Hispanics, Jews, and Equality –

Hispanics, Jews, and Equality – Jimmy Smits, the star who played Detective Bobby Simone on “NYPD Blue” for several years, has an “Hispanic Mission.”

According to a brief notice in the Washington Post,

heartthrob actor Jimmy Smits thinks Latinos “should have more influence on the popular culture — not only as performers but also as writers, directors and producers. What I would want to strive for is equal influence, commensurate with the population.”

This notion that equality requires, even means, proportional representation in every sphere of life is increasingly popular, and hence increasingly pernicious. It is unappealing morally and unworkable practically. What, for example, is the justification for “Latino” influence that would not also justify, say, Mexican-American influence?

Another story in the same issue of the Post reveals that 58.5% of Hispanics in the U.S. originally came from Mexico, while 9.6% are Puerto Rican, 4.8% Central American, 3.8% South American (does that include Argentineans of Italian and German origin?), and 3.5% Cuban. [Note: the table from which these numbers are taken does not seem to be online; it appears on p. C14 of the paper Post.] Can Mexican-Americans stand in for Argentineans or Portuguese-speaking Brazilians on the scales of equality? In the Washington, D.C., area, however, only 14.8% of Hispanics are Mexican-Americans while 28.9% are Central Americans. Does equality thus require something different in Washington from other places? Is one Spanish-speaking person — or rather, one person with an “Hispanic” surname who may or may not speak Spanish — pretty much the same as another? Is the notion that Latinos are culturally fungible any more appealing than the notion that all Asians look alike?

Yet another article in the same issue of the Post, on religious affiliation, indicates that Jews now make up 2.2% of the population. Will Smits’s “mission” to achieve “equal influence” for Latinos be incomplete until Jewish representation in the arts is reduced to that number? I suppose it could be protested that, well, Jews make up more than 2.2% of the population in Hollywood, or in the pool of qualified, er, arts workers, but defenders of preferences will spot the flaw in that protest: the current population distribution simply reflects historical patterns of discrimination, or at least of the absence of equality, and must be corrected by affirmative action.

There is one remaining fly in the ointment of Smits’s “mission.” The “Names and Faces” entry that discusses his project states that Smits “is of Dutch and Puerto Rican ancestry,” which raises the question of what exactly is a Latino, and how we can tell. Do those percentages quoted above, for example, reflect the numbers of what might be termed “half-Hispanics” like Smits? Who knows.

How much simpler, and better, it would be to regard us all as simply Americans and to treat us all as individuals.