Well. if you could test a randomly selected sample of several ethnic groups, they would be quite unlikely to score identically. The question is, what would yo conclude from this?
I see people try to play dumb with this one and I just don’t buy it. Imagine you were an explorer 1000 years ago and you pull your sailing vessel up on shore on the west coast of Africa. A group of black Africans meets your boat. Do you think, “Oh, how lucky, a group of nice people just like me” or do you think “I am pretty sure they are people but they have really dark skin and black kinky hair like I have never seen before. They must be different group somehow?” Next you explore much of the rest of Africa and you see variations on the same thing. When you go back are you really going to tell everyone with a straight face what great people they were while omitting that their physical features were quite different from yours and that you found the same thing all over the continent. Repeat with Asia etc. In the absense of very recent scientific techniques, I think it is easy to understand how anyone could come up with the idea of races.
Note that I never said that the idea of “races” is correct. We all know the science refutting that and the percentage of shared DNA blah blah blah. I just don’t like it when people play the dumb and incredulous card when they claim that they can’t understand where the idea even came from in the first place. In the absense of science, the human tendency to group outsiders, makes it intuitive that races do exist.
gobear, your endeavor is noble, but such lists almost always lead to errors and exclusions. Phyllis Wheatley was not America’s first poet or even the first published female poet. She was the first African-American to publish a book of poetry. When you consider that for the most part, slaves were intentionally kept illiterate, her genius is all the more stunning.
Was the other thread title ever changed? It was, in my opinion, intentionally offensive for the sake of attracting attention.
BTW, on my granddaughter’s 10th birthday, she spent some of her birthday money on two books about Rosa Parks for me because she knew that she is my hero.
See, I don’t buy this either, though I can see how it seems plausible.
First of all, I have heard that the concept of “race” wasn’t even around back then.
Second, “races” never made scientific sense. I mean… name me a biological component only present in one “race”? You can’t do it.
It seems more likely to me that “race” as we know it was invented by people who wanted to use it to justify inequality. For example, if you know that, say, blacks have a shorter average life span, why not say that it is because of their race, so you can justify the worse conditions you force them to live under?
So no, I don’t believe that today’s concept of race came about because people “looked different”. Nor do I believe people are completely ignorant of color being a spectrum, rather than part of the world being dark black, and the other part lily white. It doesn’t add up.
From dictionary.com
African American also Af·ri·can-A·mer·i·can ( P ) Pronunciation Key (fr-kn–mr-kn)
n.
A Black American of African ancestry.
Having been lived in the US for over a half of a century I can recall when the people whose ancestors came from Africa were referred to as Negros. Then that term was considered insulting and they started refering to themselves as Black. Then it changed again (Not sure why, I wasn’t copied in on that memo) to African Americans. So Negro = Black = African American. The dictionary.com entry above seems to support this.
So what group would be considered both African American and not black?
Oh and of course not all blacks are African Americans, only the ones that live here in the states could be considered African Americans. :wally
Algebra, astronomy, and the preservation of Greek works to name a few.
Sorry, Aesiron, but this thread goes out to Americans of African descent. There are international black folks, but they can open their own threads.
This thread was inspired because there is another thread that needlessly insults black people. In addition, it’s Black History Month here in the US, so I just wanted to give soem love to my fellow Americans.
What about Shirley Chisolm, Billi Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and let’s not forget Darth Vader himself, James Earl Jones?
Yes, it was. It was just different than our present concept. The ancient Greeks noticed black folk right away. Their label for them (“Ethiopian”) was not an instrument of oppression and denegration. It was just a label for dark-skinned Africans.
Humans like to label and group things, whether we’re being “accurate” or not. That’s why our original two kingdoms of life–plants and animals–have sprouted into four and now five. The tomato is technically a fruit, as is rice and the peanut, but this doesn’t mean our wrongness will stop us from viewing these things and other fruits the way we do.
It is incorrect to group a Maori with a Nigerian. Russians and Irish folk are not brothers and sisters. It is also laughable that people confuse Koreans for Japanese. But it is not unnatural or unconceivable that people would make these mistakes. The truth of the matter is that a Maori looks more like a Nigerian than he looks like a Russian, who looks more like an Irishman than he does a Korean or a Japanese person. Saying"I don’t see why someone could make these mistakes" does not make you appear more enlightened than the rest of us.
