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I went to the article Editingoprah suggested. What do I find, but the stalest old piece of trash from the history of science, 2 centuries ago. This is the same sort of stuff that the Nazis used when they were deciding who to send to the death camps. The Nazis bent it around to prove that the Japanese were some lost Aryan Race. It was soundly discredited and seen as the worst form of pseudoscience. For one thing, some of the people with dark skin that the Northern Europeans wanted to classify negatively (like the East Indians) had the wrong sorts of measurements. There were bad statistics used. The sampling was awful. I can hardly stand to look at anything that ludicrous. That is not of any interest scientifically except in a historical and sociological context. Sorry. That stuff is nonsense. And, as I said before, when they thought they might have some physical differences, it was used in the most negative way possible. Do you know that it was legal to hunt Aborigines in Australia as game until the 1920s when the law was finally taken off the books? There are probably still people alive today who did that !!! Wake up! Humans are an ugly disgusting species and we are terrible towards each other. We are tribal and we will use ANYTHING we can get our hands on to prove our group is superior to another group: skin color, language, eye color, hair color, height, weight, sex, profession, ancestry, religion, you name it. Human beings LOVE to hate others. It is in our nature.-- Filll 05:20, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Well it depends on the KIND of articles you are going to have on race. If you have a whole raft of NEGATIVE articles then of course there will be problems. If you have just one or two negative articles you will have problems. If you have a balanced set of articles that depicts race more realistically, based on solid science, then it will not cause hate, just the opposite. It will make people examine their own internal hatreds they might be carrying around, their own biases etc and cause them to hold their tongues. I have to say, it is very very difficult for me to imagine that somehow scientists have been secretly withholding the real nature of race from the rest of society for decades just for political correctness, which did not even exist when they first started getting these results. I do not buy it. Believe me, there are PLENTY of bigoted scientists. I am a scientist and I know lots and lots. You are fooling yourself if you think otherwise. Even now. Even with political correctness. Even with Affirmative Action. I have had scientists tell me to my face how stupid I am because of my race and that my entire race is retarded and does not belong in science. And worse. Streams of invective and cursing and insults. You have no idea.== Filll 05:50, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
I am from a tiny minority and I stand out quite a bit. I feel funny revealing it here since I sort of enjoy the semi anonymity online. But I am not in the dominant race, or even the 2nd or 3rd most dominant races in science. I could not believe that it was said to my face, and believe me I was shocked and stunned. I would sit in my car and scream until I could not talk I was so hoarse. I wanted to lash out in the worst way. But of course I could not, since the dominant groups held all the power. And no one would listen to me if I complained. Also, I will say that I also have a somewhat unusual eye color and in the last year or two, a woman who was my girlfriend's employer came up to me in a social situation and went on and on and on about how inferior I was because of my eye color and how all people like me with my eye color are inferior. Right to my face. I just stood there like an idiot smiling and nodding. My blood was boiling but I just had to swallow it, since it was her boss. I am still irritated about that. Part of me wishes I had slammed her with an insult or just excused myself and left. I am telling you, human beings are tribal. They will use ANY and I mean ANY excuse to divide each other into groups and attack each other (just like at the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, or the Sunnis and the Shiites in Baghdad, or the Khymer Rouge and the people who knew how to read in Cambodia, etc). I think ignoring the problem will not make it go away. We have to expose it to sunlight. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If I could publicly embarass the scientists who said those things to me in private with video records of their brow beating, or the boss with a video record of her comments, and lambaste these people in public for their attitudes and what they said, it would do WAY more good than covering it up. And it would be even more powerful if I had real science behind me, not just political correctness. -- Filll 06:30, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
I am impressed at how optimistic you are and what a favorable view you have of human nature. I am a bit more pessimistic after what I have seen. Maybe it is just after some bad experiences, I start to expect the worst out of people since I have seen it over and over. --
Filll 06:35, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
WE huh? I see. And who is this we and how did they come to be in charge?-- Filll 05:23, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Why is so much prominence given to Rushton and Coon? They are both important in terms of the support their works have given to those who favor the view that the [race] of an individual is predictive of that individual's most salient characteristics, true. But if they are to be given their present degree of prevalance it is important to balance them in two ways:
If someone were to go the the biology professors of major universities and asked them for a short list of people whose work on [race] issues they would recommend as objective and worthy of study, I very much doubt that these names would appear on the lists of very many people. P0M 11:45, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Since they are both cited and used now, they should be mentioned. However, they probably are mainly of historical interest. I think that we do need to talk about current science as much as possible. A revolution has happened in ALL biologicially-related fields since the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. This was a quantum leap forward, similar to the introduction of calculus in physics. Everything done in anthropology and race before 1953 is basically crap, to be totally frank. And sure it still has an effect, but it is utter nonsense and we should not feature all this obsolete stuff so prominently to the exclusion of the most modern science we have. In fact, I suspect strongly that a lot of stuff done after 1953 is also garbage. I have taken a quick look at "the bell curve" and the book by Rushton, and in terms of statistical analyses (one of the areas I am qualified to talk at a professional level), these two works are pretty sad excuses for scholarship, frankly. However, it is not our purpose in an encyclopedia to judge these references, but to report on them if they are influential.-- Filll 17:14, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Rushton is cited because his research and theories are very up to date (based on the African Eve theory) and of all the racialist theories, Rushton's is the most formidable because he uses DNA evidence and draws on the r/K reproductive theory. Everything Coon had to say has now been discredited (with the possible exception of Ethiopians being Caucasoid). Rushton and Coon are actually opposites, with Coon arguing that Whites were superior because they are the first human race, and Rushton arguing that blacks are most primitive because they are the first race tto split off, and that Orientals, not Whites, are the advanced race because humans branched into North East Asia very recently. Rushton argues that all life on Earth can be ranked based on the time period it branched off from the main trunk of the evolutionary tree. Many biologists would argue that this is not logical because all life on Earth are equivalent examples of time tested evolutionary success, however others argue that more recently emerged life forms are by definition more highly evolved because their branch literally started higher on the evolutionary tree when you draw it out. Rushton of course is not saying that blacks today are the same as the earliest modern humans, but rather he's saying, that the branch that lead to today's blacks was the most archaic branch on the human tree, and the branch that lead to today's Orientals is the most recent branch. Timelist 21:59, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
And btw Coon's typology is not widely used: The most popular race model is the 3 race model: negroid, caucasoid, monologoid (aka blacks, whites, East Asians), not Coon's congoid, capoid, australoid, caucasoid, mongoloid, 5 race model. Considering how offensive his ideas are, and considering the limited impact of his typology was, and considering that his cauasoid supremacy theory has been destroyed by the African Eve model, I have no idea why everyone on wikipedia thinks Coon was some kind of God, Timelist 22:08, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Absolutely (although I am not so sure about the penis size part but whatever). I just think that there should be no objection to seasoning it with some more balanced scientific material as well.-- Filll 23:23, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Well it will slowly get filled out with a diversity of material, as long as it is permitted by the other editors.-- Filll 23:41, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
After correcting one comment on a photograph that alleged that Cavalli-Sforza said something about Europeans being half black and half Asian (see above), the correction was reverted by User:Kobrakid with a rather derogatory edit summary. Kobrakid wrote in the edit summary: "(revert POV pushing by Patrick to last version by Halaqah, "I've read Sforza & know what he said. Sigh, this was a good article a week ago)" The article that is linked to the text that is not in the article again certainly does not quote Cavalli-Sforza, but let us give Kobrakid the benefit of the doubt. Provide a valid citation. P0M 02:21, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise for reasons that were already clar to Darwin. Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the hands of modern taxonomists, who define from 3 to 60 or more races (Garn 1971). To some extend, this latitude depends on the personal preferences of taxonomists, who may chose to be "lumpers" or "splitters." Although there is no doubt that there is only one human species, there are clearly no objective reasons for stopping at any particular level of taxonomic splitting. In fact, the analysis we carry out in chapter 2 for purposes of evolutionary study shows that the level at which we stop our classification is completely arbitrary. Explanations are statistical, geographic, and historical. Statistically, genetic variation within clusters is large compared with that between clusters (Lewontin 1972; Nei and Roychoudhury 1974). All populations or population clusters overlap when single genes are considered, and in almost all populations, all alleles are present but in different frequencies. No single gene is therefore sufficient for classifying human opulations into systematic categories.
As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear....
Interestingly, shortly after Moore's article invoking Boas was published, Time magazine published an article featuring the HGDP and its leading spokesman, geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza (Jan 16, 1995:54-55). Time reported in passing that "All Europeans are thought to be a hybrid population, with 65% Asian and 35% African genes.
For those who care to view scientific statements as texts, there's one for the books. It is not even false; it is simply ridiculous as articulated -- as if Asians and Africans were opposites, homogeneous and pure, and Europeans were less so.
This whole thing is outdated and this must be pointed out. The article in question was published in 1995, before the completion of human genome project and some recent important genetic studies.
Thulean 16:58, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
i THINK I have to agree with Thlean and i think this issue has caused enough problems the coon stuff should be removed Thlean is absolutly correct, every debate seems to rearticulate this feeling. And if many agree something is misleading then we have to go with it.--- Halaqah 18:43, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
It will not hurt the article to allow in a bit of modern science. Let's not aggressively revert every attempt to put in some diversity here, including the most accurate, most modern information we have. The tools we now have for understanding race make a lot of previous work obsolete. Sure, the previous work still has an influence of course, and it is of historical interest as well. However, an encyclopedia needs to have balance, and it needs to have currency. The advantage of Wikipedia is that it can be very current. Before you aggressively revert huge chunks of modern material, let's discuss it here on the talk page. This article is not the province of one individual, one particular group or one particular viewpoint.-- Filll 15:58, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree that all viewpoints should not have equal weight. I would favor more modern views based on better data. However, with conflicting "agendas" to contend with, I think that we can either settle on one particular agenda and irritate a bunch of others, or have two or three agendas shoved into the same article, or farm out agenda-rich material into neighboring articles. I do not care about which model is taken, but I do want to know, even if it is parenthetically, about various theories and black agenda that exist. If there is a theory of black unity, I want to know that it exists. I might not put any credence in it, but I want to know. If there were stories of discrimination based on darker skin color from around the world, I want to know those too. If there is science that shows where black skin comes from, I want to know that theory. And so on...--
Filll 23:52, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Please cool it with the genetics discussion. If Time magazine claims Cavali-Sforza said something, that's not good enough for us. Please refrain from putting your own interpretations of complex science into the article. Gottoupload 23:32, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Why do you keep changing my edits? The first change is about misdefinition of a genetic study, the second changes "in addition" with "in 1963" and the third reflects alleged source... Thulean 23:44, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Are you reading what you are editing? My edits arent only about Cavali-Sforza. Do your own advice and read before you revert. Thulean 23:49, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
If Europeans were to be intermediate between Africans and East Asians, they would cluster with either groups. However, they form their own distinctive cluster. For someone commenting on "Editors in over their head", you are making ridiculous comments. Thulean 00:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
And I'll remove "outdated" this time but read the above discussion about what Cavalli-Sforza really said. Therefore we have to use the term "alleges"... Thulean 00:04, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Speaking as a quantitative scientist, the idea of "distance" or "genetic distance" or some other sort of metric in this complicated high dimensional space is quite complicated. We need to use some sort of modified information theory to get a handle on this, but that probably veers into the forbidden "no new research" territory. But it is a very interesting question. However, having us argue it about it with no facts or other information or a good literature survey is just hopeless.-- Filll 02:17, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
I fixed the following line grammatically and was going to leave it at that, but then I realized that we can leave the implication that other people have made (if it is really true that they have done so), and avoid judging the validity of their claims.
To establish that somebody said something we have to have the citation, the original quotation, and then if we are not to quote the whole thing we need to be sure that our paraphrase accurately reflects the original.
We are not permitted to do "original research" and that involves putting ourselves in the position of professional geneticists. Even a professional geneticist cannot just plop his own judgments into an article. S/he must quote and cite something in a peer-reviewed journal.
Here is the statement that I have removed:
Recent genetic studies which cluster populations on the basis of genetic similarity do not support such a conclusion.
Was there a citation provided for this assertion? Everything was jammed up together on the editing screen and I wasn't sure what was intended to go with what. Even if we had a set of genetic studies that all showed populations and how their genetic characteristics cluster, those studies along would not make the above statement valid. We would still need an authority saying, "These studies do not support the conclusion quoted above."
I have several other things that I could add, but let's take this a step or two at a time. P0M 02:26, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
FWIW, I've already quoted Marks verbatim above. Paraphrased for brevity here is what he says:
Time implied that Luca Cavalli-Sforza claims that all Europeans are a hybrid population, with 65% Asian and 35% African genes. As stated, this statement is simply ridiculous. It makes it seem that Asians and Africans are opposite "types," homogeneous and pure [races], and that Europeans are an impure, mixed race.
Now, please tell me, what does this statement have to do with a photograph of the child of two (by Marks's account) not-pure, not-homogeneous [races]? It seems to give the lie to what Marks, the one whom Time purportedly quoted, said. It seems to show two opposite types mixing and the resultant mixture showing obvious traits from each type. (Samples taken of a mixture at equilibrium and samples taken of a mixture that has not reached equilibrium can look quite different. Explaining why Marks is right would take lots of space -- space not appropriate to a photo caption. P0M 03:14, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, it had a source. [1] The source says:
"Other studies have produced comparable results. Noah A. Rosenberg and Jonathan K. Pritchard, geneticists formerly in the laboratory of Marcus W. Feldman of Stanford University, assayed approximately 375 polymorphisms called short tandem repeats in more than 1,000 people from 52 ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. By looking at the varying frequencies of these polymorphisms, they were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts or mountains: sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; East Asians; inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia; and Native Americans. They were also able to identify subgroups within each region that usually corresponded with each member's self-reported ethnicity."
If Europeans were to be genetically intermediate between Asians and Blacks, they wouldnt form a distinctive cluster but some Europeans would cluster with Asians while some would cluster with Blacks. If you are satisfied, reverse your changes... Thulean 13:41, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
1) What footnote?
2) Currently it still says "According to Cavalli-Sforza", I was the one who changed it to "An article in Time (1995) alleges that
Cavalli-Sforza... "
3) Again: "Recent genetic studies which clusters populations on the basis of genetic similarity does not support such a conclusion.
[1]"
Thulean 19:34, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
The article currently says that Harding was the first U.S. President with "negro blood". Negro blood? What century is this? How about "with black ancestory" or "with at least one black ancestor" or something like that instead? Michael.passman 23:24, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Michael.passman 23:24, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
The article currently says:
While mainstream scientists would agree that humans evolved in Africa, Hare's assumption that Black people are closer to the first Homo sapiens sapiens is false, since by definition all humans are equally related to the African eve.[27]
The trouble with this evaluation of Hare's assumption is that it is not contained in the article cited. The article is a recapitulation of recent history pertaining to human genetic history, and that is all.
It is true, according to the article cited (and many other published works), that we are all descended from the same ancestral female. But some of us have picked up only two Y-chromosome mutation markers and some of us have picked up five. Work has thusfar not been done, as far as I know, to map out changes on all the other chromosomes. But just from this one study it is already clear that even though we are all related to the African Eve (and all living humans are descended from a later single male, too), we are not equally in possession of the same genes that these two early humans possessed. The reason is that individual descendents pick up all sorts of mutations, some good and some bad, along the way. Some of these mutations are clearly good and aid in the survival of their possessors, some are so bad that they are lethal and are so not passed down, and some fall somewhere in the middle. The mutation for sickle-cell anemia is a good example since it imposes a high price on individuals yet it allows them to survive to sexual maturity and reproduction in areas where malaria is prevalent. My ancestral line might show a mutation accumulation rate of 1.03 per thousand years, and they might have all been mutations of trivial importance. In all important respects I might not be either better or worse than somebody who lived 150,000 years ago. Your ancestral line might show a mutation accumulation rate of 1.001 per thousand years, but your line may have won the lottery and may have picked up a dozen highly favorable mutations.
So there is no proof given in the article cited either that accumulated mutations have accrued at the same rate or that they have on average been equally good or bad. There is certainly nothing in the article cited that says that we all have equally preserved the genetic constitution of the African Eve, nor does the article say that Africans have as many significant mutations carrying them away from African Even as does any other group. Moreover, the author of the material cited in an M.D., not a geneticist. P0M 09:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Someone new (?) with username Camelback99954 deleted material and left the edit message: "Delete Rajasingam comment- Nirmala Rajasingam is an unknown obviously biased activist. Why not give the opinion of an activist KKK member?" Nirmala Rajasingam is a person with an international reputation (even if she has not made a big splash in USA mass media). She is a Tamil who opposes anti-black activities in her home, Sri Lanka, and she is someone who opposes the Tamil Tigers.
As Samuel R. Delany says, politics is what you have to deal with. One of the things that people with darker skin have to deal with is "doing xyz while black." Anybody, be s/he Tamil, Shan, San. or a student from Malawi is a school in a small town in Iowa, must deal with abuse and the ever-present possibility of abuse because of his/her skin color.
Why would someone suggest giving the KKK perspective on this problem in preference to the perspective of someone who has commented on the American experience (as well as the Tamil experience) from the standpoint of someone who has a measure of acquired sensitivity to the problem and a measure of distance and objectivity regarding those manifestations of the problem that do not directly bear on her and her family members?
On top of that, her analysis of the functional reason originally in play when the idea of creating a positive black identity is (IMHO) penetrating and relevant to solving the social problems (racism) faced by black people the world over. P0M 18:40, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
what do you mean by Nirmala Rajasingam fighting against anti-black activities back at home?.Do you mean to say there is problem in srilanka because of Colour of the skin???.There is no such problem there.Tamils and Singalese do look alike and they dont have any problem based on skin color.The division is based on the language they speak!!!!. I am a srilankan and she is not considered to be a notable personality within our community.What do you know about Srilankan problem to talk about it here?.If you dont know anything then its better for you to keep quiet..This black people article has become crap just beating around the bush.By the way who on earth told you that tamils are having problems based on colour???.Why are you people picking up tamils only.The whole Indian sub continent has some dark skinned people belonging to various groups like Telugu,malayalee,Kannada ,Singalese,rajastani ,bengali etc etc. This shows your damn ignorance.No one considers themselves black and all will be shocked if you say so!!!except some out of moon people like Nirmala Rajasingam!!!!! Sria
Sria 04:46, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I originally objected to a line in the caption to "Blasian" because it was unsourced.
Thulean replaced the line with a valid citation. Unfortunately he didn't mention the addition of the citation in the edit summary, refering to mention of the citation in this talk page. (I had to reasssure myself that he had put the footnote into the caption, since it wasn't clear to me from what he said in the discussion that he'd actually done that.)
