In his July 14 guest opinion titled “The many shades of racism, some of which don’t count!,” Columbia Falls letter writer P. David Myerowitz made more than a few statements which, by any standard of measurement, “don’t count.”

I can state unequivocally that his comments which apparently equate brown skin color with being Hispanic are totally incorrect. Yet, in his rambling discussion of the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case in Florida, Myerowitz time after time seemed to invoke this false assumption.

At one point, he wrote, “Zimmerman’s heritage seems pretty obvious to me from TV interviews I’ve seen.” Really? Elsewhere, he stated that Zimmerman is “half white and half Hispanic.” He seemingly believes that just having brown skin automatically classifies someone as being Hispanic.

He couldn’t be further from the truth. Indeed, it is quite possible to be, to paraphrase Myerowitz’s uninformed thinking, “100 percent white” and be Hispanic at the same time. In fact, skin color is never used to determine whether or not one is Hispanic. And for a simple reason: people of every known skin color are part of the world’s 450 million-large community of people classified as Hispanic. Millions are as white as my Colombian friend Pablo, whose German ancestry is reflected in blue eyes, blond hair and fair skin. Millions are as black as Trayvon Martin. And millions of others fall everywhere in between on the continuum of skin color tones.

As a two decade-long contributing editor to Hispanic, a national publication, I‘ve had many opportunities to learn more about this large mass of humanity. Consider the following list of some better known Hispanics in the world today: King Juan Carlos of Spain, Pope Francis, actress Raquel Welch, actors Martin Sheen and his son Charlie, singers Ricky Martin and Shakira, and current Tea Party favorites in the U.S. Senate, Ted Cruz of Texas and Florida’s Marco Rubio. And, who among us who enjoy 1940s movies can forget the lovely actress Rita Hayworth? They are all Hispanic, but, do any of these individuals have brown skin? Not unless it’s a suntan.

So, just what qualifies someone to be considered Hispanic? To quote the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it is “of or relating to the people, speech, or culture of Spain,” and “of, relating to, or being a person of Latin American descent living in the United States; especially one of Cuban, Mexican, or Puerto Rican origin.” See any mention of skin color there? The U.S. Census Bureau defines Hispanic as “A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.”

Unfortunately, as evidenced in many letters to this paper, the term “Hispanic” is increasingly being used as a kind of code word by anti-immigrant zealots and xenophobes for dark-skinned laborers who not only pick our cabbage but also, in the view of the letter writers, take advantage of government services for which they did not help pay while working overtime to erode the traditional values of our national culture (which, in the minds of these commentators, seems to be stuck in a mid-1950s cultural reference). These letter writers seemingly do not realize that while a Hispanic may be picking their avocadoes and washing the dishes in their favorite restaurant, Hispanics are also serving as university presidents, admirals and generals, airline pilots, brain surgeons and nuclear physicists.

Not surprisingly, negative, anti-immigrant sentiments have frequently surfaced in many countries of the world. In a new book on Argentine history, the authors, detailing the national mood there in the 1930s, write that the local population’s “hostility towards the immigrant population, whom they relentlessly associated with moral decline and criminality, was palpable.” Sound familiar? Consider the chilling results of what happened in one European nation during that time when hatred of several minority groups was carried to a tragic extreme.

In closing, here are two interesting footnotes. The U.S. Hispanic population of about 55 million — 44 million of it “legal” in every sense — is larger than the population of any Spanish-speaking nation except Spain and Mexico. And, according to recent studies, the U.S. Hispanic community’s contribution to our national economy has grown from just $210 billion in 1990 to $1.2 trillion last year. Significantly, during that same time period, the percentage of Hispanic economic contributions grew twice as fast as the population of this group increased. Not bad for, in the view of some letter writers, a bunch of brown-skinned freeloaders.

Holston, of Kalispell, is a contributing editor to Latino Magazine and the Latin Business Chronicle and has presented research papers to the The National Association of Hispanic & Latino Studies.