Is La Raza a Race?

Charles Kamasaki from the National Council of La Raza makes a point near and dear to my heart: "we have a racial paradigm in this country that is largely built either on slavery or on immigration and when you have a population that is of many colors and comes from many different places . . . it’s very difficult to fit that population into a traditional paradigm."

Ironically, this had come to my mind just minutes before when Kamasaki asked the audience if any Hispanics in the house could raise their/our hands. I'm never 100 percent certain how to answer questions like that. According to the racial paradigm, I think I'm supposed to raise my hand. But at the same time, I have white skin, I'm a fourth-generation American, and my knowledge of Spanish is limited to a summer semester I took at NYU years ago.