Statistics can be deliberately distorted, and innocently misinterpreted. This is especially true with statistics about “race”, whatever that is.

People belong to different cultural groups, which can then be further subdivided by socio-economic criteria. It has nothing to do with genetics. There may be some correlation with skin color and culture, for obvious reasons of geography and history, but it is not the defining factor, or even a very useful indicator. Spaniards look like Frenchmen, not like Cubans, because there were no Negroes or Indians living in Spain. But a lot of Cubans still look like Spaniards.

Hispanics have nothing in common with one another except that they all speak different dialects of the same language. Portuguese/Brazilians, Italians and sometimes even Frenchmen are considered “Latinos” by “Hispanics” and they don’t even speak Spanish. I was brought up taught that Latinos were people whose native tongue descended from the speech of Ancient Rome, not a voting bloc in American politics.

I was also brought up with the definition of “Hispano” (translated into English as “Hispanic”) as an abbreviation for the formal term “Hispano-Americano”, which means a person living in the New World whose ancestors came from the Iberian peninsula. “Americano” means anyone living in the Americas, regardless of origin or race. The fact that gringos have appropriated that term for themselves alone, and “America” for “Los Estados Unidos” always pissed us off. We got here a century before they did. We call people from North America “Norteamericanos”
which includes Canadians. A USA citizen is ‘un estadounidense”.

Comparing a Cuban with a Mexican with an Argentinian is like comparing a Scot and an Irishman and a Welshman. The only thing they have in common is that none of them are English or want any part of the English.

Because of the history of slavery in the US, most American blacks can be lumped into a relatively homogeneous cultural group with a fairly uniform history, people of African descent who were brought as slaves to the British colonies in North America, mostly its southern parts. But even they vary enormously depending on their social and economic status, and what part of the US their family comes from. There is a sizeable community of US blacks that rode the Underground Railroad to Canada to escape from slavery, perhaps Jeff-Wash could give us a report on their culture in the event it differs substantially from Canadian norms.

I live in south Florida, where there are sizeable Haitian, Jamaican, and other West Indian populations, as well as numerous blacks from Cuba and Puerto Rico. They have little in common culturally, not in the way they dress, dance, eat, speak English (if they even do so at all!) or their own native tongues. I will not comment on their propensity to gun violence, although I’m sure they vary there, too.

Although all four of my grandparents were born in Cuba, and I am thoroughly familiar with the language and culture of that nation, you could know me all your life and never guess by appearance or behavior I was of Cuban ancestry unless I told you.

Any statement that even obliquely implies the disproportionate gun crimes in immigrant communities are somehow a part of their DNA is massively, and I believe, maliciously misleading. I was brought up in the rural south, where rednecks were obsessed with guns and routinely killed each other in alarming numbers, but I don’t think that is a consequence of their being “white”.

And remember, in any community where there is a disproportionate number of perpetrators of gun violence, the innocent victims, including children, of that violence are primarily from that community. This is a fact often ignored by law enforcement and overall public opinion.

“Let them kill each other off. Those people are savages anyway.”