Who in here doesn't "see race"?

[Bob]

speaking of views of race,
i recall us being taught in elementary school that you only have three main races: white, black, and 'yellow', and anything else is a sub-race.
for instance, they argued that since latinos were a creation of spanish men raping the indians, they're not a race that was just there, but that was created, such as the mulattos or whatever other terms they used.
arabs were considered a sub-race of white, and i can't even remember how they classified others.
lol its just interesting how different places have different takes on race.

What you learned is wrong. In fact, I'm going to slap that miserable liar called a teacher. Even back 20 yrs ago, the notion of discrete races was considered invalid in the scientific world. Unless s/he actually believed in individuals like J. Phillippe Rushton who attempted to resurrect racial theory. The implication of their pseudo-scientific garbage would be blacks Africans being viewed as humans who are limited intellectually due to larger penis size.

But I wouldn't be surprised if teachers were on that shit. Canada is still run by racist morons. It also re-appears in mainstream community where natives are viewed unfit for society, even today!

Seriously why is this is difficult to comprehend? You cannot reform a theory that was racist to the core. Race was not just use to denote certain physical features. No far from it. Race was used to divide populations. The 'Negroid' was a highly specific type, one with very dark skin, extremely curly hair, wide noise short headed, prognathism, etc.

Why is this the case? Well throughout history conquerors embellished the fact that their genetic footprint is visible on the conquered populace. It brought a sense of superiority, of course. In the American story, Black Americans were actually conditioned to associate these 'foreign' traits with superiority. Now the problem with this setup is that the 'white' phenotype is actually intermediate to the African and East Asian phenotype. Therefore if a black person wasn't conditioned, s/he'd never assume that traits observable amongst a large section of Americans are foreign. That is why the Classification of Races played a vital role in the development of the Americas.

Yes, this didn't just affect Black Africans but also 'Mongoloids' (includes East-Asians and Natives). The Caucasoid race included regions as non-white as East Africa, hell even the forefather of Asian and the Native Americans were considered white. Therefore progressive itself was whiteness. The 'intermediate' Mongoloid were relegated as the coolie class since their features were adopted for the paddy fields. The problem with this notion is that East Asians are very diverse physically. There are Asians who had warrior clans akin to Europeans and lived in a maritime-based economy.

Not to be intrusive, but I've noticed that actually clinging onto this nonsense. Obviously its because they feel a need to justify their masked mindset that was implanted by Eurocentric sources at a young age. While one does not promote the premise in a multi-cultural sphere, it certainly does fly in the private sphere. No, it is not merely a viewed carried by whites only. Also - the oppressed - people of colour also subconsciously accept this nonsense as truth. Its quite obvious when one views texts. But what the fuck do I need to continue? Immortal-Technique points this out for gods sake. Refer back to his lyrics, my friends.

Last..specifically to Anita.

Why 'yellow'? Its a phene. People could have a brownish-yellowish skin tone aka yellow just as one with a chocolate brown or 'black' complexion. However that has NOTHING to do with race. The terms used in the classification of race include Australoid, Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid, not brown or white.

Here's a dictionary definition of the scientifically bankrupt Caucasian race:

   Anthropology. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of one of the traditional racial divisions of humankind, marked by fair to dark skin, straight to tightly curled hair, and light to very dark eyes, and originally inhabiting Europe, parts of North Africa, western Asia, and India: no longer in technical use.

The darkest or 'black' skinned Indian was also considered white. If you refer to Coon's theory, Somalis are also Caucasian. No need to shift definition to the mainstream racial classification which may be defined differently, but have the same purpose.

[Bob]

The last question means nothing. As long as I expect a ideology - of any variant - that suggests that Black Africans are simians, Yellow people are one-dimensional labourer, and whites carry unlimited potential, shit will not change.

I really suggest individuals to observe the comments on youtube and those made in your house. Amongst friends. There is no need to bring them up, because they're obvious. This is "1+1 = 2" type knowledge.

[piercehawkeye45]

What you learned is wrong. In fact, I'm going to slap that miserable liar called a teacher. Even back 20 yrs ago, the notion of discrete races was considered invalid in the scientific world.

I think a lot of it has to due with people no knowing what the scientific world has to say. There is a big gap between science and mainstream thinking nowadays.

