There's a lot that I find problematic with this video.

1. In the interview, Jennifer Lee doesn't define "Latino". In the United States, "Latino" is a ethnicity and not a race. People can be Latino and be Black or White or Asian for that matter.

2. In the interview, Jennifer Lee doesn't define "African Americans" or "Black Americans".

3. In this interview, Jennifer Lee does not discuss the possibility that the definition for who is White in the USA may change in the future (if it is not already changing). Why shouldn't people with a White birth parent and a birth parent of another race or ethnicity (with ethnicity here meaning Latino) be considered White? If Lee had delved into this subject, I hope that she would have been honest enought to place the blame where it belongs-on the racist notion of White racial purity.

4. In this interview, Jennifer Lee does not mention Native Americans and people of other races in the USA besides Black, White, Latino, and Asians. I'm African American with no American Indian ancestry that I know of. But the lack of references to Native Americans in discussions about race & ethnicity in the United States really bugs me. I'm assuming that leaving out Native Americans from these discussions would bug many Native Americans more than it bugs me.

5.In this interview, Jennifer Lee seems to approach "Asian" as a homogeneous race and does not discuss the difficult experiences that some some Asians have in the USA.

6. Jennifer Lee makes a statement about discrimination against Black people in the USA in the past and doesn't mention that discrimination and racism against Black people continues to occur in the USA.

7. Jennifer Lee makes no mention of institutional racism. There is no discussion about why there continue to be poor outcomes in the USA for Black people and for other Latinos with dark skin.

8.Jennifer Lee talks about Latinos with dark skin and names Puerto Ricans and Dominicans as examples of those Latinos. She later names Cubans as examples of Latinos with light skin. However, there are Cubans with dark skin, and Puerto Ricans with light skin. And there probably are also people from the Dominican Republic with light skin.

9. Jennifer Lee makes no mention of the growing use of the referent "People of Color" (PoC) in the United States. For those not familiar with this referent "Person of color (plural: people of color; persons of color) is a term used, primarily in the United States, to describe all people who are not white. The term is meant to be inclusive among non-white groups, emphasizing common experiences of racism. People of color was introduced as a preferrable replacement to both non-white and minority, which are also inclusive, because it frames the subject positively; non-white defines people in terms of what they are not (white), and minority frequently carries a subordinate connotation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color

In summation, I was very disappointed in this video. I look forward to reading other people's reactions to this interview.

What is fascinating to me about the discussion of "race" in the United States is that it has very little to do with race in any biological sense at all. It has a lot to do with U.S. history, but that seems to be left implicit when it should be put out front. The meaning of "race" shifts in the U.S. every few years, and has done so since the beginning. Strictly speaking, there is only one biological race: homo sapiens sapiens. We are all simply human beings. Our animal species is: homo sapiens sapiens and there are no biological "races." Everything beyond that is a kind of superficial, mainly morpological characterization of people in terms of very superficial visual criteria like skin color or shape of eyes and/or nose. When an American citizen comes to Canada she or he is automatically a member of the "American" race, in a way, since s/he is no longer classified in the same way. In Canada there is much more attention paid to people who come from the Caribbean and the discussion of Cuba versus other parts of the Caribbean is so superficial it is laughable outside of the U.S. context of "black" versus "white." I am very, very disappointed at the very superficial tone of this video. It gives an entirely misleading impression. The Irish became "white" in the nineteenth century. Moreover, when precisely did Jews become "white"? Do Jews themselves accept the idea that they are a separate "race"? Or is it an "ethnicity"? The whole issue of whiteness and blackness needs to be taken out of the immediate American context and put into the context of all people of the earth. While "ethnicity" can be discussed in a national context, the term "race" cannot mean anything in a national context. Perhaps if we always said "cultural race" it might help. But there really is not and never has been such a thing as a "white race" biologically. It is a remnant of an outdated nineteenth century racist classification scheme that led to European (including British) Fascist ideas of a "pure" race. Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic epistemology of semiotic signs helps to make the arbitrariness of a sign like "race" very clear. If a classification scheme is not based on scientific criteria then it means next to nothing, except in terms of tracking bias.

I watched the video again to try to make sure I was not over-reacting. There are some subtle hints that the history of the situation has to be put in the fore-front and as short interviews go this is far better than many. Nevertheless, if this is going to be a part of a textbook for undergraduate students I feel it could be vastly improved. The notion that skin color is what defines "race" is something that should decline rather than increase. So if it is blackness of one's skin that will determine being African-American then perhaps all copies of Ebony magazine should be removed from the shelves! (Ebony tends to favor very light skinned African-American female models, etc.) The key is not that we will move from whiteness to blackness in the U.S. but that we should move to a global, contextualized understanding of the way in which U.S. history is not the be all and the end all in the determination of "race" as opposed to "ethnicity" (or "cultural race"). For many people in Southeast Asia the "cultural race" of Americans is "American."

Just Latinos and Asians? What about Middle Eastern people? Natives?