Month: October 2020

This article by Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas appeared in Yahoo!News on October 20, 2020:

The tragic death of George Floyd and recent events have fueled widespread protests and a renewed call for racial equality nationwide. Amid this, our country has been compelled to reflect on issues that are often uncomfortable, and leaders have been driven to examine their organizations in ways like never before. The Air Force, in many ways, is no different. But as a war-fighting organization we cannot afford to squander this moment, because our future — and national security — depends on it.

Pursuing equality means we must be sure that we are attracting the most capable members of our society, from all races and walks of life, as we prepare for the next fight. This fighting force should be highly capable while reflecting the diversity of the country we serve.

Before I even took command of my service’s recruiting efforts this spring, Air Force leadership made it clear to me that improving diversity would be on the top of my to-do list. And recent national events only serve as an accelerant as we take aim and tackle this vexing issue.

Pentagon leaders didn’t need to explain the why, although Gen. David Goldfein, our former chief of staff, did that in calling diversity “a war-fighting imperative.” It’s been clear for some time that our progress in better reflecting the society we serve has been too slow.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the first African-American to lead any branch of the military, has called on us to accelerate change or risk losing ground to Russia and China, both of which are integrating potential game-changing technologies like artificial intelligence and hypersonic flight. We need both the best technologies and the best people to win. Improving our diversity falls squarely in Brown’s mandate. […]

To be clear, the Air and Space Forces are not setting quotas based on race or gender. We will, however, focus intensely and concentrate our efforts in traditionally underserved communities. It wouldn’t be legal or productive to hold recruiters accountable for bringing in a certain number of recruits from various demographic groups. But if we see that we’re not hitting recruiting targets that mirror the qualified population in those categories, we will adjust to concentrate on areas where we can get a more representative balance in our applicant pool. […]

While we are meeting or exceeding nearly all demographic targets in our enlisted ranks, inside our cockpits is where we have the greatest disparities and opportunities for improvement. In all, 86 percent of our aviators are white males. Less than 3 percent of our fighter pilots are females. This is why we established a detachment within Air Force recruiting two years ago charged with improving diversity for those who wear flight suits. The mission of Detachment 1 is to bring a singular focus to recruiting qualified women and minorities who have not always felt they belonged.

Read more.

In this article, General Watson indicates he will recruit more women as pilots and cites the success of the medical profession in changing its gender composition, with half the students in medical school now women. This raises several questions. Will the goal of the Air Force be to have half its combat pilots women? Will that improve our effectiveness in combat? Do women collectively have the same aptitude for mass destruction as they have for healing?

He also fails to reveal which racial minority he plans to target. His reference to the Black martyr, George Floyd, gives us a hint that it will be from that community. If so, he should be reminded that meritocracy is racist. Any selection of Black pilots would have to be based on criteria other than intelligence, education, competence, aptitude, or performance in competitive examinations.

On the other hand, if he is planning to recruit from our Asian minorities …

From Lefticon:

Moment – a short segment of time.

Moment has recently become a popular word in progressive political discourse, used to signify a time of special significance or opportunity—a momentous moment, so to speak.

Meritocracy – a system in which advancement is based on ability, performance, competence, intelligence, and education.

Many progressive women and people of color hold that meritocracy is racist, sexist, ableist, and incompatible with social justice. It fails to recognize other components of identity which have intrinsic merit—specifically, social factors like race and gender.

Hiring and promotions based on education and competitive examinations are problematic because of their disparate impact on Blacks and women. Furthermore, the very concept of merit is flawed as it is exclusionary and based on inequality of ability, performance, competence, intelligence, and education, which cannot coexist with equality.

Equality – sameness. A word with many meanings, depending on the context.

In socio-economics and politics, equality can apply to equal rights, treatment, justice, care, ability, pay, and housing.

