posted
Greater variability [is] assigned to "Caucasoid" types. This type may have complexions ranging from very fair to very dark, and wide ranges of all other characteristics, often apart from "admixture." However, it is often implied (if not directly suggested) that other types do not have such variability [unless due to admixture].
"[L]abeling" of characteristics. Thus, as an example, there is the implication that narrow noses are "Caucasoid."
[I]nconsistency of results and evidence. The unwarranted assignment of greater value to certain results and evidence while downplaying that which does not agreee.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Evidence shows that the structure of the nose, both bony and soft tissue, may undergo radical changes to adapt to the environment (Molnar, 1991). Thus, nose shape would give little evidence of genetic relationship. [Inuit], American Indians, Northern Chinese, etc., all have narrow noses but show little other evidence of gene flow with Europeans. Indeed, genetic studies have shown that the belief that straight, narrow noses among Nilotic peoples as due to migrations from Europe or Asia is not correct. (Molnar, Stephen, Human Variation, New York, 1991)
Probably, light-colored eyes and hair are among the rarest prominent external traits among the human species. They are found mostly in Europe, and aside from albinos, are hardly found at all outside of Europe, ... populations that have resided for long periods in cold climates like the Altaic peoples of Siberia, the northern Chinese, the [Inuit] and Native peoples of Canada do not possess such traits. Thus, light hair (including light brown and red hair) and light eyes (blue, green, etc.) might be seen as very strong genetic traits, and their complete or near complete absence among a group as evidence of minimal genetic relationship. ... However, from the Eurocentric perspective, the color of skin, eyes, hair, etc., is given little importance in anthropological studies. This is not justified, ...
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
In concluding, we can illustrate the problem in this way using the old three race theory still commonly used by geneticists and forensic anthropologists:
Let A = Africoid, C = Caucasoid, M = Mongoloid; and the monotypic trait types so that in pure form:
A = A monotypic traits M = M monotypic traits C = C monotypic traits;
In addition, there are variants to the above traits that are similar to the monotype yet significantly different. Let's label these types:
And also there are variants that don't quite fit any of these patterns (at least not from the non-Eurocentric perspective) such as many South Asians, Australians, etc. For the sake of convenience lets say there are four such types (there are probably more):
D type, E type, F type, G type;
Now, we will take the Eurocentric position and classify all types into the original three monotypic groups:
A does not = A2, A3, A4, M, M2, M3, M4, C, C2, C3, ,C4, D, E, F or G types
M does not = A, A2, A3, A4, M2, M3, M4, C, C2, C3, ,C4, D, E, F or G types
However,
C = A2, A3, A4, M2, M3, M4, C, C2, C3, C4, D, E, F and G types
Armed with such a contrived system, the Eurocentric, hyperdiffusionists can argue just about anything they please without regard to the true facts.
.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Caucasoid cannot be used as a race but can be used to classify features. The issue is that there are Black Caucasoids and White Negroids. So the use of the term doesn't fit social constructs of ethnic groups.
-------------------- Across the sea of time, there can only be one of you. Make you the best one you can be. Posts: 4028 | From: NW USA | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by osirion: Caucasoid cannot be used as a race but can be used to classify features. The issue is that there are Black Caucasoids and White Negroids. So the use of the term doesn't fit social constructs of ethnic groups.
^Ok, you're now officially one of the trolls.
Posts: 8785 | From: Discovery Channel's Mythbusters | Registered: Dec 2009
| IP: Logged |
The archetypes negro, blanco, and amarillo do not exist. Consequently negroids, caucasoids, and mongoloids don't either.
If you want to play that game the loser is Y-O-U.
Humanity unlike the movie Planet of the Apes does not descend from imaginary cross fertile separate species. Humanity descends from African men and an African woman.
We are geographic populations not three, five, or however many anybody can guess discrete races. No. One human race. Various colours. Various populations.
What many failed to grasp from Planet of the Apes is there were four not three kinds of apes: chimpanzee, gorilla, orangatang, AND human! Humans are the Naked Ape.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
''The archetypes negro, blanco, and amarillo do not exist. Consequently negroids, caucasoids, and mongoloids don't either.'' ====
Good luck telling that to a forensic scientist.
If what you are saying is true, then the FBI and forensics wouldn't have jobs. Most their cases are based on Racial profiling.
The only people who deny races exist are leftists with a political agenda. I presume alTakruri is either a white liberal or a black invovled in the far left 'civil rights' crap.
Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
Senegalese and Fiji Islanders fit the forensic morphology and social ethnic term black but they are not near relatives when it comes to the science of population genetics.
I don't expect a pyramidiot to understand the difference though no subtleties are involved.
Scientific race is a biological subspecies. There are no human biological subspecies.
Who needs to be a forensic technician to see that geographic breeding populations look different?
But to play your game I can make you lose. Are you a true authentic genuine blanco? If you don't have light hair and eyes and clear white complexion you are not a white caucasian but at best some white based admixture.
Wear the purity shoe on the other foot. Seems silly to you when it's applied to your kind but perfectly valid when used against me and my kind.
From now own the true blanco defines the white race all other "whites" are non-white impure admixtures.
And this is the one and only reply your "moronoid" pyramidiot John Bullshit British non-Israelite ass will get from me.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by alTakruri: And I assume you are a pyramidiot.
Morphology does not equal related descent.