I agree with Shagnasty. If you landed on the New World as a European a thousand years ago, your first thought upon meeting the Native Americans would not be “Oh my! How we doth look alike! Like brotheren, we are!”
I’m afraid I have no idea what you are talking about.
You seem to think I am saying the exact opposite of what I am saying.
It also seems as though you are arguing that race is a biologically derived classification, so I will present the same challence to you: tell me a biological component that determines somebody’s “race.”
The question is whether I would hypothesize another “race” of humans, and as there would be no scientific evidence to support doing so, I wouldn’t.
I’m not alone: Historians believe the idea of “race” didn’t even come about until the 18th century!
You are vastly overestimating racial differences and how people in the past thought of those who looked different than them. There were slaves, there were wars, there were lots of bad things; but they weren’t because people thought they were enslaving or fighting another “race” which was biologically different.
Cite? I’m thinking of the Roman historian Tacitus(?) who wrote the Germanica in the 5th century CE (?), a work describing the race of men who inhabit what is now Germany.
What about in art?
I imagine there must be this whole world of painters, authors, musicians, etc. from over there that most Americans have no knowledge of.
In the spirit that booksmarts isn’t the only kind of intelligence, I’d like to mention Thomas Hamm. His friends (and I had the great fortune to be among them) called him “Ham”. He was a man in his 70s who had seen the turn of the century, and the turn of the tide in racial bigotry.
He knew so many wonderful things. He knew how to smile so broadly and with such twinkly eyes that he disarmed even the most sour curmudgeon. He knew how to whistle like a nightinggale. I can still remember the hauntingly beautiful tones that echoed throught the warehouse. He knew how to make you feel like the most important person in the world whenever he was talking to you. He knew how to refrain from gossip or tearing anyone down.
He knew how to make his deliveries on-time, and with loving care. He knew the names of his customers, their children’s names, their likes, dislikes, and druthers. He knew how to make them small gifts with his own hands and give them out around Christmas time. And lordy, he knew how to laugh. I can still hear that full, melodious belly laugh of his. You got to hear it even when your joke wasn’t particularly funny.
He lived alone, and drove an old Cadillac. He knew how to take care of his car, faithfully checking the oil and water every day in what became a familiar and endearing ritual. He had no family remaining. No friends. But when he died, his customers pooled their resources and held his funeral in one of the city’s largest churches. It was filled to capacity, with an overflow standing outside.
What a prince of a man. What a great intellect. To this day, I miss you, Ham. God go with you always.
Don’t the various races experience different susceptibilities to various diseases and chemicals? Asians tend to not imbibe alcohol well. (They lack an enzyme?) Blacks are susceptible to sickle cell anemia. These two examples would be biological in nature, and they differentiate based on race.
m-w.com defines an African American as “an American of African and especially of black African descent” and while I agree that the popular usage of the word just means “black”, it’s still not correct. Dave Matthews and Charlize Theron, both of whom are white, are South Africans living in the US. Are they not African American? And what of the Arabic immigrants from Egypt, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia?
Just to add balance, I worked with one stupid motherfucker who has risen to become the singular example of ineptitude and ignorance that I have experienced in my life thus far. He had dark skin, curly (“kinky”) hair, and nose features that led me to believe he was of African Ancestry, living in America. I presumed he was/is African American (I do recall asking), but back then he was just Black.
Dumb as a stump. Nice guy, but stupid.
They ain’t ALL smrt.
Change that “do recall asking” to “don’t recall asking” in your minds, please.
:: looks around GD and Pit at political threads ::
Haven’t you been paying attention?
All “blacks” don’t get sickle cell and sickle cell is also found in the Greeks, Italians, East Indians, and Saudi Arabians, among others. The reason that certain blacks have a higher rate then other people is based on GEOGRAPHY not race. Sickle Cell is an adaption against Malaria…so people who come from parts of the world that have a high incidence of Malaria also have Sickle Cell or variations of it.
How can a disease be race-based if a. all the members of that race don’t have it and b. members of different races do?
I don’t know about all Asians, but the guy I went to school with could drink a russian sailor under the table…YMMV, of course
This shouldn’t even need saying. Ah well. 