[Bob]

I think a lot of it has to due with people no knowing what the scientific world has to say. There is a big gap between science and mainstream thinking nowadays.

Yes, that is correct. However it is quite noticeable that bigoted elements still have a hold of all mainstream institutions which is going hinder progressive growth. You'd expect a teacher to understand the development of the classification of races. That is true, especially if s/he teachers his/her class of this once accepted theory.

That however is not occurring to due a highly Eurocentric education system. One that now tries to masquerade itself as egalitarian, but actually subtly divides and distributes people. No it is not done for classification purpose since there are numerous other indicators. Rather it presented to adjust the children to this white privileged society.

It is the sole reason why this type of thinking stand. In fact, being outside realm of academic history, I'd often thought that 'race' (a modified variant) must be used as a marker. No, it must not. Teaching children that they belong to a discrete race reinforces the mentality that one race is associated with certain intellectual traits. Why? Because race-based privileged is a phenomena that continues to exist. Therefore it must never be acknowledged as fact.

[[ R~e~C ]]

one of the major problems with "our" socity(can't spell for shit).....

considering people from different cultures, and with a different skin colour being in a seperate race....

dunno if that makes sense im too high...w/e
-1-

[kittenslayer]

They just jealous Eastern European hussies are hotter

[Bob]

They are, if we're introducing foolish concepts such as 'race'. Its not that hard to see the financial disparity between the two groups. That is why they're often divided. Once Eastern Europeans are more wealthier, they'll be classed as full white to ensure that aboriginal, blacks and other poor minorities remain poor.

Division means lesser likelihood of our tax money to be used for social development. That is why we're conditioned to think that we're discrete groups. Seriously, the discrete groups is the poor and the rich. If you live in an urban centre (excluding suburbs), you should know what I mean. It would be far more progressive if we see ourselves as the human race (biologically correct) vs. Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and other bankrupt terms.

[GG]

When I was young I honestly didn't see race, I was raised that way.
As I got older I noticed how different society was, confrontating.

I recently saw the movie Black Snake Moan with a friend, and we had an argument afterwards about the in his eyes apparent contrast in the 'white culture | black culture' within the movie.
I honestly hadn't recognized it one second as such while watching, I'm just seeing independant human beings interacting.

Shocking and depressing when you find out what peoples worldview looks like.

(im white btw)

[piercehawkeye45]

I think most kids don't notice race until they are old enough to realize how much racism affects our society. I remember not noticing race when I was younger as well.

I see bumper stickers around here that read "Native Pride." That's fine people should be proud of their heritage.

But

Then I see bumper stickers that read "Native Power." And I think:

If a white person had a bumper sticker that read "White Power" they would immedietley be percieved as KKK type person, and possibly catch heat from someone.

So in this instance I think "Native Power" bumper stickers are a form of racism also.

I don't know so much about power, depends on how it is used, but you can not compare white pride to native or black pride because of the reasons they came up. Both natives and blacks have been told to be ashamed of their skin by society so pride will naturally come up as a reaction but white pride comes only through white supremacy or jealousy of black and native pride.

[piercehawkeye45]

Pride in your culture and pride in your "race" are two separate things. I am proud, not in a nationalist way, of being Polish but I could care less about being white.

[GG]

I hate most aspects of human culture, it's often used as an instrument to divide people, I don't like it.
Why should I be proud of something I have nothing to do with directly. I think being proud of your heritage beyond some traditional stuff that's passed on to give some sort of a 'home sweet home' feeling is kind of ridiculous. I respect other peoples views on life, but I'm not gonna listen when people claim history as theirs in any way.

[ineed<3]

^^^now see, thats the kinda native i was thinking of

[Jihad]

Race, by definition is a belief in a common ancestory.

No, race is a false social construct created to justify oppression towards and subjugate the "others."

[piercehawkeye45]

Race, by definition is a belief in a common ancestory. We can argue about semantics all day. But the terms are still synonmous.

No, race is based of phenotype or genotype, depends on different systems. Culture is the patterns and traditions performed by the people from your society. It is possible for a black person to be part of the Polish culture just as it is possible for a native to be part of the Chinese culture.