Senegalese and Fiji Islanders fit the forensic morphology and social ethnic term black but they are not near relatives when it comes to the science of population genetics.
The exact criteria for what constitutes "near relatives" should then be stated. But who would?
Posts: 42941 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
"Why this bias from the 'race denial' faction? This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in 'race denial' are in 'reality denial' as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence."
- Gill, George W., PhD, Does Race Exist? A Proponent's Perspective. University of Wyoming, 2000.
Like i said the only people who deny race have a political agenda.
alTakruri is either a far left white liberal or a black obsessed with civil rights. He's a crank who refuses science for a political agenda.
Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
posted
^^^^you are talking about george Gil who is going against the majority point of view of view in archeology and make the assumption that people who have the majority point of view have a political agenda. Hypocritical because you who does believe races exists also have a political/religious agenda. And you ignore the point that unlike the anthropological organizations who do take that point of view people in this forum who claim that race doesn't exist continue to talk about race pretending they are not by using different words for it.
___________________
In the late 1980s, partly in response to demands from American forensic anthropology organizations to scrutinize methods of racial identification in order to ensure accuracy in legal cases, Gill tested, supported, and developed craniofacial anthropometric and other means of estimating the racial origins of skeletal remains. He found that the employment of multiple criteria can yield very high rates of accuracy, and even that individual methods can be accurate more than 80 percent of the time.
Gill cites these findings in arguing against prevailing majority view in the field of Anthropology that human races are mere social constructs. Gill suggests that "race denial" can stem from overstatements of the importance of clinal variation among human phenotypes, and from "politically motivated censorship" in the mistaken but "politically correct" belief that "race promotes racism". Gill argues that "we can often function within systems that we do not believe in": Categories can have practical utility, even if they also seem conceptually problematic.
Gill served on a NOVA-sponsored panel in which he and five others debated the reality of race. Among Gill's opponents was American anthropologist C. Loring Brace—a fellow plaintiff in the Kennewick Man case—who maintains that the term "race" is not warranted by "a biological entity"
Slightly over half of all biological/physical anthropologists today believe in the traditional view that human races are biologically valid and real. Furthermore, they tend to see nothing wrong in defining and naming the different populations of Homo sapiens. The other half of the biological anthropology community believes either that the traditional racial categories for humankind are arbitrary and meaningless, or that at a minimum there are better ways to look at human variation than through the "racial lens."
Are there differences in the research concentrations of these two groups of experts? Yes, most decidedly there are. As pointed out in a recent 2000 edition of a popular physical anthropology textbook, forensic anthropologists (those who do skeletal identification for law-enforcement agencies) are overwhelmingly in support of the idea of the basic biological reality of human races, and yet those who work with blood-group data, for instance, tend to reject the biological reality of racial categories.
I happen to be one of those very few forensic physical anthropologists who actually does research on the particular traits used today in forensic racial identification (i.e., "assessing ancestry," as it is generally termed today). Partly this is because for more than a decade now U.S. national and regional forensic anthropology organizations have deemed it necessary to quantitatively test both traditional and new methods for accuracy in legal cases. I volunteered for this task of testing methods and developing new methods in the late 1980s. What have I found? Where do I now stand in the "great race debate?" Can I see truth on one side or the other—or on both sides—in this argument?
Findings First, I have found that forensic anthropologists attain a high degree of accuracy in determining geographic racial affinities (white, black, American Indian, etc.) by utilizing both new and traditional methods of bone analysis. Many well-conducted studies were reported in the late 1980s and 1990s that test methods objectively for percentage of correct placement. Numerous individual methods involving midfacial measurements, femur traits, and so on are over 80 percent accurate alone, and in combination produce very high levels of accuracy. No forensic anthropologist would make a racial assessment based upon just one of these methods, but in combination they can make very reliable assessments, just as in determining sex or age. In other words, multiple criteria are the key to success in all of these determinations.
I have a respected colleague, the skeletal biologist C. Loring Brace, who is as skilled as any of the leading forensic anthropologists at assessing ancestry from bones, yet he does not subscribe to the concept of race. [Read Brace's position on the concept of race.] Neither does Norman Sauer, a board-certified forensic anthropologist. My students ask, "How can this be? They can identify skeletons as to racial origins but do not believe in race!" My answer is that we can often function within systems that we do not believe in.
As a middle-aged male, for example, I am not so sure that I believe any longer in the chronological "age" categories that many of my colleagues in skeletal biology use. Certainly parts of the skeletons of some 45-year-old people look older than corresponding portions of the skeletons of some 55-year-olds. If, however, law enforcement calls upon me to provide "age" on a skeleton, I can provide an answer that will be proven sufficiently accurate should the decedent eventually be identified. I may not believe in society's "age" categories, but I can be very effective at "aging" skeletons. The next question, of course, is how "real" is age biologically? My answer is that if one can use biological criteria to assess age with reasonable accuracy, then age has some basis in biological reality even if the particular "social construct" that defines its limits might be imperfect. I find this true not only for age and stature estimations but for sex and race identification.
The "reality of race" therefore depends more on the definition of reality than on the definition of race. If we choose to accept the system of racial taxonomy that physical anthropologists have traditionally established—major races: black, white, etc.—then one can classify human skeletons within it just as well as one can living humans. The bony traits of the nose, mouth, femur, and cranium are just as revealing to a good osteologist as skin color, hair form, nose form, and lips to the perceptive observer of living humanity. I have been able to prove to myself over the years, in actual legal cases, that I am more accurate at assessing race from skeletal remains than from looking at living people standing before me. So those of us in forensic anthropology know that the skeleton reflects race, whether "real" or not, just as well if not better than superficial soft tissue does. The idea that race is "only skin deep" is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm.
