Also, Spaniards from Spain who are, like Italians, Caucasians and often have blonde hair and blue eyes, can take advantage of affirmative action as “Hispanics” even though very few South and Central Americans and Mexicans can be considered “Caucasian”.
Make sense?
Of course not.
But then liberalism never did.
Actually, a point of fact: Spaniards are not permitted to benefit from “affirmative action.” They are Europeans and as such do not qualify.
“Affirmative action” wasn’t meant for Hispanics in the first place: it was intended only for blacks, but there was an attempt to broaden it to Asians and Hispanics because many people felt its “reparations” quality was too obvious. I was a teenager when all this was going on under Johnson and I remember the arguments over this.
Asians, of course, didn’t need it because they work hard and also because their average IQ is higher than that of white Americans in any case, and they dropped out of many of these coalitions. It has now come to the point that they are the only group against which legal discrimination is permitted: there are limits on the number of Asians who are permitted into the elite programs in California colleges and into the state’s flagship schools.
What Hispanics have is a language handicap, and unfortunately for the Dems, that only lasts a generation. If you have ever lived any place with an established long-term Hispanic population, you would find it very difficult to tell them apart from other whites except by their last names. Those who have more Indian blood have more difficulties, but that is because they come from remote and less educated parts of their native countries. However, if they don’t get into La Raza-itis, they also can assimilate.
Even Sotomayor knows this, because the Ricci case involved two Hispanics who had also passed the test (after much hard work) but were not promoted when the test was thrown out because no blacks passed it. So she voted against them, because the important group, the group that is really the core group for affirmative action, is the black voter block. Affirmative action is all about maintenance of political power, and it is the way for a relatively small group (blacks are only about 12% of the population and dwindling) to leverage its way to much more power than it would have had otherwise.