Other people have come along and argued about whether it's a statement with a citation. Check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Black_people&oldid=89498137
The citation is there, and it is valid. P0M 20:49, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand why Rushton's daft idea is given space in the "are Africans the first humans" section. Firstly it is not relevant to the section, his ideas about evolution being progressive are far far from mainstream and are irrelevant to the section. Secondly his ideas can not even be called marginal, let alone a significant minority POV, it seems to be the pov of a single rather confused and certainly biased fascist academic. Including this pov is a clear breach of the WP:NPOV policy, which doesn't allow the inclusion of all points of view, only significant minority points of view. Besides which no other pov is given, if we want to claim that evolution is progressive then we need to state categorically that most biologists don't agree. This guy, Rushton is neither a biologist nor an anthropologist, he's a psychologist and so does not count as an expert on evolution. It is clearly biased and POV to include his ravings. The whole article is a mess with various bits cobbled together with no consistency, for someone to claim that it is "stable" is ludicrous, how can it be stable when there are so many edits being made to it. I also received a warning against vandalism for some good faith edits I made to this article. I stand by my edits, and if someone else wants to accuse me of vandalism I'll be happy for them to take their spurious allegations further. By accusing other good faith editors of vandalism you damage your own credibility and the community as a whole. NO one "owns" this article, and attempted intimidation of other editors will not succeed. Alun 03:59, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Alun 07:17, 23 November 2006 (UTC)Genetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been interpreted as genetic support for "races." A recent study in which >350 microsatellites were studied in a global sample of humans showed that they could be grouped according to their continental origin, and this was widely interpreted as evidence for a discrete distribution of human genetic diversity. Here, we investigate how study design can influence such conclusions. Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or "races."....The absence of strong continental clustering in the human gene pool is of practical importance. It has recently been claimed that "the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level" (Risch et al. 2002). Our results show that this is not the case, and we see no reason to assume that "races" represent any units of relevance for understanding human genetic history. [2]
However, creationist views were still dominant at the start of the enlightenment. Blumenbach believed that humans were originally white, having populated the world after the Biblical flood from Mount Ararat (at the modern Turkey/Iran border). The white race, characteristic of this locale, was thus the closest to the original type, central to humanity. He believed that hot climates subsequently degraded some whites into browns who degraded into blacks at one extreme, and other whites were degraded into reds who degraded into yellows at the other extreme[2]. In the post-Darwin era, Carleton Coon believed that different races evolved into modern humans independently and that Caucasoids were the most advanced because they were the first to become modern humans.
does not belong in this section. The section should be devoted to an analysis of whether the proposition is supported by modern science, not a potted history of what people used to believe, or what some wingnut racist psychologist believes about "progressive evolution". I think there is a section in the Human skin colour article about this, where they say something along the lines that one of our pre human ancestors probably had pale skin colour like chimps, but that when they/we lost their/our body hair, selection due to strong sunlight probably lead to an increase in protective pigmentation. This is a reasonable comment about skin pigmentation and the African ancestors of us all. All the other stuff there seems like little more than the gratuitous inclusion of irrelevant and deliberately offensive material. Alun 18:20, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Well the fact that it's there a all is a bit odd. It's like one of those old Victorian books with lots of pictures of "natives" so people could "see how they look", all put nicely into their little "groups" so we can gawk at them and classify them as this or that, 83% this 10% that, conforming to this dictionary definition or that census definition. Then there's the text:
The point is that many of these people are Black people (bizarely some are not, and others who clearly are are claimed not to be) who have achieved great things, but all you seem to be interested in is defining them by the various "categories" white racist anthropologists or white authoritarian governments or white writers of dictionaries have decided to put them in. Come on, have pictures of well known Black people by all means, but define them by their achievements as individuals, not by dubious and often offensive "racial" epithets. I'm not a Black person myself, but I find this really offensive, and about 50 years out of date. Alun 21:14, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Before we get too upset, you have to realize that these pictures and their captions were chosen by black people. So as strange as they seem, you might want to consider them carefully and the reasoning behind them. I will make comments on each one:
The point is that many of these people are Black people (bizarely some are not, and others who clearly are are claimed not to be) who have achieved great things, but all you seem to be interested in is defining them by the various "categories" white racist anthropologists or white authoritarian governments or white writers of dictionaries have decided to put them in. Come on, have pictures of well known Black people by all means, but define them by their achievements as individuals, not by dubious and often offensive "racial" epithets. I'm not a Black person myself, but I find this really offensive, and about 50 years out of date.
P0M 04:12, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
This article serves or can serve two purposes. It can describe black people, in terms of what is known about them. Like, they have dark skin (no surprise here!) and distinctive facial feautures, etc.
It can also talk about how people have regarded blacks - in terms of "race" or even just "skin color". For example, "light-skinned blacks" are often more popular (as entertainers or sports celebrities) than darker skinned ones. Is that too much for the present article to handle?
I hesitate to go over to Race because it's filled with discontent and fights over whether there even *is* such a thing a race, a dispute which drowns out every calmly-voiced attempt to describe the general *attitude* toward black people.
Both whites and blacks have a "concept" of who black people are, and what their "value" is. Is this something Wikipedia can handle?--unsigned contribution by Ed Poor
Here is a graph, a family tree. It is accurate (scientific, done with the best technology), but it is flawed because it is abstract. It abstracts from all the adventuresome individuals going around like honeybees from branch to branch of the flowering tree, carrying pollen among all the branches.
It does not draw in the connections that occur in the real world, e.g., the children of my friends. One family has a Chinese father and a N. European mother, another has a N. European father and a Japanese mother. And then there is my friend Syrtiller, whose family connections go off in all sorts of directions. The Australian group stayed relatively unconnected by any great number of those little lines for several tens of thousands of years. But now the same filigree of colored lines from all the other endpoints would have to be drawn in to show all the real-world complexity that such abstract charts conceal.
According to this chart, nobody has a straight-line shot at the original branching off point where Homo sapiens departed from all the other Homo species. And another important point: If I understand it correctly this chart was built up by a systematic process of determining who is most similar to whom. The mutations that produced the differences would have to be inferred as far as this chart goes. The argument would be, e.g., that you cannot get a group of people that resemble each other by virtue of being redheads unless a mutations occurred that is responsible for this relatively new hair color. But we knew that there were redheads long before we knew about genes, and we knew that red hair color it heritable.
There are rare cases (involving relatively recent mutations) where a genetic characteristic has not spread all over the globe. One instance would probably be the blue skin color mutation found in the United States. It is only a few generations old, and it appears to carry some health risks along with it, so it may not spread far and fast. But for the most part you will find somebody with a certain characteristic in any population group.
So, what does it mean to be African, and what does it mean to be black? Not quite the same thing because "blackness" only refers to a subset of the characteristics of people found in Africa. And what it means to "be black" depends on which individual is deciding on the subset of characteristics. As Sria has pointed out, not everybody wants to define the subset so that it would include people who inherited the dark skin color but who did not inherit the nose structure or the tightly curled hair.
All of this stuff is a good lesson in how human beings use their minds to reach out and organize perceptions (data) into "things." "Black people," as has been shown right here on this discussion page, means different things to different people. So how should we structure any article about an undefined or a contestedly defined subject? P0M 07:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Here is another way to organize the information about the diversification of the human race during the last 50,000 years or so. Note that all humans alive today trace their descent back to a single "ur-father" who lived sometime around 50,000 years ago. The other male lines of descent have died out in the intervening years, or at least nobody has found a living human who doesn't fit on this chart somewhere.
Little mutations occur all the way along all of these temporal tracings. (See Wells's book, p. 182f if you want to see where each of these migration trails ended. I put M130 down twice simply because the trail split somewhere around Malaysia and one group went up and around into N. America while the other group went to Australia.
Some of the mutations have been good, some of the mutations have been bad (killing their possessors off in the embryonic stage or later in some cases), and some have mixed evaluations (for instance, the mutation that protects against malaria but gives people sickle cell anemia). It's hard to come up with examples of good mutations. Maybe it is a mutation that gives Amerinds native to the high mountains of S. America a much better ability to survive at high altitudes. But the idea that one is better either because one is on the M168 path that is drawn straight-line from the bottom to the top or because or because one is on the M3 path that diverged from the M242 path that diverged from the M43 path that diverged from M9 that split from M168 makes as much sense as saying that the person who started on Interstate 40 at one end and got off Interstate 40 on the other coast is in a better place than one who traveled from coast to coast by side roads, county and state highways, and segments of a number of other Interstates. Thus far nobody has discovered a path that takes them to the land of $0.25 gasoline or billion-mile automobile engines, just as Olaf Stapledon's Odd John' is still science fiction. P0M 22:30, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I think that [the stuff somewhere before P0M's long rant just above ;-) ] is a good short hand way for the average person to think about it. The truth is far more complicated, since it involves a complicated metric in a high dimensional space which is impossible to visualize.-- Filll 22:56, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Scientists believe that consumers of primarily vegetarian diets found insufficient dietary sources of vitamin D in Northern climates, which were therefore unavailable for agricultural colonization until a mutation developed that limited skin pigmentation and thereby promoted vitamin-D synthesis. [2]
I am not claiming the article is so great, but chopping it up so much will cause trouble, I promise you. Just look back in the talk history.-- Filll 21:56, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
After Darwin this view was adapted to claim that blacks were at a lower stage of evolution. In recent times this view that blacks are more primitive has been revived by J. Phillipe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario, who argues that because blacks were indeed the first race to branch off to from the human evolutionary tree, they are primarily superior in primitive traits like size of genitalia, salience of muscles and buttocks, and reproductive output, but lag behind when it comes to more evolved traits like brain size and social organization, especially when compared to orientals, whom Rushton believes evolved most recently in a challenging ice age environment. "One theoretical possibility," said Rushton, "is that evolution is progressive and that some populations are more advanced than others."[25]
Well it's not, it seemed little more than a thinly veiled way to introduce racist pseudo-science that does not even conform to the NPOV policy, this dingbat is so far from mainstream science that he should set up his offices on Pluto. But somehow his ravings get squeezed in here, even though they are totally irrelevant to the article and the section in the article. How is this relevant to human origins? How can he conclude that there is a "progressive" branch in human history but that the African one is "static? The section was about whether Black people were the original humans, so how does his neo-nazi ideas fit in to that? How can Black people be the first to branch from the "human evolutionary tree"? Humans have evolved (speciated) once, and only once. If there was a branch then how can one be progressive and the other not? This is not science it is nazism. This is a clear braeach of wikipedia policy on neutrality. Your choice of what to include is indicative of a very narrow and essentially biased and racist attitude. This article, at present, seems to serve no purpose than to demean and humiliate Black people by only representing the views of racist pseudo-scientists who have an axe to grind. Alun 23:12, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
A huge amount of material was removed or unilaterially rewritten. I would again caution you. The text you see now was arrived at by really vicious debate over a long period of time with many inputs. Do not summarily change it drastically and remove big pieces. I think that a section about the vitamin D theory is interesting and useful, for example. Some of our more combative contributors here would have a tantrum at what you have done. This has to be debated and discussed carefully before more is done. I would not be surprised if someone revered everything that wobble did. Sorry, but I have seen it before many times here.--
Filll 22:54, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Look if you only want to include politically correct science in the article then you might as well delete the whole thing, because the politically correct view is that race can't possibly exist because that leads to racism. Well if there's no such thing as race, then black people don't actually exist and are little more than a social illusion. If that's your position then nominate the article for deletion, because if race is pseudoscience, then by definition, so are black people. Gottoupload 00:25, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
This is what you should be including. How can you include Rushton, and exclude Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, slavery, segregation, apartheid and the social and cultural revolutions of the past fifty years? Where's Kirk and Uhura's first interracial kiss? Where's the civil rights movement? You guys are so far from a good article. I could go on and on and on and on and on. Oh and please try to actually address my concerns rather than distorting what I say. Alun 06:52, 24 November 2006 (UTC)Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free....This note was a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.....I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state, sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. Martin Luther King
Very true, especially with this topic. There are so many with special agendas here of various sorts. So they want to push certain points of view. And I have seen a lot of changes to the article as some editors resist any changes at all and it sits stagnant for weeks on end while people fight about nonsense. See the history and/or archive.-- Filll 06:10, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
The term "black people" is used, or has been used, to refer to many different groups. Unfortunately, there is no uniformly accepted definition of who is a "black person". Therefore, this article describes several different perspectives on the word "black" (and its equivalents in other languages) when this word is used to describe people. This word is used currently and it has also been used this way in the past. There are a variety of definitions of "black people" that are based on racial, socio-political, lexical, biological, and other factors.
The concept of "black" people has been traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans who labelled dark skinned peoples from North East Africa as "Kushite", "Nubian", and "Ethiopian"...
I think it is clearer English and simpler. What is wrong with it?-- Filll 23:01, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Well first the intro you have right now is about the 100th that existed. So there is nothing special about the current intro. However, in the current intro the English stinks and it is not easy to read. My proposed change does not remove any information, just makes the english cleaner.--
Filll 02:47, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
To ignore the fact that the term black people is and has been intimiately connected with racism is to whitewash and ignore an ignominious history most Europeans would rather forget. I say keep the records of European past racism in the article. Expose it to the light of day. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.-- Filll 23:05, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I think that this article and Rushton should be leavened with other references and with science. I think you are playing with fire if you want to remove him and go against the "black pride" perspective that is widely taught in US universities.-- Filll 23:55, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Well then the solution is to add a quote from someone criticising Rushton. Deleting cited material only causes edit wars and robs the reader of the chance to see all sides. Removing Rushton from the article is wrong for 2 reasons. A) If we limit the artilce to only "credible" sources, there will be nothing left, as few mainstream scientists openly admit to believing in race (and thus have nothing to say about black people) and none of the Afrocentric views in the article are by mainstream sources, and B) As disturbing as Rushton's views are, he is a credible source. His entire theory is based on the work of Cavalli-Sforza, he's a professor at a prestigous university, and he's a member of the prestigous American Association of Advancement of Science. Gottoupload 00:32, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Ugh...Are you sure that is what Rushton is claiming? Ugh.-- Filll 00:51, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
The reason for keeping it is that
and most important is that there would be an immense uproar if you removed it, and it would not stay removed very long. If you removed it, you would start World War III. Just look at the history here.-- Filll 02:09, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I am thinking about compiling a list of academic books and peer-reviewed papers that show Rushton is full of nonsense. However, the viciousness is so deep surrounding this article that I do not think I could get any scientific or contrary content into the article. It would get reverted immediately since we are basically in a logjam, once again.-- Filll 03:44, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
An example of Rushton's problems: <bar> Rushton claims there is more AIDS in Africa because blacks are more oversexed and have more sex as a result. However, there are many alternate theories:
I could probably come up with another 50 alternative explanations with no effort at all. That I can dredge up so many alternative theories off the top of my head, and the fact that Rushton just blithely proposes his theory with no proof or testing demonstrates that Rushton is really no scientist. In fact he is basically a pseudoscientific flake. But then he has a degree in psychology, so I would not expect anything different. So how much credence should I put in all his other claims? I know his statistics is pure crap.-- Filll 04:09, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I am not super interested in race issues myself. Otherwise I would just write a parallel article and link it in. Just do it by fiat. Or create another better article and then propose this one be deleted. I am just not that interested. My main goal here is to try to help fights get resolved so people can be productive.-- Filll 04:27, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I have edited it in small ways only. The tiny bit of improvement I proposed for the introduction was reverted immediately. I might try again I do not know. I have only seen one or two evolution types here. Evolution/Creationism is a hot button issue for me so I do not put up with much crap from them.-- Filll 04:51, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
The term Black was soon replaced (in the U.S.) by Negro but by the 1970s African-Americans reclaimed the term Black.[3]
This sort of is a stupid statement, at least without careful scholarship to back it up. At least in the last 100+ years, the linguistic sequence in the US was colored (think NAACP) to Negro (think United Negro College Fund) to Black (think black is beautiful) to Afro American (think platform shoes and afro hair styles) to African American (think Jesse Jackson). I am not sure what was the politically correct term before colored, but this is an example of the linguistic process known as "pejorization". I know why it was said this way. This bears the fingerprints of the blacks writing the article who took black studies in college and want to scream about "black pride".-- Filll 15:50, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
As I had suggested before, it is almost impossible to "improve" this article. There are strong forces of various kinds that do not want the article changed, and any changes will be reverted, as we have just seen. I was amazed that it was claimed that the statement "The concept of "black" people has been traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans who labelled dark skinned peoples from North East Africa as "Kushite", "Nubian", and "Ethiopian"." which has a good reference associated with it, and I tried to retain through the edits, was just personal opinion. Efforts to clean up the English, or remove "racism" or put in other sources, or include science will fail. The only way to do this is to start fresh and write another article from scratch. Then at that point, invite scrutiny and potential merger or whatever. There are too many disparate points of view here and too many people believe their point of view is more important than anyone else. Which is exactly why I have done very little editing, but just tried to keep people calm if possible instead.-- Filll 21:07, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Please include who you think may be a puppet, so we can request checkuser. Thulean 21:38, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Someone added the following nonsense to the article to contradict the well established fact that East Asians and blacks are genetic opposites: "Recent genetic studies which clusters populations on the basis of genetic similarity does not support such a conclusion" Please quote the section in the reference that refutes the idea that blacks and East Asians are genetic opposites. Don't go into a politically correct lecture about how there's no such thing as race (I'm black and I'm proud of my race and if another race is the genetic opposite of me I have a right to not have this information censored). Even if there were no such thing as race, there are humans from Africa and there are humans from East Asia, and Cavali Sforza clearly showed that humans from Africa fall in the bottom right of a genetioc quadrent and humans from East Asia fall in the top left. Editingoprah 21:44, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Cavalli-Sforza et al. transformed the distance matrix to a correlation matrix consisting of 861 correlation coefficients among the forty-two populations, so they could apply principal components (PC) analysis on their genetic data...PC analysis is a wholly objective mathematical procedure. It requires no decisions or judgments on anyone's part and yields identical results for everyone who does the calculations correctly...The important point is that if various populations were fairly homogenous in genetic composition, differing no more genetically than could be attributable only to random variation, a PC analysis would not be able to cluster the populations into a number of groups according to their genetic propinquity. In fact, a PC analysis shows that most of the forty-two populations fall very distinctly into the quadrents formed by using the first and second principal component as axes...They form quite widely separated clusters of the various populations that resemble the "classic" major racial groups-Caucasoids in the upper right, Negroids in the lower right, North East Asians in the upper left, and South East Asians (including South Chinese) and Pacific Islanders in the lower left...I have tried other objective methods of clustering on the same data (varimax rotation of the principal components, common factor analysis, and hierarchical cluster analysis). All of these types of analysis yield essentially the same picture and identify the same major racial groupings.