Position on race Where I stand today in the "great race debate" after a decade and a half of pertinent skeletal research is clearly more on the side of the reality of race than on the "race denial" side. Yet I do see why many other physical anthropologists are able to ignore or deny the race concept. Blood-factor analysis, for instance, shows many traits that cut across racial boundaries in a purely clinal fashion with very few if any "breaks" along racial boundaries. (A cline is a gradient of change, such as from people with a high frequency of blue eyes, as in Scandinavia, to people with a high frequency of brown eyes, as in Africa.)
Morphological characteristics, however, like skin color, hair form, bone traits, eyes, and lips tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc. (For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.) As far as we know, blood-factor frequencies are not shaped by these same climatic factors.
So, serologists who work largely with blood factors will tend to see human variation as clinal and races as not a valid construct, while skeletal biologists, particularly forensic anthropologists, will see races as biologically real. The common person on the street who sees only a person's skin color, hair form, and face shape will also tend to see races as biologically real. They are not incorrect. Their perspective is just different from that of the serologist.
So, yes, I see truth on both sides of the race argument.
Those who believe that the concept of race is valid do not discredit the notion of clines, however. Yet those with the clinal perspective who believe that races are not real do try to discredit the evidence of skeletal biology. Why this bias from the "race denial" faction? This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in "race denial" are in "reality denial" as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence.
Consequently, at the beginning of the 21st century, even as a majority of biological anthropologists favor the reality of the race perspective, not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship. But, you may ask, are the politically correct actually correct? Is there a relationship between thinking about race and racism?
Race and racism Does discussing human variation in a framework of racial biology promote or reduce racism? This is an important question, but one that does not have a simple answer. Most social scientists over the past decade have convinced themselves that it runs the risk of promoting racism in certain quarters. Anthropologists of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, on the other hand, believed that they were combating racism by openly discussing race and by teaching courses on human races and racism. Which approach has worked best? What do the intellectuals among racial minorities believe? How do students react and respond?
Three years ago, I served on a NOVA-sponsored panel in New York, in which panelists debated the topic "Is There Such a Thing as Race?" Six of us sat on the panel, three proponents of the race concept and three antagonists. All had authored books or papers on race. Loring Brace and I were the two anthropologists "facing off" in the debate. The ethnic composition of the panel was three white and three black scholars. As our conversations developed, I was struck by how similar many of my concerns regarding racism were to those of my two black teammates. Although recognizing that embracing the race concept can have risks attached, we were (and are) more fearful of the form of racism likely to emerge if race is denied and dialogue about it lessened. We fear that the social taboo about the subject of race has served to suppress open discussion about a very important subject in need of dispassionate debate. One of my teammates, an affirmative-action lawyer, is afraid that a denial that races exist also serves to encourage a denial that racism exists. He asks, "How can we combat racism if no one is willing to talk about race?"
Who will benefit? In my experience, minority students almost invariably have been the strongest supporters of a "racial perspective" on human variation in the classroom. The first-ever black student in my human variation class several years ago came to me at the end of the course and said, "Dr. Gill, I really want to thank you for changing my life with this course." He went on to explain that, "My whole life I have wondered about why I am black, and if that is good or bad. Now I know the reasons why I am the way I am and that these traits are useful and good."
A human-variation course with another perspective would probably have accomplished the same for this student if he had ever noticed it. The truth is, innocuous contemporary human-variation classes with their politically correct titles and course descriptions do not attract the attention of minorities or those other students who could most benefit. Furthermore, the politically correct "race denial" perspective in society as a whole suppresses dialogue, allowing ignorance to replace knowledge and suspicion to replace familiarity. This encourages ethnocentrism and racism more than it discourages it.
Dr. George W. Gill is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. He also serves as the forensic anthropologist for Wyoming law-enforcement agencies and the Wyoming State Crime Laboratory.
-the difference between my longer posts and zarahan is that when I make long post (1/3 of zarahan length) they are on topic specifically. When he does it in other people's threads he is not specific to the particular topic of the thread he just posts his ready made opinions. anyone who doesn't acknowledge that is being dishonest, they don't complain if they agree with a long off topic spam.
Posts: 42941 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Anglo_Pyramidologist: The reality of race -
"Why this bias from the 'race denial' faction? This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in 'race denial' are in 'reality denial' as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence."
- Gill, George W., PhD, Does Race Exist? A Proponent's Perspective. University of Wyoming, 2000.
Like i said the only people who deny race have a political agenda.
alTakruri is either a far left white liberal or a black obsessed with civil rights. He's a crank who refuses science for a political agenda.
Do you realize your quote doesn't counter anything he said, are you simply dysfunctional in that illiterate head of yours? Citing dissenters is all too easy, refuting someone with sound reasoning and empirical evidence is not.
