Chavez blame game

I won't be reading his book, the one Obama accepted as a gift after listening to a despot denigrate his country for 50 minutes. Curiosity seeker-buyers have pushed it to the top of the Amazon list. Man, does this guy know how to market, or what? Too bad his politics aren't democracy and capitalism. I'm sure he's more than happy to take the profits and store them out of his country. The book appears to blame Latin America's failures on white Europeans. So what is Chavez' ethnicity? According to one census account I read (for 2000) Venezuela is 34% mulatto (African European mix), 10% black, 21% white, 34% mestizo (European Indian mix) and 2% Indian. Now, in the United States that would mean 44% black, 21% white, and 36% Indian. Also, the Venezuelans have long played loosey goosey with their own racial designations--according to the report I read (sorry I didn't note the link--I usually do). Looking at Chavez, who in photos appears to be darker than Obama, I'm guessing he's part mestizo and part mulatto, which would make him a big part European, right? So we've got one big boss, the son of a white teenager who had an affair with an older married African, hobnobbing with another big boss ridiculing his own ancestry. Where are their manners? It's not nice to dis your mama. Or your country.

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Hispanics--the made-for-politics racial category

"With the beginning of large-scale non-European immigration in the late 1960s as a result of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, entrants from Europe fell from over 50%, 1955-64, to less than 10% in 1985-90, while Third World entrants rose rapidly. This opened an opportunity for lobbies to create new categories of 'disadvantaged minorities.' Thus the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a powerful interest-group in alliance with the Democratic Party, succeeded in establishing a racial category known as 'Hispanic,' which included latin mestizos, people of predominantly European, black, and American Indian descent, descendants of long-assimilated Californios and Tejanos, and other groups who once spoke Spanish--almost anyone in fact who found it advantageous to belong, so long as they could not be accused of being 'Caucasian' or 'Aryan.' This pseudo-race came into existence as the result of statistical classification by bureaucrats." Paul Johnson, A history of the American people, Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 956-57