BTW, when the big, bushy “Afros” were in style, my father referred to them as “Africos.”
He was quite sincere about it. He thought that’s what they were supposeds to be called.
Whenever he did say it, it was all I could do to not laugh.
Well, at this point, this thread is clearly NOT a general QUESTION, but either a great or not-so-great debate. And since, in this medium and intellectual context, I obviously have trouble seeing what goes on here in simple enough terms not to end up wasting a lot of time and riding on the edge of social tastes by accentuating some abstract points that are brought out in such an interchange. Of course, if I go out on the streets of Berkeley, or the campus, my mind shifts into a completely different gear, unless I talk to someone who I know is not emotionally twanged by elements of this stuff, and is open to the full range of objective aspects the issues here. I have no occupational or other position in this society at present where I’m involved in an policies affected by or affecting these considerations; so, in my case at present, there are only the one-on-one pragmatic and the intellectually aloof stances. All my heavy contentions have been with “co-conspirators” of the conquering (?) whatever-it-is-that-we’re-not-supposed-to-call-a-race, most all of us more or less Anglo-Saxons.
Phaedrus:
[quoteI call an African American a person who is Negroid and lives in America.[/quote]
A number of serious problems, such as:
- What’s cutoff percentage of negroid “blood”?
- What are the borders of “America”?
- Does/should the subject person have a means of influencing whether (s)he is to be so categorized?
Do they intend to? I don’t follow them, but the idea of whether “there is” or “there isn’t” any such thing as race simply amuses me. This is just one example of what is, in my mind, a general sort of ridiculous dilemma: People have employed a word rather indiscriminately, and not closely tied into a tight little paradigm, for ‘x’; does ‘x really exist? NOTHING EXISTS IN ITS OWN RIGHT; IT ONLY EXISTS WITHIN A MENTAL SETTING – CORRELATE TO CERTAIN WEIGHTINGS OF SYNAPTIC INTERCONNECTIONS IN BRAINS – WHICH SETTING PRESUMABLY HAS COLLECTIVE FUNCTIONALITY IN THE LIVES OF THE ENTITIES HAVING THOSE BRAINS AND IN WHAT IS SEEN AS SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS WHEREOF THEY ARE PARTS. This is essentially the same notion as came up in the thread on the order of mathematical operations within a conventionally expressed equation. OK, so it’s only one philosophical point of view. . .but all the others seem to me to just wander off into infinite [<font face=“symbol”>¥</font> (Hey, I was shown how to do it, so I gotta use it.)] nowhere. Science sometimes likes to kid itself that it is independent of pragmatic societies’ and their individuals’ desires, and that its concepts are set in some kind of “holy”, absolute objectivity that “exists” outside of the human or whatever mind. . .but what do you sit on (scientifically, of course) while you prove this is all so?
Anyhow, I say a very wide range of people on this planet want, and feel they have a need, to use some term that is close to the everyday present usage of the word ‘race’. As for scientists (and I’m not sure physical anthropologists are always all that scientific), what do they want out of a decision of whether ‘race’ or a similar word be considered “to exist”. . .in presumably some scientific sense? We readily admit that things macrobiological vary all over the place, so much so that we all admit that the whole taxonomic hierarchy of biological organisms on earth, begun back in the murky early days of biology and only patched up in small ways now and then, is only a crude outline of the menagerie, and that the subject matter is even still varying. Some want to completely overhaul this quite imperfect diagrammatic history and addressing system of variant organizations of living matter, to the extent of doing away with the fixed across-the-board ranks of this hierarchy, i.e., kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The basis of the present biological taxonomic system began with Linnaeus’ classification of plants and animals and established biology as a science in the 18th century.
http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/LFSC/life_sciences/.plant_biology/nomcl/nictxt.html
But in this age of “organics”, some guy named Daston concluded in 1997:
“Classifications organize, but they are not organic.”
So classifiers of organisms started thinking about becoming organic, and Kevin de Queiroz has proposed this phylogenetic system be substituted for the present Linnaean nomenclatural system:
http://www.inform.umd.edu/PBIO/nomcl/dequ.html
But the bulk of taxonomists being as stuffy as they are, apparently neither this nor similar schemes are likely to happen over night.
Now, I’m not saying I waded through all this stuff. (It would’ve “taxed” me just to much.) But before telling the public around the world that ‘race’ isn’t a scientific enough concept, so they shan’t use it, I say clean thy own house first. . .and ‘race’ = ‘variety’ ain’t all that less scientific than our present Linnaean-based “scientific” hierarchical taxonomic systems, with their silly words for their ranks, like ‘kingdom’. Sounds pretty patriarchal to me. I’ll have to run that by NOW. 
In the meantime, I think your physical anthropologists should hold their decision off until the biolgists, as a more basic science, restabilize about a phylogenetic taxonomic system for all living things, because genes and genetics is where it’s at in these kewl days of millenial shiftiness.
Why not.
Beruang:
Well, you can’t exactly go to Amerinds to find a common name for themselves. Most of them have spent out their energies on negative names for each other, the same as the rest of the world. You can’t even do it for within the US (which is a kind of artificial task borderwise, in respect to the aborigines), because more than one language family is involved.
pointy:
So you say it’s OK to yell ‘ethnic’ appellations but not ‘racial’ ones; is that it? But apparently ‘Sri Lankan’ doesn’t label much of an ethnic designation; you have to break that down to Sinhalese and Tamil, or something, and if you did this task right, you’d probably cross over into a share of India, which, of course, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) used to be when the British ruled it. . .and I’m sure the Brits had some creative names that would cover all non-Brits in India – although racial, subracial, cultural and religious differences were exceedingly apparent in India, as in few other places.
