Well, I think Germany has issues with Turks, but I don’t know how serious it is.
When the Irish first came to the US, the WASPs in charge often viewed them as racial inferiors. There were scathing essays written about those “white negros”, and there were even scientific hypotheses which proposed blacks and Irish suffered from the same syndrome. I remember one that suggested the hyperpigmentation of the Irish (they have those ruddy complexions, ya know) and the negro was linked to their emotionalism and overall mental inferiority.
It was only when the WASPS realized the power of having a white majority that the Irish–as well as Italians and other previously stigmitized European groups–became ethnic groups, not racial groups.
So in the grand scheme of things, if ethnic groups and racial groups are both fluid in time and place, how important is it to quibble over their differences? Particularly when the ones doing the hating rarely do?
Fiestymongol, the US’s system of apartheid is in the past too, but racie is still a big issue. So I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the “bigness” of race in a place like South Africa, which got rid of its Jim Crow just a few weeks ago in the grand scheme of things. Segregration is still present there, and I don’t think the hatred magically stopped just because Mandela took over.
I would also argue that simply noticing racial differences (as in, massive staring at a non-white) isn’t necessarily tantamount to obsession. I mean, I’m sure if I went to Norway or some in-the-middle-of-nowhere village in South America, people would stare at me simply because I look different. Staring is rude, yes, but it’s also a natural response. So maybe you should give us another example of how you think Americans are obsessed with race.
I heard much worse things about the turks in my two weeks in Germany, than I’ve heard in 10 years in Texas about Mexicans.
I’ve heard Eastern Europeans practically spit when talking about Gypsies. They asserted with a straight face that literally every Gypsy is a (1) thief, (2) whore, or (3) beggar, without exception.
They were serious.
I think Lissa has some good observations about jumping to conclusions. It reminds me of some boisterous Asian American activists in college who decried the general population’s “lack of knowledge” about the contribution made by Chinese coolie labor in building the transcontinental railroads. To them, it was evidence of active supression in the history books. To me, it was yet more evidence that Americans are dumbasses at history. :rolleyes:
Which would be find as a paranoid thesis if one ignores the fact that aside from Lott and Thad Cochran, the vast majority of Mississippi Senators in the past century have been Democrats.
For most of the last 100 years, the Republican agenda about Mississippi was to ignore it.
The roots of racism in that state have little to do with any political party.
Err, fine as a paranoid thesis.
While the Israeli conflict doesn’t follow strict ethnic lines, ethnicity has had a huge role. While race, ethnicity, and religion have indeed become confused, I don’t think that I am the one responsible.
Feistymongol
I don’t understand the distinction you are making between ethnic strife in other countries, and that of America. Of course if you look at the divisions in other countries through American eyes, using American concepts of ethnicity, it’s going to seem like they don’t have the same problems with race as we do. And if you go to a Muslim country with American concepts of religiosity, you might think that they aren’t religious because there aren’t any churches. Just as different cultures have different ways of worshipping God, they also have different ways of defining race. “Tribal rivilries”, “heritage” seem like just different terms for the same basic concept as race. Even religion can take on the role that race plays in America. For instance, when you hear reports talking about “Muslim Albanians”, they aren’t simply referring to their devotion to Muhammed. There are Albanians with cultural ties to Kosovo which are considered to be a separate ethnic group.
Filed: 11/24/2002, 12:44:19 PM
Source: Usenet
Introductory note: this Usenet classic, penned ca. 1997 by a US academic, has come to be regarded as the non-PC (of course) ‘Race FAQ’.
"Question: How is it that in some human populations homozygous recessive genes have replaced the homozygous dominant genes of their ancestors for outward physical appearance?
As far back as 1950 geneticist William Boyd listed about 20 gene loci for outward appearance traits that are homozygous recessive for typical Asians and/or Europeans but are homozygous dominant for Africans. These recessive genes include the 6 to 8 gene loci for light skin color, the genes for blue eyes, gray eyes, blond hair, red hair, thin lips, straight hair, sacral spot, lack of facial hair (beards), narrow nose shape, and some others.