A distinction is frequently made between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity, with the political left generally favoring the former and the right espousing the latter. This implies a dynamic process, but there also is a steady state of inequality which exists in every complex society and can never be overcome, e.g., systemic racism.

The only true equality is abstract and mathematical. Identical manufactured products can come close by being dimensionally and functionally equal. Biological equality is essentially impossible except for identical twins at conception. Yet we are told that all men are created equal and have the same rights. In a free society, this is true in the abstract sense of equality before the law, but even that never happens in real life because of enforcement overreach, selective nonenforcement, prosecutorial zealotry, judicial bias, and inequalities in access to quality legal representation.

Equality is or was the slogan or rallying cry of many ideologies and political movements. In the Declaration of Independence of the United States, the founders declared that all men are created equal, yet many of them owned slaves. In the French Revolution, Liberté, égalité, fraternité was the slogan of the Jacobins. Robespierre implemented égalité during the Reign of Terror, when aristocrats and common people were equally guillotined.

Social, educational, economic, racial, and gender equalities of opportunity and outcome are laudable but not fully attainable in any society inhabited by imperfect, unequal, and corruptible humans. Realizing these limitations, it is still necessary to strive toward the most equality possible in the area of civil rights and the aspirational goal of social justice.

Note:  Even the USSR, hailed as a benchmark of equality, had an unequal, elite ruling class of bureaucrats, an apparat of nomenklature and apparatchiks who enjoyed special privileges such as automobiles, dedicated stores, and dachas in the countryside. These perquisites were decried by Trotsky and Schachtman, who were apparently more dedicated to equality and the concept of a classless society than Lenin and Stalin.

This article by Ria Modak was posted on August 11, 2020 in the Harvard Political Review. It is particularly timely because of the recurrence of rioting and extensive looting the last three days in Philadelphia, which spread to New York, Portland, and Washington, DC. Once again, the trigger was the police shooting of a Black man.

On May 29, in response to escalating protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, President Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Invoking the rhetoric of White supremacists and segregationists from George Wallace to Walter E. Headley, Trump asserted that the theft and destruction of private property was punishable by violence. In doing so, he laid bare his ideological commitments: Private property matters more than Black lives. However, this sentiment is not limited to right-wing leaders. Even those sympathetic to anti-racist mobilization have criticized looting, some going so far as to brand it as “domestic terrorism.” […]

In addition to embodying the anger and frustration of centuries of oppression, looting is a radical challenge to capitalism and its conceits. 

In the American context, property has always been racialized. As slavery replaced indentured servitude as the primary system of labor in America by the late 17th century, racial categories emerged as a way to differentiate between those who could be enslaved and those who could not. Black slaves were considered property because they were Black. According to Harvard professor of African and African American studies Brandon M. Terry, abolition under this conceptualization of property could be considered its own form of looting. […]

More recently, looting played an important role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Of course, nonviolent civil disobedience was also vital to the civil rights movement, and its legacy of peaceful protests continues to inspire activists across the world. However, threats of looting helped force the hand of politicians. In the summer of 1963, for example, protesters rioted in Birmingham, provoking immediate action on the part of the president. The riots prompted Attorney General Robert Kennedy to convince John F. Kennedy to deliver his Civil Rights Address and move towards civil rights legislation. Looting, then, played a key role in accelerating the rate of change. […]

Looting, then, has taken on a variety of political meanings: a challenge to the violence of racial capitalism, an alternative and accelerated path to justice, and a way to call attention to the reality of racial violence that is often ignored by the media, to name a few. Importantly, these political meanings cannot be severed from the violence that looting entails. Terry spoke of the importance of redefining what we see as violence in the context of revolutionary movements: “Even if the participants are making their claims explicitly, there are underlying justice claims within their actions.” In other words, the explicitly violent act of looting is inextricably tied up with political aspirations for justice.

