Search Results: whiter skin or tanned skin

I'm just wondering since I will admit, I suffer from this. As someone who's American of Mexican "descent" or "Latino" from Mexican immigrant, I've always felt pretty stressed out about how I should racially and ethnically identify myself. I have very light tan skin with more predominant White European features but I have a few other distinguishable non-white features on my face and skull structure. Technically, Latino or any Latin American nationality can be of any race but the majority of them tend to be racially "mestizo" or just mixed in general (with no racial percentage balance).

Because I live in the US, a country that is incredibly very race-obsessed more than anywhere else in the world but is at least upfront about it's race issues, I used to have this self-hatred of being Mexican or Latino because technically, Latino is a diverse culture (influenced by White Southern Europeans, American Indians and Black African Slaves) with no original traditional culture of their own like East Asians and Europeans.

Even up to this day, I still kinda beat myself up over my extremely confused racial and ethnic identity and not sure if whether or not identifying as Latino would be a smart thing and prideful thing for me to do or a foolish and laughable thing to do.

I ask since people think Arabs and Middle Eastern people are a separate race from the Caucasoid race (mainly referred to as the "white race") when in reality, a lot of Arabs and Middle Eastern people look very similar in appearance toward Southern Europeans (Sicilians, Greeks, Southern Spaniards and Southern Portuguese). Hell, some Arabs can even have blonde hair, pale skin and blue eyes and here's a picture of one.

Here's a picture of an Middle Eastern girl (Persian) who could have easily been mistaken for a Sicilian/Southern Italian.


I feel like the only reason why many "white" people from the US and from some European countries don't consider Arabs and Middle Eastern people to be "white" are because of obvious racial stereotypes since to them, an Arab or a Middle Eastern person has to be a brown or tan-skinned Muslim.

like a stereotypical Mexican person to pretend that he's Latino to be funny?

I'm not Latino but I have a friend who isn't Latino either yet thinks it'll be funny of him to do this. I warned him that he might get jumped for dressing up like a racial stereotype and offend at least one person.

And yes, I know Latino technically is just an ethnicity, not a race but the racial stereotypes of them are still obvious (most of them being racially mixed, with more obvious Amerindian and Spaniard facial features and some Sub-Saharan African in them and all).

While race does have some biological truth with all of us having different phenotypes and skin color, it's been concluded by more modern, advanced anthropologists and scientists that separating groups of humans by "race" isn't a completely accurate way of differentiating between humans. Historically there's only been 3 races, which are Caucasoid, Mong0l0id and N3gr0id.

The reason why race is also a social construct because the amount of ignorance, stupidity and egoism from human beings living in the US and many European countries. For instance, many people from the US and a lot of European countries think, Jews, Muslims, Arabs (or both a Arab and Muslim), and Latinos are all "separate races" when nearly all of them fall under being "White/Caucasoid", except for Muslims and Jews since they're religious creeds, NOT races (Although Latinos can be of any race but are usually a mixture of all 3 races). In fact, Sicilians at one point weren't considered true whites back then in the US due to their tan skin and Catholic religious faith, not falling under being WASPs. Hell, Sicilians were even treated horribly back then in their own home country by Northern Italians due to Northern Italians having a more "whiter" look.

That's the way I see race also being a social construct. In the end, there will always be hatred and discrimination everywhere, regardless if you're of a different "race", different ethnicity, different religious faith or different anything.