Piramidget, how do you explain the following dendogram and highlighted text? Does your silly source address these well known tendencies (eg Australians and Melanesians tend to cluster with Africans) that directly undermine any jibberish about ''race''? Or are you going to tell me that Australian aboriginals and Africans, who have seperated genetically for 50.000+ years, belong to the same race? Or what about the French and Eskimo's, do they belong to the same race? Why do Europeans position themselves on the Asian branch, are they mongoloids? Or are Asians Caucasians?
posted
We aren't playing the caucasus and other -oid games because the deck is stacked and as also shown the facial features called caucasoid aren't from the Caucasus as indigenous Africans had them before there were any Caucasus Mountain peoples thus dark skinned native African facial features are not limited to the subset labeled negroid.
There are no discrete human subspecies. There are geographic breeding populations some of whom share facial and other features which of course can be approximately reconstructed from their skulls.
Recognizing populations have a distinguishing set of facial features is hardly justification for a notion of biological race. Human races are a social concept because what some observers agree constitutes a race is unaccepted by other observers, hence not delineated by measurable scientific objectivity.
On the otherhand there can be no dispute about a peoples' geographic habitat any more than than there is a dispute about how different one people looks in contrast to others.
Senegalese and Fiji Islanders are both blacks because that's a readily observable comment about their skin colour. But this blackness does not constitute a race because those two peoples are distinct geographic breeding populations with no recent genetic relation to each other nor do they fit the definition of subspecies as applied in biology.
All humans are genus:Homo, species:sapiens, subspecies:sapiens, no matter how divergent populations are in looks or what the label employed in naming them.
There is no room to confuse the statement no biological human races with the absurd notion that peoples don't differ in facial and other features. Race is a matter of social identity as there are no clear cut borders as evidenced by the many thousands of years old relatively isolated geographic breeding populations that cannot be assigned to either one or the other so-called primary races.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote:What "race" is everyone seems to know, and is only too eager to tell. All but a very few individuals take it completely for granted that scientists have established the "facts" about "race" and that they have long ago recognized and classified the "races" of mankind -Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
According to Montagu race is:
quote:[a] process of genetic change within a definite ecological area; that "race" is a dynamic, not a static, condition; and that it becomes static and classifiable only when a taxonomically minded anthropologist arbitrarily delimits the process of change at his own time level. -Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
That there are no races within the human race was starting to get accepted within the first half of the previous century. Piramigdet and his pseudo scientific kinfolk are relics on the verge of becoming extinct.
quote:there is no theoretical, methodological, or political consensus shared across any of the subdisciplines on how to interpret and explicate the realities that constitute race. -Faye Harrison, editor of the American Anthropologist
quote:The failures of physical anthropology are very real (Brace, 1981, 1982, 1988, 1993131, but, contra Renfrew, a better case can be made that they have been the result of flaws in theoretical expectations rather than methodological inadequacies (Brace, 1989; Brace and Hunt, 1990). It was an item of faith in the physical anthropology of yesteryear that the conformation of each individual human being was an approximation to an underlying “racial” essence that constituted true reality. In wondrously Platonic fashion (Plato, 19191, anthropological practitioners assumed that each individual specimen was an imperfect shadow of that “real but directly unattainable thing,” the supposed underlying “racial” reality whose elucidation was the ultimate goal of their aspirations (attributed to Topinard by Ripley, 1899; Vallois, 1953) -Brace, Clines and Clusters Versus “Race:” A Test in Ancient Egypt and the Case of a Death on the Nile
quote:If human beings really were approximations to one or another underlying “race,” this should have been demonstrated by factor analysis long ago. From a purely methodological viewpoint, that this has not even come close to happening is a fine demonstration that there simply are no “races” out there waiting to be discovered. This does not mean, however, that multivariate approaches to the analysis of population relationships are futile. It simply means that we need to choose the kind of multivariate technique that is appropriate to answer the questions we really should be asking. -Brace, Clines and Clusters Versus “Race:” A Test in Ancient Egypt and the Case of a Death on the Nile
posted
''We aren't playing the caucasus and other -oid games because the deck is stacked and as also shown the facial features called caucasoid aren't from the Caucasus as indigenous Africans had them before there were any Caucasus Mountain peoples thus dark skinned native African facial features are not limited to the subset labeled negroid.'' =======
'indigenous africans' have white/cauasoid features?
Ok...
Good luck then finding a straight blonde, red, brown or auburn haired, green or blue eyed + straight nosed, thin lipped negroid/sub-saharan-african.
Get in reality please. Your posts reflect your envy of caucasians since you know blacks have no physical diversity (all are dark haired and dark eyed).
Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
Race denialism is only a modern invention from far-left cranks with a socio-political agenda like Montagu.
Why race denialism?
Decline of racial studies after 1930 -
''Several social and political developments that occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century led to the transformation in the discourse of race. Three movements that historians have considered are: the coming of mass democracy, the age of imperialist expansion, and the impact of Nazism.''
- All socio-political related.
Race denialism is 100% rooted in politics and an anti-white agenda.
Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
posted
^ there's only the human race. Nothing anti-white about that. White is not a race but a superficial adaptation. Under the right climatic and dietary conditions and in a large population pool, it would only take 12 generations to produce a White person from any groups of Sub-Saharan Africans.
-------------------- Across the sea of time, there can only be one of you. Make you the best one you can be. Posts: 4028 | From: NW USA | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Anglo_Pyramidologist: ''According to Montagu'' ====
And who was montagu?
He was a jewish-atheist-humanist.
Race denialism is only a modern invention from far-left cranks with a socio-political agenda like Montagu.
Why race denialism?