[GG]

Race is a loaded term though, kind of relevant to be on the same page defenition wise.

[piercehawkeye45]

They have two different meanings, one is a categorization of your genetics and one is a categorization by the social norms of the society you live in. They are similar but not the same. Once again, you can have a black person that part of the Polish culture. You can not have a black part of the white race.

[LastNameForgotten]

Race is a categorization alright, but the purpose of it is problematically to say the least. The categorization of people into races is no different than the categorization of people into nationalities or the categorization of oneself with a certain gang. The problem with the race categorization is has been used and was created to justify certain acts of oppression against distinct others as Jihad put it and to support the superiority complex that certain others want to feel about themselves. It is one thing to accept the concept of the use of the race categorization, but something different if you buy into the race categorization as fact. The different groups in West Africa did not become Africans until the appearance of people who instead of getting to know the different groups chose to identify them all as Africans, the lazy person route of action in my opinion.

I have a question for percehawkeye45:

Taking in minding what you said about what race is, in your latest post, what race is Immortal Technique? Keep in mind that IT identifies his grandfather as being of African decent.

[piercehawkeye45]

I don't believe in different human races so I try to stay away from classifications but by the European classification he would probably be considered "two or more".

Race is usually classified and differentiated by genetic or physical traits of a person while culture is classified and differentiated by traits, traditions, and norms of a group of people. The individual characteristics of a person shouldn't have any affect on a culture unless the culture is naturally racist, but that would mean race is only one characteristic of a culture, not a representation of the entire culture.

[SetuT]

Village Voice Feb 11, 1997

Why the Obsession
With Defining Race If There Is No Apparent-Scientific Basis?

Have you gotten anyone to define race for you?" Jonathan Marks, a molecular anthropologist at Yale, asks tentatively when queried about race and biology. "No one wants to do that. One of the things we've learned in the last couple of hundred years is that the human species just doesn't come packaged that way."

Despite Marks's assertion, certain characteristics are associated with race-skin color, hair texture, body type, and arguably, intelligence-which define how we perceive it. Often, it's in the probing questions, and ethnic stereotypes, we take for granted: Why are blacks better sprinters, and whites better swimmers (ignoring the folk wisdom of amateur geneticists like Jimmie "The Greek" and Al Campanis)? Reasonable questions, yet none of which have an unassailable answer. But for the better part of the 20th century, we have tried to qualify what it means, in scientific terms, to be black, white, or yellow.

"The very word race itself was an invention, a substitute for `reality, " says Ashley Montagu, who at 92 is considered one of the leading anthropologists in changing conventional race theories. The author of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, Montagu argued that people did not differ in intelligence, and further proposed the idea of "ethnic groups" as a more relevant taxonomy.

However, the latest scientific debate has focused almost exclusively on connections between intelligence and race, following the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994. (The New York Academy of Sciences is holding a conference later this month entitled "The Bell Curve Reconsidered") Along with books by a number of other scientists, notably psychologists Jean Phillippe Rushton and Christopher Brand, the age-old debate on racial inferiority is being revived.

Rushton's book, Race, Evolution and Behav ( 1994), proposes a "life history theory," which suggests each race or "subspecies" adapted differently to their environmentsome developing a kinship model, or k-strategy; and others an r-strategy that emphasizes reproduction. Based on his research, Rushton asserts that blacks, r-strategists, have smaller brains and exhibit more sexual and aggressive behavior compared to "Orientals," who are k-strategists and have the largest brains, less sex drive and are more readily socialized. Whites fall somewhere in the middle of this k-r continuum.

Brand, a lecturer at Edinburgh University and a self-described "scientific racist"-scientists who believe in a genetic link between race and intelligence-wrote Theg Factor last year, which was initially well received by his publisher. But after an interview in which Brand suggested that single mothers should be encouraged to mate with high-IQ males to widen their offspring's gene pool, the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, decided against releasing the book.

Nonetheless, Montagu believes there is still a market for race-based genetics. "The obsession pays good dividends" Not surprisingly, many of these same arguments have been made before, periodically recycled for prevailing social ideologies.

