Latina Bears Hopes of Her Party and People
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Amanda Renteria is a Democrat running for Congress in California. Latinos — the nation’s most rapidly growing minority — are greatly underrepresented in public office.
For a long time, I've been pointing out how the New York Times has been egging on racial bloc voting among ethnic Hispanics, who frustrate Democrats by being much less racialist than blacks.
Trying to parse out how "non-White" Renteria looks. She looks vaguely Eurasian in many of the google images. If I were to see her without prior knowledge of her background, I might think that she was a White-East Asian mix. On the other hand, some White people have a similar appearance, so I might think that she was just a vaguely Eurasian looking White person (cf Bjork, who is often mistakenly assumed to be of mixed ancestry).
ReplyDeleteFunny how Liberals don't play racial politics WITHIN the 'Hispanic' community. After all, just as Anglos enslaved Negroes and took land from the Indians, the Latino Europeans conquered and ruled over brownies.
ReplyDeleteNow, we don't include American Indians among the Anglos but see them as separate, BUT we are to believe that some blonde Hispanic-American and some dark-faced Indian-American belong in the same category of 'Hispanic' or 'Latino'. So, Andrew Jackson and Geronimo belong to separate ethnic groups, but Marco Rubio and Moctezuma belong to the same one.
If Liberals really hate 'white privilege' and want whites to own up to their history of imperialism, colonization, slavery, rape, genocide, and blah blah, they should go after the Conquistador-Hispanics who ruled over the brownies, even raping them in huge numbers to create the mestizo.
But no such yammering I hear from Lib side. Whatever is politically expedient, I guess.
But then, Jews even made common cause with Right Sector in Ukraine to harass Putin.
As white Hispanic bait white Americans over 'racism', I think white Americans should start guilt-baiting white privilege in Latin America.
ReplyDeleteIf only for revenge and tit-for-that or shit-for-shat.
ReplyDeleteIt seems racist or at least Yankeenormative to still be using this made up classification of 'Hispanic'. My male line left for Ireland from Roman Hispania in the 370s AD, does that make me Hispanic?
ReplyDeleteTime to use the Latin American racial categories. Mestizo, Pardo and something akin to 'white hispanic' so Gisele Bundchen doesn't get free tuition.
OK, a NY Times story datelined in Sanger -- nothing unusual there
ReplyDelete"If I were a Micronesian and had to apply as "Asian" to college, I'd be pissed."
ReplyDeleteColleges and universities are more than happy to break out various (non-white) ethnic groups when it would help them. Pacific Islanders often get treated separately from Asians for AA purposes. The same, of course, doesn't hold true for, say, Greek- or Irish-Americans.
Her racial identification is hard to characterize. It would make sense that Renteria would play up her Hispanic ancestry given that she is running for Congress in a heavily Hispanic district. Yet she must had a strong sense of Hispanic identity well before her campaign, as her young sons both have Spanish first names (Diego and Trinidad, the latter being a bit surprising as I though it was a girl's name).
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, her husband is not Hispanic - though obviously he was okay with giving his children Spanish names. And then there's the obvious fact that Renteria dyes her hair blonde. Her parents were farmworkers from Mexico, and I would presume that the likelihood of naturally blonde hair in someone of that background is basically zero. All in all, the extent to which she self-identifies as Hispanic is somewhat questionable.
An interesting note: Renteria is rather coy about revealing her age. It's not on her Wikipedia entry and her campaign website does not reveal when she graduated from college. It took a bit of digging to determine that she is 38 or 39.
Peter
Renteria is the Castilian version of Errenteria the name of a Basque town.
ReplyDeleteCogswell:
ReplyDeleteSo being "White, Non-Ashkenazi" won't help when applying to Harvard?
Americans now 'racist' for waving American flag
ReplyDeleteSvi
I find it humorous that transitioning from a Goldman Sachs job to working instead for senior Democrats/San Jose CRA fixers/Emily's List can be termed "going into public service."
ReplyDeleteI thought Asians were the "most rapidly growing minority," not Hispanics (although, of course, the sheer absolute number of Hispanics swamps all that "rate" or "percentage of growth" talk).
ReplyDeleteI thought Asians were the "most rapidly growing minority,"
ReplyDeleteThat masks a regional political problem; the devil's in the details:
"According to OMB, 'Asian' refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam."
Chinese is the largest/fastest-growing category (part-whites count in this stat), with subcontinent Indians and Filipinos in 2nd and 3rd place. But Indians have dispersed more than Chinese and typically represent the "largest Asian group" away from the Pacific. This is how you get the phenomenon of West Coast Indians representing themselves as the "moderate" alternative to the left-wing East Asian infrastructure. Meanwhile non-PR Latins are *entirely* concentrated in the Sun Belt.
Latina Bears Hopes of Her Party and People
ReplyDeleteIs this the quintessential NYT headline?
Hey, my senior Senator is a graying blond, blue-eyed Cherokee!
ReplyDeleteWhy describe blacks as racialist and never mention white ethnic politics? Irish immigrants invented ethnic politics in the 19thC and all subsequent immigrant groups have tried to copy them; but not so cleverly.
ReplyDelete"SHERYL GAY STOLBERG"
ReplyDeleteCovering most of the bases there.
I guess she's not Jennifer Aniston's older sister.
ReplyDeletehttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/JenniferAniston08TIFF.jpg