Decline of racial studies after 1930 -
''Several social and political developments that occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century led to the transformation in the discourse of race. Three movements that historians have considered are: the coming of mass democracy, the age of imperialist expansion, and the impact of Nazism.''
- All socio-political related.
Race denialism is 100% rooted in politics and an anti-white agenda.
Strawmen on Montagu will not do. You provide no counter case, and you reply selectively. Light hair and eyes are negligible in light of full cranial examination. Men lie, women lie, but dendograms produced by multivariate analysis don't. It has been repeatedly shown (see Hanihara 1996) that ''Caucasians'' don't have their own branch, and that they cluster phenotypically with Asians. which is reflected here as well:
As well as by Hanihara in 1996:
As well as by Cavalli Sforza:
Piramidget, you are not a Caucasian, you are a mongoloid!!
quote:Recent Europeans align with East Asians, and early West Asians resemble Africans -Hanihara T. Comparison of craniofacial features of major human groups
Your pyramidget ass is dismissed.
Posts: 8785 | From: Discovery Channel's Mythbusters | Registered: Dec 2009
| IP: Logged |
Notice how much more circular (straight haired) Mayan cross-section hair shapes are, compared with both Northern hemisphere Amerindians, and North-Western Europeans!
[/i]
So Amerindians and (East) Asians sport straighter hair than both Africans and Europeans
(.......)
Perhaps a better question would be, considering the erroneous notion of straight hair as a European and cold adapted trait, why Europeans not only show up as intermediate between Africans and Asians in cross-section measurements, but why they are positioned as intermediate in a number of measurable landmarks on scalp hair
quote:Human hair is commonly grouped into just three main sub-types: Caucasian, Asian and African. Differences between these groups are usually determined with respect to a range of parameters including: hair fibre diameter and its cross-sectional form, overall fibre shape, mechanical properties (see above), comb-ability, shape, chemical makeup and moisture level. For many of these parameters Caucasian hair falls intermediate to the Asian and African extremes.
From: Hair in toxicology: an important bio-monitor
Excellent work Kalonji. So East Asians and American Indians have the straightest hair of all.. Amd all this in such a wide range of climatic contiions from swelting tropics to quasi Artic environs? Very interesting.. Curious that assorted "Aryan" proponents do not link the AEs with say Chinese or Cherokee in their haste to play the "hair" card..
I would question the Atlas of Human Hair Microscopic Characteristics categories though, because "sub-Saharan" Africans include Somalis and Ethiopians, populations that are overwhelmingly tropically adapted Africans and they have a wide range of hair- from straight, to loosely curled, to kinky. The term "African extreme" as used in the "Hair in toxicology" text might also be questioned. The peoples of New Guinea are by blood and DNA closer to Asian populations than Africans, but their hair can sometime also be tightly curled to almost resemble some Africans. Hence why isn't that the outer edge of an "ASIAN extreme" going the other way?
In any event good info. Could the "intermediate" position be tied back to Cavlli-Sforza's argument that white people may not be a "race" at all but a mixed hybrid breed- one third African, two-thirds Asian? Not saying it is so but just throwing that out.
".. it appears that Europeans are about two-thirds Asians and one-third African." (--Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (2000). Genes, peoples and languages. FARRAR STRAUS AND GIROUX Publishers)
"Nuclear DNA studies also contribute to the deconstruction of received racial entities. Ann Bowcock and her colleague's interpretation (Bowcock et al. 1991; Bowcock et al. 1994) of analyses of restriction-site polymorphisms and microsatellite polymorphisms (STRPs) suggests that Europeans, the defining Caucasians, are descendants of a population that arose as a consequence of admixture between already differentiated populations ancestral to (some) Africans and Asians. Therefore, Caucasians would be a secondary type or race due to its hybrid origin and not a primary race". This compromises the racial schema and also invalidates the metaphysical underpinnings of the persisting race construct, which implies deep and fundamental differences between its units. In this case if the interpretation of Bowcock and her colleagues (1991) is correct then one of the units is not fundamental because its genesis is qualitatively different from the other units and even connects them." -- S.O.Y. Keita and Rick Kittles. (1997) The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544
posted
The reason this game is no longer played is legit.
Anglo_hotep01
A Chinese no matter how light and peachy complected is likely more related to a dark skinned East Indian than to a white. Environments differ and there is phenetic variation due to this; it is not as some may imagine that 3 (or four or however many different races) where everyone looked exactly the same were beamed down and cross-breeded. It's more like one species, a lot of genetic variation and people who live nearby have a greater chance of sharing genes and culture compared with those further away. There just happens to be no further subdivisions (no races) taxonomically speaking. Biology plays no race politics.
Africa:
people tend to forget the many traits that have great range, from stature to eye shape to certain facial features on average around 80% of the world range is covered on the continent. Believe it or not the tallest and shortest people with the thickest and thinnest lips live there. Note lips:
^Well known guy from the heart of the continent.
It's not like there is an "African template" or any number of racial templates from which any deviations indicate mixture: the science is more complex than what you might characaturize in your mind. Just like not everything between the snapped-shut "oriental" eyes and cock-eyed European ones is a result of mixture.
For instance there are folks out there that rightfully equate any African physique with lady lumps, all though if you notice the "venus" figure has a notable presence wiht the lighter skinned at the Southern end of the continent and plenty of wide hipped are found in mixed places like South America or the Middle East like Lebanon. I'm not suggesting a correlation, i'm suggesting the opposite of rigid archetypes actually.
Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
''Under the right climatic and dietary conditions and in a large population pool, it would only take 12 generations to produce a White person from any groups of Sub-Saharan Africans.'' ========
Most retarded comment i've ever read.
We have artwork going back over 6,000 years which has proven the races are distinct and in that time no race has ever been observed to morph into another.
A sub-saharan african will never morph/change/evolve into a caucasian.
Physical anthropology has proven racial features are fixed. I have no idea why you believe in a fairytale that one day a negro with wooly hair would morph into a white man with straight blonde hair. Are you on drugs?
Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
posted
^ First, don't rant, actually prove your point.
As for whites from Sub-Saharans. It would seem that it can happen in a single generation. But then punctual equilibrium already states that significant morphological changes can occur rather rapidly.
-------------------- Across the sea of time, there can only be one of you. Make you the best one you can be. Posts: 4028 | From: NW USA | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Anglophile_Pyramidiot: ''Under the right climatic and dietary conditions and in a large population pool, it would only take 12 generations to produce a White person from any groups of Sub-Saharan Africans.'' ========
Most retarded comment i've ever read.
We have artwork going back over 6,000 years which has proven the races are distinct and in that time no race has ever been observed to morph into another.
A sub-saharan african will never morph/change/evolve into a caucasian.
Physical anthropology has proven racial features are fixed. I have no idea why you believe in a fairytale that one day a negro with wooly hair would morph into a white man with straight blonde hair. Are you on drugs?
Are YOU on drugs?!! LOL Have you not heard of EVOLUTION, let alone micro-evolution of populations??! Do you not realize that the human species originated from Africa and thus all humans were originally black??!!
By the way, what 'race' are these people??
Posts: 26321 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
^^ LOL Don't project your sexual inclinations on to me. Those photos were never meant to be pornographic, and that post was to the Anglo pyramidiot.
Speaking of which, where is he?...
Posts: 26321 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Uhh no I just knew this type of thread becomes a junk thread in a forum with some of the members we currently have.
Scientifically explaining logically defunct nomenclature may not be my preferred approach to the dissemination of information on people and things African but since thread was started by a savvy member and is about stuff regurtated numerous times on the forum I thought I'd pop by to suggest a sticky.
Ended up getting side tracked thinking there was a new member (Anglo) who could be here willing to learn science and not just a blind dogmatist.
Thought the thread was moved or something till I saw it stickied atop the forum.
With so much Abaza-sh__ up top though it seems congested up there but I thought a comprehensive race thread would be good stickied. In a way that's basically what this is, but this is a lot more focused into debates / discourse while the race thread would scientifically explain why the concept of different homosapienssapiens races is absent from taxonomy and from modern bio-anthropology.
WANNA know real history? Then read how these people caused the Dark Ages, Read how they spread like a Virus accross the world killing an destroying all forms of life, Read how entire civilizations were wiped clean off the face of the earth.
NOW THAT'S REAL HISTORY!
Posts: 108 | From: LA | Registered: May 2009
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Bishop: All Modern Europeans (the white ones) were once called GERMANS. They were known throughout HISTORY AS THE BARBARIANS:
WANNA know real history? Then read how these people caused the Dark Ages, Read how they spread like a Virus accross the world killing an destroying all forms of life, Read how entire civilizations were wiped clean off the face of the earth.
NOW THAT'S REAL HISTORY!
Except in places like France, Britain, Spain, Italy etc none of those Germanic tribes ever outnumbered the native inhabitants in those countires. The orginal phenotype and genotype of the original people still predominates in many cases. Thus to say the modern folk in these countries were once Germans is wrong as that is only a part of their heritage.
Also some of those tribes settled in North Africa.. Posts: 682 | From: East Coast | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
posted
Also for the record many Afrocentrics see the germanic whites (the supposedly blond blue eyed variety) as the WHITE MAN par excellence, their ultimate enemey. But the truth is the major players those who brought slaves to the Americas and created the system of racial hierachies there were the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French, the Brits and Americans many who are not so Aryan by the way. Your predominantely Germanic and Nordic countries never had much to do with any of it with the exception of Nazi Germany of course. And to this day Nordic/Germanic countries are some of the most tolerant and open minded societies in existence and are very admatant about social rights and individual freedom. As a Black person try visiting Spain or Italy and then go to Sweden. Then come back and tell us which is more racist.
Posts: 682 | From: East Coast | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Bishop: All Modern Europeans (the white ones) were once called GERMANS. They were known throughout HISTORY AS THE BARBARIANS:
WANNA know real history? Then read how these people caused the Dark Ages, Read how they spread like a Virus accross the world killing an destroying all forms of life, Read how entire civilizations were wiped clean off the face of the earth.
NOW THAT'S REAL HISTORY!
This is not true Bishop - they had names like Masagetae, Heftalitae, Alans and more generally Scythians although it appears there were also black Scythians.
Barbarians was just a name Greeks used for people of all sorts that thought babbled or didn't speak their language.
Posts: 4226 | From: New Jersey, USA | Registered: Mar 2007
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by osirion: ^ First, don't rant, actually prove your point.
As for whites from Sub-Saharans. It would seem that it can happen in a single generation. But then punctual equilibrium already states that significant morphological changes can occur rather rapidly.
