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The human capacity for cognitive dissonance, unlogic, magical thinking, the desire for whiteness or white adjacency, the level of self-hatred and self-destruction--all of it is ASTOUNDING. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-families-idUSKBN27I16E
"President Trump’s big win in Florida...was cemented in the state’s most populous county, where his message against socialism and for law and order resonated heavily with Cuban-Americans." https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/03/us/election-day?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage#how-trump-won-florida
The category "Latinx/Hispanic," from my perspective, really misleads.
When many people think about "Latinx/Hispanic," they don't simply assume Spanish as the dominant language. They also assume a racial character that is generally considered Brown and wholly distinct and oppositional to whiteness.
But Latinx/Hispanic is not a racial category. Within Latinx/Hispanic, which is an colonial identity placed upon certain Indigenous populations by a colonizing and European Spain and Portugal, there are Indigenous peoples...
...(who, themselves, can be identified from various racial identities), Black peoples, white peoples, Asian peoples, and Brown peoples (who are various combinations of the preceding racial categories).
Latinx/Hispanic is a stratified, hegemonic category that generally places the European members at the top and the Black members at the bottom, while the Indigenous and Brown members fall somewhere in between...
...based on how close they are to Blackness or whiteness in phenotype, skin color, hair texture, eye color, psychology, spirituality, geography, politics, and loyalty.
Mistakenly, we often assume that Latinx/Hispanic people are automatically "people of color" because of the Latinx/Hispanic designation, not taking into account that many Latinx/Hispanic people are, in fact, white...
...and what separates them from the rest of white Europe and the white European diaspora is, simply, language and geography.
We cannot regard all Latinx/Hispanic people in the same way, when they constitute a plethora of categories of race and nationality.
An Indigenous Mexican is not a white Mexican is not a Black Puerto Rican is not a Brown Brazilian is not a white Venezuelan is not a Mestizo Filipino. So we lump all of these very different peoples and experiences into one amorphous category why exactly?
Primarily because white people need to be able to distinguish white from non-white for the purposes of who can be inducted into whiteness when the white population begins to dwindle and who should be kept out for matters of "racial purity."
We can generally understand which members of the Latinx/Hispanic identity category are actually marginalized by how white people regard them. Which is why white Cubans are welcomed by white people in the U.S. and Indigenous Mexicans are locked in cages.
The Internet, especially social media, isn't large enough to hold these nuances and examine them because the point, it seems, of social media is to chop everything, and everyone, down to neat, bite-sized bits that can fit into small, simplistic, binary, easily recognizable...
...but also easily dismissible, categorized boxes, devoid of any complexity, stripped of any dimension, and requiring little critical thought.
This is why, for me, I'm becoming less interested in any particular identity categories that don't guarantee that I know this about any given person or group:
Pro-liberation or anti-liberation.
Pro-Black or anti-Black.
Pro-liberation or anti-liberation.
Pro-Black or anti-Black.