"What race is," says Montagu, "is an emotional approach. It's a way to rationalize one's beliefsjust as the Nazis believed the Jews were genetically inferior. There is no connection between physical appearance and genetic intelligence, he says. "The whole scientific basis collapses"

Indeed, after the eugenics movement and postwar backlash against Aryan theories of racial superiority, there was a temporary lull in the scientific study of race. Not until Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races ( 1962), which held that various races developed long before homo sapiens-and thus evolved at different ratesdid the debate resume in earnest.

"The idea of clear-cut races is actually an American phenomenon," says C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. "The categorical view is American and it is sociopolitically American. There was no race concept prior to the Renaissance. It's not present in the Bible, in the writings of the Antiquities. And it is not in Herodotus"

But if the American concept of race is prefigured by a kind of melting-pot ideology, then how do you explain its disparities? "What you have in America is an overlay of the same kinds of exploitation-political, social, and economic-grafted onto a biological difference," says Marks. "What is easy to do in that situation is to recruit the biological difference as a justification for economic, political, and social subjugation. And that way it makes it seem as though the man-made evil is actually derived from the natural order."

Once people challenge that natural order, according to Marks, it is the first major step in dismantling racial problems. "But," he adds, "that involves recognizing that racial problems are not in the nature of racial differences. They're in the nature of cultural-political issues"

The black-white race paradigm presents peculiar problems, especially given America's social caste system, where white is privileged, followed by Asian, and finally black. Classifications for mixed-race people have resulted in what anthropologists call hypodescent, a euphemism for the one-drop rule. Historically, the offspring of one white parent and one black parent are deemed black, appearance and biology notwithstanding.

"If you're the product of a mixed marriage, you have to chose one, and you become thatwhich is the contradiction of biological heredity versus racial heredity," says Marks. "Racial heredity is an all-or-nothing thing, whereas biological ancestry is a little of this, a little of that. As long as we start recognizing the reality of mixed ancestry, that will undermine the all-ornothing cultural classifications of race."

But the all-or-nothing concept persists, despite the consensus that racial purity is a myth. Even white ethnic purity is a relatively recent phenomenon.

"Sixty or 70 years ago, we separated the Irish from the Italians," says Marks. "People looked at Europeans and we didn't call them all white. We called them Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine. Nowadays, we don't talk about that kind of stuff anymore. We lump all whites together as one group, because we're trying to juxtapose them against all black people, he says. "But that has nothing to do with the real patterns of variation that are out there in the natural world."

There is already evidence of erosion in the cultural construct of race. Hispanics, who can be of any race, are a cross-cutting category-meaning the term has the cultural currency of race without its implications. Marks speculates that as more immigrants from different parts of the world arrive here, the tripartite scheme-white, black, yellow-will fall apart. "Of course there's a lot of history, so it will die hard," he gays. "I think that what we'll find is people identifying themselves in terms that are not the classical kinds of races we're accustomed to. Although I think we will always classify people."

So is there such a thing as race? The answer to that is no, says Brace, "but that's a crude answer" There are genetic characteristics found more frequently in some groups than in others, he says, but if they have any biological meaning, they are distributed according to their environments. `But there's absolutely no relationship to skin color.

There are some exceptions though, Brace admits: idiosyncratic features such as eye form or ear form-nonadaptive traits which he describes as kinship writ large. "The one remaining thing that is of importance is intellectual capability. That is not different from one population to another because it's all related to the same thing-culture-particularly the linguistic component of culture. Every human population has to learn its language and they all do" Will we ever see the end of race?

Perhaps. "When I first suggested these ideas, my colleagues scorned them, says Montagu of his UNESCO proposal. "Now most generally agree. So it's possible that scientific wisdom about such things can change."

But it would be naive to think that the sociopolitical construct of race can be so easily dismantled. Ultimately, it serves a critical psychic function-it defines who we are.

"I think that classifying people is going to be inevitable," says Marks, "probably not necessarily along black-white lines. But people are always going to identify themselves because people are different and have their own interests. Without categories it would be impossible to make sense of your place in the universe. That's why we have all these categories that we use to self-identify."

[piercehawkeye45]

Interesting article.

Its funny because there is much more genetic diversity between Chimps as a whole species than humans are. On average, humans will be different in 1 in every 1,000-1,500 chromosomes while chimps will be different at 1 in every 500. Time to start making chimp races, fruit flies for that matter as well.