Because so much of the discourse around looting is determined by the media, it is important to think critically about the aims and consequences of looting. Who is doing the looting? Whose property is being damaged? What communities are being hurt? In the most recent wave of protests, looters have targeted chains like Whole Foods and Target which have been criticized for intensifying existing problems of inequality in low-income and majority-Black neighborhoods, suggesting that poor communities of color loot as a way to redistribute the wealth in gentrified neighborhoods. The conspicuous lack of Black business ownership in these communities, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19, poses the question: How can a community loot or destroy a neighborhood that it does not own?

This question becomes even more complicated when we account for the successes of recent immigrant entrepreneurs who benefit from significant advantages compared to their generational African American and Native American counterparts. According to Terry, systemic racism has made it extremely difficult for Generational African American entrepreneurs to thrive…  […]

Although police chiefs and political commentators have argued that the protests have given criminals a cover for looting, this discourse of criminality can only be rationalized by capitalism. The foundational organizing principles of the United States rest on the right to private property, a right which is constitutive of liberty itself, according to the Bill of Rights. Under capitalism, the right to private property is transformed into a property regime in which private property is the basis of power for the ruling class. The elite ruling class, which is mostly White and wealthy, ensures the maintenance of private property through violence. The property regime, in other words, values profits over people. In the context of American White supremacy, this means that Black lives are collectively found less valuable than property. The logic of a capitalist and White supremacist state dictates that the punishment for stealing bread is far more severe than the punishment for murdering a Black person. […]

Abbie Zamcheck, an organizer involved with the Occupy City Hall movement in New York City, thinks that this dichotomy distracts from the broader goals of anti-racist struggle. “The whole effort to divide ‘good’ and ‘bad’ protesters comes from the perspective of the state,” he told the HPR, “which claims that the only correct and proper way to fix the system is through peaceful protest. When communities in the United States do not have power, the better question to ask is, ‘What tactics and strategies can we use to win power for ourselves?’” Looting offers one powerful response to his question.

Read more.

This essay should be read in its entirety; my excerpts do not do it justice. It was written by a Harvard junior who is well versed in the terms, topics, and concepts of the left. I doubt if Marx or Engels could have made a better case for looting as an instrument of political change. I also doubt if looters are aware of the noble motives and traditions behind their breaking and entry of a big-box store to acquire a pair of sneakers or a new TV.

Compare it with my humble entry in Lefticon:

Looting – the expropriation of property from the owner of a retail store to a member of the underclass/lumpenproletariat during a political demonstration or riot.

Looting usually takes place during a protest, demonstration, or riot, when the protesters forcibly access retail stores. It is a means of redistribution of wealth which is entirely consistent with progressive values and goals. Obviously, private property is a racist concept, integral to the systemic racism and hegemonic white supremacy promulgated by capitalist whites. Looting is nothing more than partial reparations for slavery and oppression—Blacks taking what is owed to them by whites.

The anti-racist organization, Black Lives Matter (BLM), has demonstrated a high level of proficiency in the use of looting to bring attention to anti-Black systemic racism. BLM members and their white antifa comrades form a particularly successful synergistic alliance.

Looting is conceptually similar to flash mobs, a sophisticated form of coordinated shoplifting by inner city youths, but it is on a larger scale and can be accompanied by the destruction and arson of the targeted stores.

Note:  Looting can also take place during war or at times when there is anarchy or the temporary absence of law enforcement, such as following a natural disaster.

 

This was reported yesterday by Natasha Bertrand in Politico:

More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter’s business dealings. Under the banner headline “Biden Secret E-mails,” the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who also alerted the FBI.

While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.

Read more.

In the rest of this article, the reporter quotes from the letter and cites purported examples of Russian interference in our last presidential election in 2016 as though they were proven. Two pertinent quotes from the letter (italics theirs):

“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

“We do not know whether these press reports are accurate, but they do suggest concern within Executive Branch departments and agencies that mirrors ours. It is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”

The first four main signatories are Jim Clapper, Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan. Nearly all of the others are former CIA, with a few NSA. The FBI is not represented. This is rather strange, because the FBI had possession of the Hunter Biden computer for almost a year, and their forensic analysts would certainly have detected any evidence of Russian hacking.

