Bernard Goldberg on the media’s invention of the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman; and (a more abstruse question), is Zimmerman even Hispanic?

Last night I attributed a zinger of a line about the Martin-Zimmerman case to an unnamed reader. In fact it was from an article by media critic Bernard Goldberg. I’ve just revised the entry, with a fuller quote from Goldberg.

Also, while Goldberg is protesting the “white” part of Zimmeran’s description as a “white Hispanic,” a Brazilian reader protests the “Hispanic” part. “Hispanic” he says, refers properly to people of Spanish and Portuguese heritage, the name being derived from Hispania, the Roman province on the Iberian peninsula. But Zimmerman is largely of Amerindian, not Spanish, background, and therefore should not be called any kind of a Hispanic. At least that is what I understand the reader to be saying.

Update, March 29: another reader takes issue and says that “Hispanic” is the correct designation for partly Amerindian, partly European people.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 28, 2012 08:47 PM | Send