Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-25184427-20140722165407/@comment-19765459-20140728161232

BoricuaWolf wrote:

Yeah, as a half Puerto Rican (My Screen name is the Spanish word derived from an indigenous Carib-Indian language for Puerto Rican Person) half African-American person (born and raised in Puerto Rico), the whole concept of Race and how it’s perceived in America irks me in general. LadyX hit it on the head with the term African-American being used as a euphemism for Black. You can’t assume all Dark people (even if they are of African descent) are African-American. The term really should only be applied to the Black people here in the US that descended from the Slave Trade. The term was only developed to refer to this group of people because they don’t know their actual countries of origin (oddly enough a lot of people forget that Africa is actually a continent). Even a recent immigrant from a Sub-Saharan African country would NOT be African-American. Their politically correct designation would refer to their native country just like European people (e.g. Nigerian-American).

It’s really cool how people’s different perspectives color how they see the world. You look at Posey and see an American guy, and I look at him and immediately see him as Latino. After seeing him in interviews (especially in the panel from this year’s Comic Con) I did get the impression that he is definitely removed from Mexican Culture (although that’s just my impression and I could be wrong). But as far as his look, I definitely SEE him as Latino. See, and I tend to go the opposite way. I see him as "white" because of the way he talks. As I mentioned above, my first cousin is half Puerto Rican as well. But he and I look a lot alike and we have the same NJ/NY accent, and his Spanish is the school-learned kind, not the spoken-in-the-home kind. So I (and his mother) tend to question why he thinks of himself as Latino when he (in our minds) has neither a distinctive look nor accent that would pass him as anything other than white without revealing his surname. I also joke that because his wife is of Irish ancestry, and thus his two young kids are very white (unless blond and light-brown hair darken significantly as they grow up) and they have surname-ethnicity-mismatch. They could pass for actual Spaniards (Spanish people have a lot of Celtic ancestry), but they don't look Latin American.

Of course, neither do a lot of Latin American's. When talking about the vast swath of land south of the U.S. border, there is a HUGE amount of racial diversity. Just as much as in the U.S. actually. There's also a big difference between countries where the population is still predominantly native, versus ones where there is a lot of European or African ancestry in the gene pool.

"African-American" is a politically-correct term, not an accurate one. We don't use "European-American" for whites, even though it would be just as accurate, since white people are rarely one ethnicity. Technically I'm mostly Polish, with a little Irish and French. But, my maternal grandmother's ancestors included a lot of Prussians (that's where the borders were back then) and thus I am a little bit Germanic, despite being mainly Slavic with some Celt. Europe had shifting borders throughout most of its history, and until Hitler came along there was a lot of mixing between ethnic groups. Neo-Nazi types adored the Icelanders for a long time as supposedly being a perfect example of "pure" Nordic/Germanic ancestry. But then DNA testing revealed they are as much Celt as Norse. Oops!

Posey can play it either way, although he largely comes across as Californian rather than Mexican. It would actually be interesting to see him play a Latino role and might make it easier to visualize him that way. Again, "Latino" and "Hispanic" are linguisitic terms. They tell you nothing about genetics. It is funny how many people assume that Melissa Ponzio (Scott's mom's actress) is also Latino when in fact she isn't. We don't even know if Melissa McCall is in-show! I don't recall her character's ethnicity ever coming up.