#tl;dr racists in america will treat all native-spanish speakers w/ darker skin tones exactly the same

[i-am-church-the-cat]

To tack on to the ask you had about Carlos being white: your anon wasn’t entirely wrong and neither are you, but there’s more that some fans—especially European fans—may not recognize about certain prejudices and misconceptions that exist outside of Europe.

While it’s true that Carlos is white (both ethnically and in privilege) and therefore can’t really experience racism, prejudice always exists in context. Carlos is a Spanish-speaker. White Americans typically associate the Spanish language with latine people, who are regular targets of white racism on this side of the Atlantic. Carlos can’t personally experience racism since he’s white, but he can still be (and is, I see it all the time) the target of racist sentiments from white American fans, usually online. This doesn’t hurt Carlos directly I think so much as it affects anyone passively absorbing those kinds of sentiments while they’re scrolling their feed.

So no, Carlos could never be a victim of racism the way Lewis, Alex, Checo, Zhou, or Yuki are. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t fans implicitly or explicitly spitting racist shit at him.

I actually had these same thoughts while responding to that previous ask and that’s kind of why I brought it up in the first place, because I come from a culture where, even though Carlos is white, he would still be the target of racist sentiments and prejudice. Racists in the US probably can’t distinguish between latine and Spanish people and I do think it’s very likely that there are American F1 fans who treat Carlos differently compared to other European drivers because they don’t understand that he’s as culturally white as any of the paler Europeans on the grid.