Talk:Caucasian race

Contents

1 =========================================================================== 1 Genetics and race 2 Indian subcontinent 3 Offensive, Americocentric article 4 Use of talk page 5 Use of the term 'Caucasian' wrt Southern Europeans in the U.S. 6 Some authors? 7 Useless linguistic criteria 8 "Whites" a redirect?

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Usually excluding southern Europeans? (maybe the author of that sentence was an American usually confusing Latin Americans with Spaniards or Italians?) From where I stand, this article still lacks labour and must be improved. I am not going to make any suggestions at the moment.

Yes I think it is a pure american view of the concept. anyway we don't speak about "caucasian" in Europe. Nobody except the people who live in those mountains (Chechenians, azerbaidjans, armenians, etc...) would describe himself as "caucasian". Most people consider himself as "white", even if in Europe we generally don't identificate with a "race" but with cultural-linguistic groups. The latins, for exemple, are the people who speak a latin romance language (french, italians, spanish, portuguese), and, even if they have generally more dark-hair than the northener people, they have always been "White". The american view of "latin" is biaised by the fact that most of the romance-language speakers in USA are mostly of native indian or mestizo origins (non-white). So the latin word have been badly used to describe these people who didn't enter really in white or amerindian categories.

--GTubio 20:53, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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Moved comment below from 129.100.152.211 from article to here:

Very interesting. As far as I know three groups, the Manchurian, the Yeniseyan and the Ainu, carried three blood groups Haplotype C, Haplotype A, Haplotype D to the Americas. That's how the American Indians got them. Another group, the Northern Chinese, went over later on with Haplotype E which is found commonly among the Pueblo and Navajo Indians. At the mean time, two central Asian groups carried Haplotypes D and C to Europe which is found commonly among modern day Caucasian populations. While Haplotype B which is totally absent among the Amerindians, spread among Caucasian groups and Mongoloids later on from Africa via the Middle East. And the Mongoloids, like their cousins the Caucasians developed male pattern baldness and resistence to epidemic deseases, which are almost absent among their cousins the American Indians. This is the basis on which our society is legally divided into Mongoloid(Asian), Caucasian-Mediterranean, Indo-Dravedian, African-Mulato and Amerind-Meztiso social groups. And these groups continue to celebrate Multiculturalism by cultivating their own images, feeling proud on TV networks and popular entertainment, helping people of different ethnicities to understand their own respective cultures, supporing members of their own respective groups in highschool cafeterias, in order to make this society more diverse.

-Frecklefoot

I am scottish, czech, and Albanian. Why do I note my ethnicity? Because I am 100%caucasin. My father is from Albania. The Albanians are;a.) Nomads who live in Eastern Europe. These nomads originally came from the Caucus Mountains. b.) They are the poorest country due to there resistance of frivilous self glorification. c.) Their language is recorded as being the oldest language in Europe. d.)Before thier pilgrimage to East Europe from the Caucus Mountains they fled from persecution from the Islamic Semites and Orientals. The point is caucasins both eastern European and Enlish etc...are defined by common language,persuction for thier Christian beliefs and there long standing strength. I believe it good people love one another for their inner selves, which often comes around to who one is on the outside and through thier historical blood. Note: Oddly enough the English word yes is yo in Albanain, Ja pronounced "Ya" in German and of course the common thread runs on. One other comment I would like to add, the Galatians in The Holy Bible are better known as the Gauls. These people live were? They live in Europe. The Celts? The Celts were founders of Galatia!The Celts domination runs from Bohemia to the U.k. To close,simply put,Christianity is richly rooted in white soil....pretty amazing huh!

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I have moved the Latin name to the History section, assuming that it was Blumenthal who coined it. Could anyone confirm that? Thanks...Jorge Stolfi 17:45, 1 May 2004 (UTC)

Genetics and race

The claim is not that skin color is unrelated to genetics - that would be silly. The claim is that there is no set of genetic characteristics that defines "the black race" as separate from "the white race" - that is to say that genetics cannot be used as the primary means of drawing racial lines. You have to resort to appearance - i.e. skin color. Not to a particular genetic sequence. This is not an obviously untrue claim, and I'd like to see some evidence against it before you revert it again. Snowspinner 06:44, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

No. You are building a strawman there, not that I think I can expect different from you anytime soon, you unfortunately being highly biased against White people and all (reference for people who might wonder about this: look to the race-discussion at the bottom of the VillagePump page for a couple of examples). -Three arguments saying that your version is both incorrect and POV-

• The article states; "Indeed, the advances in biochemistry over the past 30-40 years have revealed that the traditional racial divisions have no genetic basis."