There you have Cavali-Sforza's very own genetic distance chart showing East Asians and Africans are genetic opposites. Editingoprah 21:47, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Editingoprah 21:44, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I dont see anything about Europeans being between Africans and Asians. Also see Talk:Black_people#Removed_one_line_for_study, as I pointed out in my edit summary. Thulean 21:50, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, the middle part of top left and bottom right would be near origin. And bottom left contains lots of other Asians like Malaysians, S Chineese, etc...By your "logic" Asians are also intermediate between Asians and Africans. Thulean 21:57, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
When one is in a high dimensional space, and has defined some sort of metric or distance measure that may or may not be reasonable, it is not too easy to talk about "between". Why not put this graph in the paper if it is available? or is it not public domain?-- Filll 22:05, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes it isnt. Try to back up your claims next time... Thulean 22:36, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
While I have it at hand, the place where C-S says that "the classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise," and then goes on to explain why, starts on p. 19 of History and Geography of Human Genes. P0M 00:33, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Instead of accusing me of not understanding, trying to use simple logic, it's not hard. Lukas19 12:55, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
I get the ridiculous idea that race has been discredited from many respected studies by respected scientists at mainstream institutions. Not from groups that cannot be pigeon-holed. One sentence saying Rushton is wrong is not enough. I would say adding a nice 5 or 10 references that show he is a fruitcake and a fringe element would do the job I have in mind nicely. I have no problem with the fact that this is a nut with an opinion. He is a nut with an opinion that many people share. However, let's make sure we do not present him in an uncritical and unrealistic light. I do not want to get the article sidetracked. But I want us to not show ONLY the nonstandard nonmainstream material, and ignore the mainstream. Would you object to references that disagree with Rushton being included?-- Filll 15:45, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
I really DO NOT mean to be racist in ANY WAY at all, but to me that picture of an Afrocoid looks more like an ape than a human being, was he of monkey-human heritage, some so-called humans are really monkies in my hypothesis, please be sensible and discuss this reasonably.
[ [6]] If you follow the link you can watch a brief clip of Rushton during his debate with David Suzuki Editingoprah 06:29, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
This is the sort of thing we should be aiming for Black British. Alun 14:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
I am a bit tired of being in the middle. Do none of you read what the others write on the talk page? Wobble/Alun and Ezeu make the case that Rushton is a nut and a racist nonmainstream scientist whose views do not agree with those of most scientists. I think that there is evidence of this. Gottoupload and Editingoprah do not want more science in the article and does not want any references that dispute the existence of races. Editingoprah wants an article about differing opinions of black people, racist or not. I agree that they have a point, if it can be balanced to avoid giving misleading opinions.
Here is a cut and paste from above. My words are in italic. Wobble/Alun's are in plaintext:
Alun 07:29, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Fill, you're going to need to calm down. As one of the few editors who has never been banned or blocked, I can say this article is in excellent shape, it's just that a few politically correct extremists are upset that some controversial opinions are briefly mentioned. These people are used to having the politically correct opinion forced down everyone's throat so as soon as they see an article that presents views different from their own in a neutral way they go ballistic. Last night a couple of us worked hard trying to neutralize some of the more controversial ideas in the article and I simply removed the obsolete theory that blacks are monkeys because it didn't fit in with the modern discussion about whether blacks are the original race. Of course there are always going to people who are offended by some aspect of the article. As a hardcore black, I'm offended by the entire "other view points" section because it implies that all these dark skinned wannabes get to call themselves black too. But any person of note (nutty or sane, smart or stupid, mainstream or politically correct) are welcome in this article if they have something to say about what it means to be black. In fact if we limited the article to only mainstream opinions all that would be left are the dictionary definitions and the census. So I suggest everyone just calm down. If the biggest problem in your life is what you read in wikipedia, consider yourself damn lucky. Editingoprah 19:49, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
As I mentioned above when I presented a chart of the inferred migration trails by which humans reached their "home countries" (until they messed it up by traveling everywhere and leaving babies behind everywhere ;-), there are picture of what these migration paths are that have been derived from looking at genes other than those on the Y-chromosome that Wells studied. Here is one that came out around 1995.
So that's where Rushton gets his data on the relative antiquity of the 3 main races. Crucial to Rushton's hypotheis is that archaic forms of the 3 main races branched off of the human evolutionary tree in nice, neat sequential order. Rushton claims that negroids branched off at a primitive stage (200,000 years ago), mongoloids branched off at an advanced staged (about 40,000 years ago) and caucasoids were in the middle (100,000 years ago). Rushton cites the date of the African Eve (200,000 years ago), the date when humans left Africa (100,000 years ago) and the date when East Asians and Europeans split (about 40,000 years ago) to argue that archaic Africans (later negroids) emerged 200,000 years ago, archaic non-Africans (later caucasoids) emerged about 100,000 years ago, and archaic non-caucasoids (later mongolids) emerged about 40,000 years ago. I've seen a map by Spencer Wells which appears to support this sequence, except all of Well's dates are much more recent. Wells seems to think that humans left Africa only 50,000 years ago. Timelist 21:22, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Edit conflict. Continuing what I started above. (The part about Tavish is, shall we say, not documented in my family history. I may have gotten the generation wrong, but he's got to be there.)
The map in Wells's book is not that much different. The main new thing he adds is that the first wave of migration (that ends up in Australia in the map above) split somewhere around Thailand and one band made it into N. America. The map above shows only the second-wave migration path into the Americas.
What is shocking to people like "Son of Rolf" who thought he was better than Mexicans because he was pure is that my ancestors with translucent skin in Eire didn't just show up there one fine day when the cloud ceiling was down around 1000 feet and it was chilly and cold and say, "Perfect!" They actually came from some place. Everybody in my tow-headed family came from Africa, ultimately. But before that time around half of them had gotten themselves somewhere in Central Asia (around where the 6 in 60,000 is located on the map above) and then they headed back west where they met and enthusiastically coupled with members of anotgher migration path that had come by a rather more direct path from out of Africa. By this time our own relatives wouldn't have recognized us because we had changed color.
Whether we got there 35,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, we have surely had time to make something "pure and noble" of ourselves. Surely we have evolved some stunning new capabilities. The trouble is nobody can say what they are. Since the Irish have been enthusiastically killling each other for generations, they can't claim to be so very noble, can they? And as for "pure"... If they would have stopped bringing exotic women back with them from wherever in the world they fought or traded we might have had a chance. But every family has a skeleton in the closet and every family has somebody in it that was from too far away, looked too different, spoke the wrong language, danced the wrong dances, looked the wrong way when they were being spoken to and again looked the wrong way when they were talking to somebody else.
And then we had to fight the British to try to maintain our self rule, and we lost, and so maybe some of us drank a little too much, and maybe the stress or whatever turned some of us a bit daft.
Now here's the rub: We're known as the Irish race, and the first thing that anybody knows about it is that we are alcoholics. The next thing they know is either that we are likely to turn schizophrenic. And some people are themselves so daft that they think all true Irish people must have red hair.
Truth to tell, if you want to find a redhead in a hurry then Ireland is one of your best bets. Out of a hundred people you might find nine or ten. You can't say that about China. (But you might seek among the Berbers, Kabylie, Tochar, Pashtun, Iranians, and even the Japanese.) But it's bloody stupid to say that we're not a one of us with yellow, brown, or black hair. And bald too, some of us.
When we came to the U.S. we were mistreated. So the question is, do we want to be judged as "the Irish race"? Or do we actually want people to look at us to decide whether we are red headed, have us walk a straight line if they think we might be driving drunk, etc.
Looking at what happened to our chilren in places like Boston during the 1800s (and later than that if the truth be known), I can't see why any of us would want to be identified as members of a race because the way people generally think about it, if you are of a certain race then you have a certain set of characteristics. So they don't hire you as a driver depending on whether you can drive well, they just don't hire you because you're a lousy Irish drunk. How else could you be other unless you aren't really Irish? It's bad enough for the adults, but look at what it does to child who is told to take the vocational track in high school because he is not suited to become an M.D.
It's not that we want to give up the celebration of our culture and our heritage, but if the "Irish race" is made up of "Irish people," then where does that leave me, with with great great great grandfather Basker Moor being a moor?
Nobody ought to doubt that our real family tree is as it is If we go back not so many generations we'll find that we're all related. The closer we get to the near end of our family trees the more we will look like that smaller set of relatives. I've got my grandfather's hay fever but not my grandmother's diabetes. People say I take after my mother and bear some vague resemblance to her brother, but I can't see it. People can hardly tell my brother and I apart even after 60 years, yet he's several inches taller than I am. We even tend to get the same diseases. So for all related people there are both resemblances and differences. Occasionally one may meet ones perfect double but find no known common relatives. All it takes is for the right selection of genes to pop up on the routlette wheel of reproduction.
Nobody ought to want to be treated, or to treat other people, as though they were not individuals. Even twins are different by reason of the programming, much of it prenatal, that turns on or shuts off genes according to environmental conditions.
Where would it be at if some guy could trace his ancestry back to Wellington and was all proud of being a lineal descendant of the great British leader, but at the same time wanted to deny that Fritz Wellington, who had the same great great grandfather, was a true Wellington? How would we explain that kind of reaction? Or, conversely, how would we understand it if a Czech community in the U.S. that had preserved its language and culture and had not brought back many husbands or brides from the "outside" wanted to deny that they were a Czech community?
How many branches lower in the family tree does it make sense to go before you say, "Those folks aren't in my family?!" Head backwards from any arrowheads on the chart and look for a place where a label should be inserted saying, "The line ends on the right side of this point and a new line begins on the other side," or, to put it in terms of family values, 'This child that I gave birth to is no child of mine and no child of my husband?" Or, "These parents from whom I sprung, and all their siblings, parents, and ancestors, are no parents of mine. I am the new human."
P0M 22:42, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Well one thing that's clear from the map is that race is real and that Johan Blumenback 5 color typology was more or less correct. Humans started in Africa as the black race. The maps then shows humans branching out of Africa in 2 directions about 100,000 years ago. The first direction is through Southeast Asia to Australia. Descendants of this migration formed Blumenbach's brown race and can be seen through the likes of Australian aboriginals, negritoes, aetas, etc. The next direction was up through the middle east and the descendants of this migration formed the white or caucasian race seen today in the form of Arabs, East Indians and Europeans. The map then shows that by 35,000 years ago, the white race divided into 2 groups. One that would colonize Europe, and the other that would head East and mutate into the yellow race (orientals). The yellow race headed about as far East as they could go, and then by 15,000 years ago, a few yellows crossed into the Americas where they mutated into the red race. So now do you at long last understand why whites are genetically intermediate between Africans and East Asians? Editingoprah 23:15, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
To Editingoprah (I'll respond to Filll in a minute):
Homo sapiens sapiens, and another subspecies would be something like Homo sapiens neanderthalis, Homo sapiens whatever. The differences among humans are not sufficient to reach the level of subspecies. That's just the way we do things in biology. To the extent that "race" has any meaning, then, it has to be at the sub-subspecies level.
The trouble is that however you try to define the sub-subspecies level you end up including individuals that would make some people go ballistic. (We've seen people with black skins object to being called "blacks" right here on this talk page, and if you told some of the aryan supremecists that Ainu are "whites" they would react belligerantly, no?
The way you define a [race] in terms of family tree is to start with one individual, back down until you can't tolerate somebody sitting on the next twig, and then work forward, including all the stuff "above" that point on the branch your starting point is on. There are two problems with this approach. (1) It is entirely arbitrary what point you make your cut-off point. To take Africa as an example, what if the San (those earliest of all earliest peoples who have left traces in Africa) decide that they want to trace "Africans" back to the point where the so-called Bantu races diverged. In other words, what if the San don't want to be categorized with the other groups in Africa? They are, after all, on their own branch.
To use the analogy of a tree, it's a solid tree. It doesn't come apart like tinker toys. You can take pruning shears out or use a chain saw for bigger branches, but wherever you cut a certain amount of connected wood will fall from the tree and that is a "race." If somebody objects that you should have cut a couple feet away so as to include or exclude certain side branches, then they have as much right to their opinion as you have to yours.
The other problem with the idea of race you propose is that you don't know what to do when somebody has ancestors from two or more [races]. They do not fit the definition of any race. The only thing I can see to do is to define a new race (e.g., "Blasian"). But then the "Blasian" has children with an "Amerblanco." So we need yet another [race.] The more precise a definition of a [race] is, the fewer people that fit into it.
By the way, how do you understand the difference in appearance between the "Blasian" individual and an statistically average N. European "white" individual. On the surface of things, if N. Europeans are "intermediate between blacks and Asians, then why do they look so different from a person who is the product of one black and one Asian parent? P0M 00:40, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
POM, race is no more arbitrary than any other biological classification. If biologists can divide kingdoms into classes, classes into orders, orders into species, and species into sub-species, then why stop there? Why not divide sub-species into sub-sub species? Is not the decision that human variation doesn't rise to the level of sub-species also arbitrary? And yet you don't question that. You only question race because it's politically incorrect so you've been brainwashed into denying it. You can argue that all biological classifications are subjective. For example, based on DNA evidence, an increasing number of biologists have concluded that humans are actually apes because the genetic similarity between us and chimps is less than the genetic difference between chimps and other apes, hence it makes sense to lump humans in with apes genetically. There are mathematical procedures that allow us to divide correlated variables into groups and sub-groups. PC analysis is one such procedure. The best PC analysis of genetic data I have ever seen suggests that there are 6 races: A) Blacks, B)Caucasians, C)North East Asians, D) Amerindians, E)South East Asians and Pacific Islanders, and F) Australian/New Guinean aboriginals. Your point about hybrids is not all that relevant. Just because a minority of the population is too genetically mixed to fit neatly into broad category or another in no way negates said category's existence. For example, if genetic engineering progresses to the point where snakes and crocodiles can produce off-spring, we don't suddenly decide that species is not valid concept, simply because inter-species mating has occured. Editingoprah 01:16, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Except for cases like that of Michael Jackson and of the author of Black Like Me (hope I have the title right, I'm talking about the white guy who dyed himself convincingly "black" and then went around getting maltreated by "nice white people" and wrote a book about it), hardly anybody doubts that traits like skin color are inherited. Suppose I took a month-long vacation among the aboriginal people of Taiwan living on Orchid Island and I got invited out of the tourist trap and into a remote fishing village. During a period of about a month that started nine months after I arrived on Orchid Island, four babies were born of four girls from different families. All of the babies had lighter skin than had ever been seen among that group and honking big noses. Before long I am getting legal demands for child support. I say that I had nothing to do with the sudden appearance of four anomalous-looking babies, and that it must be the result of mutations. I can't imagine any judge even bothering to get DNA evidence in the case providing that I was the only white man anywhere near those women during that period of time.
I don't know of any human group that fails to understand that many traits are inherited, and that the closer the relationship of individuals is the more likely it is that they will resemble each other. Were that all that people mean by the word "race," I'd say, "Fine, let them have their pet word." But that's not the only use that people make of the word.
Many people attach a whole rap sheet to the possession of a few marker characteristics, and then they act their fantasies out in the real world. In the Salen Witch Trial days some poor ten year old girl was killed. Reason? She had green eyes. Anybody who failed to have the normal eyes, blue, brown, or black, must be the spawn of the devil. We've all heard of the crime called "Driving while black." Many of the alleged correlations between [races] amd characteristics are false simply because they are assumed to correlate 100%. Other correlations are assumed to be higher or lower than they are, e.g., assuming that at least a quarter of the Irish have red hair, or assuming that no African people have epicanthic folds. So if by "race" somebody means that it is valid to declare the 100% probability of possession of a whole list of traits based on the individual's observed possession of a limited set of marker characteristics, then I will definitely reject the word.
The trouble with the word "race" is that it is so imprecise that it is worthless for rational discussion and so loaded with affect (connotations) that it has long been a source of great mischief. If we all spoke Loglan maybe we could limit the harm of words like "race" more easily. As things stand, however, it is acceptable to many people to reason as fantasized in the following examples: (1) General Whitehead: That person is Vietnamese, and life is cheap in the Orient, therefore that person doesn't care when his sibling is killed in one of our attacks. (2) Chief Redfeather: Never mind that she says the dam is breaking. All whites speak with a forked tongue. (3) Admiran Huang Aihua: I don't care how many people he says he has willing to pilot our ships through the shoals and let us escape, he's Japanese and all Japanese are treacherous. (4) James Bond: Of course it's not a security risk for me to go drinking with that stringer for the NKCIA. One shot of vodka and any Korean rolls under the table. (5) Basketball club owner: Who's that you say, Yao Ming? Look, sonny, we aren't playing midget league. Tell the little shrimp to get lost.
Probably these examples all look stupid. They should look stupid, because they are. But the terminology of "race" facilitates these invalid inferences. And that is why racists are called racists.
