America continue to decline as a percentage of the population, it is likely that within a decade, even African Americans will outnumber the large European ethnic groups in the country. both German and English Americans. But this also begs the question as to whether blacks in the United States are a single ethnic group or not.
And this is where it gets even more confusing, as one could accurately say that your average black American of pre-emancipation stock are all African peoples at once, and yet their own group entirely. By all African peoples, I mean that the vast majority of black Americans have ancestry from a plethora of African groups, predominantly from the west-central coast of the continent. but occasionally from more exotic locales as well, such as Madagascar or the Horn of Africa. However, due to slavery, their ethnicity and culture was stripped away and remolded, with the community being morphed into a new people group through their shared struggle and heritage, which is why, when it comes to ancestry, many black Americans identify with the whole of the African continent and quote unquote black race rather than a single ethnicity or nation. Now, when it comes to Asian Americans, I don't even really need to explain that not all people of Asian ancestry are Asian.
ancestry in the U.S. are of the same ethnicity. Most people already understand this, since Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans obviously make their ethnic differences pretty well known, even after the first or second generations. But it is becoming increasingly common for Asian Americans to marry other Asians of different ethnic groups in the country, as I've personally met many people of partial Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Korean, or any other number of unique ancestral combinations, which means the community is very very quickly starting to look like the white American population.
Although the Asian American community is currently made up of many diverse peoples who think and act very differently, it is possible that the Asian community may begin to converge into a single pseudo-ethnic bloc, in the same way that white, black, or Latino Americans have done over the years, becoming a somewhat culturally homogenized, Americanized people that have somewhat vague Asian roots. In the same way that many white or black Americans have been in the country for so long, they are no longer aware of their specific European or African roots. So, if someone wanted to identify as ethnically Hispanic or American or black or Asian, what's stopping them exactly?
Well, technically nothing. An ethnic community can form from any group of people, but in the present there are still many distinctions to be made, even if the lines between different groups slowly begin to dissolve every day with intermixing and cultural assimilation. So, please let me know your thoughts on the Hispanic American community.
and different ethnic groups of the United States. And for today's poll, let me know which terminology could be used to describe this new, growing, pseudo-ethnic collective in the country. As always, this has been Mason.
Thanks for watching, everyone. And I'll see you next time.