Famed academicians J.B.S. Haldane (who published in 1924), R.A. Fisher, and S. Wright all helped to develop the mathematical approaches to population genetics in regard to selection and proved (among many other things) that it would require 1,001,741 generations (i.e. about 25,000,000 years for humans) for a dominant autosomal gene pair to be entirely replaced naturally by a new recessive gene pair in an ideal population (going from a gene frequency of 0.01% to 99.99%) if the improved selective advantage were 1 percent greater per generation (which is a fairly large advantage) for the new recessive genetic trait over the old dominant genetic trait, but the Euro/Asian line of humans split from the African line approximately a mere 100,000 years ago, and we must account for about 20 different recessive gene loci for appearance, not just one.
The mechanisms of genetic drift (including founder effect), migration, and gene flow have all been invoked to explain the rapid genetic change observed in small populations of early humans, but as an explanation for the observed changes in outward human racial appearance such reasoning is strained. The outward appearances of Euro/Asians seem to have very small, if any, actual advantages in regard to natural selection over that specified by the replaced African genes, but clearly some extraordinarily strong selective mechanism has been at work.
A partial solution to the problem of how the various races of man came to appear outwardly as they do now was proposed in 1931 by scientist and writer Sir Arthur Keith who pointed out that tribal isolation and the human predisposition for conflict, competition, and warfare against those who appear to be different from our own tribe (i.e. “instinctive prejudice”) was most likely the cause, in that driving away or killing people with certain genes very quickly reduces the frequency of those genes in a population, but by the post-war 1950’s such thinking had become politically unacceptable, as shown by Boyd’s firm rejection of the idea -although he at least took the time to discuss the hypothesis at length in his famous 1950 book “Genetics and the Races of Man”, which in many ways the model for L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s “History and Geography of Human Genes” (1994). We may dislike Robert Ardrey’s famous assertion that we are all “killer apes” at heart (African Genesis, 1961), and the solid support for that thesis supplied by Konrad Lorenz and Raymond Dart, but everything in our horrifying history of continual warfare from the Great Wall of China to the Holocaust attests to our inherently xenophobic nature.
The racial appearance puzzle is avoided in most evolution classes today by invoking Loomis’ 1967 hypothesis that light skin color among Europeans and Asians exists because these populations could not get enough sunlight to stimulate sufficient vitamin D production in their skin in those terribly dark Northern continents of Europe and Asia. Although this theory has never been well supported by factual inquiry, it has been repeated so often and it is so politically comfortable that it has become enshrined as an indisputable fact in the minds of many casual students of evolution. In reality numerous valid objections have been raised to the vitamin D theory of light skin color:
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It cannot satisfactorily explain the evolution of the many other appearance genes that are also autosomal recessives (such as for blue eyes, and blond hair, and several others) that seemingly have no significant natural selective advantage,
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a small patch of the darkest African skin can produce more than the required amount of vitamin D from only a few minutes of exposure to faint sunlight each day (indeed, the Lapps live in arctic latitudes and are rather dark skinned), and in any event most of the vast land mass of Europe and Asia has been found to be quite sunny,
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of the 6 to 8 gene pairs for skin color all of the genes for light skin color are recessive to those for dark skin color; for all the dominant genes for dark skin color to be replaced by recessive genes for light skin color would require an intensely strong selection advantage operating for many millions of years, but man left Africa only 100,000 years ago and the natural selective pressure for light skin over dark would be small at best and therefore too slowly acting to fit the time frame,
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light skin color is a probably actually natural selective disadvantage at any latitude because sunlight causes skin cancer and may result in severe debilitating sunburn for those with white skin,
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`white skin color has a strong peak only in Northern Europe and not in other parts of the world’ (this is a quote by Cavalli-Sforza in his book “History and Geography of Human Genes” mentioned above as he discusses the problem with the vitamin D explanation for skin color invoking world pigmentation intensity maps drawn by Carleton Coon in 1954). Cavalli-Sforza also suggests the very light skin color of Northern Europeans may have appeared as recently as 5,000 years ago, a time so recent that no natural selection process could possibly account for it.
