Rather than envisioning and enacting a better and more beautiful world, white democracy's vision is defined by scarcity. In the logic of racial repla… - Cristina Beltrán

I think that one of the things that's interesting about the politics of multicultural conservatism, for example, is that multicultural conservatism - which is the kind of conservative politics of reaching out to other racial minorities practiced by folks like Jack Kemp or George W. Bush - was an effort to recognize the specific histories and backgrounds of particular racial populations and to say that they could be part of the GOP. And I think that one of the things that's interesting is that there's a segment of people of color who don't necessarily want to be recognized at all. They don't want to be recognized for their racial distinctiveness-that for them, the very act of sort of identifying them as Latino, as African American - that they themselves have a certain discomfort with that very logic. They want to be understood as simply Americans outside of those kinds of identity categories.

1980s feminism focused on questions of difference and making the category of women more inclusive

"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.