Conventions used when discussing race and ethnicity The Poverty Tracker uses the question from the Census Bureau listed above to identify if individuals are of “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin.” We must use this question in order to weight the sample to Census Bureau data and to make it representative of the city’s population. When identifying New Yorkers who say yes to this question, we use the term Latino instead of Hispanic or Spanish origin. Hispanic is a term originally used in the U.S. by the Census Bureau to refer to a very diverse group of people who were linked by their history of colonization by Spain or by their Spanish origin. The term is thus thought to exclude many people with origins in Latin America who do not speak Spanish — including people with origins in Brazil and/or within many indigenous groups. The term Latino, on the other hand, is more inclusive of all people with origins in Latin America. 32 Because the Poverty Tracker is weighted to Census Bureau data, and because the term Latino is more consistent with the Census Bureau’s question wording, we have chosen to use the term Latino in this report. With regards to capitalizing the names of different racial groups, there has been a general consensus among organizations, publications, and news outlets that Black should be capitalized, as a recognition of the racial and ethnic identity that many claim. However, such a consensus has yet to be reached regarding whether or not the same should be done for white. Those in favor of capitalizing white argue that designat- ing it as a proper noun assigns accountability to the white race, and invites white people to contemplate the role that their whiteness plays in society. The main argument against capitalizing white is that white people do not have a shared culture or history, and that capitalization has been used throughout history to signify superiority and white supremacy. In this report, we leave white uncapitalized, though we note that societal and editorial discussions on this topic are ongoing and unresolved.
32 Latino is also gendered, and many people choose to identify as Latinx to remove the gender binary implied in the term. There is also a debate around the term Latinx, with some identifying with the term and others not, or doing so only in specific settings (see Salinas, “The Complexity of the ‘x’ in Latinx.”)
THE STATE OF POVERTY AND DISADVANTAGE IN NEW YORK CITY 45
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