What I don't want to see are things like my students being scrutinized by some shopkeeper just because of the colors of their skins. P0M 08:33, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
It appears to me that she added a reference, and did not remove a reference. And what is wrong with the part she added? Of course you can do whatever you want since you want to play the race card constantly and we all know that once someone has decided to call someone else racist, the person charging racism always wins. -- Filll 00:51, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
When I went to the melanin theory part of the black supremacy article. It all becomes more clear.-- Filll 05:58, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I mean for real this is just crazy, can't black people have there own article and work on it in peace Whites seem to dominate just about every other article in wikipedia and now they want to control this one as well, call me paranoid but I think there's a conspiracy a foot to rob us of our right as afrowikipedians to present our racial and social povs which are in themselves informative and encyclopedic in a practical, street-smart sense.-- OJPimp'son 11:36, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
So OJPimp'son, what is wrong with the black people article that has been done by white people, in your opinion? Do you think it has a white bias? Or a nonblack bias? -- Filll 12:39, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Now that I am slowly starting to understand what is going on here, and at the white people article, I can see what to me is the underlying problem. Namely, metrics. When I looked up the Wikipedia article on genetic distance, it is an embarassment, but that is what everyone seems to be arguing about. Distance. And yet we have a very cursory treatment of this important concept. I guess people do not like math.-- Filll 14:56, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
No, I'll tell you what the problem is this article should be written in the dialect that reflects the Black Man's historical and social reality, not in the dialect of the master. This article is perpetuating the white man's domination of the Black Man, right down to the linguistic level. It's a damn shame, have we learned nothing from Cosmo Kramer, racism is inseparable from the American consciousness and the American language. If your White in the US and you get mad at a Black Man you are linguistically irresistibly bound to respond with racial epithets, the history of American English compels you to it, so I say drop the language of the oppressor and take up the language of Black English and we'll all be free to write this article the only real and truthful way possible.-- OJPimp'son 16:37, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I've removed four non-free copyrighted pictures from this article, as they are being used on Wikipedia under fair-use provisions which do not permit their use in this article. Please do not add non-free pictures to this article. Please use some free ones. Thanks. -- zzuuzz (talk) 12:57, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Locale | Usage |
---|---|
Australia | Australian Aborigines are commonly called black. |
Canada | Canadians use the terms African American or Black Canadian to refer to people with dark or African skin. |
France | The French slang term black (pronounced the same as English, except in plural in which form the 's' is not pronounced) is a pseudo-anglicism, used only as a noun. In standard French, noir (literally, "black") is generally used. |
Germany | "Farbige", meaning "Coloured" in German. |
Israel | "Schwartze," (from 'schwarz', German for 'black'), was a derogatory term to describe Sephardi Jewish immigrants, particularly from North Africa. The term has diminished in use especially after the arrival of the Beta Israel from Ethiopia. Other terms used by the Hebrew speaking world are "Kushim", meaning that their origins are in Kush, or "Yemenites." These terms generally are not considered offensive in any way. |
Italy | Black people (usually African immigrants, many of which from Senegal), can be called neri, while the similar term negri is highly offensive. Another derogatory expression is vu' cumpra' ("wanna buy?"), referred especially to black immigrants selling on streets or beaches. A borderline term is extracomunitari, that refers to the fact that these people come often from outside the European Union (which used to be called the European Economic Community; since this is never used to indicate, say, Americans, Norwegians or Swiss, this term is often considered hypocritical. |
Latin America | A number of terms are used. The most politically correct form would be terms such as Afro-Mexican, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, etc., or – on a continental basis – Afro-Latin American. Commonly used terms include negro (Sp. "Black"; note that this rarely carries a derogatory meaning in Latin America.) and moreno (in the distant etymological past, a reference to the blackness of "los moros," or "the Moors"). Derogatory terms do exist, however, such as chombo (used in South America). |
The Netherlands | The Dutch use negers (negroes). Zwart (black) is used as an adjective, though as a noun (zwarte) it may be intended in a (slightly) derogatory manner. However, it is common to refer to the country of origin instead, e.g. Somaliër, Senegalees, Nigeriaan, Antilliaan or Surinamer, though it should be noted that the latter two can also refer to whites from the Netherlands Antilles or Surinam. Nikker, roetmop and kaffer are offensive (kaffer comes from the arabic word kafir which means infidel and was used by Arabs for Africans). The antiquated word moor refers to Mauritania and was used for both black and muslims. |
Norway | In Norwegian the most common term is neger (negro) and negre (negroes). The adjective form is svart (black) and svarte (blacks). Some people find the term neger offensive, but this is a pretty new phenomena (from around 2000) and the term is usually not regarded as offensive. |
Poland | The neutral Polish term for a black person is Murzyn (plural: Murzyni). The term czarnuch (pl. czarnuchy, from czarny = "black") is considered offensive. |
Romania | Romanians use the term negri (blacks) to refer to African or African-American people, either in or outside Romania. Negri is not used to refer to other dark-skinned people, such as Pacific Islanders or Indians. The diminutive form negrotei might be occasionally considered offensive. The term cioroi or cioară, which also means crow is usually offensive. |
Russia | Russians today apply the name chornyye (чёрные, Blacks) mostly not to Africans, but to people from Caucasus, which quite naturally belong to the Caucasian race. Africans are usually called negry (не́гры, Negroes). |
South Africa | The South Africans use the term blacks for the general black population, but since the country consists of different ethnic groups, they are often called by their ethnic names, e.g. Zulus, Xhosas, Basutos etc. |
Turkey | Zenci (Negro) is widely used for people of sub-Saharan ancestry. The once popular arap is now out of use and people who find Zenci derogatory prefer to use siyah (black) or more commonly, siyahi (black person) instead. |
United Kingdom | The term black Briton is sometimes used in the UK, but it is more common to use an adjectival rather than a noun term and write about black British people. Rarely the description is loosely used to also include what is actually a larger demographic, British people of south Asian descent. See also: British Afro-Caribbean community. |
United States | In the USA, African Americans are commonly called, and call themselves, black. They may also use the N-word. |
I found this in the past history of the page. It was removed. What was wrong with it?-- Filll 23:50, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
It has no source. It's POV. What does it means to say Australian aboriginals are commonly called black in Australia? How common is common? It's not a factual statement. What does it mean to say Black Briton is sometimes used? Every term is used sometimes. Kobrakid 01:42, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
(Edit Conflict)
I'm going to do minor copyedit and grammar check. I just wanted to point out that I can't stop laughing about the template saying "To-do list for Black people" at the top. My dad would love it. Resonanteye 00:15, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't know what was originally there, but someone glossed "yellow" as "Asian" and Kobrakid reverted it, writing: (revert, Asian is not a race.)" Even though "orient" just means "the East," Asian-Americans have taken great umbrage to the use of this word because (as Edward Said argued in his book Orientalism) so great a negative connotation has accreted to the word. Major universities have sometimes had to change department names because they originally contained the "O" word. Both "Asian" and "oriental" are flaky for another reason: Anything east of a certain north-south line a little to the east of Macedonia (forget whete the irrational thing is) fits into that category. People living in Afghanistan, for instance, would be "Asians" or "Orientals."
Maybe we should key [race] names to the map rather than to emotion-stained words. P0M 03:42, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
This discussion page is getting so it takes pretty long to download via a telephone modem. Any objection to archiving the top half or so? P0M 03:45, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes I strongly object. Please don't archive it. Kobrakid 04:18, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
This is all very interesting and I encourage further eugenical(?) exploration, but there should indubitably be somewhere a section on the recent mass invasion of Maghrebans and Subsaharians to the Canary Islands for example, this is causing many problems in the islands in question. Thanks.-- LaBotadeFranco 08:12, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Though I'm happy to go along with consensus there seems to be a simple explanation for the longwinded section regarding East-Africans/Ethiopians. It is simply about how one defines Black people. When Black people are assumed to be those people mainly of sub-Saharan African origin, then East-Africans may not be included in this group. When a broader definition of Black people is included (for example Indigenous Australians and African people of dark skin colour), then East-Africans are considered to be Black people. Essentially both of these points of view are correct, it is very much a question of opinion as to whether Black people are defined as exclusively of sub-Saharan African ancestry. I think the section could be improved by including several different definitions of who constitutes a Black person. I also think the article needs to be more careful with language. If we mean people of sub-Saharan African descent, then we should say this. If we mean people of east African descent then we should say that. If we mean Black people, then it should be taken for granted that this may indeed include people who are Indigenous Australians or east Africans or African-Americans or Black British or anyone in the African diaspora. As I say this is just my thinking and I'm happy to go along with consensus if it's against my thinking. Alun 10:58, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
You're absolutely wrong to assume that because humans originated in Africa the first group of humans was, in your sense of the word, "black." In fact, most recent research seems to indicate that the first modern humans were born only lightly pigmented, although they may have become significantly darker as a result of sun and element exposure by the time they reached adulthood. Recent research also suggests that these first groups of humans would have, in large part, faciologically (and not just melanistically) resembled modern Europeans much more than they would have modern Subsaharan Africans (i.e. blacks in your use of the term). The qualities that make many Subsaharan Africans "black" or "negroid" (robust facial features, one assumes you mean) are frequent (though not necessarily predominant) in many human populations and in no way imply a recent genetic connection with Africa's modern day "black" inhabitants, nor are they the result of "atavistic" mutations, although they may, roughly speaking, be akin to the foundational mutative processes that eventually led to the formation of durable clusters of typically "black" or "negroid" phenotypes across parts of the African continent. Also of note: light skin color will often have the classic "photogenic" effect of softening facial features, thus masking phenotypical qualities in groups that might otherwise resemble "blacks", the reverse phenomenon appears to be much less effective in influencing racializing perceptions (the Ethiopian case notwithstanding). On the other hand, that millions of people across the globe associate Africanicity simply with very dark-skin pigmentation is both a sociological fact and a biological falsehood, and should be carefully reported as such in this article.-- Albinomite 21:25, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Does this man look lightly pigmented to you? This is the most up to date scientific imagery of what the earliest humans look like, and he is black in every sense of the word: African homeland, Dark skin, wooly hair, prognatheous face, athletic build. Blacks are the first truly human beings to ever walk the earth. Blacks are your parents. Whatdoyou 01:16, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Excerpted from The Biology of Skin Color, Black and White [ [16]]: Jablonski, now chairman of the anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences, begins by assuming that our earliest ancestors had fair skin just like chimpanzees, our closest biological relatives. Between 4.5 million and 2 million years ago, early humans moved from the rain forest and onto the East African savanna. Once on the savanna, they not only had to cope with more exposure to the sun, but they also had to work harder to gather food.
Not even if you produce a "dark" image of a million year old human will I be able to take your "mater nigra theory" seriously-- Albinomite 05:01, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
"Race is as real as us and our ancestors, it's about family lineages stretching back many hundreds, in some cases, thousands of years. Race is also about settling down and forming immediate and extended families and webs of cousins and marrying within the radii of relations across a span of hundreds or thousands of years. It's about the same faces being "stamped" over and over again on succeeding generations of people and about the formation of "tribes" of eerily similarly faced people inhabiting easily demarkatable spaces over historically lengthy periods of time. The linking of races almost exclusively with skin-color traits demonstrates a terribly unfortunate lack of imagination and a profound ignorance of human as well as familial histories, especially on the part of the most technologically advanced societies. Needless to say, in demographic terms three thousand years ago Europe was radically different from what it is today or even from what it was in the time of the First Crusade or the Thirty Years War; pre-Roman Europe was a land of clans and tribes, many of whom lived sequestered in deep valleys surrounded by unarable hills which were in turn protected by steep mountains, the deeply stamped and strongly featured faces of the peoples that composed these closely knit, highly territorial groups would—if they were to somehow be revived—surely strike the modern European as strangely frightening and for this same reason enthralling, it would be akin to a European revisiting the "discovery" of America and its wonderously "exotic" panoply of peoples." This was originally posted by cupidon and merits reposting here I think.-- Albinomite 05:54, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Excerpted from The Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Tone: "Of course, nothing above is meant to imply that pre-LGM Europeans were as dark as Africans. Evidence suggests that early modern humans had a medium complexion, like that of today’s Khoisan or Ethiopians. The very dark complexion of central Africans also seems to be a recent adaptation [italics post-placed] (Semino and others 2002). To be sure, prior studies had suggested Mbuti pygmies as most resembling the first moderns, but current molecular evidence points to the Khoisan and Ethiopians..."[ [17]]. The Khoisan, it should be noted, do in no way consider themselves black, and if given a "carte" of choices from which to select racial affinities, will regularly pick examples representing South or Central Asian phenotypes. -- Albinomite 23:28, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
This is all very interesting and I encourage further eugenical(?) exploration, but there should indubitably be somewhere a section on the recent mass invasion of Maghrebans and Subsaharians to the Canary Islands for example, this is causing many problems in the islands in question. Thanks.-- LaBotadeFranco 08:15, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
This has been discussed and discredited ad nauseum. Ethiopeans are not white blacks. European colonial anthropologists made the same flawed claims in the 1800s (see Hamitic Myth), arguments that are entirely discredited by contemporary science. -- Ezeu 17:29, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Regardless of what our politics or who our friends are, I think we can all agree that what we're sorely missing is the "big picture." First: there are undoubtedly certain "sociological facts" regarding "race and space" which this article must both contend with and dutifully represent, these "facts" all relate to the long and widely held belief that to be African is to be black and that blackness is proof that one is African. To be sure, most of us here do not subscribe to the myth of African négritude, we know that Africa does not magically turn one black and yet we dispute among ourselves whether dark pigmentation was a necessary adaptation on the part of our first human ancestors to conditions in an African equatorial environment (so it seems that the myth does contain some truth after all), likewise we argue about whether Ethiopians, Khoisans, and Somalis are really black, yet I suspect that no one here would seriously consider not mentioning at least one of these three controversial groups in this an article on "black people." My point is this: our problem is not that we do not as a group know what to include or what the relevant "issues" are, it is that we can not seem to agree on how these "issues" should be presented, we do not seem to be willing to either make the effort or take the time to consider that "problems" which some see as "white" and others as "black" are in reality "grey," and should be depicted as such.-- Albinomite 19:24, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Man this makes no sense. I am confused and I have no idea what the point of this is.-- Filll 03:00, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
I hope we can at least get the convoluted language out of the article. I have made an effort to make the introduction a bit clearer with more straightforward language. It needs more effort however. Hopefully it will not all get nuked as it has the last several times I tried. -- Filll 21:53, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Blackness is an american invention? What on earth? Surely you are kidding me. You cannot be serious. And our racial boundaries ARE sort of nonsense. At least by our best biological data. People ARE far closer to grey. The races blend into each other. And races do not have the special traits that we like to think they do, or at least to the extent we think they do. -- Filll 23:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
You are kidding me. That is a very strange perspective. And VERY centered on the US. I could give dozens of counter examples. That is just wrong, I believe. But americans always think they are most important people on the face of the earth. So it is typical. -- Filll 23:50, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I do not believe that anyone seriously believes that the idea of calling certain groups black originated or was popularized in the US. I have to think it must be a joke. I do not think it is "excessive and unreasonable". It is more like a comical statement because it is so obviously bizarre and biased, and ignores a few thousand years of history, some of which is even referenced in the article at present. This HAS to be a joke.--00:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)-- Filll 00:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
The reason this article is such a mess is that there have been many stripes of extremist involved, all fighting with each other, for months and months. So, not much gets done. And it ends up very one-sided, by whatever group manages to get the upper hand.-- Filll 00:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
What about Scipio Africanus?-- Balino-Antimod 01:09, 1 December 2006 (UTC)-- Balino-Antimod 01:09, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Some comments:
So is it any wonder people are a bit concerned? Of course, who really cares about who uses or has used the word "black", or this article, or wikipedia in general? Obviously some people care, given the racial strife in many places and the arguments I have seen here on this page. -- Filll 03:10, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Fill, all I can say is that if people are going to fly off the handle over an argument as trivial as "who popularized the term black?" then this article is doomed. Timelist 03:35, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
This is just provides good examples of pejorization. Colored was the preferred word 100+ years ago (think NAACP), and then when it fell out of favor, negro gained currency (think UNCF), which was replaced by black (think Black is Beautiful), which was replaced by Afro American and now African American. I would not be surprised if African American is eventually replaced as well. One can also look at the history of the two words "ass" and "arse", which were alternately the polite and the rude form of the same word for centuries. To blackamoor, I might also add the word Moor, which is somewhat ambiguous because to some it can also signify Arab or Muslim.-- Filll 04:59, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
One of the reasons that discussions about Black people are so heavily loaded with affect is that so much damage has been done to the natives of Africa by slavers and colonialists, people who had reasons to rationalize their taking advantage of other people and to discredit any indications that the people of Africa had their own culture.
Two things are missing in the education of most if not all of us.
One thing missing is a clear knowledge of the genetic history that relates all of us. Many people do not want to admit that some of their ancestors are also the ancestors of the people of Africa. Clarifying that picture can make it much clearer in what sense a Shan tribesman is black and in what sense his genetic heritage includes some wrinkles that (without saying whether they make him better or worse) differentiate him from the descendants of those same ancestors who remained in Africa.
The other thing missing is a clear knowledge of the cultural accomplishments of the black peoples of the world. Racists would like to make it appear that "culture" is something limited to European society, with, perhaps, a bow to ancient Chinese poetry, early Japanese novels, or whatever. But culture is, in essence, inventions that people make to smooth and regularize human interactions. All societies have a culture. In addition to the everyday institutions of culture, which may be the most important, it is important to understand the cultural features such as music that each group and each time contributes. The music of Africa is, to my ear, highly evolved. It may grow out of a continuous tradition reaching all the way back to the earliest Homo sapiens to rest around a campfire after the sun goes down.
What have been the civilizations of Africa? Most people, myself included, received no instruction in this matter at any time from kindergarten to graduate school. The time of human beings in China is not so long as that of humans in Africa, but I do not think that is the reason that one could fairly easily produce a series of maps at intervals of the centuries perhaps, showing the locations of human habitations, the character of architecture and cityscapes, etc. Starting from around 1000 B.C. information taken from written accounts could be added to this picture.
The maps that Cavalli-Sforza produced (see above) show some indications of migration paths in Africa, but that information is already pretty old. Perhaps there are more detailed accounts available now.
In my understanding, the development of cities of greater and greater size and having greater internal structure (e.g., areas for boat building, areas for markets, etc.) is a pretty good indication of the general level of civilization in the society of the time, the reason being simply that large city require not only large resources in the material sense but also large resources in management skills and thriving economies to support their existence.
Depicting the African peoples not only by their genetic (fuzzy) categories but also by their accomplishments would be a much more objective presentation. It is extremely reductionistic to limit the description of a group or an individual to inherited traits. P0M 03:23, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
I can see no discussion for this move from Black people to "The Black race", and there was no consensus. People refer to themselves as Black, that's why it's Black people. I think a big change like this should never be done unilaterally by an editor, this needs to be agreed upon by at least a majority of editors and preferably a consensus. And what's the sarcastic remark about "heavily tan white people or coal miners". What do other editors think? Alun 06:20, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Should actors in black face be in some way classified as "black people?"-- Balino-Antimod 06:54, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
No there was no consensus. Calling the article "black race" is POV because it assumes that race is a valid concept, and we've seen from this talk page, that's an enormously controversial issue. As Ezeu said, thaks for reverting the renaming Timelist 07:08, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Black race simply means rooted in black or very dark lineages, black people don't just spontaneously appear, they come from other black people. This, if I recall, was also Thulean's point.-- Balino-Antimod 07:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
If the goal of this move was to create a family of articles with different viewpoints (which I suspect goes against Wikipedia rules), then it might have worked. However, my impression is that the point of the move was to try to bludgeon into submission people with contrary views.-- Filll 14:25, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Appears to me to be a white supremacist type, if I had to guess.-- Filll 15:48, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes I say with pride I am a Nuevo Falangista, ¡Arriba España!-- Balino-Antimod 16:28, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Also there is nothing racist or communist about being a falangist and the very article you cite concedes it:Despite changing times, Falangism remains a living political philosophy. The Kataeb, a political party in Lebanon, also espouses a Falangist ideology, and is the most prominent nationalist organization in the region; in Bolivia there is a political party called Falange Socialista Boliviana. In America, one small group, the Christian Falangist Party of America, inspired by Kataeb, was formed in 1985. It is vehement in rejecting racism, antisemitism, and neo-nazism and espousing traditional National Syndicalism, which it claims is neither racist nor socialist in nature (see Falangist). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Balino-Antimod ( talk • contribs).
