Someone needs to dub Idioteque over Squidward freaking out and yelling FUTURE ! !!<| sep |> shrug The intermingling of the word race and ethnicity and what the various terms that have fallen under them all make up a complicated swirl in the US stemming from history . I intentionally used the text the article used . Latino is probably more correct than Hispanic and I think that it ' s seeing more use , but Hispanic was historically used for everyone south of the border , because everyone down there who comes north speaks Spanish aside from a few francophones and the Brazilians , neither of which makes it to the US much , and it ' s not correct to just miscall everyone Mexican . White and Black aren ' t really races either though if you really wanted to start tamping down on terms , invariably someone would say that race doesn ' t have hardandfast definition either and . You could be a lightskinned Latino with a black mother and speak Spanish . Gotta reconcile that somehow . At the end of the day , this set of terms along with Asian meaning people only from East Asia and Native American once American Indian . thank you , Christopher Columbus and a few other oddball ones , like Pacific Islander , moreorless make up a set of identities in common use in US society . It ' s a little fuzzy , but it ' s what people work with in common use , and it has real social meaning , so it gets used for datagathering .