Covering The Coverage: Columnist Kindly Asks That Voters Stop Being Categorized, Is Ignored.

Election time is upon us once again and, with it, comes a reminder that you, gentle reader, are nothing more than a mass of labels and numbers on a page. You’re a Latino, babyface. And that means nothing, ultimately. Yet everything:

Personally I’m sick and tired of dividing a nation of individuals into clumsy and imprecise words like “lily white,” “black” and “Latino.” What do these words really mean and do they matter when it comes to the opportunity of every American to exercise their right to vote?

The short answer? “Yes.” We’re part of a group, whether we sign up for it or not.

And finally we arrive at the “Latino” clump, a buzzword that dumps new immigrants from Mexico in with generation-old immigrants from the Dominican Republic or Guatemala. Like the African Americans, and the “lily white” Americans, most Latino Americans who’ve lived here more than one generation have met and married folks from other ethnic groups, meaning their kids with a rich and diverse cultural heritage can’t be summarized in a single term, “Latino.”

We use words like “lily white,” ‘black” and “Latino” to simplify and attempt to predict events like the presidential election. Experts like to target messages and products based on race and ethnicity, when in fact behind skin color are individuals with diverse and varied interests, beliefs, and values which, as hard as we try, can’t be described using one word alone.

But are campaign slogans and TV commercials carefully crafted to appeal to certain demographics after many, many painstaking hours spent researching census surveys and state populations really aimed at a “cultural heritage” as the culture in question thinks it exists, or is “Latino culture” really just a social construct that makes it easier to label a group that is simultaneously disparate and specific?

Fuck if we know. We’ve even been accused of perpetuating stereotypes by our readers. Of course, this is ridiculous since we’re both infallible and sexy, but we also understand that there’s no winning. “Latino” means something, whether that something is created by an ad exec or a civil rights activist. It can be divisive, sure, but it can also help bring about much-needed changes to certain groups who use this term as a means of drawing attention to specific concerns and problems.

So, people can be totally justified in complaining about terms like “lily white” and “Latino” because they can be pretty meaningless descriptive terms. We’ve complained about them, and we’re always excruciatingly right about everything, always, so.

But they can and do serve a purpose. It’s all about context, babies, as far as we see it.

But, what say you, writhing Latino masses? Is “Latino” a useful term within the context of political campaigns and voting demographics? Is it outdated? Should groups be broken down more, to be even more specific? Or should society work to do away with ethnic and racial categories and focus on, say, economic classes instead? Do share.

Quite describing voters as lily white, black or Latino [Statesman Journal]