In the name of diversity, America’s racial classifiers obliterate diversity.

Long ago, long before the diversity movement and the sprouting of departments of diversity and inclusion in academia, government, media, and industry, I lived in a San Antonio barrio, where my friends and neighbors who were Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, referred to themselves as “Mexican,” and where I referred to myself as “Italian.”

Since then, I’ve lived in Phoenix for 30 years and am now living in Tucson, where Mexicans still refer to themselves as Mexicans, unless they’ve had the misfortune of being miseducated in college and/or working as a programmable automaton in Big Media, Big Academia, Big Business or Big Government. 

In these big institutions of conformity and appalling ignorance of history and anthropology, Mexicans are agglomerated with other distinctly different nationalities and ethnocultural groups and plastered with the labels of “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or the latest linguistic monstrosity of “Latinx.”

This labeling is done by people who see themselves as educated, enlightened, and open-minded, but prove otherwise in their thoughtless parroting of utterly ridiculous “racial” concoctions. (The penultimate word in the preceding sentence is in quotes because today’s racial categorization is mostly anti-science, in that it has little basis in evolutionary science, genetics, or anthropology.)

Inanity, and possible insanity, also can be seen in the other “racial” labels that have become the lingua franca of those with a pathological need to reduce the rich diversity of the nation and the world to six categories that are an incongruous mix of skin color and geographic origin. In addition to the official and specious category of Hispanic are the official and specious categories of White, African American, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander.

Given current trends, it may come to pass someday that people will be required to wear their assigned label on their backside, like a bumper sticker for humans.  

I’ll return to the other catch-all categories momentarily but will first finish the discussion on Hispanics (aka Latinos, Latin Americans, or Latinx).

The word “Latinx” was masterfully ridiculed in a December 19, 2021, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I can’t do a better job than the op-ed and letters in exposing the silliness of such nouveau terms as “Latinx,” so I won’t try; but I will mention some facts about Latin America apparently not known by those inflicted with Obsessive Category Disorder, or OCD.

One fact is that an estimated 30 million people of Italian descent live in Brazil, which is the largest country by population in Latin America. To that point, here are questions for those with OCD:  How should these Italian Brazilians be classified—as Hispanic, White, Latino, Latinx, or Latin American? And for the millions of Italians who have intermarried with black, Spanish, and indigenous Brazilians, are their offspring considered to be people of color, and if so, what color? (If you’re not sure what color is produced from mixing the colors of olive, black, brown, beige, and white, you can call a color expert at Sherwin-Williams or your local hardware store.)

Even miseducated college graduates might know enough to understand that the Romance languages spoken in Latin America have their etymological roots in the Latin language, which is how Latin America got its name. (Given that I studied Latin for four years in high school, I’m an honorary Latin American.)

Another explanation for how Latin America got its name can be found in the wonderful work of history, The Last Emperor of Mexico, by Edward Shawcross. Unfortunately, directors of diversity and inclusion won’t read the book, because it’s three standard deviations above the average IQ for the “profession.”

Anyway, Shawcross explains that in the 1850s, under the reign of Napoleon III, French thinkers invented the term “Latin America” to rally southern Catholic peoples against a feared onslaught from northern Protestant peoples. He goes on to write, “Soon after a French journalist used it in print in 1856, a Columbian living in Paris wrote a poem warning that the Anglo-Saxons, as he referred to the United States, were the mortal enemies of Latin Americans.”

This dovetailed with a belief of Catholic monarchs that due to cultural and historical differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglo-Saxon nations were better suited to democracy and liberalism while Latin nations were better suited to monarchies. In turn, this became a pretext for French, Spanish, and Habsburg monarchs, who, fearing republicanism and American hegemony in the New World, to attempt to recreate their own hegemony, by taking the side of Mexican rebels who wanted to overthrow the fledgling Mexican republic and restore the monarchy.

On a personal note, although I am not an Anglo-Saxon Protestant or an apologist for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and colonialism, I’ve long held that the parts of the Americas where Latin-Catholic culture is more dominant than Anglo-Saxon-Protestant culture are less free, less prosperous, and less liberal, in the classical sense. This also applies to certain parts of the United States, which I won’t identify here, because it’s too easy to be misunderstood without writing a long dissertation on the subject.

Having covered the official category of Hispanic, let’s turn now to the other official categories of White, African American, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander. As with the Hispanic category, those inflicted with OCD have reduced a large number of distinct nationalities and ethno-cultural groups to this handful of categories. Then, in violation of equal rights and equal opportunity laws, they discriminate against those in the concocted White category, and more recently, against those in the concocted Asian category, in college admissions and in hiring and promotions, in the name of diversity and inclusion.

Note the incongruous and inconsistent way that the categories are organized. Only one of the categories, the White category, refers to skin color. The rest refer to the geography of origin: Africa for African Americans, Asia for Asians, the Americas for Native Americans, the Pacific Islands for Pacific Islanders, and Europe’s Hispanic Peninsula, or the Iberian Peninsula, for Hispanics. The only exception is when African-American category is called the Black category.

Whoever coined these categories should be arrested for committing a crime against the field of anthropology. The crime has resulted in absurdities, in people having their heritage overlooked or insulted, and in much political mischief.

Take the Asian category, where scores of unique nationalities and ethnocultural groups are lumped together as if they are homogenous. 

To see firsthand how absurd this is, try convincing Filipinos and Koreans that they are the same as the Japanese. Or, following the lead of corporations, appoint a Han Chinese or East Indian Hindu to a board of directors or senior management position to represent all peoples who hail from Asia, including Uyghurs, Mongolians, Eastern Russians, Malaysians, Pakistanis, and many others.

This is as ridiculous and insulting as believing that Boston Brahmins or the Pilgrims or the Chesapeake Bay colonists were no different from my poor Italian ancestors or the ancestors of Albanian Americans, Iranian Americans, Jewish Americans, Walloon Americans, and so on for hundreds of other groups force-fitted into the White category and stereotyped as privileged, bourgeois, racist, and oppressive.  Yes indeed, that certainly describes my immigrant grandfather, who worked as a coal miner in southern Illinois; or my wife’s grandfather, who worked as a field hand in the oil fields of western Pennsylvania.

To circle back to the subject of diversity on corporate boards, a board would need thousands of directors to represent all of the world’s peoples. To get an idea of how many peoples there are, go to the following link, scroll through the list of ethnic groups that come up, and click on the names of the various ethnic groups to get the names of the sub-groups within each one.

Only those with Obsessive Category Disorder can believe that they are furthering racial enlightenment and diversity by obliterating this rich diversity and by using such fatuous words as “Latinx”.