Our intelligence and security officials should ideally be apolitical, but that is not possible when the top positions in these agencies are political appointees. This letter, clearly contrived to support the Biden candidacy, is a case in point. It is a weak letter, composed in haste, saying “we do not know” more than once but making their accusations anyway. It’s like saying “I don’t know if you’re still beating your wife, but it’s high time you stopped.” Perhaps it was not meant to be read by the masses, but to create a headline and be selectively quoted, with a link to a PDF download which they thought few readers would take the trouble to open.

Could these former spooks, obsessed with Russia from when it was Communist and still fighting the Cold War, be trying their hand at a little of their own dezinformatsiya?

From Lefticon:

Disinformation – deliberately false information.

Disinformation differs from misinformation, which is mistakenly false and not deliberate.

The Russian version, known as dezinformatsiya, was perfected in the former USSR by propagandists of the KGB and its predecessors. During the Cold War, Soviet agents spread disinformation through the Comintern and a network of collaborators and fellow travelers whom Lenin famously described as “useful idiots.”

Disinformation is an important component of propaganda. The media propagandize disinformation (fake news) to manufacture the consent of the masses.

 

This editorial was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on October 8, 2020. These are the first and last paragraphs:

Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.  […]

Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences. Our leaders have largely claimed immunity for their actions. But this election gives us the power to render judgment. Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many political positions taken by candidates. But truth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.

Read more.

The New England Journal of Medicine was once the premier medical journal in the United States. I subscribed to it for many years, when it was untainted by politics or political correctness. That was another era; now we find it publishing a political editorial, advising us how to vote, written in the same tone as the cancel culture.

This editorial has a disclosure statement for 34 co-authors, all of whom are deputy editors, consultants, or statisticians. Only one of them, the corresponding author—who probably was the one who composed the piece—had the need to disclose that he has relevant conflicts of interest. He has grants from the Ragon Institute, NIH/NIAID, the Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, and is involved in numerous HIV and COVID vaccine clinical trials.

Like the two representative paragraphs above, the body of this editorial repeats the same vague accusations against unnamed leaders without specific examples or evidence. The authors cite incidence rates and mortality outcomes based on tests with low specificity and unacceptable levels of false positives. They fail to note that the death certificates in many jurisdictions do not distinguish between “with” and “from” Covid-19, thus making the claim of “more than 200,000” deaths highly questionable.

They also fail to specify what “our leaders” could have done differently. Although they do not name the leaders, it is obvious that they are referring to the governors of New York, California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, who were responsible for the high death rates in their states by forcing nursing homes to accept Covid-infected patients transferred from hospitals. They could have allowed nursing homes to refuse those transfers, but those were judgment calls which were made under pressure and are easy to criticize in hindsight.

The editorialists were also critical of “the administration” for reasons that could have been talking points of the Democratic Party. Other than that, the only other lapses of leadership were when the governors and mayors in multiple states and cities allowed Black Lives Matter and antifa to hold ongoing protests of police brutality and systemic racism in violation of the quarantines and social distancing imposed on everyone else. Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland are particularly egregious examples. This may have been a factor in the disparate impact of the virus on the Black community, but it was unmentioned in the editorial.

The general tone of this editorial was passive-aggressive: accusations without names going hand-in-hand with anonymous authorship. It is sad that the 34 authors of this editorial sacrificed the integrity of a renowned medical journal to make a weak political statement.

This was reported today by Grace Hauck in USA Today:

Scores of cities and towns plan to host virtual or outdoor events Monday to mark Indigenous Peoples Day, which celebrates and honors Native American histories and cultures.

Fourteen states – Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin – plus the District of Columbia and more than 130 cities observe Indigenous Peoples Day instead of or in addition to Columbus Day. 

