I know, it seems like a simple google search would bring up a quick answer. I don’t seem to be able to find it. I assume that it is because it is very difficult to define race.
I’m curious what the basic racial breakdown of the planet is. I’m even willing to accept just about any definition of race, but I’m not interested in answers like, “Well, It’s 100% human.” 
Anyone know where to get data like this?
Check back after watching.
Is that an order? Does it answer the question?
As you said, it depends on your breakdown. WikiAnswers, citing the USAID Population Reference Bureau’s 2006 World Population Data Sheet (warning: PDF), gives these “major-race” figuires: Asian 60.6%, Black 14.1%, White 16.7%, Latino 8.5% (and I do question Latino as a separate race, and wonder what happened to Amerinds, Polynesians, Khoisan, etc.). That’s probably as good a “grouper” response as is available.
At the other extreme, the CIA World Factbook’s online data gives detailed ethnic breakdowns for every country – and I’ve been using CIA Factbooks to confirm this sort of thing since 1975; the data are reliable and extremely detailed.
Yeah, I was trying to view the CIA Factbook for “World”, but it didn’t have the breakdown, probably do to how complicated it is to define race.
I guess what I’m really looking for would be a list of racial demographics that had too many groups as opposed to too few. A list like that would allow me to group ethnic types together based on how I define race or by how I am interested.
Surprising how hard it is to find.
Great link! Fascinating list of terms, many of which I’ve never heard of. I like that groups that haven’t had much outside influence are just designated ‘homogenous’. This seems to be a immigratory perspective on ethnicity.
So Egyptians presumably come under white, while the paler Afghans an Russians are a different race known as Asian and are lumped with the Chinese and Indonesians.
Interesting scheme.:dubious:
“Asian” as a category makes no sense even according to traditional racial categories. About 2.1 billion people, or 33% of the global population, are East and Southeast Asian, who would traditionally be classified as “Mongoloid.” Most of the rest, those of the Indian Subcontinent, as well as Iranians, Turks, Arabs, etc, would under traditional schemes be classified as Caucasians (although they would generally also be considered “non-white”). “Latino” as you observe is not a racial category at all. Most of the population of Central and South America are racially mixed, the majority being mestizo - a mixture of European (Caucasian) and Amerindian (usually considered “Mongoloid”). There are millions of pure or nearly pure Amerinds, but their numbers are far exceeded by the mixed population. Of course many Latin Americans are Caucasian (most of Argentina and Uruguay) or of sub-Saharan African ancestry (especially in Brazil).
While distinctive, groups such as Khoisan, native Australians, Melanesians, etc have such relatively small populations they can pretty much be ignored on a global scale.
I apologize to everyone – on looking carefully at the PRB study, I see that WikiAnswers simply grabbed figures somewhat at random, and I bought into it.
Much like “Jewish” as descriptor of both a religion and an ethnicity, “Asian” is commonly used to denote “people of (one of) the ethnic groups formerly termed ‘Mongoloid’,” as well as “inhabitant or native of Asia the continent.” As Colibri notes, this usage confutes ethnic groupings by confusing “denizen of Asia” with “person of East Asian or related racial extraction.”
I would love to see some system set up that acknowledges, without bringing into the picture the 300 years of abuse and hatred, oppression and fear, that poison the well, that Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Desmond Tutu have phenotypical characteristics in common that they do not share with Dag Hammarskjold and Mohandas Gandhi or with Sun Yatsen and Saionji, each pair of which also have characteristics in common justifying some sort of broad grouping of ethnicities. Maybe someday…
The thing is, it’s not clear that Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and Tutu do have more genetically in common with each other than with Hammarskjold or Yatsen. You’ve just grouped by pretty much one phenotypic characteristic-- skin color (OK, maybe you’re also include eyefolds). If you look at real genetic variation over a broad selection of gener in humans, it turns out that populations in (sub-Sarahan) Africa differ by more than populations around the rest of the world. So if we split up human populations into races using broad selection of genetic markers, you’d have this list:
Africa Group 1, Africa Group 2, Africa Group 3, RestoftheWorld.
