Flymaster was right. You didn’t answer my original post either, you attacked me, because there is a touchy question in the thread title I don’t think that you really read it clearly. My friend, the religious zealot, is the one that assumes they were white. I’m not the one assuming that they were white. I thought that I made it pretty clear that my friend was the one that asked me this and that I thought it was ridiculous, because I believe in evolution. I personally don’t think Jesus was caucasian, blonde, etc. like my friend does. Just making a guess, because of the part of the world Jesus was from he was most likely arabic. I wanted to find out from people that are religious conservatives what color they thought A&E were and how they explained how other races came into being.
I must really thank you for being kind enough not to call me a racist, considering that my OP shouldn’t come across as me being racist to anyone that takes time to read the two paragraphs I wrote.
Nitpick to an extent. Semetic not Arabic. Of course his linguistic affiliation (an Aramaic speaker, yes?) says only a little about probable phenotype. All things being equal, definately not very pale, definately, barring some recessive genes expressing, not pale haired. Features could have run a fairly wide gamut, but definately not northern european!
About those features - you never know, perhaps his dad was a blond haired, blue eyed “Naughtius Maximus”
(I know, unusual in most romans)
Or maybe God has blond hair and blue eyes? I think he has white hair in Revelation…
Oh! That would explain adam and eve. “In the image of God…”
Alright, I’m getting as silly as a fundy.
It’s reasonable because, most likely, being a fundamentalist christian, it can be assumed that they live in the US, where the white population holds a rather significant plurality over the black population. Because of this, the person probably naturally thinks of white people as somehow the “default,” and black people as the model with extra options. I’m not saying that this is a “good” impression, or a “right” impression, or a “scientifically accurate” impression, or anything of the sort, but for someone naiive enough to ignore the overwhelming scientific evidence that Adam and Eve didn’t exist, I don’t see why the rudimentary and childish logic here isn’t “reasonable” when factored into their particular world view. It certainly is not iherently racist in any way, just really, really naiive.
This is not to say that the person ISN’T a racist, but it’s also not proof that he is.
Why are there “black” people? Why the answer is obvious – they are more aesthetically pleasing. Consider, if you will, two infants… one “black”, one “white”. Exam the heads of each… the “white” child’s head is a mess of mottled blue veins, indeed, it is very clear where the make-up artists on the Star Trek series took their inspiration when they designed the Borg – on the other hand, the “black” child, while just as likely to squall and discharge fluids from both ends, has a head that doesn’t look something that a entrail reading Roman priest could predict the future from.
As to AnnieXmas’ assertion that we are all shades of brown – if I were into that sort of thing I would invite her over to inspect MY skin colour. Being descended from people who lived on a boggy island in the North Atlantic, I would be surprised if she could detect any difference between my skin colour and that of a fish that is floating belly-up, downstream from any major chemical spill…
There is nothing wrong with “white” people, we just aren’t that aesthetically appealing.
>>Anyway, his reasoning was that “Adam and Eve were both white, so where did Black people come from?”<<
How in God’s name can anyone be sure what the hell Adam and Eve looked like? Even if you take the Adam and Eve story literally, you still have to be pretty arrogant to believe that Adam and Eve or Moses or Jesus or any one else were “white.” Max von Sydow is a white man. That’s absolutely for certain. But he is also an actor and not the Son of God Himself. The great masterpieces of art show Jesus Christ as a white man, not because Christ actually looked like that but more likely for reasons including the fact that European artists couldn’t locate Middle Eastern subjects as models as easily for their works. Your friend needs to take his head out of the clouds and give common sense a consideration.
Flymaster, It seems our difference is really a semantic quibble over the definition of racist. I agree with your view that the questioner appears to more or less unthinkingly see white as the “default” option because he/she is in a predominantly white culture. I would characterize that as racist- although as I said before, not caused by maliciousness, merely by the naivite you describe. And I draw a distinction between having some unrecognized racist assumptions and being a racist (which to me means recognizing and embracing those presuppositions).
Thus, we seem to be in agreement as to the basic process involved here. We merely disagree on the proper terms to use in describing it.
Bagkitty, they tell me that when I was a baby I had to have so many IVs that the doctors eventually had to start sticking them in my scalp. My melanin deficient, road map head must have made it a lot easier for the doctors
Hehe…shortly after Empire Strikes Back came out, an acquaintance of my mother visited with her newborn baby. Nine-year-old me thought the kid looked like Yoda (although nine-year-old me thought that was cool rather than ugly) and said so. My mom had to trip over herself to apologize to the poor woman. [evil smirk][/evil smirk]
Actually his name was Pantera.
And that passage in Rev. continues “and his feet were like unto fine brass, as if they were burned in a fire.” ie. dark brown.
So apparently God is an elderly black man. Now we know.
The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
That is why it was called Babel --because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
Um, I don’t see anything about “races” in there, just languages and geographical scattering.
For the people that are always using climate and heat etc. to explain why there are white and black and yellow people, it works, kinda but doesn’t really explain it.
If you look at the full spectrum of Caucasian people, you see the Fair nordics, to the browish to black looking Indian Middle East peoples, to the Really Black looking Aboriginies. Climate seems to have made a difference amongst the Caucasians, but amongst the Blacks and the Asians, you still have brown eyes brown skin, even though the Mongoloids were thought to have evolved out of a cold climate.
As for why there are black people in the first place, Inate sexiness comes to mind for me.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the nineteenth century ethnologists put Europeans, the peoples of Mesopotamia and Palestine and Egypt, and the peoples of India into one group and labelled it “Caucasian” simply to be able to identify most of the major cultural centers as “ours.” The only thing that puts a Swede, a Persian, and a Tamil in the same “race” is the arbitrary assertion of some European that that was how he wanted to label them. Once you take away that arbitrary classification, you find people in widely separated parts of the world developing similar characteristics related to climate.
(BTW, I have never heard of an Aboriginal Australian classified as Caucasian.)
Races are arbitrary constructs which do not, at the level you use here (the old stereotypical races), come anywhere close to describing human variation. Population genetics has already taught us this. Rather, quite the contrary, they are false dichotomies based on trivial surface morpholigies which are as often as not coincidental rather than indicating shared gene pool (other than that of our race, the human race).
Instead of a high school science book, try some relevant literature on population genetics. Your assertions are false (as well as nonesensical). So, rather than repeat the same old thing over and over again, I direct you to the following threads where this issue has been discussed:
My thoughts on why God and Jesus are depicted as being caucasian or white…
Picture Da Vinci as he painted The Last Supper or Michelangelo as he painted the Sistine Chapel. They were both pretty bright guys and let’s assume they were open minded enough to think that just perhaps God wasn’t white but a shade of brown.
Remember that both were pretty bright and likely geniuses… they weren’t stupid enough to risk imprisonment or death.
Remember that the Inquisition was in full swing back in the good old 1400’s and depicting God as anything but white would most likely get you charged with heresy and get you a one way ticket to the torture chamber. This might have been a crime high enough to rate more than house arrest (See Galileo) and get one executed.
It’s a good thing most of us have become more open minded about such matters… and YES… I’m humming the inquisition song from Monty Python…