The notion of an Indigenous Peoples Day took root at an international conference on discrimination sponsored by the United Nations in 1977. South Dakota was the first state to recognize the day in 1989, and the cities of Berkeley and Santa Cruz, California, followed. California and Tennessee observe Native American Day in September.

Though some groups argue that Columbus Day celebrates Italian American heritage, many say the holiday glorifies an exploration that led to the genocide of native peoples and paved the way for slavery.  […]

Although Columbus is credited as the “discoverer” of the New World, millions of people already inhabited the Americas. Columbus made four expeditions to the Caribbean and South America over two decades, enslaving and decimating populations and opening the floodgates of European colonization.

Many groups have called for the removal of monuments to Columbus, as well as to Confederate generals. Several Columbus statues came down this summer amid protests after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May and cries to end systemic racism.

Columbus, Ohio, named for the explorer, removed the Columbus statue outside City Hall. The city of Genoa, Italy, where Columbus was from, sent it as a gift 65 years ago. In Baltimore, protesters pulled down a statue of Columbus and threw it into the city’s Inner Harbor on the Fourth of July. And in Chicago, officials “temporarily” took down two statues of Columbus after dozens were injured in a clash between protesters and police at one of the monuments.

Read more.

Christopher Columbus was a man of uncommon courage, as were all the early explorers who overcame fear of the unknown, risked their lives, and endured great hardships in their voyages of discovery. In his dealings with the indigenous people, he was no angel, but neither were they. This is a good day to look dispassionately at Columbus, those who were here before him, and those who followed.

Addendum:  Anyone contemplating the destruction of a Columbus monument should read this interview first, or better yet, read the book by Prof. Carol Delaney, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. The interview changed my mind, and I plan to read the book. Professor Delaney is a cultural anthropologist who did the work that should have been done by accredited historians.

From Lefticon:

Noble savage – a depiction of indigenous people as peaceful but courageous, dignified and wise, the inheritors of rich tribal cultures in perfect harmony with nature.

The noble savage is a sentimental portrayal of the uncorrupted goodness of humanity that supposedly existed before civilization took its toll. This image, portrayed by Rousseau in the eighteenth century, has persisted to this day.

Tragically, those noble savages were displaced, oppressed, killed, and exploited by white European men in their quest for gold, natural resources and territorial acquisition. Their lands were plundered and spoiled; they were converted to white man’s religion; they were ravaged by white man’s diseases. All of which is a portrayal that highlights the nobility and victimization of primitive cultures while ignoring their savagery.

There is anthropologic evidence, from all parts of the world, that prehistoric tribes were not inherently peaceful; instead, they waged constant war with each other. The Aztecs of meso-America, for example, preferred capturing to killing their enemies so that they could sacrifice them to their gods and extract their beating hearts.

The Incas of South America also used their prisoners of war for human sacrifice. The North American tribes were less religious but just as warlike, though there were a few that preferred to run rather than fight. The Comanches in particular were known for mass killing, torture, mutilation, rape, and enslavement of their victims. Their women took charge of the torture of their captives. The Comanches equally savaged other tribes as well as white settlers, and it took a major effort by the Texas Rangers and US Army to bring them under control.

Sitting Bull—who was not a Comanche, but a chief of the Sioux—became the archetypal noble savage of American history in 1876, when his Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors defeated the US Army in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Three years later, in the South Africa of 1879, Zulu warriors, armed with spears, defeated the British Army, armed with guns, at the Battle of Isandlwana. Their tactics of frontal assault, encirclement, and trapping were developed more than half a century earlier by the legendary Shaka Zulu, the African version of a noble savage.

The Zulus were much like the Comanches in their constant warfare against all neighboring tribes and their treatment of the conquered. Shaka killed anyone who challenged his power, including members of his own family. He set up a 200-mile genocidal buffer zone around his territory, which he systematically depopulated by killing all the non-Zulus, after which his patrols killed any unfortunate intruders. The other tribes outside his no-man’s zone, however, were not much different. They were also constantly warring with each other and were just as vicious to those they conquered. So much for noble savages.

