The borders of racial categories are malleable, contested, and change over time. But believing that demographic changes will inevitably cause the racial hierarchy to fade away ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary.
Aristotle said, “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime” (Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality). But in the wake of violence in impoverished Black communities, we often only hear the same refrain: “Why is no one doing anything about this?” The idea that nobody in Black communities works to stop community violence is racist, classist, and false.
The conscious ambiguity concerning the definition of the “Hispanic” was a fundamental part of its institutionalization.
But race is a social construct, and social constructs have social histories. Our modern understanding of race was created at a specific historical juncture in colonial Virginia. Prior to that, it did not exist.
