Race

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"Race" became further entrenched with the traffic of enslaved Africans to the New World made it a way to define who may or may not be a freeman.
 
"Race" became further entrenched with the traffic of enslaved Africans to the New World made it a way to define who may or may not be a freeman.
In the 1920s, US immigration throws an old wrench back into the issue of "race". One again, conveniently ignored by so-called "3 races" types.  Italian and Spanish people were very dark skinned, and to the "American", clearly "not like us", but were also "more like us than primitive Blacks".  <ref>Race, the Power of an Illusion. PBS, 2003</ref>  Depending on the need of the day, they would be tossed in with the "Negroid", or tossed in with "Caucasian".  Jews, Arabs and Indians (from Indian, not Native America - they were just "savages") fell into this strange place of not belonging to any race.
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In the 1920s, US immigration throws an old wrench back into the issue of "race". One again, conveniently ignored by so-called "3 races" types.  Italian and Spanish people were very dark skinned, and to the "American", clearly "not like us", but were also "more like us than primitive Blacks".  <ref>Race, the Power of an Illusion. PBS, 2003</ref>  Depending on the need of the day, they would be tossed in with the "Negroid", or tossed in with "Caucasian".  Jews, Arabs and Indians (from India, not Native Americans - they were just "savages") fell into this strange place of not belonging to any race. The US Supreme Court even ruled in U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) that Caucasian Indians were not "white" within the meaning immigration law, as, despite anthropologists classifying them with Europeans, they were not considered that in the view of the "common man" which is apparently what counted. This not only led to Caucasian Indians now being ineligible for naturalized citizenship, but denaturalization of some immigrants already made citizens. Congress did not lift this restriction until 1946, when India was on the verge of becoming an independent country. <ref>http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5076</ref>
  
 
==Race vs species==
 
==Race vs species==

Revision as of 04:39, 17 March 2012

The touchy subject of

Race

link=:category:
Key concepts
Racism and racists

The term race refers to the debatable belief that it is possible to divide people into clear, well-defined groups based on a haphazard variety of characteristics. The most usual way is to arbitrarily ascribe "race" based on skin color; although others attempt to to define it based on hypothesized common ancestry, language and self-identification. The only difference skin color makes is whether or not you will burn quickly when left out in the sun and how quickly you can produce usable vitamin D from sunlight.

Not that long ago, it made sense to talk about things like "the French race" or "the German race." Nowadays, the term ethnicity or ethnic group is often used where we used to talk about "race." This isn't just the same thing disguised with political correctness. Ethnicity takes into account cultural identification, language, and religious beliefs — you can, in principle, belong to multiple ethnic groups — rather than just "look, mommy, a painted man". It's still as arbitrary and useless as a system of classification as "race," but used in context it doesn't really pretend not to be.

Contents

Identification of Races

As Europeans began to exert power around the globe, they directly encountered people of a variety of different appearances. At that time, geographical origins were a more likely way for Europeans to classify people than was race. As European colonization and the trans-Atlantic slave trade began to define global relationships in the modern world, Europeans began to rely on the idea of biologically distinct races, including such constructions as Negroids, Caucasoid, and Mongoloids - labels often based on the level of interaction with the individuals. If they seemed to have a clear, civilized culture, they were not "Negros". This simple classification system failed in one significant area, however. Darker-skinned Europeans from southern Italy and southern Spain, Indians, and significantly Dravidic Indians clearly were not "Caucasian", but they were also not "Negroid". The matter was largely left without comment.

"Race" became further entrenched with the traffic of enslaved Africans to the New World made it a way to define who may or may not be a freeman. In the 1920s, US immigration throws an old wrench back into the issue of "race". One again, conveniently ignored by so-called "3 races" types. Italian and Spanish people were very dark skinned, and to the "American", clearly "not like us", but were also "more like us than primitive Blacks". [1] Depending on the need of the day, they would be tossed in with the "Negroid", or tossed in with "Caucasian". Jews, Arabs and Indians (from India, not Native Americans - they were just "savages") fell into this strange place of not belonging to any race. The US Supreme Court even ruled in U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) that Caucasian Indians were not "white" within the meaning immigration law, as, despite anthropologists classifying them with Europeans, they were not considered that in the view of the "common man" which is apparently what counted. This not only led to Caucasian Indians now being ineligible for naturalized citizenship, but denaturalization of some immigrants already made citizens. Congress did not lift this restriction until 1946, when India was on the verge of becoming an independent country. [2]

Race vs species

As there is only one human species, each human is genetically and physically capable of breeding with a fellow human (of opposite sex, obviously). Even after the 10,000 years that they were otherwise isolated from other groups, aboriginal Australians still have no trouble making babies with other groups. Therefore it is difficult to see, from a scientific taxonomical view, how humanity can be conclusively and objectively sub-divided into "races" based on the varying definitions that different societies have applied over time. Essentially the term "race" is no more than social invention, one which changes depending on the society and over time. Most people in the west will recognize "Chinese" as a race, but in China you will find Hui, Han, Miao, Zhuang, and almost countless other "races" which are — to the Chinese — just as distinguishable as black and white is in America and Europe.

Typically race is only used by more powerful groups in an attempt to provide some legitimacy for denigrating, controlling or exploiting others. It would be more difficult to start an effective slave trade, for example, if there wasn't a way of distinguishing people (however arbitrarily) in a way to legitimise it.

Racists

Racists exist and thrive in nearly every, if not every, country in the world. Along with religious affiliation/discrimination and Nationalism, Racism is among the most popular forms of Tribalism in the world. Since race is arbitrary, any group of people that seek to identify "otherness" in another group of people can use racism to their own ends, by labeling the group they don't like as belonging to a certain race.

The concept of "reverse racism" is an exceptionally silly one, implying that there is one correct or even one predominant way in which racism flows (usually assumed in the Western world to be "White"s discriminating against non-"White"s, especially "Black"s). In reality, no one color of people have a monopoly on racism. Examples can be found anywhere.

Not surprisingly, the racists at Metapedia have different ideas.

Racist works

Apart from the various screeds such as Mein Kampf and the The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, there have been several scientific attempts to link race and IQ (even though both are imprecise measures). The Bell Curve, a book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, is a recent attempt at this flawed concept.

"Race-based medicine" and geographic ancestry

A topic that has been controversial (for both social and scientific reasons) is so-called "race-based medicine." Currently, some doctors may use racial profiling as a proxy for determining the geographic origins of the patient's lineage to diagnose and treat certain diseases.[3] However, this is not the same thing as race. The researchers at the Human Genome Project sum it up:

DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other.[4]

The word cline is sometimes used to describe this. Sickle-cell anemia is a famous example of this. It was originally classified as a "negro disease" due to its high incidence in blacks. However, it was later found that sickle-cell anemia, being an adaptation to the risk of malaria, was also more common in central and western Africans (but not southern Africans) as well as Mediterraneans (Turks, Greeks, etc.) and Indians. Thus, the disease was not an indication of race, but of geographic ancestry (in this case, areas where malaria was more common).[5]

See also

External links

Footnotes

  1. Race, the Power of an Illusion. PBS, 2003
  2. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5076
  3. Race-Based Medicine: A Recipe for Controversy, Scientific American
  4. Minorities, Race, and Genomics, Human Genome Project Information
  5. Race and Gene Studies: What Difference Makes a Difference? by Larry Adelman
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