Filll, comment on content, not on editors... Lukas19 17:39, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Filll, I think you're reading way too much into Lukas's and Balino's comments. I think we should focus on article-building and not on editor-questioning. Let us all stick to the true task at hand, manos a la obra as they say in Spanish.-- Albinomite 18:18, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Albinomite has put a great joke on my page about writing in German. However, I do not think that everyone finds these kinds of jokes funny.-- Filll 18:39, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
I know how you feel Filll, I believe not too long ago there was a Black Supremacist here by the name of OJPimps'on, where is he now I wonder?-- Albinomite 19:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
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I went to the article Editingoprah suggested. What do I find, but the stalest old piece of trash from the history of science, 2 centuries ago. This is the same sort of stuff that the Nazis used when they were deciding who to send to the death camps. The Nazis bent it around to prove that the Japanese were some lost Aryan Race. It was soundly discredited and seen as the worst form of pseudoscience. For one thing, some of the people with dark skin that the Northern Europeans wanted to classify negatively (like the East Indians) had the wrong sorts of measurements. There were bad statistics used. The sampling was awful. I can hardly stand to look at anything that ludicrous. That is not of any interest scientifically except in a historical and sociological context. Sorry. That stuff is nonsense. And, as I said before, when they thought they might have some physical differences, it was used in the most negative way possible. Do you know that it was legal to hunt Aborigines in Australia as game until the 1920s when the law was finally taken off the books? There are probably still people alive today who did that !!! Wake up! Humans are an ugly disgusting species and we are terrible towards each other. We are tribal and we will use ANYTHING we can get our hands on to prove our group is superior to another group: skin color, language, eye color, hair color, height, weight, sex, profession, ancestry, religion, you name it. Human beings LOVE to hate others. It is in our nature.-- Filll 05:20, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Well it depends on the KIND of articles you are going to have on race. If you have a whole raft of NEGATIVE articles then of course there will be problems. If you have just one or two negative articles you will have problems. If you have a balanced set of articles that depicts race more realistically, based on solid science, then it will not cause hate, just the opposite. It will make people examine their own internal hatreds they might be carrying around, their own biases etc and cause them to hold their tongues. I have to say, it is very very difficult for me to imagine that somehow scientists have been secretly withholding the real nature of race from the rest of society for decades just for political correctness, which did not even exist when they first started getting these results. I do not buy it. Believe me, there are PLENTY of bigoted scientists. I am a scientist and I know lots and lots. You are fooling yourself if you think otherwise. Even now. Even with political correctness. Even with Affirmative Action. I have had scientists tell me to my face how stupid I am because of my race and that my entire race is retarded and does not belong in science. And worse. Streams of invective and cursing and insults. You have no idea.== Filll 05:50, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
I am from a tiny minority and I stand out quite a bit. I feel funny revealing it here since I sort of enjoy the semi anonymity online. But I am not in the dominant race, or even the 2nd or 3rd most dominant races in science. I could not believe that it was said to my face, and believe me I was shocked and stunned. I would sit in my car and scream until I could not talk I was so hoarse. I wanted to lash out in the worst way. But of course I could not, since the dominant groups held all the power. And no one would listen to me if I complained. Also, I will say that I also have a somewhat unusual eye color and in the last year or two, a woman who was my girlfriend's employer came up to me in a social situation and went on and on and on about how inferior I was because of my eye color and how all people like me with my eye color are inferior. Right to my face. I just stood there like an idiot smiling and nodding. My blood was boiling but I just had to swallow it, since it was her boss. I am still irritated about that. Part of me wishes I had slammed her with an insult or just excused myself and left. I am telling you, human beings are tribal. They will use ANY and I mean ANY excuse to divide each other into groups and attack each other (just like at the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, or the Sunnis and the Shiites in Baghdad, or the Khymer Rouge and the people who knew how to read in Cambodia, etc). I think ignoring the problem will not make it go away. We have to expose it to sunlight. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If I could publicly embarass the scientists who said those things to me in private with video records of their brow beating, or the boss with a video record of her comments, and lambaste these people in public for their attitudes and what they said, it would do WAY more good than covering it up. And it would be even more powerful if I had real science behind me, not just political correctness. -- Filll 06:30, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
I am impressed at how optimistic you are and what a favorable view you have of human nature. I am a bit more pessimistic after what I have seen. Maybe it is just after some bad experiences, I start to expect the worst out of people since I have seen it over and over. --
Filll 06:35, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
WE huh? I see. And who is this we and how did they come to be in charge?-- Filll 05:23, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Why is so much prominence given to Rushton and Coon? They are both important in terms of the support their works have given to those who favor the view that the [race] of an individual is predictive of that individual's most salient characteristics, true. But if they are to be given their present degree of prevalance it is important to balance them in two ways:
If someone were to go the the biology professors of major universities and asked them for a short list of people whose work on [race] issues they would recommend as objective and worthy of study, I very much doubt that these names would appear on the lists of very many people. P0M 11:45, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Since they are both cited and used now, they should be mentioned. However, they probably are mainly of historical interest. I think that we do need to talk about current science as much as possible. A revolution has happened in ALL biologicially-related fields since the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. This was a quantum leap forward, similar to the introduction of calculus in physics. Everything done in anthropology and race before 1953 is basically crap, to be totally frank. And sure it still has an effect, but it is utter nonsense and we should not feature all this obsolete stuff so prominently to the exclusion of the most modern science we have. In fact, I suspect strongly that a lot of stuff done after 1953 is also garbage. I have taken a quick look at "the bell curve" and the book by Rushton, and in terms of statistical analyses (one of the areas I am qualified to talk at a professional level), these two works are pretty sad excuses for scholarship, frankly. However, it is not our purpose in an encyclopedia to judge these references, but to report on them if they are influential.-- Filll 17:14, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Rushton is cited because his research and theories are very up to date (based on the African Eve theory) and of all the racialist theories, Rushton's is the most formidable because he uses DNA evidence and draws on the r/K reproductive theory. Everything Coon had to say has now been discredited (with the possible exception of Ethiopians being Caucasoid). Rushton and Coon are actually opposites, with Coon arguing that Whites were superior because they are the first human race, and Rushton arguing that blacks are most primitive because they are the first race tto split off, and that Orientals, not Whites, are the advanced race because humans branched into North East Asia very recently. Rushton argues that all life on Earth can be ranked based on the time period it branched off from the main trunk of the evolutionary tree. Many biologists would argue that this is not logical because all life on Earth are equivalent examples of time tested evolutionary success, however others argue that more recently emerged life forms are by definition more highly evolved because their branch literally started higher on the evolutionary tree when you draw it out. Rushton of course is not saying that blacks today are the same as the earliest modern humans, but rather he's saying, that the branch that lead to today's blacks was the most archaic branch on the human tree, and the branch that lead to today's Orientals is the most recent branch. Timelist 21:59, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
And btw Coon's typology is not widely used: The most popular race model is the 3 race model: negroid, caucasoid, monologoid (aka blacks, whites, East Asians), not Coon's congoid, capoid, australoid, caucasoid, mongoloid, 5 race model. Considering how offensive his ideas are, and considering the limited impact of his typology was, and considering that his cauasoid supremacy theory has been destroyed by the African Eve model, I have no idea why everyone on wikipedia thinks Coon was some kind of God, Timelist 22:08, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Absolutely (although I am not so sure about the penis size part but whatever). I just think that there should be no objection to seasoning it with some more balanced scientific material as well.-- Filll 23:23, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Well it will slowly get filled out with a diversity of material, as long as it is permitted by the other editors.-- Filll 23:41, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
After correcting one comment on a photograph that alleged that Cavalli-Sforza said something about Europeans being half black and half Asian (see above), the correction was reverted by User:Kobrakid with a rather derogatory edit summary. Kobrakid wrote in the edit summary: "(revert POV pushing by Patrick to last version by Halaqah, "I've read Sforza & know what he said. Sigh, this was a good article a week ago)" The article that is linked to the text that is not in the article again certainly does not quote Cavalli-Sforza, but let us give Kobrakid the benefit of the doubt. Provide a valid citation. P0M 02:21, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise for reasons that were already clar to Darwin. Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the hands of modern taxonomists, who define from 3 to 60 or more races (Garn 1971). To some extend, this latitude depends on the personal preferences of taxonomists, who may chose to be "lumpers" or "splitters." Although there is no doubt that there is only one human species, there are clearly no objective reasons for stopping at any particular level of taxonomic splitting. In fact, the analysis we carry out in chapter 2 for purposes of evolutionary study shows that the level at which we stop our classification is completely arbitrary. Explanations are statistical, geographic, and historical. Statistically, genetic variation within clusters is large compared with that between clusters (Lewontin 1972; Nei and Roychoudhury 1974). All populations or population clusters overlap when single genes are considered, and in almost all populations, all alleles are present but in different frequencies. No single gene is therefore sufficient for classifying human opulations into systematic categories.
As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear....
Interestingly, shortly after Moore's article invoking Boas was published, Time magazine published an article featuring the HGDP and its leading spokesman, geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza (Jan 16, 1995:54-55). Time reported in passing that "All Europeans are thought to be a hybrid population, with 65% Asian and 35% African genes.
For those who care to view scientific statements as texts, there's one for the books. It is not even false; it is simply ridiculous as articulated -- as if Asians and Africans were opposites, homogeneous and pure, and Europeans were less so.
This whole thing is outdated and this must be pointed out. The article in question was published in 1995, before the completion of human genome project and some recent important genetic studies.
Thulean 16:58, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
i THINK I have to agree with Thlean and i think this issue has caused enough problems the coon stuff should be removed Thlean is absolutly correct, every debate seems to rearticulate this feeling. And if many agree something is misleading then we have to go with it.--- Halaqah 18:43, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
It will not hurt the article to allow in a bit of modern science. Let's not aggressively revert every attempt to put in some diversity here, including the most accurate, most modern information we have. The tools we now have for understanding race make a lot of previous work obsolete. Sure, the previous work still has an influence of course, and it is of historical interest as well. However, an encyclopedia needs to have balance, and it needs to have currency. The advantage of Wikipedia is that it can be very current. Before you aggressively revert huge chunks of modern material, let's discuss it here on the talk page. This article is not the province of one individual, one particular group or one particular viewpoint.-- Filll 15:58, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree that all viewpoints should not have equal weight. I would favor more modern views based on better data. However, with conflicting "agendas" to contend with, I think that we can either settle on one particular agenda and irritate a bunch of others, or have two or three agendas shoved into the same article, or farm out agenda-rich material into neighboring articles. I do not care about which model is taken, but I do want to know, even if it is parenthetically, about various theories and black agenda that exist. If there is a theory of black unity, I want to know that it exists. I might not put any credence in it, but I want to know. If there were stories of discrimination based on darker skin color from around the world, I want to know those too. If there is science that shows where black skin comes from, I want to know that theory. And so on...--
Filll 23:52, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Please cool it with the genetics discussion. If Time magazine claims Cavali-Sforza said something, that's not good enough for us. Please refrain from putting your own interpretations of complex science into the article. Gottoupload 23:32, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Why do you keep changing my edits? The first change is about misdefinition of a genetic study, the second changes "in addition" with "in 1963" and the third reflects alleged source... Thulean 23:44, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Are you reading what you are editing? My edits arent only about Cavali-Sforza. Do your own advice and read before you revert. Thulean 23:49, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
If Europeans were to be intermediate between Africans and East Asians, they would cluster with either groups. However, they form their own distinctive cluster. For someone commenting on "Editors in over their head", you are making ridiculous comments. Thulean 00:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
And I'll remove "outdated" this time but read the above discussion about what Cavalli-Sforza really said. Therefore we have to use the term "alleges"... Thulean 00:04, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Speaking as a quantitative scientist, the idea of "distance" or "genetic distance" or some other sort of metric in this complicated high dimensional space is quite complicated. We need to use some sort of modified information theory to get a handle on this, but that probably veers into the forbidden "no new research" territory. But it is a very interesting question. However, having us argue it about it with no facts or other information or a good literature survey is just hopeless.-- Filll 02:17, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
I fixed the following line grammatically and was going to leave it at that, but then I realized that we can leave the implication that other people have made (if it is really true that they have done so), and avoid judging the validity of their claims.
To establish that somebody said something we have to have the citation, the original quotation, and then if we are not to quote the whole thing we need to be sure that our paraphrase accurately reflects the original.
We are not permitted to do "original research" and that involves putting ourselves in the position of professional geneticists. Even a professional geneticist cannot just plop his own judgments into an article. S/he must quote and cite something in a peer-reviewed journal.
Here is the statement that I have removed:
Recent genetic studies which cluster populations on the basis of genetic similarity do not support such a conclusion.
Was there a citation provided for this assertion? Everything was jammed up together on the editing screen and I wasn't sure what was intended to go with what. Even if we had a set of genetic studies that all showed populations and how their genetic characteristics cluster, those studies along would not make the above statement valid. We would still need an authority saying, "These studies do not support the conclusion quoted above."
I have several other things that I could add, but let's take this a step or two at a time. P0M 02:26, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
FWIW, I've already quoted Marks verbatim above. Paraphrased for brevity here is what he says:
Time implied that Luca Cavalli-Sforza claims that all Europeans are a hybrid population, with 65% Asian and 35% African genes. As stated, this statement is simply ridiculous. It makes it seem that Asians and Africans are opposite "types," homogeneous and pure [races], and that Europeans are an impure, mixed race.
Now, please tell me, what does this statement have to do with a photograph of the child of two (by Marks's account) not-pure, not-homogeneous [races]? It seems to give the lie to what Marks, the one whom Time purportedly quoted, said. It seems to show two opposite types mixing and the resultant mixture showing obvious traits from each type. (Samples taken of a mixture at equilibrium and samples taken of a mixture that has not reached equilibrium can look quite different. Explaining why Marks is right would take lots of space -- space not appropriate to a photo caption. P0M 03:14, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, it had a source. [1] The source says:
"Other studies have produced comparable results. Noah A. Rosenberg and Jonathan K. Pritchard, geneticists formerly in the laboratory of Marcus W. Feldman of Stanford University, assayed approximately 375 polymorphisms called short tandem repeats in more than 1,000 people from 52 ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. By looking at the varying frequencies of these polymorphisms, they were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts or mountains: sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; East Asians; inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia; and Native Americans. They were also able to identify subgroups within each region that usually corresponded with each member's self-reported ethnicity."
If Europeans were to be genetically intermediate between Asians and Blacks, they wouldnt form a distinctive cluster but some Europeans would cluster with Asians while some would cluster with Blacks. If you are satisfied, reverse your changes... Thulean 13:41, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
1) What footnote?
2) Currently it still says "According to Cavalli-Sforza", I was the one who changed it to "An article in Time (1995) alleges that
Cavalli-Sforza... "
3) Again: "Recent genetic studies which clusters populations on the basis of genetic similarity does not support such a conclusion.
[1]"
Thulean 19:34, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
The article currently says that Harding was the first U.S. President with "negro blood". Negro blood? What century is this? How about "with black ancestory" or "with at least one black ancestor" or something like that instead? Michael.passman 23:24, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Michael.passman 23:24, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
The article currently says:
While mainstream scientists would agree that humans evolved in Africa, Hare's assumption that Black people are closer to the first Homo sapiens sapiens is false, since by definition all humans are equally related to the African eve.[27]
The trouble with this evaluation of Hare's assumption is that it is not contained in the article cited. The article is a recapitulation of recent history pertaining to human genetic history, and that is all.
It is true, according to the article cited (and many other published works), that we are all descended from the same ancestral female. But some of us have picked up only two Y-chromosome mutation markers and some of us have picked up five. Work has thusfar not been done, as far as I know, to map out changes on all the other chromosomes. But just from this one study it is already clear that even though we are all related to the African Eve (and all living humans are descended from a later single male, too), we are not equally in possession of the same genes that these two early humans possessed. The reason is that individual descendents pick up all sorts of mutations, some good and some bad, along the way. Some of these mutations are clearly good and aid in the survival of their possessors, some are so bad that they are lethal and are so not passed down, and some fall somewhere in the middle. The mutation for sickle-cell anemia is a good example since it imposes a high price on individuals yet it allows them to survive to sexual maturity and reproduction in areas where malaria is prevalent. My ancestral line might show a mutation accumulation rate of 1.03 per thousand years, and they might have all been mutations of trivial importance. In all important respects I might not be either better or worse than somebody who lived 150,000 years ago. Your ancestral line might show a mutation accumulation rate of 1.001 per thousand years, but your line may have won the lottery and may have picked up a dozen highly favorable mutations.
So there is no proof given in the article cited either that accumulated mutations have accrued at the same rate or that they have on average been equally good or bad. There is certainly nothing in the article cited that says that we all have equally preserved the genetic constitution of the African Eve, nor does the article say that Africans have as many significant mutations carrying them away from African Even as does any other group. Moreover, the author of the material cited in an M.D., not a geneticist. P0M 09:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Someone new (?) with username Camelback99954 deleted material and left the edit message: "Delete Rajasingam comment- Nirmala Rajasingam is an unknown obviously biased activist. Why not give the opinion of an activist KKK member?" Nirmala Rajasingam is a person with an international reputation (even if she has not made a big splash in USA mass media). She is a Tamil who opposes anti-black activities in her home, Sri Lanka, and she is someone who opposes the Tamil Tigers.
As Samuel R. Delany says, politics is what you have to deal with. One of the things that people with darker skin have to deal with is "doing xyz while black." Anybody, be s/he Tamil, Shan, San. or a student from Malawi is a school in a small town in Iowa, must deal with abuse and the ever-present possibility of abuse because of his/her skin color.
Why would someone suggest giving the KKK perspective on this problem in preference to the perspective of someone who has commented on the American experience (as well as the Tamil experience) from the standpoint of someone who has a measure of acquired sensitivity to the problem and a measure of distance and objectivity regarding those manifestations of the problem that do not directly bear on her and her family members?
On top of that, her analysis of the functional reason originally in play when the idea of creating a positive black identity is (IMHO) penetrating and relevant to solving the social problems (racism) faced by black people the world over. P0M 18:40, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
what do you mean by Nirmala Rajasingam fighting against anti-black activities back at home?.Do you mean to say there is problem in srilanka because of Colour of the skin???.There is no such problem there.Tamils and Singalese do look alike and they dont have any problem based on skin color.The division is based on the language they speak!!!!. I am a srilankan and she is not considered to be a notable personality within our community.What do you know about Srilankan problem to talk about it here?.If you dont know anything then its better for you to keep quiet..This black people article has become crap just beating around the bush.By the way who on earth told you that tamils are having problems based on colour???.Why are you people picking up tamils only.The whole Indian sub continent has some dark skinned people belonging to various groups like Telugu,malayalee,Kannada ,Singalese,rajastani ,bengali etc etc. This shows your damn ignorance.No one considers themselves black and all will be shocked if you say so!!!except some out of moon people like Nirmala Rajasingam!!!!! Sria
Sria 04:46, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I originally objected to a line in the caption to "Blasian" because it was unsourced.
Thulean replaced the line with a valid citation. Unfortunately he didn't mention the addition of the citation in the edit summary, refering to mention of the citation in this talk page. (I had to reasssure myself that he had put the footnote into the caption, since it wasn't clear to me from what he said in the discussion that he'd actually done that.)
