Re: Will America ever acknowledge Mestizos or continue to push the White/Black dichot
It should be noted that although there is still some racism and race-based classism in Latin America countries, they do not have the intense obsession with race seen in the USA. That is because the USA is fairly unique with its fairly recent history of laws making someone a second-rate citizen because they are partially non-white.
"The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term in the United States for the social classification as Negro of individuals with any African ancestry; meaning any person with "one drop of Negro blood" was considered black. The principle of "invisible blackness" was an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status.[1]...
The one-drop rule was not adopted as law until the 20th century: first in Tennessee in 1910 and in Virginia under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (following the passage of similar laws in several other states)....
In the United States, European Americans usually classified people of partial American Indian descent as Indian, in a similar example of hypodescent. In the early years of these types of unions and marriages, the fathers were usually white and the mothers Indian...
Whites also applied this rule to mixed-race descendants of Native American and African ethnicity, classifying them as African. In this they ignored how people identified themselves; many Native American tribes reared children of mixed race as culturally within their tribe. This distinction was critical as Native American slavery had ended during the colonial years, and a child of a Native American mother should not be enslaved...
Among the colonial slave societies, the United States was nearly unique in developing the one-drop rule; it derived both from the Southern slave culture (shared by other societies) and the aftermath of the American Civil War, emancipation of slaves, and Reconstruction....
In colonial Spanish America, many soldiers and explorers took indigenous women as wives. Native-born Spanish women were always a minority. The colonists developed an elaborate classification and caste system that identified the mixed-race descendants of blacks, Amerindians, and whites by different names, related to appearance and known ancestry. Racial caste not only depended on ancestry or skin color, but also could be raised or lowered by the person's financial status or class....
...racial culture shock has come to hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned immigrants to the United States from Brazil, Colombia, Panama, and other Latin American nations. Although many are not considered black in their homelands, they have often been considered black in US society."
One-drop rule - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