It should be noted that civilized white men are capable of equal or greater savagery. Their early history is one of constant warfare between monarchies, aristocracies, and caliphates for the expansion of wealth, power, territory, and religion. There were no noble savages among them, but plenty of savage nobles.

As European whites became more civilized and their weaponry more lethal, their wars became more destructive and their enemies more inclusive. The First World War destroyed existing empires and a caliphate. Then they discovered the motivational power of ideology and fought a Second World War for or against Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Imperialism, and Democracy. The World Wars of the twentieth century, and the smaller regional wars that followed, saw war crimes by both the victors and the vanquished. They included the deliberate targeting of civilians to break the resistance of the enemy; saturation bombings, fire bombings, atomic bombings; napalm, white phosphorus, and poison gas attacks; delivery of death via missiles and drones directed by remote warriors; genocides and democides. There were prewar sanctions and blockades and postwar starvation of vanquished civilians and prisoners of war. Like the crimes of the savages, the war crimes of the civilized are largely unpunished, and are swept by historians into an Orwellian memory hole.

This was reported yesterday by Josh Boswell in the Daily Mail:

The leader of the Proud Boys, the ‘white supremacist’ group at the center of the presidential debate furor, is a state director of Latinos for Trump and ran for Congress as a Republican, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Donald Trump told the Proud Boys to ‘stand back and stand by’ after he was asked to denounce their alleged white supremacist views during the presidential debate Tuesday night.

Afterwards Trump’s son and spokesman both tried to downplay the comment, calling it a ‘misspeak’. The president backpedaled on Wednesday telling reporters he had never heard of the group.

DailyMail.com can reveal the Proud Boys national chairman, Enrique Tarrio, is close to the Republican party, having been pictured with the president’s son Don Jr. and currently serving as the Florida state director of the political support group Latinos for Trump.

Read more:

The rest of this article gives more details about the organization known as the Proud Boys and labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other progressive watchdog groups.

Enrique Tarrio is the national chairman of the Proud Boys. Members of its Miami chapter are mostly Latinos of Cuban heritage. This may lead one to ask: How can they be white supremacists if they are Latinos? The answer is easy. They are white Hispanics.

Look at photos in this article. The leader, Mr. Tarrio, is rather swarthy, but that could be from exposure to the sun—it is Miami, after all. Look at the complexions of the other members—all are very pale and white. Yes, white!

Haven’t we learned from our teachers and sensitivity training sessions about Critical Race Theory that all whites are racists, and that all anti-Black racism is systemic and rooted in white supremacy?

Logical conclusion: The Proud Boys are racist white supremacists, their Cuban members are white Hispanics and racist white supremacists, and any Black members (which they also claim to have) are internalized racists and Uncle Toms.

From Lefticon:

White Hispanic – a person of Spanish heritage who identifies as white, rather than mixed Spanish-black (mulatto) or Spanish-indigenous (mestizo).

Most white Hispanics are descendants of the conquistadores and early Spanish colonists who occupied the southern United States. Some are later, post-colonial immigrants from Spain (ethnic Spaniards).

The term white Hispanic is used by the media as a convenient label for a Hispanic who commits a crime against a black. It can also be used to skew official crime statistics toward bolstering the rates for certain crimes by whites.

The mainstream media popularized this usage after the shooting of Treyvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. They described Zimmerman as a white Hispanic even though his facial features were those of someone with mixed Spanish-indigenous heritage. The crime was obviously more sensational when perpetrated by a white than it would have been if perpetrated by a racial hybrid.

The terms Latino/Latina (or Latinx) and Hispanic are generally interchangeable with two exceptions: Brazilians are not Hispanic, and Spaniards are not Latinos.