Other people have come along and argued about whether it's a statement with a citation. Check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Black_people&oldid=89498137
The citation is there, and it is valid. P0M 20:49, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand why Rushton's daft idea is given space in the "are Africans the first humans" section. Firstly it is not relevant to the section, his ideas about evolution being progressive are far far from mainstream and are irrelevant to the section. Secondly his ideas can not even be called marginal, let alone a significant minority POV, it seems to be the pov of a single rather confused and certainly biased fascist academic. Including this pov is a clear breach of the WP:NPOV policy, which doesn't allow the inclusion of all points of view, only significant minority points of view. Besides which no other pov is given, if we want to claim that evolution is progressive then we need to state categorically that most biologists don't agree. This guy, Rushton is neither a biologist nor an anthropologist, he's a psychologist and so does not count as an expert on evolution. It is clearly biased and POV to include his ravings. The whole article is a mess with various bits cobbled together with no consistency, for someone to claim that it is "stable" is ludicrous, how can it be stable when there are so many edits being made to it. I also received a warning against vandalism for some good faith edits I made to this article. I stand by my edits, and if someone else wants to accuse me of vandalism I'll be happy for them to take their spurious allegations further. By accusing other good faith editors of vandalism you damage your own credibility and the community as a whole. NO one "owns" this article, and attempted intimidation of other editors will not succeed. Alun 03:59, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Alun 07:17, 23 November 2006 (UTC)Genetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been interpreted as genetic support for "races." A recent study in which >350 microsatellites were studied in a global sample of humans showed that they could be grouped according to their continental origin, and this was widely interpreted as evidence for a discrete distribution of human genetic diversity. Here, we investigate how study design can influence such conclusions. Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or "races."....The absence of strong continental clustering in the human gene pool is of practical importance. It has recently been claimed that "the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level" (Risch et al. 2002). Our results show that this is not the case, and we see no reason to assume that "races" represent any units of relevance for understanding human genetic history. [2]
However, creationist views were still dominant at the start of the enlightenment. Blumenbach believed that humans were originally white, having populated the world after the Biblical flood from Mount Ararat (at the modern Turkey/Iran border). The white race, characteristic of this locale, was thus the closest to the original type, central to humanity. He believed that hot climates subsequently degraded some whites into browns who degraded into blacks at one extreme, and other whites were degraded into reds who degraded into yellows at the other extreme[2]. In the post-Darwin era, Carleton Coon believed that different races evolved into modern humans independently and that Caucasoids were the most advanced because they were the first to become modern humans.
does not belong in this section. The section should be devoted to an analysis of whether the proposition is supported by modern science, not a potted history of what people used to believe, or what some wingnut racist psychologist believes about "progressive evolution". I think there is a section in the Human skin colour article about this, where they say something along the lines that one of our pre human ancestors probably had pale skin colour like chimps, but that when they/we lost their/our body hair, selection due to strong sunlight probably lead to an increase in protective pigmentation. This is a reasonable comment about skin pigmentation and the African ancestors of us all. All the other stuff there seems like little more than the gratuitous inclusion of irrelevant and deliberately offensive material. Alun 18:20, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Well the fact that it's there a all is a bit odd. It's like one of those old Victorian books with lots of pictures of "natives" so people could "see how they look", all put nicely into their little "groups" so we can gawk at them and classify them as this or that, 83% this 10% that, conforming to this dictionary definition or that census definition. Then there's the text:
The point is that many of these people are Black people (bizarely some are not, and others who clearly are are claimed not to be) who have achieved great things, but all you seem to be interested in is defining them by the various "categories" white racist anthropologists or white authoritarian governments or white writers of dictionaries have decided to put them in. Come on, have pictures of well known Black people by all means, but define them by their achievements as individuals, not by dubious and often offensive "racial" epithets. I'm not a Black person myself, but I find this really offensive, and about 50 years out of date. Alun 21:14, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Before we get too upset, you have to realize that these pictures and their captions were chosen by black people. So as strange as they seem, you might want to consider them carefully and the reasoning behind them. I will make comments on each one:
The point is that many of these people are Black people (bizarely some are not, and others who clearly are are claimed not to be) who have achieved great things, but all you seem to be interested in is defining them by the various "categories" white racist anthropologists or white authoritarian governments or white writers of dictionaries have decided to put them in. Come on, have pictures of well known Black people by all means, but define them by their achievements as individuals, not by dubious and often offensive "racial" epithets. I'm not a Black person myself, but I find this really offensive, and about 50 years out of date.
P0M 04:12, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
This article serves or can serve two purposes. It can describe black people, in terms of what is known about them. Like, they have dark skin (no surprise here!) and distinctive facial feautures, etc.
It can also talk about how people have regarded blacks - in terms of "race" or even just "skin color". For example, "light-skinned blacks" are often more popular (as entertainers or sports celebrities) than darker skinned ones. Is that too much for the present article to handle?
I hesitate to go over to Race because it's filled with discontent and fights over whether there even *is* such a thing a race, a dispute which drowns out every calmly-voiced attempt to describe the general *attitude* toward black people.
Both whites and blacks have a "concept" of who black people are, and what their "value" is. Is this something Wikipedia can handle?--unsigned contribution by Ed Poor
Here is a graph, a family tree. It is accurate (scientific, done with the best technology), but it is flawed because it is abstract. It abstracts from all the adventuresome individuals going around like honeybees from branch to branch of the flowering tree, carrying pollen among all the branches.
It does not draw in the connections that occur in the real world, e.g., the children of my friends. One family has a Chinese father and a N. European mother, another has a N. European father and a Japanese mother. And then there is my friend Syrtiller, whose family connections go off in all sorts of directions. The Australian group stayed relatively unconnected by any great number of those little lines for several tens of thousands of years. But now the same filigree of colored lines from all the other endpoints would have to be drawn in to show all the real-world complexity that such abstract charts conceal.
According to this chart, nobody has a straight-line shot at the original branching off point where Homo sapiens departed from all the other Homo species. And another important point: If I understand it correctly this chart was built up by a systematic process of determining who is most similar to whom. The mutations that produced the differences would have to be inferred as far as this chart goes. The argument would be, e.g., that you cannot get a group of people that resemble each other by virtue of being redheads unless a mutations occurred that is responsible for this relatively new hair color. But we knew that there were redheads long before we knew about genes, and we knew that red hair color it heritable.
There are rare cases (involving relatively recent mutations) where a genetic characteristic has not spread all over the globe. One instance would probably be the blue skin color mutation found in the United States. It is only a few generations old, and it appears to carry some health risks along with it, so it may not spread far and fast. But for the most part you will find somebody with a certain characteristic in any population group.
So, what does it mean to be African, and what does it mean to be black? Not quite the same thing because "blackness" only refers to a subset of the characteristics of people found in Africa. And what it means to "be black" depends on which individual is deciding on the subset of characteristics. As Sria has pointed out, not everybody wants to define the subset so that it would include people who inherited the dark skin color but who did not inherit the nose structure or the tightly curled hair.
All of this stuff is a good lesson in how human beings use their minds to reach out and organize perceptions (data) into "things." "Black people," as has been shown right here on this discussion page, means different things to different people. So how should we structure any article about an undefined or a contestedly defined subject? P0M 07:09, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Here is another way to organize the information about the diversification of the human race during the last 50,000 years or so. Note that all humans alive today trace their descent back to a single "ur-father" who lived sometime around 50,000 years ago. The other male lines of descent have died out in the intervening years, or at least nobody has found a living human who doesn't fit on this chart somewhere.
Little mutations occur all the way along all of these temporal tracings. (See Wells's book, p. 182f if you want to see where each of these migration trails ended. I put M130 down twice simply because the trail split somewhere around Malaysia and one group went up and around into N. America while the other group went to Australia.
Some of the mutations have been good, some of the mutations have been bad (killing their possessors off in the embryonic stage or later in some cases), and some have mixed evaluations (for instance, the mutation that protects against malaria but gives people sickle cell anemia). It's hard to come up with examples of good mutations. Maybe it is a mutation that gives Amerinds native to the high mountains of S. America a much better ability to survive at high altitudes. But the idea that one is better either because one is on the M168 path that is drawn straight-line from the bottom to the top or because or because one is on the M3 path that diverged from the M242 path that diverged from the M43 path that diverged from M9 that split from M168 makes as much sense as saying that the person who started on Interstate 40 at one end and got off Interstate 40 on the other coast is in a better place than one who traveled from coast to coast by side roads, county and state highways, and segments of a number of other Interstates. Thus far nobody has discovered a path that takes them to the land of $0.25 gasoline or billion-mile automobile engines, just as Olaf Stapledon's Odd John' is still science fiction. P0M 22:30, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I think that [the stuff somewhere before P0M's long rant just above ;-) ] is a good short hand way for the average person to think about it. The truth is far more complicated, since it involves a complicated metric in a high dimensional space which is impossible to visualize.-- Filll 22:56, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Scientists believe that consumers of primarily vegetarian diets found insufficient dietary sources of vitamin D in Northern climates, which were therefore unavailable for agricultural colonization until a mutation developed that limited skin pigmentation and thereby promoted vitamin-D synthesis. [2]
I am not claiming the article is so great, but chopping it up so much will cause trouble, I promise you. Just look back in the talk history.-- Filll 21:56, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
After Darwin this view was adapted to claim that blacks were at a lower stage of evolution. In recent times this view that blacks are more primitive has been revived by J. Phillipe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario, who argues that because blacks were indeed the first race to branch off to from the human evolutionary tree, they are primarily superior in primitive traits like size of genitalia, salience of muscles and buttocks, and reproductive output, but lag behind when it comes to more evolved traits like brain size and social organization, especially when compared to orientals, whom Rushton believes evolved most recently in a challenging ice age environment. "One theoretical possibility," said Rushton, "is that evolution is progressive and that some populations are more advanced than others."[25]
Well it's not, it seemed little more than a thinly veiled way to introduce racist pseudo-science that does not even conform to the NPOV policy, this dingbat is so far from mainstream science that he should set up his offices on Pluto. But somehow his ravings get squeezed in here, even though they are totally irrelevant to the article and the section in the article. How is this relevant to human origins? How can he conclude that there is a "progressive" branch in human history but that the African one is "static? The section was about whether Black people were the original humans, so how does his neo-nazi ideas fit in to that? How can Black people be the first to branch from the "human evolutionary tree"? Humans have evolved (speciated) once, and only once. If there was a branch then how can one be progressive and the other not? This is not science it is nazism. This is a clear braeach of wikipedia policy on neutrality. Your choice of what to include is indicative of a very narrow and essentially biased and racist attitude. This article, at present, seems to serve no purpose than to demean and humiliate Black people by only representing the views of racist pseudo-scientists who have an axe to grind. Alun 23:12, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
A huge amount of material was removed or unilaterially rewritten. I would again caution you. The text you see now was arrived at by really vicious debate over a long period of time with many inputs. Do not summarily change it drastically and remove big pieces. I think that a section about the vitamin D theory is interesting and useful, for example. Some of our more combative contributors here would have a tantrum at what you have done. This has to be debated and discussed carefully before more is done. I would not be surprised if someone revered everything that wobble did. Sorry, but I have seen it before many times here.--
Filll 22:54, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Look if you only want to include politically correct science in the article then you might as well delete the whole thing, because the politically correct view is that race can't possibly exist because that leads to racism. Well if there's no such thing as race, then black people don't actually exist and are little more than a social illusion. If that's your position then nominate the article for deletion, because if race is pseudoscience, then by definition, so are black people. Gottoupload 00:25, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
This is what you should be including. How can you include Rushton, and exclude Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, slavery, segregation, apartheid and the social and cultural revolutions of the past fifty years? Where's Kirk and Uhura's first interracial kiss? Where's the civil rights movement? You guys are so far from a good article. I could go on and on and on and on and on. Oh and please try to actually address my concerns rather than distorting what I say. Alun 06:52, 24 November 2006 (UTC)Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free....This note was a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.....I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state, sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. Martin Luther King
Very true, especially with this topic. There are so many with special agendas here of various sorts. So they want to push certain points of view. And I have seen a lot of changes to the article as some editors resist any changes at all and it sits stagnant for weeks on end while people fight about nonsense. See the history and/or archive.-- Filll 06:10, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
The term "black people" is used, or has been used, to refer to many different groups. Unfortunately, there is no uniformly accepted definition of who is a "black person". Therefore, this article describes several different perspectives on the word "black" (and its equivalents in other languages) when this word is used to describe people. This word is used currently and it has also been used this way in the past. There are a variety of definitions of "black people" that are based on racial, socio-political, lexical, biological, and other factors.
The concept of "black" people has been traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans who labelled dark skinned peoples from North East Africa as "Kushite", "Nubian", and "Ethiopian"...
I think it is clearer English and simpler. What is wrong with it?-- Filll 23:01, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Well first the intro you have right now is about the 100th that existed. So there is nothing special about the current intro. However, in the current intro the English stinks and it is not easy to read. My proposed change does not remove any information, just makes the english cleaner.--
Filll 02:47, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
To ignore the fact that the term black people is and has been intimiately connected with racism is to whitewash and ignore an ignominious history most Europeans would rather forget. I say keep the records of European past racism in the article. Expose it to the light of day. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.-- Filll 23:05, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I think that this article and Rushton should be leavened with other references and with science. I think you are playing with fire if you want to remove him and go against the "black pride" perspective that is widely taught in US universities.-- Filll 23:55, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Well then the solution is to add a quote from someone criticising Rushton. Deleting cited material only causes edit wars and robs the reader of the chance to see all sides. Removing Rushton from the article is wrong for 2 reasons. A) If we limit the artilce to only "credible" sources, there will be nothing left, as few mainstream scientists openly admit to believing in race (and thus have nothing to say about black people) and none of the Afrocentric views in the article are by mainstream sources, and B) As disturbing as Rushton's views are, he is a credible source. His entire theory is based on the work of Cavalli-Sforza, he's a professor at a prestigous university, and he's a member of the prestigous American Association of Advancement of Science. Gottoupload 00:32, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Ugh...Are you sure that is what Rushton is claiming? Ugh.-- Filll 00:51, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
The reason for keeping it is that
and most important is that there would be an immense uproar if you removed it, and it would not stay removed very long. If you removed it, you would start World War III. Just look at the history here.-- Filll 02:09, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I am thinking about compiling a list of academic books and peer-reviewed papers that show Rushton is full of nonsense. However, the viciousness is so deep surrounding this article that I do not think I could get any scientific or contrary content into the article. It would get reverted immediately since we are basically in a logjam, once again.-- Filll 03:44, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
An example of Rushton's problems: <bar> Rushton claims there is more AIDS in Africa because blacks are more oversexed and have more sex as a result. However, there are many alternate theories:
I could probably come up with another 50 alternative explanations with no effort at all. That I can dredge up so many alternative theories off the top of my head, and the fact that Rushton just blithely proposes his theory with no proof or testing demonstrates that Rushton is really no scientist. In fact he is basically a pseudoscientific flake. But then he has a degree in psychology, so I would not expect anything different. So how much credence should I put in all his other claims? I know his statistics is pure crap.-- Filll 04:09, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I am not super interested in race issues myself. Otherwise I would just write a parallel article and link it in. Just do it by fiat. Or create another better article and then propose this one be deleted. I am just not that interested. My main goal here is to try to help fights get resolved so people can be productive.-- Filll 04:27, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I have edited it in small ways only. The tiny bit of improvement I proposed for the introduction was reverted immediately. I might try again I do not know. I have only seen one or two evolution types here. Evolution/Creationism is a hot button issue for me so I do not put up with much crap from them.-- Filll 04:51, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
The term Black was soon replaced (in the U.S.) by Negro but by the 1970s African-Americans reclaimed the term Black.[3]
This sort of is a stupid statement, at least without careful scholarship to back it up. At least in the last 100+ years, the linguistic sequence in the US was colored (think NAACP) to Negro (think United Negro College Fund) to Black (think black is beautiful) to Afro American (think platform shoes and afro hair styles) to African American (think Jesse Jackson). I am not sure what was the politically correct term before colored, but this is an example of the linguistic process known as "pejorization". I know why it was said this way. This bears the fingerprints of the blacks writing the article who took black studies in college and want to scream about "black pride".-- Filll 15:50, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
As I had suggested before, it is almost impossible to "improve" this article. There are strong forces of various kinds that do not want the article changed, and any changes will be reverted, as we have just seen. I was amazed that it was claimed that the statement "The concept of "black" people has been traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans who labelled dark skinned peoples from North East Africa as "Kushite", "Nubian", and "Ethiopian"." which has a good reference associated with it, and I tried to retain through the edits, was just personal opinion. Efforts to clean up the English, or remove "racism" or put in other sources, or include science will fail. The only way to do this is to start fresh and write another article from scratch. Then at that point, invite scrutiny and potential merger or whatever. There are too many disparate points of view here and too many people believe their point of view is more important than anyone else. Which is exactly why I have done very little editing, but just tried to keep people calm if possible instead.-- Filll 21:07, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Please include who you think may be a puppet, so we can request checkuser. Thulean 21:38, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Someone added the following nonsense to the article to contradict the well established fact that East Asians and blacks are genetic opposites: "Recent genetic studies which clusters populations on the basis of genetic similarity does not support such a conclusion" Please quote the section in the reference that refutes the idea that blacks and East Asians are genetic opposites. Don't go into a politically correct lecture about how there's no such thing as race (I'm black and I'm proud of my race and if another race is the genetic opposite of me I have a right to not have this information censored). Even if there were no such thing as race, there are humans from Africa and there are humans from East Asia, and Cavali Sforza clearly showed that humans from Africa fall in the bottom right of a genetioc quadrent and humans from East Asia fall in the top left. Editingoprah 21:44, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Cavalli-Sforza et al. transformed the distance matrix to a correlation matrix consisting of 861 correlation coefficients among the forty-two populations, so they could apply principal components (PC) analysis on their genetic data...PC analysis is a wholly objective mathematical procedure. It requires no decisions or judgments on anyone's part and yields identical results for everyone who does the calculations correctly...The important point is that if various populations were fairly homogenous in genetic composition, differing no more genetically than could be attributable only to random variation, a PC analysis would not be able to cluster the populations into a number of groups according to their genetic propinquity. In fact, a PC analysis shows that most of the forty-two populations fall very distinctly into the quadrents formed by using the first and second principal component as axes...They form quite widely separated clusters of the various populations that resemble the "classic" major racial groups-Caucasoids in the upper right, Negroids in the lower right, North East Asians in the upper left, and South East Asians (including South Chinese) and Pacific Islanders in the lower left...I have tried other objective methods of clustering on the same data (varimax rotation of the principal components, common factor analysis, and hierarchical cluster analysis). All of these types of analysis yield essentially the same picture and identify the same major racial groupings.