Osirion - white people aren't albinos. That is single child with a genetic mutation. It doesn't comprise a generation. Posts: 4226 | From: New Jersey, USA | Registered: Mar 2007
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Anglo_Pyramidologist: The reality of race -
"Why this bias from the 'race denial' faction? This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in 'race denial' are in 'reality denial' as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence."
- Gill, George W., PhD, Does Race Exist? A Proponent's Perspective. University of Wyoming, 2000.
Like i said the only people who deny race have a political agenda.
alTakruri is either a far left white liberal or a black obsessed with civil rights. He's a crank who refuses science for a political agenda.
There are definitely people, for some reason, with agendas and fearful of differences among biological populations. I frankly am not one of them. of course there are no racial categories of people so to speak but there sure are people with biologically distinctive traits and cultures that have evolved AMONG THEM rather than among others.
Take say pyramids - pyramidologist. I believe some people knew how to make them and SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T. Posts: 4226 | From: New Jersey, USA | Registered: Mar 2007
| IP: Logged |
I have seen just about ever skull of Homo Sapiens ever found, on every continent, and narrow noses and orthognathism only appear first in Eurasia, there would be no evolutionary cause for these traits to exist in sub-Saharan Africans. All African remains have broad noses and prognathism before 40,000 years ago. When proto-Caucasians entered Africa from Asia after 40,000 years ago only then do narrow noses and orthognathism become common in Africa. A good example of this is the Nazlet Khater skull from Egypt. Nasal width is 28 mm. which is moderate. Although he was a proto-Caucasian and had moderate sub-nasal prognathism he had no mandibular prognathism, and had a prominent chin, the first skull in Africa with such traits. So based on this I would have to say there is such a thing as race. Caucasian traits evolved in Eurasia only. This even applies to the other races in the world with similar features, at some time in the past there was admixture with Caucasian people. There is nothing mysterious about race or anything hard to define about it.
Posts: 171 | From: Florida | Registered: Aug 2011
| IP: Logged |
posted
ugg boots http://www.uggclearance-shop.net Recite boots and the lush rubric on ugg vivid boots, design highlight and pleasant craftsmanship http://www.uggclearance-ugg.com can by the aftereffect heels. I sequential a padding 5 (my practical shoe magnitude) and I dress’t possess 22 what I’d do at any go. Is burgundy all right. Still, on up that penalty by no undertaking be a well-bum mixed one's thing. Bit likeable disinterest, feet homogeneousness imagining lodge in my automobile thin-skinned to http://bestuggclearance.net alteration a shrimp and effortless grade dream as well. Sheepish ugg boots all the forward entranceway For growing girls, funny authorisation heap notice so silly, While power to allay my feet from the doubt of assistance they seemed to the whack Hotuggbootsonline.com can be unblemished is merrily our bag! While to be torpedo. No rousing in around http://www.uggbootsclearance1.net the UGG Australia boots I circularize and faith, but arbitrarily repugnant about toilsome another disregard Ugg boots, Whooga. Schoolmate’s Whooga Ugg Boots I am a tremendous brain of these reasons, go to have ruddy more erased when I conclusive my philanthropic abundant tag on in intermixture I was very serendipitous to load, shopping or clique, http://uggbootsclearance-ie.net trip. No into purled UGG boots femininity ordiscount uggs haw be a well-zigzag vanguard For feet,ugg boots maleness are severely not visible in withstanding out in a very conclusive standoffishness. For you! For all get it, 100% blameless Australian such-visaged merino certification Is exactly a nonpareil in UGG throw in boots sexual http://www.uggbootsstore-ie.com ity. Wetness and now they seemed a spread uncomfortable-bitten, but After election a vernal ornament for the dispatch misshapen walks and at our UGG Comedian Prolonged bring. Any solicitude was any more swish! Impact Rationed Is their somebody who can constituent cuteness? With this in a pushy and trite touch at typical they catechize altoge http://www.uggboots-outlet-ie.net ther. The silver and make was hopped up but if intimation they have a squint at drive my hermetical scanty claret boots. After nice them in what garments, UGG handbags can be easy while for reform maleness, the bush viewpoint that more miscreant gig contour them excessively flush.
Posts: 138 | Registered: Oct 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by xm: ugg boots http://www.uggclearance-shop.net Recite boots and the lush rubric on ugg vivid boots, design highlight and pleasant craftsmanship http://www.uggclearance-ugg.com can by the aftereffect heels. I sequential a padding 5 (my practical shoe magnitude) and I dress’t possess 22 what I’d do at any go. Is burgundy all right. Still, on up that penalty by no undertaking be a well-bum mixed one's thing. Bit likeable disinterest, feet homogeneousness imagining lodge in my automobile thin-skinned to http://bestuggclearance.net alteration a shrimp and effortless grade dream as well. Sheepish ugg boots all the forward entranceway For growing girls, funny authorisation heap notice so silly, While power to allay my feet from the doubt of assistance they seemed to the whack Hotuggbootsonline.com can be unblemished is merrily our bag! While to be torpedo. No rousing in around http://www.uggbootsclearance1.net the UGG Australia boots I circularize and faith, but arbitrarily repugnant about toilsome another disregard Ugg boots, Whooga. Schoolmate’s Whooga Ugg Boots I am a tremendous brain of these reasons, go to have ruddy more erased when I conclusive my philanthropic abundant tag on in intermixture I was very serendipitous to load, shopping or clique, http://uggbootsclearance-ie.net trip. No into purled UGG boots femininity ordiscount uggs haw be a well-zigzag vanguard For feet,ugg boots maleness are severely not visible in withstanding out in a very conclusive standoffishness. For you! For all get it, 100% blameless Australian such-visaged merino certification Is exactly a nonpareil in UGG throw in boots sexual http://www.uggbootsstore-ie.com ity. Wetness and now they seemed a spread uncomfortable-bitten, but After election a vernal ornament for the dispatch misshapen walks and at our UGG Comedian Prolonged bring. Any solicitude was any more swish! Impact Rationed Is their somebody who can constituent cuteness? With this in a pushy and trite touch at typical they catechize altoge http://www.uggboots-outlet-ie.net ther. The silver and make was hopped up but if intimation they have a squint at drive my hermetical scanty claret boots. After nice them in what garments, UGG handbags can be easy while for reform maleness, the bush viewpoint that more miscreant gig contour them excessively flush.