What about “sexual selection”? Often it has been proposed as the reason that racial differences exist, not to mention blue eyed blond women, but such white skinned women are regarded as hideous and repulsive by New Guinea tribesmen. Beauty is a relative concept and it is indeed a racist attitude to assume one type of human is inherently more beautiful than another, rather our individual concepts of human sexual attractiveness appear to be synonymous with people that appear to be similar to our set of internalized norms as imprinted in our childhood years- i.e. we generally find those not of our “tribe” less attractive than those people who more closely resemble us (there are always exceptions of course- some degree outbreeding is surely advantageous at times for a tribe of humans).
Darwin, in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” asserted that racial appearance differentiation in humans was due to what he called “sexual selection”, but a close reading of that book shows that for humans he regarded conflict and warfare (including genocide) as part of “sexual selection”, a term he actually used for anything other than “natural selection”, the other of his two selection mechanisms. Hence Sir Keith’s 1931 idea on how the different races came to appear the way they do today really originated with Darwin, and Darwin’s intuitive genius has been proven to be correct from what we now know about the genetics controlling human appearance.
Three other interesting factors affecting human appearance must be considered: 1) climate, 2) neoteny, and 3) intelligence. All of these factors must be considered in conjunction with tribal conflict in order to fully understand how we came to appear the way we do, and it must be understood that these factors are overlayed on a tapestry of genetic drift, founder effect, migration, gene flow, and geographic isolation.
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Climate surely has played a factor in the initial development of several appearance traits, although it cannot account for strong selective pressure required for such rapid gene frequency change. For example, a narrow nose, epicanthal eye fold, straight hair, and thin lips are surely advantageous in a cold climate to warm the air we breathe, protect eyes form freezing winds, keep heads warm, and to prevent frozen lips, but blue eyes are a disadvantage in a dazzlingly sunny snow covered terrain, the long ears of Europeans are more prone to frostbite than are the short compact ears of most Africans, and lack of facial hair in the people of frigid Northeast Asia is certainly impractical, hence climate fails to explain neither the origin nor the rapid spread of some human appearance features.
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Neoteny has been written about by Kollman (inventor of the term), Bolk, Portmann, and Gould. Louis Bolk best stated the case in 1926 with this famous line: “man is a primate fetus that has become sexually mature”. The human fetal growth rate period actually lasts about 22 months - at birth we are simply an extrauterine fetus at the 9 month stage with our brain still growing at the rapid fetal rate, thus did nature solve the birth canal bottleneck problem for producing big brained humans. A series of increasingly neotenic mutations probably account for mechanism of the amazing 4 fold increase in hominid brain size over the past 3 million years, and our outward appearance owes much to this phenomenon (i.e. all adult humans look like a huge primate fetus that can walk). It was once acceptable to point out in textbooks that neoteny related traits in the races of man seem to differ, with Negroids (Africans) being the least neotenic, Mongoloids (Asians) being the most neotenic, and Caucasoids (Europeans) being not quite as neotenic as Asians for several traits, including the important brain to body size ratio and in having less body hair, but more neotenic in regard to pigmentation of hair, skin, and eyes. The empirical support for this distinction is quite compelling, but it has become a somewhat sensitive subject.
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Intelligence is surely the most controversial factor that has influenced the different appearance of the human races, but any discussion of the reasons why it has had such an influence is a another very sensitive undertaking. As isolated tribes of humans over the past 200,000 years naturally attempted to expand they inevitably came into conflict with neighboring tribes. For humans and other hominids the most valuable genetic selective trait in such conflicts was probably a higher level of intelligence, for that is what generally determined the winner, although many other factors (such as disease resistance) played a role as well. An advantage in intelligence often allowed an ancient tribe to achieve a higher level of population density, better strategy and tactics for warfare and hunting, and greater levels of altruism and social adhesion within their group. Although, as mentioned above, neoteny related mutations were the genetic mechanism for the amazing 4 fold increase in hominid brain size over the past 3 million years, the value of intelligence for survival and tribal success was the driving evolutionary selection force and continued to be so until the recent advent of civilization.
