As an outsider, it's obvious looking in that racial classification in the US is just crazy -- they took some racial stereotypes from 100 years ago, gave them neutral sounding names, and started pretending it's not racist to group everybody south of Texas as "hispanic". And then build official policy on top of these simplistic classes that fail to describe reality in any meaningful way, only serving to reveal to everybody else in the world what the people in the US think about them.
At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are being sincere in their ignorance.
I myself have to mark a checkbox saying "Hispanic OR Latino". I'm Latino, but NOT Hispanic. But I can also check "white". One is a skin color, another is ancestry, and yet another is geographical location...
My (least?) favorite anecdote on this was when we were running stats demographics and found there was one more African American than Black. Turns out it’s a rich white kid who was born in South Africa. He’s not wrong…
The fun part is that 60% of world population have to share a single classification whereas a couple of small islands in the pacific somehow get a label for themselves
At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are being sincere in their ignorance.