You know it's a stupid question when...

You know it's a stupid question when the majority of websites that come up in a Google search are either blogs, Wikipedia or Yahoo answers. :)  

I was discussing "race" and "ethnicity" with a friend the other day and I was holding my own until I was asked what race I thought the American Indian fell under (I hadn't a clue!), which prompted me to look into the definitions. 

One of the only remotely interesting articles I found was, in fact, a blog. If nothing else it answer the "American Indian" question...they're listed under Mongolian race, which sort of makes sense I guess, since they would be the southern descendants of the Eskimos, who have a distinct oriental leaning, features-wise.   

Here's how the one blog broke it down: 

• Caucasian races (Aryans, Hamites, Semites)
• Mongolian races (northern Mongolian, Chinese and Indo-Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Tibetan, Malayan, Polynesian, Maori, Micronesian, Eskimo, American Indian),
• Negroid races (African, Hottentots, Melanesians/Papua, “Negrito”, Australian Aborigine, Dravidians, Sinhalese)

I decided to see what Dictionary.com had to say on the subject too: 

race

  [reys] noun

1.

a group of persons related by common descent or heredity.

2.

a population so related.

3.

Anthropology .

a.

any of the traditional divisions of humankind, the commonest being the caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negro, characterized by supposedly distinctive and universal physical characteristics: no longer in technical use.

b.

an arbitrary classification of modern humans, sometimes, especially formerly,based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape, and now frequently based on such genetic markers as blood groups.

I finally found an academic paper on "the concept of race" that (in a far more prolific manner) basically said that race was a sociological term based on geographic location and biological similarities...but that the three basic and widely accepted groups are Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid. 

It gets tricky when you try breaking down ethnicities from race. Which race does each ethnic group fall in to? Being a mix makes it more difficult...such as Mexican, which is a mix between Mexican Indians with Spanish, with possibly a bit of French (due to their short reign in Mexico) or Irish thrown in for good measure. The same goes for other Latin American counties...though in Brazil they had the Portuguese influence, but otherwise they're basically the same. So being Hispanic by ethnicity means a mixture of Caucasoid and Mongoloid races...the question then being, if you just have to pick one race to categorize Hispanics under, which one would you choose? 

Personally, I think it's fair to categorize Hispanics as Caucasoid (Caucasian). The language they all speak is Spanish (or Portuguese) based...a Mexican and a Spaniard can speak to each other with a limited degree of difficulty, comparatively less so than a Spaniard speaking to an Italian, even though those two languages are very similar. 

Some Hispanics have more of a European influence than others. A few generations back there was a Harrison (pronounced Arr-ee-son, since the H is silent in Spanish) in my family...which was possibly due to a brigade (battalion? I don't know my military terms very well) of Irish soldiers who defected to Mexico during the Mexican-American War due to the American military's poor treatment of Catholics.  There ended up being a pocket of Irish in northern Mexico who married the locals and added to the European portion of the ethnic mix. 

Therefore, in my opinionated and (slightly) informed assessment, it is a logical conclusion to categorize "Hispanic/Latino" as an ethnicity beneath the overarching heading of "Caucasian," based on the similarities in language and greater physical affinity to the European (Caucasian) influences than the American Indian (Mongoloid) contribution.

In the grand scheme of things it really doesn't matter. Races and ethnicities are just arbitrary terms with no concrete meaning other than to break down sociological or anthropological groupings. But I am glad I took the time to look into it, so I can be prepared the next time someone bring up the topic! :)

  

~ Katie