Before Trump, conservatives seeking to appeal to Latinos typically embraced the politics of conservative multiculturalism. Politicians such as George… - Cristina Beltrán

What I actually find helpful about theorizing and talking about whiteness as understanding that the politics of whiteness is distinct from white people is I think it actually opens up and expands our political possibilities going forward because we're not actually trapped in our identities or our demographics. It means that white citizens can - and many are - rejecting the politics of whiteness and working with communities of color to forge a multiracial democracy. But we have to understand this complicated and tragic and also beautiful shared inheritance we have. If we want to build something new together, we have to understand where we've come from.

"Hispanic" and "Latino" are terms whose descriptive legitimacy is premised on a startling lack of specificity. The categories encompass any and all individuals living in the United States who trace their ancestry to the Spanish-speaking regions of Latin America and the Caribbean; Latinos hail from Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and beyond-more than twenty countries in all. Such inclusivity is part of the problem: "Hispanic" and "Latino" tell us nothing about country of origin, gender, citizenship status, economic class, or length of residence in the United States. An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala is Hispanic; so is a third-generation Mexican American lawyer. Moreover, both categories are racially indeterminate: Latinos can be white, black, indigenous, and every combination thereof. In other words, characterizing a subject as either "Hispanic" or "Latino" is an exercise in opacity-the terms are so comprehensive that their explanatory power is limited. When referring to "Latinos in the United States," it is far from immediately clear whether the subjects under discussion are farmworkers living below the poverty line or middle-class homeowners, urban hipsters or rural evangelicals, white or black, gay or straight, Catholic or Jewish, undocumented Spanish monolinguals or fourth-generation speakers of English-only.

Emphasizing standing and status rather than political participation and collective action, white citizenship continually constrains the meaning of both democracy and political freedom. (p 118)