1) Here it is stating that traditional racial divisions (Black, White, Asian, and so forth) have no genetic basis, when that simply is not true. DNA is heritable (sp?), and "race" is our name for groups of people having spread their genes more among themselves than with other groups, and thereby having gained unique genetic features if long enough time has passed. Race is a term for groups of people being markedly different from other groups, and these differences does have indeed basis in genetics. Therefore the statement in that article is extremely POV, even false, and is not fit for an encyclopedia.

2) The article itself even contradicts itself, because it says that "There is currently extensive debate on the scientific validity of racial classifications". First it says that there is extensive debate on the validity, and then it says that its validity is "indeed" 100%.

3)Quote: "Its relevance is debatable as a physical anthropological, ethnic/cultural or socio-political concept."

Here the article expresses even more POV, it even dictates what is and what is not debatable, even when it just said that the "undebatable" was under "extensive debate."

Therefore, your edits are incorrect, and I am not the one making controversial edits. Fix the article. - 66.185.84.80

To my knowledge, you are not a biochemist, making me suspicious of your blanket statements about what has and hasn't been revealed in biochemistry in the past 30 years. This makes me question point one very much. Perhaps you'd like to give a citation. Point two does not seem to me to contradict point one. The advances described in point one happened, launching scientific debate. This is largely how science works. As for point three, the fact that it is debated (As shown in the response to point two) proves its debatableness beyond, I think, any real doubt. Snowspinner 07:32, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Point 3: Of course the statement in point number three proves that it is in fact debatable, that is exactly my point. It thus also makes the article's blanket, de facto statement about the validity of the debatable very debatable indeed. It is the article that contradicts itself and makes "100% claims" about something that even you know is highly debatable, so give it a rest and free the article of this blatant POV.

Point 1: As for your simple, non-valid rebuttal involving a statement of my not being a biochemist: What I stated is the simple and widely accepted theory of evolution. Have you never heard of evolution, man? Or perhaps you have, and disagree? If the latter is true, then I must inform you that you are in the minority. The world accepted evolution a long time ago.

Point 2: So that's what it seems like to you. Unfortunately for you, seeming is not good enough. The sentences speak for themselves, they are in direct opposition. Please refrain from trolling behaviour when losing an argument.

- 66.185.84.80

To the anonymous editor 66.185.84.80: please take the time to read some modern scientific text on population genetics, and you will perhaps understand why that sentence is not POV. Trying to give a quick summary, some of the major discoveries in question (that 18th century anthopologists did not know about) are: (1) humans have tens (hundreds?) of thousands of genes, which are inherited independently and randomly from either parent; so classifying people by the visible characteristics like skin color and skull shape makes as much sense as classifying cars by their windshield decals. (2) there are no "pure races", not even "somewhat pure" ones: even when one looks at the "purest" races, there is much more genetic variation within each race than between the means of the two races. (3) even the most paranoid racial barriers are leaky as a sieve, so over a millenium or two any social group will become genetically very similar to the neighboring populations, and vice-versa -- even if the group continues to maintain its "ethnic" identity. And so on.
Because of these reasons, it is simply impossible to give any sound basis to the old concept of "race"; it would be like asking a car mechanic to provide a link between engine power and windshield decals. There simply isn't such thing as a "Caucasian gene" or even a "Caucasian gene set". An article which does not say this clearly would be doing a bad service to its readers.
Jorge Stolfi 09:34, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

• the 66.185.84.80 user's disruptive history and nazism, and the "race != one gene" straw man aside, of course race is genetic. it is a characteristic statistical distribution of genes. Badanedwa 05:47, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Well, one problem with defining rece that way is that there would be no clear-cut boundary between such "races", so labels like "Caucasian race" would become completely arbitrary. One could as well define a "United States race" as meaning (among other things) X% black skin, Y% white skin, etc. Another problem is that you would not be able to say whether an individual belongs to a given race or not: if "race" A is defined as 40% blue eyes, 60% black (and other things), while "race" B is the other way around, to which race does a blue-eyed individual belong?

This problem becomes much worse when you consider all genes instead of two or three. With 30 genes, each having two variants, you could define about one billion different "pure races", and an infinitude of gene distributions.

A more fundamental problem is that genes get inherited independently, and those which are bad/good for a given environment are quickly selected out/in while those that are indifferent just drift around. White skin may be an advantage in colder climates, but is a definite disadvantage if you live in the tropics at low altitude. (Spend a couple of hours under the sun in a tropical beach, without suncreen, and you will understand why.)

This problem is made worse by our modern understanding of how genes work. For instance, black skin involves complicated mechanisms for manufacturing and regulating melanin, depositing it in the right places, etc. etc. All humans have the genes needed for that mechanism, but white-skinned people ("Caucasian" as well as "Asian") have a small genetic defect somewhere that prevents the mechanism from working properly. Obviously this defect has nothing to do with intellectual capability or whatever other attribute that, according to old-style racial theorists, are associated with skin color.

