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Changing the Way We Look at Race: Why Latinos Matter

Creative Commons 'BY-NC-ND' version 3.0 license
Abstract

For the first time in American history, there is a numerically significant population in the United States that cannot be defined primarily in terms of race. I will show how almost half of Latinos, when given a chance to self-define racially, pick labels that have nothing to do with color. It is through an expanded awareness of creative and defiant Latino racial identities that non-Latinos in the U.S. can greater appreciate how racial classifications are not scientifically meaningful categories.