I think some of those numbers are wrong, e.g.,
That implies that substantially all of the 5% of the richest people in the world are US citizens. 5% of the world’s population is about 340 million: I would guess that of the 340 million richest people in the world, no more than 40% would be from the US. (Some would be from Western Europe, some would be Japanese, and there’d be significant numbers from other places).
That’s around 400 million people. I think that’s a bit dated, and the number is significantly higher now.
That’s not all that useful a racial divide. For a start, there’s a continuum in Caucasoid people, from Scandinavia to South India: where does “white” end and “non-white” start? Secondly, it groups together East Asian, South Asian and Sub-Saharan African all under the name “non-white”: if there are racial groups, these are all distinct.
by CP:
*http://channel.nationalgeographic.co…-3706/Overview
Check back after watching. *
No, and please let me apologize…on re-reading it it does sound curt. It was not meant to be. I was in a hurry.
The emphasis of the program is ancestry of various individuals–and trying to sort them out. Were I interested in your question, I’d like to know about the show as it seems particularly germane. The concept of “race” is closely related to the question of how and to what extent we are all related to one another.
If you say that Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Desmond Tutu, etc belong to the same race, then they belong to the same race. That’s it. The same goes with Dag Hammarskjold and Mohandas Gandhi or with Sun Yatsen and Saionji. Race isn’t something real. It’s not a measurement of something. It’s just an artificial grouping based on geography; but even this definition breaks down in places where there are/have been migrating humans (cities, the “Americas”).
So have fun, take out a map and draw the racial lines wherever you want. It’s not like it means anything, nor will you ever get anyone to agree with anything you say. That’s race!
The answer to this question on the racial demographics of the world centers around the definition of “white” and “caucasian”. White being of white European ancestry, and “caucasian” being a scientific definition not focussed on skin type, and more based on craniometry (oooh, that old science).
So Egyptians are really 80% Caucasian, other North African 95%, Arabs 90%, Syria & Turkey 100%, Iraq, Iran 99%; Pakistan 90%, India 75%, Bangladesh 60%, and even Myrammar 30%. Even in subsaharan Africa, you have Ethiopia 50%, Somalia 60%, Kenya 30%. It is the Nigeria, Ghana, and Cameroon that are 0%. Going to the America’s, Mexico 80%, Columbia 85%, Equador 75%. Khazakstan probably 60%. Even in the Phillipines, there is substantial Caucasian ancestry, probably 25%, due mostly to Spanish influence, and some American.
As time goes on less and less people are pure “White”, but more and more people have substantial Caucasian ancestry. A lot of the regions of the world that are exploding in population have substantial Caucasian ancestry, including North Africa, Ethiopia, Somalia, the entire Middle East and central Asia, Pakistan, and india. I would guess that 50% to 60% of the people in the world have substantial Caucasian ancestry.
More importantly, as people migrate and races merge, off-white Caucasian is the middle race genetically, between all of them. The racial extremes of the world are China, Nigeria, and NW Europe. So the average person, genetically is the “off-white” person in Latin America, the Middle East, or India.
Now if you cross a Chinese with a Hindu from India, you get something very close to Caucasian, but of course not a white European.
So what will happen in the future, 1000 years from now, is that 90% of the world population will be on average 75% Caucasian. The Caucasian race isn’t going anywhere, it’s the median, it’s the genetic average of all the others. There will probably be no pure white people left in Europe or North America, and less and less racially pure people in sub-saharan Africa and East Asia
This thread will get zombie bumped again?
17% = White
83% = Other
Me: .000000000000000000001%
Everyone else: 99.99999999999999%
Yeah, interesting definitions.
The CIA world fact book for Australia says white 92%, Asian 7%, aboriginal and other 1%.
Now, that can o only work if it considers all Europeans to be white and Indians and Sri Lankas as asian. God only knows where or what those of arabic background would come under.
We’ve got around 24% of the country currently born overseas.
So trying to get racial demographics for the whole world would be a bitch because you either have broad high level categories which don’t really tell much, or a mix of racial and nationalities, or low level racial categories which would potentially be way too much detail.