Caucasian, Europid, or White?

Which term do you prefer?

If you have no race-based labels then, for example, attempts to combat things like Tay-Sachs and sickle-cell anaemia become a hell of a lot harder, for one thing.

Really?

No communication is possible without dividing, sub-dividing, categorizing, and classifying things?

I think that's overstated.

Consider a basic statement like "The cat is on the mat" or "I love you". You can't make those statements without labels for objects like cat, mat, I, you or labels for categories like "on" or "love".

Words are symbols that we use to label the real world.

Not merely communication but even thought consists pretty much solely of labelling things and the relationships between them.

Assuming you have a finite and limited amount of money to spend on combatting hereditary conditions like those, racial targetting will (I think - I should stress that I'm not an expert) almost certainly let you save more lives for your buck than randomly testing as many people as you can afford to.

If you had enough money (or, to put it another way, cheap enough tests) to test the whole population then it wouldn't help, but we're a long, long way off that at present, I think.

Just a few years, I would say. Certainly well within my lifetime.

We are all Homo sapiens. The rest is bullshit.

I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but I think you could make it far more compellingly by means of a true statement along the lines of "racial divisions within the human species should not in general be significant" than with the false statement "There is only one race: Human".

That's the point. Race is categorized differently in every single culture, and when you get right down to studying the actual human genome, there are no distinct genetic differences to concretely assign individuals to a particular race. There never were pure, separate "races," and there has been so much overlap and, for lack of a better term, interbreeding, that racial categories are completely a matter of cultural perception, not physical reality.

Edit to clarify: it is an absolute, verifiable fact that biologically, race does not exist.

"when you get right down to studying the actual human genome, there are no distinct genetic differences to concretely assign individuals to a particular race" is clearly not true - if it were, skin colour would not be hereditary.

The point I think you may be trying to express, without any great success, is that ethnicity is a continuum rather than a discrete thing. This is clearly true, and I don't think anyone would dispute it, but you appear to have wildly misinterpreted it.

You again obscure what has the germ of a valid point in it when you say "racial categories are completely a matter of cultural perception, not physical reality" rather than "there is a very large element of cultural perception in our concepts of race and ethnicity".

Telling me something is "an absolute, verifiable fact" when it's clearly not even true, let alone "absolute" or "verifiable" doesn't help matters.

I can point you to countless established anthropology texts that explain the same things, in much more technical terms than I just did, if you like. Ask any physical anthopologist out there (they're the group of social scientists most concerned with documenting physical characteristics and differences between groups). How you define race is totally dependent on your culture's conceptions of what "race" is. Race only includes the visible genetic differences that a particular culture arbitrarily concludes are significant. On a biological level, race does not exist. It is a social construct.

Even genetic conditions like sickle cell anemia, which we consider racially linked, have more to do with latitude of origin than "race" per se. Certain groups originating in India, Africa, and other tropical latitudes where malaria is prevalent have a higher incidence of sickle cell anemia than other groups, even groups of their own "race." There are all kinds of genetic markers linking people together, and looking at the genetic makeup of populations around the globe it is possible to roughly divide people into many different classifications based on genetics, which don't correspond at all to the few observable, visual differences by which we generally classify people.

is a social construct. And it quotes some of those anthropology texts you probably are familiar with.

:thumbsup:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20010211&slug=race11m

It discusses the variations between groups vs. the variations within them, the discovery that sickle cell anemia was more tied to location than race, and the reality that only very small genetic markers tied to physical appearance have become the dominating factor in dividing people into separate classifications.

Now, of course this doesn't mean that genetic differences don't exist at all, or that they aren't worth studying, particularly in the context of genetic diseases that are more prevalent in some groups than others--group being an intentionally loose term that can refer to people of common culture, history, location, genetic ancestry, etc. The problem occurs when those genetic differences, or those groupings, are tied to race, which is an arbitrary classification based on physical appearance.

Note that I didn't accuse you of "wildly misinterpreting" anything either. I argued my points with the knowledge that I had and didn't make things personal. That's what civility is.

I'd tend to use caucasian when talking scientifically about humans, but white when talking about people.

A body on a slab, a police suspect or a population migration is caucasian; a person or a group of people are white.

I've never heard the word "Europid" in my life.

than asked for race. She wrote - human.

I'm pink rather than white.
I was born in the United States to parents born in the United States and have British, Scotch, Irish, German, Cherokee, and Norwegian ancestry (and those are only the ones I know of). The Cherokee "refudiats" Europidiness. Interestingly, Europid is defined as "In what some call scientific racism, the term Caucasian race (or Caucasoid, sometimes also Europid, or Europoid) has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the indigenous human populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia." I "refudiate" racism and so will pass on the Europidiness.


I am a member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens.

Caucasian is defined as "White: a member of the Caucasoid race." Since race does not exist from an anthropological point of view, and I am pink (more or less) I can not claim Caucasian.

They are not biologically meaningful.

when we deliver our white rap.

Caucasian.

Is it Dr. Chow Mein, perhaps?

Caucasians who aren't white in the slightest degree, and there are plenty of them.

According to the 2010 census.

;-)

:)

Sheesh@!

:sarcasm:

Aryan

:sarcasm:

:nuke: