Who are you? What am I? Are you a him, her, or they? How shall we be identified? And for what purpose is our identity identified?
Americans believe that race, ancestry, age, sex, occupation, education, and where you lived last year, are important indicators of something. I don’t question that. I am a perpetual data nerd, one who sees the world as revealed in its data.
But what happens when people are freed from traditional classifications and given a broader set of categories in which to wallow? Thus it is that we now have Hispanic or Latino (of any race) as a grouping supplemented by NOT Hispanic or Latino. This is then subdivided into a mélange of identifiers. We have White and Black or African American, but also Asian which itself is split into locations (Central, South East Asia, etc.). Central Asian separately provides data on Afghan, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkman and Uzbek.
This proliferation of subsets offers pride, but also dissociation from others. Were it not for our Brooklyn (NY) accents, my brother and I could be differentiated by his Knoxville (TN) birth and my peri-natal experience in the Flatbush section of Kings County (NY).
Hispanics accounted for 56% of the 30.8 ...