Preserving the intellectual advantage of a successfully expanding tribe is a difficult problem however, because interbreeding with a tribe a lesser intelligence dilutes and decreases the genetic advantage of the advantged expanding tribe, thus eventually ending the expansion. The solutions for this problem have always ranged from genocide to ethnic cleansing, but being able to visually identify the genetic heritage of offspring to exclude offspring resulting from intertribal matings was always of great value to a genetically advantaged expanding tribe, allowing for continued expansion until the tribe were to encounter a more genetically advantaged tribe (i.e., generally meaning more intelligent) or some substantial geographical barrier. That is why autosomal recessive genes for outward physical appearance have an advantage over dominant genes in a genetically advantaged tribe: the introduction of a non-tribal dominant gene can be easily visually detected in offspring thus enabling exclusion methods to operate and therefore keeping the tribes’ genetic lineage from being diluted.
Example: for a child to have blue eyes, the recessive genes for blue eyes must be inherited from both parents. A child with darker eyes would immediately be recognized as non-tribal in a blue eyed tribe. The child could possibly be exiled (and in some cases could be killed) by an ancient blue eyed expanding tribe, thus preserving the genetic integrity of the tribe. This example may seem totally absurd in today’s civilized world, but human racial evolution goes back at least 200,000 years, long before civilized human behavior developed. If eye color discrimination seem too far fetched however, consider skin color. As recently as 100 years ago the birth of a dark skinned child to a white woman typically resulted in ostracism by her displeased family, and sometimes infanticide was committed. The other recessive appearance traits of present day Europeans and Asians were most likely at one time also used in a similar manner for tribal identification in order to account for their modern day geographic gene frequency distributions.
Eventually multiple traits (i.e. white skin blue eyed blondes for one example, although there are many others) were used for tribal identification in ever increasing rounds of conflict among tribes. Perhaps the most efficient trait for tribal identification is skin color, in that a polygenic system (6 to 8 gene pairs are involved) of recessive genes for light skin enables the visual identification of mixed tribe offspring having only a small amount of dark skinned dominant genetic racial ancestry - octoroons are thus revealed by the skin color system whereas they would not be detected very often in a single gene system such as eye color. The uniform of skin color was no doubt used by the warriors of conflicting tribes in much the same way as modern day military uniforms are used to distinguish opposing armies - then as now individuals wearing the uniform of the defeated group could be identified and dealt with accordingly by the victors.
As an overall consequence, tribes or races that have successfully expanded and displaced other tribes or races are likely to be characterized both by 1) genes for appearance that are homozygous recessive to the corresponding genes of the displaced tribe or race and 2) by the trait that gave the successful tribe the winning advantage over the displaced tribe. In the past 200,000 years of tribal conflict among humans (the past 3,000,000 years for all hominids) the trait conferring the winning advantage has most often been a higher level of intelligence, but at times it has also been disease resistance, aggressiveness, numerical advantage, technological superiority, and a variety of other differences. Nevertheless the role of intelligence in this matter should not be underestimated; the fossil record of dramatic hominid cranial capacity increase supports the point quite convincingly, as do differences in the average IQs of present day racial groups.
Geographical limits eventually stopped the expansions of the Europeans and the Asians (along with overall stalemate at their points of mutual contact), and the Sahara Desert protected the remaining Africans from further encroachment by the Euro/Asians, thus resulting in the distribution of the three major races as found in modern times.
Lastly, the coming of civilization and the reduction of the significance of geographical barriers have made the world a vast breeding pool into which the entire genetic variance of humanity is supposedly slowly blending - for all 100,000 gene loci, not just those coding for our appearance. All of us are genetic blends to some extent, and our varied appearances demonstrate the point well.
And that, very briefly and admittedly incompletely, is why the human races look the way they do today."
The Kingship, cutting and pasting from sources like you just did is very much frowned upon here.
You might want to check some of that info against the October issue of Scientific American. In an article called “Skin Deep” the authors explore how melanin variations in the skin of pregnant mothers regulate not only the amount of vitamin D, but also the amount of folic acid in the blood. Too light and the woman’s folic acid is destroyed, too dark causes lack of vitamin D. They had some very good numbers on this.
