I recently attempted to enter the Musk Foundation Carbon Reduction X-Prize (I failed to complete the submission by the deadline - it was the most effed up proposal process I have ever seen). One of the sections was focused on environmental justice, which my company and proposal have a great handle on. The community where my shop is happens to be very poor and the vast majority of the residents are "mixed race" Hispanics, commonly referred to as Mexicans (though most of that demographic are not from Mexico, unless you consider the pre-U.S. annexation period of this neck of the woods.
Being a professional grant whore, I pulled up the Census data to validate our community worthiness for benevolent Socialist treatment and was stunned to see that the race breakdown was 85% white with a smattering of blacks and Native Americans. WHAT?
I found a different demographic evaluation of the area and it said this:
White Hispanic: 42%
Non-White Hispanic: 33%
That told me a couple of things: 1) many "mixed race" Hispanics self report as White, I think for obvious reasons; 2) the Census categorizes Hispanics by language and not race.
The fact is, the Hispanic brown people around here are descended primarily from MesoAmerican Indians (Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, Mixtec, and Mexica (or Aztec)), who were "conquered" by European Hispanics, whose culture dominated the MesoAmerican cultures. It's just plain weird that they became "Hispanics" because the Spanish language was forced on them. Of course there was some interbreeding between the invaders and the natives, but it didn't create a large class of more privileged "mixed race" folks.
It's also weird that their once more advanced cultures have been starved into becoming a commonly regarded lower class of people.
In any event, I used the second demographic breakdown in the EJ narrative...