There you have Cavali-Sforza's very own genetic distance chart showing East Asians and Africans are genetic opposites. Editingoprah 21:47, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Editingoprah 21:44, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I dont see anything about Europeans being between Africans and Asians. Also see Talk:Black_people#Removed_one_line_for_study, as I pointed out in my edit summary. Thulean 21:50, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, the middle part of top left and bottom right would be near origin. And bottom left contains lots of other Asians like Malaysians, S Chineese, etc...By your "logic" Asians are also intermediate between Asians and Africans. Thulean 21:57, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
When one is in a high dimensional space, and has defined some sort of metric or distance measure that may or may not be reasonable, it is not too easy to talk about "between". Why not put this graph in the paper if it is available? or is it not public domain?-- Filll 22:05, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes it isnt. Try to back up your claims next time... Thulean 22:36, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
While I have it at hand, the place where C-S says that "the classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise," and then goes on to explain why, starts on p. 19 of History and Geography of Human Genes. P0M 00:33, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Instead of accusing me of not understanding, trying to use simple logic, it's not hard. Lukas19 12:55, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
I get the ridiculous idea that race has been discredited from many respected studies by respected scientists at mainstream institutions. Not from groups that cannot be pigeon-holed. One sentence saying Rushton is wrong is not enough. I would say adding a nice 5 or 10 references that show he is a fruitcake and a fringe element would do the job I have in mind nicely. I have no problem with the fact that this is a nut with an opinion. He is a nut with an opinion that many people share. However, let's make sure we do not present him in an uncritical and unrealistic light. I do not want to get the article sidetracked. But I want us to not show ONLY the nonstandard nonmainstream material, and ignore the mainstream. Would you object to references that disagree with Rushton being included?-- Filll 15:45, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
I really DO NOT mean to be racist in ANY WAY at all, but to me that picture of an Afrocoid looks more like an ape than a human being, was he of monkey-human heritage, some so-called humans are really monkies in my hypothesis, please be sensible and discuss this reasonably.
[ [6]] If you follow the link you can watch a brief clip of Rushton during his debate with David Suzuki Editingoprah 06:29, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
This is the sort of thing we should be aiming for Black British. Alun 14:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
I am a bit tired of being in the middle. Do none of you read what the others write on the talk page? Wobble/Alun and Ezeu make the case that Rushton is a nut and a racist nonmainstream scientist whose views do not agree with those of most scientists. I think that there is evidence of this. Gottoupload and Editingoprah do not want more science in the article and does not want any references that dispute the existence of races. Editingoprah wants an article about differing opinions of black people, racist or not. I agree that they have a point, if it can be balanced to avoid giving misleading opinions.
Here is a cut and paste from above. My words are in italic. Wobble/Alun's are in plaintext:
Alun 07:29, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Fill, you're going to need to calm down. As one of the few editors who has never been banned or blocked, I can say this article is in excellent shape, it's just that a few politically correct extremists are upset that some controversial opinions are briefly mentioned. These people are used to having the politically correct opinion forced down everyone's throat so as soon as they see an article that presents views different from their own in a neutral way they go ballistic. Last night a couple of us worked hard trying to neutralize some of the more controversial ideas in the article and I simply removed the obsolete theory that blacks are monkeys because it didn't fit in with the modern discussion about whether blacks are the original race. Of course there are always going to people who are offended by some aspect of the article. As a hardcore black, I'm offended by the entire "other view points" section because it implies that all these dark skinned wannabes get to call themselves black too. But any person of note (nutty or sane, smart or stupid, mainstream or politically correct) are welcome in this article if they have something to say about what it means to be black. In fact if we limited the article to only mainstream opinions all that would be left are the dictionary definitions and the census. So I suggest everyone just calm down. If the biggest problem in your life is what you read in wikipedia, consider yourself damn lucky. Editingoprah 19:49, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
As I mentioned above when I presented a chart of the inferred migration trails by which humans reached their "home countries" (until they messed it up by traveling everywhere and leaving babies behind everywhere ;-), there are picture of what these migration paths are that have been derived from looking at genes other than those on the Y-chromosome that Wells studied. Here is one that came out around 1995.
So that's where Rushton gets his data on the relative antiquity of the 3 main races. Crucial to Rushton's hypotheis is that archaic forms of the 3 main races branched off of the human evolutionary tree in nice, neat sequential order. Rushton claims that negroids branched off at a primitive stage (200,000 years ago), mongoloids branched off at an advanced staged (about 40,000 years ago) and caucasoids were in the middle (100,000 years ago). Rushton cites the date of the African Eve (200,000 years ago), the date when humans left Africa (100,000 years ago) and the date when East Asians and Europeans split (about 40,000 years ago) to argue that archaic Africans (later negroids) emerged 200,000 years ago, archaic non-Africans (later caucasoids) emerged about 100,000 years ago, and archaic non-caucasoids (later mongolids) emerged about 40,000 years ago. I've seen a map by Spencer Wells which appears to support this sequence, except all of Well's dates are much more recent. Wells seems to think that humans left Africa only 50,000 years ago. Timelist 21:22, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Edit conflict. Continuing what I started above. (The part about Tavish is, shall we say, not documented in my family history. I may have gotten the generation wrong, but he's got to be there.)
The map in Wells's book is not that much different. The main new thing he adds is that the first wave of migration (that ends up in Australia in the map above) split somewhere around Thailand and one band made it into N. America. The map above shows only the second-wave migration path into the Americas.
What is shocking to people like "Son of Rolf" who thought he was better than Mexicans because he was pure is that my ancestors with translucent skin in Eire didn't just show up there one fine day when the cloud ceiling was down around 1000 feet and it was chilly and cold and say, "Perfect!" They actually came from some place. Everybody in my tow-headed family came from Africa, ultimately. But before that time around half of them had gotten themselves somewhere in Central Asia (around where the 6 in 60,000 is located on the map above) and then they headed back west where they met and enthusiastically coupled with members of anotgher migration path that had come by a rather more direct path from out of Africa. By this time our own relatives wouldn't have recognized us because we had changed color.
Whether we got there 35,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, we have surely had time to make something "pure and noble" of ourselves. Surely we have evolved some stunning new capabilities. The trouble is nobody can say what they are. Since the Irish have been enthusiastically killling each other for generations, they can't claim to be so very noble, can they? And as for "pure"... If they would have stopped bringing exotic women back with them from wherever in the world they fought or traded we might have had a chance. But every family has a skeleton in the closet and every family has somebody in it that was from too far away, looked too different, spoke the wrong language, danced the wrong dances, looked the wrong way when they were being spoken to and again looked the wrong way when they were talking to somebody else.
And then we had to fight the British to try to maintain our self rule, and we lost, and so maybe some of us drank a little too much, and maybe the stress or whatever turned some of us a bit daft.
Now here's the rub: We're known as the Irish race, and the first thing that anybody knows about it is that we are alcoholics. The next thing they know is either that we are likely to turn schizophrenic. And some people are themselves so daft that they think all true Irish people must have red hair.
Truth to tell, if you want to find a redhead in a hurry then Ireland is one of your best bets. Out of a hundred people you might find nine or ten. You can't say that about China. (But you might seek among the Berbers, Kabylie, Tochar, Pashtun, Iranians, and even the Japanese.) But it's bloody stupid to say that we're not a one of us with yellow, brown, or black hair. And bald too, some of us.
When we came to the U.S. we were mistreated. So the question is, do we want to be judged as "the Irish race"? Or do we actually want people to look at us to decide whether we are red headed, have us walk a straight line if they think we might be driving drunk, etc.
Looking at what happened to our chilren in places like Boston during the 1800s (and later than that if the truth be known), I can't see why any of us would want to be identified as members of a race because the way people generally think about it, if you are of a certain race then you have a certain set of characteristics. So they don't hire you as a driver depending on whether you can drive well, they just don't hire you because you're a lousy Irish drunk. How else could you be other unless you aren't really Irish? It's bad enough for the adults, but look at what it does to child who is told to take the vocational track in high school because he is not suited to become an M.D.
It's not that we want to give up the celebration of our culture and our heritage, but if the "Irish race" is made up of "Irish people," then where does that leave me, with with great great great grandfather Basker Moor being a moor?
Nobody ought to doubt that our real family tree is as it is If we go back not so many generations we'll find that we're all related. The closer we get to the near end of our family trees the more we will look like that smaller set of relatives. I've got my grandfather's hay fever but not my grandmother's diabetes. People say I take after my mother and bear some vague resemblance to her brother, but I can't see it. People can hardly tell my brother and I apart even after 60 years, yet he's several inches taller than I am. We even tend to get the same diseases. So for all related people there are both resemblances and differences. Occasionally one may meet ones perfect double but find no known common relatives. All it takes is for the right selection of genes to pop up on the routlette wheel of reproduction.
Nobody ought to want to be treated, or to treat other people, as though they were not individuals. Even twins are different by reason of the programming, much of it prenatal, that turns on or shuts off genes according to environmental conditions.
Where would it be at if some guy could trace his ancestry back to Wellington and was all proud of being a lineal descendant of the great British leader, but at the same time wanted to deny that Fritz Wellington, who had the same great great grandfather, was a true Wellington? How would we explain that kind of reaction? Or, conversely, how would we understand it if a Czech community in the U.S. that had preserved its language and culture and had not brought back many husbands or brides from the "outside" wanted to deny that they were a Czech community?
How many branches lower in the family tree does it make sense to go before you say, "Those folks aren't in my family?!" Head backwards from any arrowheads on the chart and look for a place where a label should be inserted saying, "The line ends on the right side of this point and a new line begins on the other side," or, to put it in terms of family values, 'This child that I gave birth to is no child of mine and no child of my husband?" Or, "These parents from whom I sprung, and all their siblings, parents, and ancestors, are no parents of mine. I am the new human."
P0M 22:42, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Well one thing that's clear from the map is that race is real and that Johan Blumenback 5 color typology was more or less correct. Humans started in Africa as the black race. The maps then shows humans branching out of Africa in 2 directions about 100,000 years ago. The first direction is through Southeast Asia to Australia. Descendants of this migration formed Blumenbach's brown race and can be seen through the likes of Australian aboriginals, negritoes, aetas, etc. The next direction was up through the middle east and the descendants of this migration formed the white or caucasian race seen today in the form of Arabs, East Indians and Europeans. The map then shows that by 35,000 years ago, the white race divided into 2 groups. One that would colonize Europe, and the other that would head East and mutate into the yellow race (orientals). The yellow race headed about as far East as they could go, and then by 15,000 years ago, a few yellows crossed into the Americas where they mutated into the red race. So now do you at long last understand why whites are genetically intermediate between Africans and East Asians? Editingoprah 23:15, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
To Editingoprah (I'll respond to Filll in a minute):
Homo sapiens sapiens, and another subspecies would be something like Homo sapiens neanderthalis, Homo sapiens whatever. The differences among humans are not sufficient to reach the level of subspecies. That's just the way we do things in biology. To the extent that "race" has any meaning, then, it has to be at the sub-subspecies level.
The trouble is that however you try to define the sub-subspecies level you end up including individuals that would make some people go ballistic. (We've seen people with black skins object to being called "blacks" right here on this talk page, and if you told some of the aryan supremecists that Ainu are "whites" they would react belligerantly, no?
The way you define a [race] in terms of family tree is to start with one individual, back down until you can't tolerate somebody sitting on the next twig, and then work forward, including all the stuff "above" that point on the branch your starting point is on. There are two problems with this approach. (1) It is entirely arbitrary what point you make your cut-off point. To take Africa as an example, what if the San (those earliest of all earliest peoples who have left traces in Africa) decide that they want to trace "Africans" back to the point where the so-called Bantu races diverged. In other words, what if the San don't want to be categorized with the other groups in Africa? They are, after all, on their own branch.
To use the analogy of a tree, it's a solid tree. It doesn't come apart like tinker toys. You can take pruning shears out or use a chain saw for bigger branches, but wherever you cut a certain amount of connected wood will fall from the tree and that is a "race." If somebody objects that you should have cut a couple feet away so as to include or exclude certain side branches, then they have as much right to their opinion as you have to yours.
The other problem with the idea of race you propose is that you don't know what to do when somebody has ancestors from two or more [races]. They do not fit the definition of any race. The only thing I can see to do is to define a new race (e.g., "Blasian"). But then the "Blasian" has children with an "Amerblanco." So we need yet another [race.] The more precise a definition of a [race] is, the fewer people that fit into it.
By the way, how do you understand the difference in appearance between the "Blasian" individual and an statistically average N. European "white" individual. On the surface of things, if N. Europeans are "intermediate between blacks and Asians, then why do they look so different from a person who is the product of one black and one Asian parent? P0M 00:40, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
POM, race is no more arbitrary than any other biological classification. If biologists can divide kingdoms into classes, classes into orders, orders into species, and species into sub-species, then why stop there? Why not divide sub-species into sub-sub species? Is not the decision that human variation doesn't rise to the level of sub-species also arbitrary? And yet you don't question that. You only question race because it's politically incorrect so you've been brainwashed into denying it. You can argue that all biological classifications are subjective. For example, based on DNA evidence, an increasing number of biologists have concluded that humans are actually apes because the genetic similarity between us and chimps is less than the genetic difference between chimps and other apes, hence it makes sense to lump humans in with apes genetically. There are mathematical procedures that allow us to divide correlated variables into groups and sub-groups. PC analysis is one such procedure. The best PC analysis of genetic data I have ever seen suggests that there are 6 races: A) Blacks, B)Caucasians, C)North East Asians, D) Amerindians, E)South East Asians and Pacific Islanders, and F) Australian/New Guinean aboriginals. Your point about hybrids is not all that relevant. Just because a minority of the population is too genetically mixed to fit neatly into broad category or another in no way negates said category's existence. For example, if genetic engineering progresses to the point where snakes and crocodiles can produce off-spring, we don't suddenly decide that species is not valid concept, simply because inter-species mating has occured. Editingoprah 01:16, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Except for cases like that of Michael Jackson and of the author of Black Like Me (hope I have the title right, I'm talking about the white guy who dyed himself convincingly "black" and then went around getting maltreated by "nice white people" and wrote a book about it), hardly anybody doubts that traits like skin color are inherited. Suppose I took a month-long vacation among the aboriginal people of Taiwan living on Orchid Island and I got invited out of the tourist trap and into a remote fishing village. During a period of about a month that started nine months after I arrived on Orchid Island, four babies were born of four girls from different families. All of the babies had lighter skin than had ever been seen among that group and honking big noses. Before long I am getting legal demands for child support. I say that I had nothing to do with the sudden appearance of four anomalous-looking babies, and that it must be the result of mutations. I can't imagine any judge even bothering to get DNA evidence in the case providing that I was the only white man anywhere near those women during that period of time.
I don't know of any human group that fails to understand that many traits are inherited, and that the closer the relationship of individuals is the more likely it is that they will resemble each other. Were that all that people mean by the word "race," I'd say, "Fine, let them have their pet word." But that's not the only use that people make of the word.
Many people attach a whole rap sheet to the possession of a few marker characteristics, and then they act their fantasies out in the real world. In the Salen Witch Trial days some poor ten year old girl was killed. Reason? She had green eyes. Anybody who failed to have the normal eyes, blue, brown, or black, must be the spawn of the devil. We've all heard of the crime called "Driving while black." Many of the alleged correlations between [races] amd characteristics are false simply because they are assumed to correlate 100%. Other correlations are assumed to be higher or lower than they are, e.g., assuming that at least a quarter of the Irish have red hair, or assuming that no African people have epicanthic folds. So if by "race" somebody means that it is valid to declare the 100% probability of possession of a whole list of traits based on the individual's observed possession of a limited set of marker characteristics, then I will definitely reject the word.
The trouble with the word "race" is that it is so imprecise that it is worthless for rational discussion and so loaded with affect (connotations) that it has long been a source of great mischief. If we all spoke Loglan maybe we could limit the harm of words like "race" more easily. As things stand, however, it is acceptable to many people to reason as fantasized in the following examples: (1) General Whitehead: That person is Vietnamese, and life is cheap in the Orient, therefore that person doesn't care when his sibling is killed in one of our attacks. (2) Chief Redfeather: Never mind that she says the dam is breaking. All whites speak with a forked tongue. (3) Admiran Huang Aihua: I don't care how many people he says he has willing to pilot our ships through the shoals and let us escape, he's Japanese and all Japanese are treacherous. (4) James Bond: Of course it's not a security risk for me to go drinking with that stringer for the NKCIA. One shot of vodka and any Korean rolls under the table. (5) Basketball club owner: Who's that you say, Yao Ming? Look, sonny, we aren't playing midget league. Tell the little shrimp to get lost.
Probably these examples all look stupid. They should look stupid, because they are. But the terminology of "race" facilitates these invalid inferences. And that is why racists are called racists.