Just an FYI
Testy
monstro, i thought i would inform some people of the facts, and dispel the ignorance peddled around here that i have seen.
I appreciate that you’re trying to dispel ignorance (although it’s not clear how your post relates to the OP). I’m just giving you a heads-up before you get in trouble.
First off,
The What’s A Race? quibble
Neurotik I think you’re falling into the classification trap. Race is nothing but social construct, beyond the previous snip copied [Sic!] from USENET which clarifies some issues and clouds some others, the debate has been had more than enough times. Biologically speaking the term race is arguably more or less useless. Therefore if you say 3, 10 or 256 races it will always be a contention biased by your own socio-cultural perception. I recommend dropping the whole idea of trying to pigeon hole people into races. As some people already noted it’s in any case an impossible task since even our ancestry wont give us a clue. I am for instance a redhead tall guy with light skin shading into the reddish pink. Racists (I’ve met many) politely classify me as of the Irish ‘race’ and enquire towards my ancestry. In fact I have about as much Irish in me as I do Zairean, that is to say a distant shared genetic background with everyone that happens to live there.
Secondly,
The OP
To not compare apples and oranges the US has to be compared with its peers in the Western World, in which case the US isn’t much worse, just maybe more loud about it and more absurdly obsessed with definition of ‘races’. Notwithstanding that the idea that races even exist is only in our minds, and that ‘racial pride’ counterproductively fuels this misconception, American racial classification hits a level that tends to the absurd, take ’Hispanic” for instance - I dare you to come up with a comprehensible definition that flies the test of logic. Then again we speak of “Latin” in Europe, but at least we have a language based definition for that group that, although absurd as classification means, does fit some sort of twisted logic (it denotes anyone with French, Italian, Castilian, Catalan, Basque, or Portuguese as mother tongue – and should, but does not, include Rumanian).
Another fact that might cloud our perception is that racism takes different forms on both sides of the pond. The US criminal system is for instance in average more prejudiced than in the EU, in the same time the EU immigration laws are more racially biased then in the US. That being said I can personally vouch for rampant racism in police forces in Sweden, Germany and especially France, and of late I understand that being Arab looking and attempting entry into the US is no guarantee for smooth and trouble free travel. As regards the police in the EU I have witnessed and experienced first hand deep and repetitious bigotry and prejudice oriented especially at Slavic, Arab or African looking young men. The statistics unfortunately support my experiences and observations. If you look at hate crimes perpetrated against minorities (perceived or real) the US and the EU chime in at about the same levels.
To read more about racism in the world I recommend going over to Human Rights Watch where you can download pdfs of all the parts of their World Report 2002 including the report on Special Issues and Campaigns focused on Racial Discrimination and Related Intolerance and of course the regional report for the United States.
Now I shall be off to ponder my direct ancestry from Ireland that I do not have, and try to get my mind around my ethno-linguistic-racial identity – I believe I shall let my two native tongues fight over which part of my body is Anglo-Saxon and which part Scandinavian. My raised-in-France induced Latin minority is observing the Lord’s day of rest and my recently acquired Teutonic self needs to focus on making sure my girlfriends rowdy daughter stays out of trouble. Good golly what a mess will it not be in April when the skiing season has tanned my face dark brown?
Happy Fourth of Advent, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Midwinter Solstice. Post-Ramadan revels - or as it is said to not offend…
Season’s Greetings
Sparc
PS Why the hell would you name a holiday the same as a river and the currency in Angola? Then again we have Easter and Christmas Island… I’ll just shut up now. DS
Random thoughts - very random.
I remember talking with someone who was here longterm (from Ireland to be exact), who said that to him, it looked like the same issues the rest of the world had with class, America had with race. And that the situations were parallel or mirror images of each other.
I was talking with someone different earlier tonight who said that he’d done a survey once in a diversity training type class - and your score on the survey supposedly showed how much race and racism had an effect on your life. After they’d finished the survey, the people in the class lined up according to their scores. He said that the line went straight from the lightest-skinned person in the room to the one with the darkest skin. Which makes sense -
as I was thinking the same thing reading the thread entitled “Does your sexual preference define YOU?” for me, no. But I fit in the majority - the unfairly-assumed default category. However, my racial categorization does have more to do with my “definition” than it should - because I’m not in the majority.