Er. . .don’t try to idiolexicize, when ‘scientize’ oughtta work just fine.
-
Next to nothing can mean a great deal in science. Like, what percentage of the earth’s matter is plutonium?
-
Who said the purpose of the notion of ‘race’ involved science? What does the Mona Lisa mean sciencewise? That a smile on an Italian woman’s face could mean just about anything? Or what does the sound of one hand clapping m
Lawrence:
What is that second word there? Is that supposed to be Latin for ‘chimes’?
I’m saying that, relative-percentagewise within their populations, they have neither the desire/interest nor the wherewithall for technical engineering. Only a few of them try it, and most of those get out of the technical sector of it. Sure, there are quite a small number who are so-equipped, and I guess there are some of those who stay in a technical area of it, but, out of a thousand or so I’ve met, I can think of only one. There are no doubt a few more than that today. I’m also not saying there aren’t a handful who are more capable of practicing technically in that field than the average temperate-latitude-evolved male, but those persons are generally also qualified to do many other things also, which things become more appealing to such persons. The student who achieved, by far, the best grades in all the engineering specialties in freshman year of my undergrad college class was a white female. After that year, however, she got much more social, the chemistry kicked in, and that was the end of that; but I don’t know what she ended up doing professionally. I’m speaking of a class that graduated in 1954, however.
Well, I don’t know exactly how I worded my statement in this regard, but what I intended to put in the prime scientific/technological-aptitude category was males of genetic lines that significantly evolved in temperate zones. South and Southeast Asia have mixes of long-term indigenous, tropical peoples and peoples who spent tens of thousands of years considerably further north in Asia. The latter tend to be dominant today in those areas and are the ones I placed in the mentioned category. Obviously there are oriental and Caucasian engineers situated in the tropics today, but they’re all, of course, descendants of “races” which evolved for tens of thousands of years in temperate regions. Clearly, at this time, there are many opportunities for engineers in all parts of the world, and indoor working areas can be made technologically accommodative to such occupations, but neither of these were the case back when the pertinent genes were being influenced. And today it’s also not as easy to live in the tropics by just grabbing fruit and throwing spears.
What are you worth?
Tom:
Well, I don’t know about all that Jesse Jackson stuff, but before African American or African-American, there was Afro-American, right? Was the lattermost from a different source. And I believe the present ‘African’ form has no hyphen, right? Without the hyphen it can’t mimic the European American X-American ethnic groups, can it?
Ray (Citizen of the California Republic)
Afro-American was a term that was evaluated (by throwing it out on the street to see whether any one would use it) back in the late 1960s, when the original discussion regarding names was in full swing. The original discussion within the black community was in regard to what word they wanted used when a news article (electronic or print) referred to them as a group. The media at the time was using Negro. The objections raised against that were that is had a pseudoscientific air about it that conveyed an image of specimens being examined. Whites were simply referred to as white, rarely as Caucasian. The word colored might have had a shot, except that nearly all the Jim Crow laws and Northern “point” systems used that word, hanging a lot of excess emotional baggage on it. (I kind of liked “colored,” myself, with the corollary that we descendents of Europeans were “colorless.”) Quite a few other terms, including African-American, Afro-American, and several that were quite bizarre were also put forth. Afro-American followed the usage of Sino-American, Euro-American, Franco-American, and similar words. I never heard why it made as strong a showing as it did at that time. At a WAG, it indicated the geographic origins while being shorter than “African American.” Eventually, they settled on black (lower case “b”) as the word that most nearly resembled white in usage and function.
The hyphen in (or out of) African American has come and gone at different times. (This is also true for Irish American/Irish-American and similar terms. The nomenclature is “hyphenated-American,” but in actual usage it is printed both ways.) The version without the hyphen is the one that made it into the various media style books. Since very few people take the time to find out word origins, the appearance of “African American” as it appears in newspapers and magazines is simply accepted as it is found and embraced or reviled by each reader/listener as they see fit.
Tom~
Come on, Ray, don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Al Campanis, the former Dodgers player and front-office man, and the time he put his foot in his mouth on “Nightline” by saying that blacks “don’t have the necessities” to be major-league baseball executives. It cost the guy his career, which was kind of sad since he’d been a friend of Jackie Robinson’s and had been one of the earliest supporters of integrating baseball. During the '40s and '50s his thoughts were very liberal compared to those of the rest of society. Too bad he got mentally stuck at that time. Your opinions sound a lot like his.
The term refers to American Blacks. I can’t believe all the attention (negative and otherwise) given to this subject. I wonder if Native American, Irish American, Italian American, etc., when first used, conjured up this much controversy. I can’t seem to figure out why one’s preference as to their label (since we OBVIOUSLY have to have them) is met with negative conjecture. I personally use “Black” because it takes too long to say african american also it simply does not matter to me. However, do consider this; I live in Italy amongst Blacks AND Whites who are from Africa AND America. Let the labels begin. And to the politically correct Whites, in an effort not to offend, which is it Red, Native American or Indian; Brown, Red, Mexican American, Mexican, or Hispanic? On a parting note, my American friends (the white variety) don’t refer to our host nationals as whites but as Italians. Hmmmmmm?!?
65 posts and counting… yup. Great Debate here. Duh.
Nickrz
GQ Mod