For these and other reasons, modern population genetics does not even try to define the concept of "race". It s not that the geneticists don't like the idea, they just cannot figure out a way to define "Caucasian race" or "Nordic race" or "Jewish race" in any way that would make sense.

All the best,
Jorge Stolfi 16:00, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

...

<there is no set of genetic characteristics>

There most certainly is, it just hasn’t been isolated yet.

Indian subcontinent

Indians are referred to as Caucasian? really? see Image:Map of skin color distribution.gif according to which East Asians have a lighter complexion that Indians. dab 12:22, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Though it seems odd now, yes, Indians were labeled Caucasian. It was not just about skin hue. My bet is that it is because Europeans had more experience with India than they did China because of their colonial history, but that is just a hunch. --Fastfission 14:17, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Nope, the hogwash is based on good linguistics: see Indo-European languages. Ironicaly, these languages are not spoken in the Caucasus. Joestynes 09:36, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

And not just solely on lingustics, Indians (from the North, at least), are descended from the proto-Indo-Europeans, who also gave rise to the Europeans, of course (in distinct contrast to the origin of the east and southeast Asians). A light-skinned Indian may be mistaken for one of European ancestry; the same would likely not be true for a light-skinned Chinese or Korean person, for instance. The facial features of Indians in general are similar to that of the other Caucasians. — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:27, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well yes and no. Don't assume that 19th-century language categorization is any more "value-free" than race categorization. And let's not give too much credit to the "visual similarities" argument, which is nonsense on a number of levels. --Fastfission 16:23, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Offensive, Americocentric article

Southern Europeans are described as "Latins"? Maybe by you they are. Are Greeks Latins? Maltese? Cypriots? They're all Southern Europeans.

The opening paragraph does not even make clear that this "concept" is entirely discredited! There's no such thing as a "Caucasian race". The term is used loosely in the US for "whites" but that doesn't mean it has any reality.

As noted, in Europe, "Caucasians" are people from the Caucusus, nothing more, nothing less. I noted Dbachmann's reversion of some changes. He said in his edit summary that they were not "NPOV". Well no, but neither's this article as it stands. I think some of the changes could have been incorporated, in more moderate language.Dr Zen 09:30, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree, you have improved the article. dab (ᛏ) 09:42, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Use of talk page

I've once again deleted the long and free-wheeling essay posted to this page. Wikipedia talk pages are for discussing changes to articles, not for giving your opinion about the use of terms in television, your opinions on political correctness in general, or your theories on the origin of "wigger" culture, as you put it. If you have concrete suggestions as to how to improve the article, please feel free to contribute them. As it is, your comments are cluttering up the talk page and far exceed what the purpose of talk pages are for. Please feel free to post them on your own user page and link to them from here if you must. -Fastfission 03:42, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[Note: I agree that one may reasonably object to the original post on the grounds that it was too long, and at times too broad in scope and overly speculative. I will not repost the original but will instead post the following more concise, more focused version:] Wikipediatag 13:03, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Use of the term 'Caucasian' wrt Southern Europeans in the U.S.

The term 'Caucasian', as used in the United States, includes southern Europeans, contrary to the claims of an earlier edition of this article that it does not. To suggest otherwise is simply inaccurate. Anyone suggesting otherwise is undoubtedly confusing and/or conflating southern Europeans with 'Latinos/Hispanics', a term which in the United States refers to persons of Latin American origin who may in fact be of any race but are often casually referred to as 'non-white'.

Wikipediatag 13:03, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Some authors?

I challenge the vague claim "Some authors have used it to specifically refer to Northern Europeans ..." and request documentation of who precisely these referenced authors are. Are we talking about the writings of fringe elements (such as Nordicists and/or Neo-Nazi types), or credentialed anthropologists? If the former, I think that should be stated clearly.

Wikipediatag 13:54, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Useless linguistic criteria

The listing referred to a "Finno-Ugrian" descent. This is rather misleading, as it groups together genetically very different people based on linguistical grounds. For example, some classify the Samoyeds as "Finno-Ugrian", and there you go. There was a theory that the speakers of Finno-Ugrian languages had a common ancestry, but this theory is discredited. Likewise, there were attempts to link Fenno-Ugrian languages with Asian ancestry. Again, this was unsuccessful (e.g. [1] (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8651309&dopt=Abstract)), as it was more an attempt to show the "racial purity" of the Swedish. The Fennic language speakers of North Europe are genetically similar to the nearby peoples, the Hungarians are like Turkish, the peoples in Siberia are like the Siberians, etc. The language is unrelated to the "race". --Vuo 23:15, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

The question is whether or not it has been historically used in that fashion. Historically the link between language and race has been variously emphasized. But I don't know about this particular aspect. If there was a theory but it has been discredited it is worth noting. --Fastfission 01:15, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

"Whites" a redirect?

Why was "Whites" redirected to this article? Gramaic 05:45, 6 May 2005 (UTC)