I disagree. First of all the ‘class struggle’ is pretty much a moot thing in most parts of Europe, just as it is in America (Chumpsky probably disagrees, but…). I can’t answer for SE Asia, but as regards the rest of the world both the rich/poor divide and ethno-cultural-racial issues are basis for much more conflict than in the developed countries. As has been pointed out so many times, poverty and underdevelopment is after all an important, maybe even the only, cause for conflict of this kind.
In any case perceptions of social class and ethnicity are so tightly linked that you should not, nay must not, separate the issues when observing and analyzing intercultural conflict. The best example is how to read statistics on crime. The White Supremacists will look at race only and conclude that ‘blacks commit more crimes.’ Even when disregarding the overrepresentation due to more convictions against dark skinned males for the same type of crime, this statistic seems to hold up. However, if instead you focus on income levels and wealth; representation in crime statistics come much closer to social demographics mapped to perceived race.
In other words, poverty fuels criminality and poverty is more prevalent in certain ethnic groups, largely due to unequal opportunity, which in turn is partly due to racism… and presto we have a vicious circle. In keeping this remotely connected to the OP; this situation is just as much valid in Europe as it is in the US, the same dynamics are also at work in most every part of the world - south, north, west or east, it’s a human problem not a geographical one.
Sparc
Why is it so impossible that we could be different? Check this out: http://www25.brinkster.com/humanraces/calc/
The difference between the san of africa and western europeans is 234 genes, with a single gene determining the sex of a child.
I have to say that this Southerner agrees with every point Chumpsky made (except perhaps the more conspiratorial implications).
The Republicans in the South have become very good at playing the race card in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways. Trent Lott’s comments were just the latest example of a Republican sending a coded signal to race-conscious constituents. Other examples of similar signals: speaking before the Council of Conservative Citizens (the “CCC”…hmmm); kowtowing to Sons of Confederate Veterans; playing the Confederate flag for political points; speaking at Bob Jones University, knowing its recent history of segregationist policiees, etc., etc.…
I think Chumpsky is absolutely correct in asserting that the issue of race is used to distract voters from more important issues.
The Democratic Party has, in the past, been guilty of the same thing. In the days when the South was solidly Democratic, these signals got sent in the Democratic primaries.
In recent years, however, the coded racial signal has become almost exclusively a hallmark of Republicans.
According to latest research, race is an illusion…
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/health/HealthRepublish_748264.htm
Basically, physical characteristics of humans cannot be linked to genetic information at an individual level.
People from the USA seem to have an obsession with appearance and culture and refer to this as ‘race’. I am not 100% sure on this, it is an observation from afar.
USA people also have a greater emphasis also on ‘class’ than other western countries (except Great Britain). Note the education divide and wealth divide.
Excuse the GQ type reply.
Then, son, you obviously haven’t travelled much.
Look up the way Jews have been and are treated in Europe, to give one example. Or tribalism in Africa. Or anglo-abo relations in Australia. It’s pretty much a universal human thing.
It’s more well-reported in the US largely because 1) our minorities are larger and more influential than many others’, and 2) we talk about and care this kind of thing much, much more.
I lived for 3 years in various parts of Asia. I was told on many occasions that all Americans smell bad, that we are lazy, that we are selfish and greedy, that we don’t love our families. FWIW, I think there is some truth to all of those, but the point is that it was almost always said as a blanket statement, and as something that “everyone knows.” I didn’t get bent out of shape, because this kind of stuff was usually done out of ignorance and without malice. But it was “insensitive”, which is what 90% of racism in America today amounts to.
On the other hand, I did see someone get fired mostly because she was fat and had a limp, I did hear malicious jokes, I did have vendors refuse to serve me, I had parents forbid daughters from dating me, and every girl that did date me was called a “whore” or the equivalent to her face.
And quite frankly, as I white guy I was better off than blacks I talked to who went through the same countries.
Again, the large majority of people were very nice to me, just as the majority of people in the US are nice. But there is ignorance, and a certain percentage of idiots, everywhere.