What I don't want to see are things like my students being scrutinized by some shopkeeper just because of the colors of their skins. P0M 08:33, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
It appears to me that she added a reference, and did not remove a reference. And what is wrong with the part she added? Of course you can do whatever you want since you want to play the race card constantly and we all know that once someone has decided to call someone else racist, the person charging racism always wins. -- Filll 00:51, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
When I went to the melanin theory part of the black supremacy article. It all becomes more clear.-- Filll 05:58, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I mean for real this is just crazy, can't black people have there own article and work on it in peace Whites seem to dominate just about every other article in wikipedia and now they want to control this one as well, call me paranoid but I think there's a conspiracy a foot to rob us of our right as afrowikipedians to present our racial and social povs which are in themselves informative and encyclopedic in a practical, street-smart sense.-- OJPimp'son 11:36, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
So OJPimp'son, what is wrong with the black people article that has been done by white people, in your opinion? Do you think it has a white bias? Or a nonblack bias? -- Filll 12:39, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Now that I am slowly starting to understand what is going on here, and at the white people article, I can see what to me is the underlying problem. Namely, metrics. When I looked up the Wikipedia article on genetic distance, it is an embarassment, but that is what everyone seems to be arguing about. Distance. And yet we have a very cursory treatment of this important concept. I guess people do not like math.-- Filll 14:56, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
No, I'll tell you what the problem is this article should be written in the dialect that reflects the Black Man's historical and social reality, not in the dialect of the master. This article is perpetuating the white man's domination of the Black Man, right down to the linguistic level. It's a damn shame, have we learned nothing from Cosmo Kramer, racism is inseparable from the American consciousness and the American language. If your White in the US and you get mad at a Black Man you are linguistically irresistibly bound to respond with racial epithets, the history of American English compels you to it, so I say drop the language of the oppressor and take up the language of Black English and we'll all be free to write this article the only real and truthful way possible.-- OJPimp'son 16:37, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I've removed four non-free copyrighted pictures from this article, as they are being used on Wikipedia under fair-use provisions which do not permit their use in this article. Please do not add non-free pictures to this article. Please use some free ones. Thanks. -- zzuuzz (talk) 12:57, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Locale | Usage |
---|---|
Australia | Australian Aborigines are commonly called black. |
Canada | Canadians use the terms African American or Black Canadian to refer to people with dark or African skin. |
France | The French slang term black (pronounced the same as English, except in plural in which form the 's' is not pronounced) is a pseudo-anglicism, used only as a noun. In standard French, noir (literally, "black") is generally used. |
Germany | "Farbige", meaning "Coloured" in German. |
Israel | "Schwartze," (from 'schwarz', German for 'black'), was a derogatory term to describe Sephardi Jewish immigrants, particularly from North Africa. The term has diminished in use especially after the arrival of the Beta Israel from Ethiopia. Other terms used by the Hebrew speaking world are "Kushim", meaning that their origins are in Kush, or "Yemenites." These terms generally are not considered offensive in any way. |
Italy | Black people (usually African immigrants, many of which from Senegal), can be called neri, while the similar term negri is highly offensive. Another derogatory expression is vu' cumpra' ("wanna buy?"), referred especially to black immigrants selling on streets or beaches. A borderline term is extracomunitari, that refers to the fact that these people come often from outside the European Union (which used to be called the European Economic Community; since this is never used to indicate, say, Americans, Norwegians or Swiss, this term is often considered hypocritical. |
Latin America | A number of terms are used. The most politically correct form would be terms such as Afro-Mexican, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, etc., or – on a continental basis – Afro-Latin American. Commonly used terms include negro (Sp. "Black"; note that this rarely carries a derogatory meaning in Latin America.) and moreno (in the distant etymological past, a reference to the blackness of "los moros," or "the Moors"). Derogatory terms do exist, however, such as chombo (used in South America). |
The Netherlands | The Dutch use negers (negroes). Zwart (black) is used as an adjective, though as a noun (zwarte) it may be intended in a (slightly) derogatory manner. However, it is common to refer to the country of origin instead, e.g. Somaliër, Senegalees, Nigeriaan, Antilliaan or Surinamer, though it should be noted that the latter two can also refer to whites from the Netherlands Antilles or Surinam. Nikker, roetmop and kaffer are offensive (kaffer comes from the arabic word kafir which means infidel and was used by Arabs for Africans). The antiquated word moor refers to Mauritania and was used for both black and muslims. |
Norway | In Norwegian the most common term is neger (negro) and negre (negroes). The adjective form is svart (black) and svarte (blacks). Some people find the term neger offensive, but this is a pretty new phenomena (from around 2000) and the term is usually not regarded as offensive. |
Poland | The neutral Polish term for a black person is Murzyn (plural: Murzyni). The term czarnuch (pl. czarnuchy, from czarny = "black") is considered offensive. |
Romania | Romanians use the term negri (blacks) to refer to African or African-American people, either in or outside Romania. Negri is not used to refer to other dark-skinned people, such as Pacific Islanders or Indians. The diminutive form negrotei might be occasionally considered offensive. The term cioroi or cioară, which also means crow is usually offensive. |
Russia | Russians today apply the name chornyye (чёрные, Blacks) mostly not to Africans, but to people from Caucasus, which quite naturally belong to the Caucasian race. Africans are usually called negry (не́гры, Negroes). |
South Africa | The South Africans use the term blacks for the general black population, but since the country consists of different ethnic groups, they are often called by their ethnic names, e.g. Zulus, Xhosas, Basutos etc. |
Turkey | Zenci (Negro) is widely used for people of sub-Saharan ancestry. The once popular arap is now out of use and people who find Zenci derogatory prefer to use siyah (black) or more commonly, siyahi (black person) instead. |
United Kingdom | The term black Briton is sometimes used in the UK, but it is more common to use an adjectival rather than a noun term and write about black British people. Rarely the description is loosely used to also include what is actually a larger demographic, British people of south Asian descent. See also: British Afro-Caribbean community. |
United States | In the USA, African Americans are commonly called, and call themselves, black. They may also use the N-word. |
I found this in the past history of the page. It was removed. What was wrong with it?-- Filll 23:50, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
It has no source. It's POV. What does it means to say Australian aboriginals are commonly called black in Australia? How common is common? It's not a factual statement. What does it mean to say Black Briton is sometimes used? Every term is used sometimes. Kobrakid 01:42, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
(Edit Conflict)
I'm going to do minor copyedit and grammar check. I just wanted to point out that I can't stop laughing about the template saying "To-do list for Black people" at the top. My dad would love it. Resonanteye 00:15, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't know what was originally there, but someone glossed "yellow" as "Asian" and Kobrakid reverted it, writing: (revert, Asian is not a race.)" Even though "orient" just means "the East," Asian-Americans have taken great umbrage to the use of this word because (as Edward Said argued in his book Orientalism) so great a negative connotation has accreted to the word. Major universities have sometimes had to change department names because they originally contained the "O" word. Both "Asian" and "oriental" are flaky for another reason: Anything east of a certain north-south line a little to the east of Macedonia (forget whete the irrational thing is) fits into that category. People living in Afghanistan, for instance, would be "Asians" or "Orientals."
Maybe we should key [race] names to the map rather than to emotion-stained words. P0M 03:42, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
This discussion page is getting so it takes pretty long to download via a telephone modem. Any objection to archiving the top half or so? P0M 03:45, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes I strongly object. Please don't archive it. Kobrakid 04:18, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
This is all very interesting and I encourage further eugenical(?) exploration, but there should indubitably be somewhere a section on the recent mass invasion of Maghrebans and Subsaharians to the Canary Islands for example, this is causing many problems in the islands in question. Thanks.-- LaBotadeFranco 08:12, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Though I'm happy to go along with consensus there seems to be a simple explanation for the longwinded section regarding East-Africans/Ethiopians. It is simply about how one defines Black people. When Black people are assumed to be those people mainly of sub-Saharan African origin, then East-Africans may not be included in this group. When a broader definition of Black people is included (for example Indigenous Australians and African people of dark skin colour), then East-Africans are considered to be Black people. Essentially both of these points of view are correct, it is very much a question of opinion as to whether Black people are defined as exclusively of sub-Saharan African ancestry. I think the section could be improved by including several different definitions of who constitutes a Black person. I also think the article needs to be more careful with language. If we mean people of sub-Saharan African descent, then we should say this. If we mean people of east African descent then we should say that. If we mean Black people, then it should be taken for granted that this may indeed include people who are Indigenous Australians or east Africans or African-Americans or Black British or anyone in the African diaspora. As I say this is just my thinking and I'm happy to go along with consensus if it's against my thinking. Alun 10:58, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
You're absolutely wrong to assume that because humans originated in Africa the first group of humans was, in your sense of the word, "black." In fact, most recent research seems to indicate that the first modern humans were born only lightly pigmented, although they may have become significantly darker as a result of sun and element exposure by the time they reached adulthood. Recent research also suggests that these first groups of humans would have, in large part, faciologically (and not just melanistically) resembled modern Europeans much more than they would have modern Subsaharan Africans (i.e. blacks in your use of the term). The qualities that make many Subsaharan Africans "black" or "negroid" (robust facial features, one assumes you mean) are frequent (though not necessarily predominant) in many human populations and in no way imply a recent genetic connection with Africa's modern day "black" inhabitants, nor are they the result of "atavistic" mutations, although they may, roughly speaking, be akin to the foundational mutative processes that eventually led to the formation of durable clusters of typically "black" or "negroid" phenotypes across parts of the African continent. Also of note: light skin color will often have the classic "photogenic" effect of softening facial features, thus masking phenotypical qualities in groups that might otherwise resemble "blacks", the reverse phenomenon appears to be much less effective in influencing racializing perceptions (the Ethiopian case notwithstanding). On the other hand, that millions of people across the globe associate Africanicity simply with very dark-skin pigmentation is both a sociological fact and a biological falsehood, and should be carefully reported as such in this article.-- Albinomite 21:25, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Does this man look lightly pigmented to you? This is the most up to date scientific imagery of what the earliest humans look like, and he is black in every sense of the word: African homeland, Dark skin, wooly hair, prognatheous face, athletic build. Blacks are the first truly human beings to ever walk the earth. Blacks are your parents. Whatdoyou 01:16, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Excerpted from The Biology of Skin Color, Black and White [ [16]]: Jablonski, now chairman of the anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences, begins by assuming that our earliest ancestors had fair skin just like chimpanzees, our closest biological relatives. Between 4.5 million and 2 million years ago, early humans moved from the rain forest and onto the East African savanna. Once on the savanna, they not only had to cope with more exposure to the sun, but they also had to work harder to gather food.
Not even if you produce a "dark" image of a million year old human will I be able to take your "mater nigra theory" seriously-- Albinomite 05:01, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
"Race is as real as us and our ancestors, it's about family lineages stretching back many hundreds, in some cases, thousands of years. Race is also about settling down and forming immediate and extended families and webs of cousins and marrying within the radii of relations across a span of hundreds or thousands of years. It's about the same faces being "stamped" over and over again on succeeding generations of people and about the formation of "tribes" of eerily similarly faced people inhabiting easily demarkatable spaces over historically lengthy periods of time. The linking of races almost exclusively with skin-color traits demonstrates a terribly unfortunate lack of imagination and a profound ignorance of human as well as familial histories, especially on the part of the most technologically advanced societies. Needless to say, in demographic terms three thousand years ago Europe was radically different from what it is today or even from what it was in the time of the First Crusade or the Thirty Years War; pre-Roman Europe was a land of clans and tribes, many of whom lived sequestered in deep valleys surrounded by unarable hills which were in turn protected by steep mountains, the deeply stamped and strongly featured faces of the peoples that composed these closely knit, highly territorial groups would—if they were to somehow be revived—surely strike the modern European as strangely frightening and for this same reason enthralling, it would be akin to a European revisiting the "discovery" of America and its wonderously "exotic" panoply of peoples." This was originally posted by cupidon and merits reposting here I think.-- Albinomite 05:54, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Excerpted from The Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Tone: "Of course, nothing above is meant to imply that pre-LGM Europeans were as dark as Africans. Evidence suggests that early modern humans had a medium complexion, like that of today’s Khoisan or Ethiopians. The very dark complexion of central Africans also seems to be a recent adaptation [italics post-placed] (Semino and others 2002). To be sure, prior studies had suggested Mbuti pygmies as most resembling the first moderns, but current molecular evidence points to the Khoisan and Ethiopians..."[ [17]]. The Khoisan, it should be noted, do in no way consider themselves black, and if given a "carte" of choices from which to select racial affinities, will regularly pick examples representing South or Central Asian phenotypes. -- Albinomite 23:28, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
This is all very interesting and I encourage further eugenical(?) exploration, but there should indubitably be somewhere a section on the recent mass invasion of Maghrebans and Subsaharians to the Canary Islands for example, this is causing many problems in the islands in question. Thanks.-- LaBotadeFranco 08:15, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
This has been discussed and discredited ad nauseum. Ethiopeans are not white blacks. European colonial anthropologists made the same flawed claims in the 1800s (see Hamitic Myth), arguments that are entirely discredited by contemporary science. -- Ezeu 17:29, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Regardless of what our politics or who our friends are, I think we can all agree that what we're sorely missing is the "big picture." First: there are undoubtedly certain "sociological facts" regarding "race and space" which this article must both contend with and dutifully represent, these "facts" all relate to the long and widely held belief that to be African is to be black and that blackness is proof that one is African. To be sure, most of us here do not subscribe to the myth of African négritude, we know that Africa does not magically turn one black and yet we dispute among ourselves whether dark pigmentation was a necessary adaptation on the part of our first human ancestors to conditions in an African equatorial environment (so it seems that the myth does contain some truth after all), likewise we argue about whether Ethiopians, Khoisans, and Somalis are really black, yet I suspect that no one here would seriously consider not mentioning at least one of these three controversial groups in this an article on "black people." My point is this: our problem is not that we do not as a group know what to include or what the relevant "issues" are, it is that we can not seem to agree on how these "issues" should be presented, we do not seem to be willing to either make the effort or take the time to consider that "problems" which some see as "white" and others as "black" are in reality "grey," and should be depicted as such.-- Albinomite 19:24, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Man this makes no sense. I am confused and I have no idea what the point of this is.-- Filll 03:00, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
I hope we can at least get the convoluted language out of the article. I have made an effort to make the introduction a bit clearer with more straightforward language. It needs more effort however. Hopefully it will not all get nuked as it has the last several times I tried. -- Filll 21:53, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Blackness is an american invention? What on earth? Surely you are kidding me. You cannot be serious. And our racial boundaries ARE sort of nonsense. At least by our best biological data. People ARE far closer to grey. The races blend into each other. And races do not have the special traits that we like to think they do, or at least to the extent we think they do. -- Filll 23:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
You are kidding me. That is a very strange perspective. And VERY centered on the US. I could give dozens of counter examples. That is just wrong, I believe. But americans always think they are most important people on the face of the earth. So it is typical. -- Filll 23:50, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I do not believe that anyone seriously believes that the idea of calling certain groups black originated or was popularized in the US. I have to think it must be a joke. I do not think it is "excessive and unreasonable". It is more like a comical statement because it is so obviously bizarre and biased, and ignores a few thousand years of history, some of which is even referenced in the article at present. This HAS to be a joke.--00:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)-- Filll 00:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
The reason this article is such a mess is that there have been many stripes of extremist involved, all fighting with each other, for months and months. So, not much gets done. And it ends up very one-sided, by whatever group manages to get the upper hand.-- Filll 00:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
What about Scipio Africanus?-- Balino-Antimod 01:09, 1 December 2006 (UTC)-- Balino-Antimod 01:09, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Some comments:
So is it any wonder people are a bit concerned? Of course, who really cares about who uses or has used the word "black", or this article, or wikipedia in general? Obviously some people care, given the racial strife in many places and the arguments I have seen here on this page. -- Filll 03:10, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Fill, all I can say is that if people are going to fly off the handle over an argument as trivial as "who popularized the term black?" then this article is doomed. Timelist 03:35, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
This is just provides good examples of pejorization. Colored was the preferred word 100+ years ago (think NAACP), and then when it fell out of favor, negro gained currency (think UNCF), which was replaced by black (think Black is Beautiful), which was replaced by Afro American and now African American. I would not be surprised if African American is eventually replaced as well. One can also look at the history of the two words "ass" and "arse", which were alternately the polite and the rude form of the same word for centuries. To blackamoor, I might also add the word Moor, which is somewhat ambiguous because to some it can also signify Arab or Muslim.-- Filll 04:59, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
One of the reasons that discussions about Black people are so heavily loaded with affect is that so much damage has been done to the natives of Africa by slavers and colonialists, people who had reasons to rationalize their taking advantage of other people and to discredit any indications that the people of Africa had their own culture.
Two things are missing in the education of most if not all of us.
One thing missing is a clear knowledge of the genetic history that relates all of us. Many people do not want to admit that some of their ancestors are also the ancestors of the people of Africa. Clarifying that picture can make it much clearer in what sense a Shan tribesman is black and in what sense his genetic heritage includes some wrinkles that (without saying whether they make him better or worse) differentiate him from the descendants of those same ancestors who remained in Africa.
The other thing missing is a clear knowledge of the cultural accomplishments of the black peoples of the world. Racists would like to make it appear that "culture" is something limited to European society, with, perhaps, a bow to ancient Chinese poetry, early Japanese novels, or whatever. But culture is, in essence, inventions that people make to smooth and regularize human interactions. All societies have a culture. In addition to the everyday institutions of culture, which may be the most important, it is important to understand the cultural features such as music that each group and each time contributes. The music of Africa is, to my ear, highly evolved. It may grow out of a continuous tradition reaching all the way back to the earliest Homo sapiens to rest around a campfire after the sun goes down.
What have been the civilizations of Africa? Most people, myself included, received no instruction in this matter at any time from kindergarten to graduate school. The time of human beings in China is not so long as that of humans in Africa, but I do not think that is the reason that one could fairly easily produce a series of maps at intervals of the centuries perhaps, showing the locations of human habitations, the character of architecture and cityscapes, etc. Starting from around 1000 B.C. information taken from written accounts could be added to this picture.
The maps that Cavalli-Sforza produced (see above) show some indications of migration paths in Africa, but that information is already pretty old. Perhaps there are more detailed accounts available now.
In my understanding, the development of cities of greater and greater size and having greater internal structure (e.g., areas for boat building, areas for markets, etc.) is a pretty good indication of the general level of civilization in the society of the time, the reason being simply that large city require not only large resources in the material sense but also large resources in management skills and thriving economies to support their existence.
Depicting the African peoples not only by their genetic (fuzzy) categories but also by their accomplishments would be a much more objective presentation. It is extremely reductionistic to limit the description of a group or an individual to inherited traits. P0M 03:23, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
I can see no discussion for this move from Black people to "The Black race", and there was no consensus. People refer to themselves as Black, that's why it's Black people. I think a big change like this should never be done unilaterally by an editor, this needs to be agreed upon by at least a majority of editors and preferably a consensus. And what's the sarcastic remark about "heavily tan white people or coal miners". What do other editors think? Alun 06:20, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Should actors in black face be in some way classified as "black people?"-- Balino-Antimod 06:54, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
No there was no consensus. Calling the article "black race" is POV because it assumes that race is a valid concept, and we've seen from this talk page, that's an enormously controversial issue. As Ezeu said, thaks for reverting the renaming Timelist 07:08, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Black race simply means rooted in black or very dark lineages, black people don't just spontaneously appear, they come from other black people. This, if I recall, was also Thulean's point.-- Balino-Antimod 07:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
If the goal of this move was to create a family of articles with different viewpoints (which I suspect goes against Wikipedia rules), then it might have worked. However, my impression is that the point of the move was to try to bludgeon into submission people with contrary views.-- Filll 14:25, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Appears to me to be a white supremacist type, if I had to guess.-- Filll 15:48, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes I say with pride I am a Nuevo Falangista, ¡Arriba España!-- Balino-Antimod 16:28, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Also there is nothing racist or communist about being a falangist and the very article you cite concedes it:Despite changing times, Falangism remains a living political philosophy. The Kataeb, a political party in Lebanon, also espouses a Falangist ideology, and is the most prominent nationalist organization in the region; in Bolivia there is a political party called Falange Socialista Boliviana. In America, one small group, the Christian Falangist Party of America, inspired by Kataeb, was formed in 1985. It is vehement in rejecting racism, antisemitism, and neo-nazism and espousing traditional National Syndicalism, which it claims is neither racist nor socialist in nature (see Falangist). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Balino-Antimod ( talk • contribs).
Filll, comment on content, not on editors... Lukas19 17:39, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Filll, I think you're reading way too much into Lukas's and Balino's comments. I think we should focus on article-building and not on editor-questioning. Let us all stick to the true task at hand, manos a la obra as they say in Spanish.-- Albinomite 18:18, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Albinomite has put a great joke on my page about writing in German. However, I do not think that everyone finds these kinds of jokes funny.-- Filll 18:39, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
I know how you feel Filll, I believe not too long ago there was a Black Supremacist here by the name of OJPimps'on, where is he now I wonder?-- Albinomite 19:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC)