Are Latinos a Racialized Minority?

Abstract

American Latinos are increasingly identified in the social science literature as a “racialized minority.” A number of problems attend this characterization, including the historically ambiguous status of Latinos in American society. A more basic problem lies in the concept of racialization itself and in its root term race. The argument here is that social discourses should be labeled as racial only if they refer to groups that are hierarchically ranked on the basis of mental and moral qualities seen as innate or inherent. Innateness, not phenotype, is the core attribute of racial discourses. Racialization then should refer only to those situations where such discourses are applied to an ethnic group, and a great deal of research shows that is not the case for Latinos, or for other contemporary American minorities. Given the developments in ethnicity theory since Fredrik Barth's groundbreaking 1969 work, it makes sense to consider racial discourses a historically specific subset of ethnic discourses and practices. Latinos are thus best seen as a panethnic group.