This is an understatement. I felt very slighted by them. The closest to an ethnicity I -and the vast majority of my compatriots and I'd venture a lot of Latin America- is being a mixture. With us as a collective squished in a limbo by activists on the left who want to erase us with a dichotomic "everybody is indigenous -if not Aztec- or a white colonizer" and the higher classes -who are disproportionately white-.
And I feel this so hard because despite my mother's family inhabiting the same area since pre-Columbian times, I'm too light skinned to be "a real Mexican". (And I'm not exactly lily white either) So the whole charade felt like a giant middle finger wielded against me.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm half White and half Asian. I'm what Filipinos call a "mestizo" which is a Spanish loan word (originally meaning half Spanish, half Indios, but the Spanish started applying it to the mixed Filipinos as well). What I find disgusting, is that to Filipinos, mestizo no longer means mixed race, it means "handsome" and/or "light skinned" (the rationale being the lighter your skin color, the better looking you are, and conversely, another Spanish loan word
moreno in Tagalog (meaning dark skinned), implies ugliness. Because the darker skinned you are, the uglier you must be). Contrast this to the now derogatory or even pejorative term mulatto. Although this is up for debate, some believe that mulatto etymologically derives from
mula or mule (mix of a horse and donkey). Despite the end of American colonization almost 80 years ago, the imprint of colonization still runs deep in Filipino culture.
This whole "well, you can be a half race, but you're really just one or the other" is racist in and of itself in my opinion. It's like rejecting half of what I am, and anyone else with any admixture. If they are doing this to try to be politically correct, they have in my view, failed miserably. It makes me wonder if they talked to anyone of mixed ethnicity before playtesting this (ideally several...I am not the sole voice of all mixed race people, but my "vote" should count)? If they're all about diversity, equity and inclusion, then you would think they would.
At the risk of getting political, this is why I've become more and more disenchanted with America's two party system and feel that neither really represents me. Given that
several polls show
almost half of Americans want a 3rd party, and that desire mostly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, it makes me think I'm not the only one feeling this way. But cancel culture is making people afraid to voice their real opinions and thus, here we are.
Whatever happened to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"? Has this saying gone out of vogue or something? This endless need to "protect the marginalized" is missing the point in the proverb above. Trying not to offend anyone through changes in language or erasing history is doomed to failure.
To be clear, there must be laws preventing physical discrimination (ie, unfair hiring, or "we don't want your
kind here") and hate speech. But therein lies the rub: where is line between hate speech and hearing something you disagree with? Where is the line between learning uncomfortable history, and changing or eradicating history that one finds "offensive" or even "unfair"? I think (American) society has totally lost this distinction.