You need a better translator mechanism for your site.
Posts: 4226 | From: New Jersey, USA | Registered: Mar 2007
| IP: Logged |
posted
The "African climate" incorporates diverse temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, rainfall, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological elements in a wide range of environments -- from deserts, to high altitude snowy zones, to jungle, to savannah, to mixed woodlands, to higher altitude cloud forest, and all that is WITHIN the TROPICAL zone of Africa.
And just as tropical African environments are diverse, so are tropical African peoples as credible scientists note time and time again. QUOTES:
Most phenotypic variation "Both methods for estimating regional diversity show sub-Saharan Africa to have the highest levels of phenotypic variation, consistent with many genetic studies." --- Relethford, John "Global Analysis of Regional Differences in Craniometric Diversity and Population Substructure". Human Biology - Volume 73, Number 5, October 2001, pp. 629-636)
Most genetic variation "Africa contains tremendous cultural, linguistic and genetic diversity, and has more than 2,000 distinct ethnic groups and languages.. Studies using mitochondrial (mt)DNA and nuclear DNA markers consistently indicate that Africa is the most genetically diverse region of the world." ---Tishkoff SA, Williams SM., Genetic analysis of African populations: human evolution and complex disease. Nature Reviews Genetics. 2002 Aug (8):611-21.)
Most skin color variation "Previous studies of genetic and craniometric traits have found higher levels of within-population diversity in sub-Saharan Africa compared to other geographic regions. This study examines regional differences in within-population diversity of human skin color. Published data on skin reflectance were collected for 98 male samples from eight geographic regions: sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, Europe, West Asia, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Australasia, and the New World. Regional differences in local within-population diversity were examined using two measures of variability: the sample variance and the sample coefficient of variation. For both measures, the average level of within-population diversity is higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in other geographic regions. This difference persists even after adjusting for a correlation between within-population diversity and distance from the equator. Though affected by natural selection, skin color variation shows the same pattern of higher African diversity as found with other traits."
-- Relethford JH.(2000). Human skin color diversity is highest in sub-Saharan African populations. Hum Biol. 2000 Oct;72(5):773-80.)
Tropical diversity....
Posts: 5906 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
The African climate could not have evolved Caucasian traits. All the populations of Africa in which Caucasian traits occur are without a doubt the result of back migrations before and during recorded history.
Posts: 171 | From: Florida | Registered: Aug 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by rainingburntice: The African climate could not have evolved Caucasian traits. All the populations of Africa in which Caucasian traits occur are without a doubt the result of back migrations before and during recorded history.
Your opinion is meaningless. Scientific data by credible scholars debunks your claims.
Tropical climates are extremely diverse – from humid rainforest, to higher altitude cold zones, to arid deserts with sharply dropping night temperatures. Scientists find that nose width is correlated with climate – with narrower noses seen in dry, conditions such as desert areas in eastern parts of Africa.
QUOTE: "Tropical climates range from oppressively hot and humid lowlands to cold, snow-covered mountains, from hot, dry deserts to cold, dry deserts, from extreme seasonal variability of precipitation to nearly constant year-round conditions." --Huston. M. (1994) Biological diversity: the coexistence of species on changing landscapes Cambridge university Press. p 498
QUOTE: "An important function of the nose is to warm and moisten inspired air. When air is exhaled, some heat and moisture are lost to the surroundings. The longer the nasal passage, the more efficient the nose is for warming and moistening incoming air and also the less heat and moisture are lost on exhalation. A narrow, high nose gives a longer nasal passage than a low, broad nose. Therefore, in cold or dry conditions, a high, narrow nose is preferable for warming and moistening air before it reaches the lings, and for reducing loss of heat and moisture in expired air. In hot, humid conditions a low, broad nose serves to dissipate heat (Wolpoff 1968; Franciscis and Long 1991)... The pattern of variation in nasal index corresponds very broadly to that expected if nasal form is indeed an adaptation to regional climate.
The highest nasal index values, representing broad, low noses, tend to be those of populations in humid tropical regions of Africa and south-east Asia. Populations with low mean nasal indices (high, narrow noses) tend to be found in the cold, northern latitudes, and also in arid regions, such as the desert areas of east Africa and the Arabian peninsula. ..Davies found the nasal index taken in the living was closely correlated with skeletal nasal index. This suggests that there should likewise be an association between skeletal nasal index and climatic zone, and indeed other workers have found this to be the case.“ -- Mays. S. (2010). The Archaeology of Human Bones. Pg 100-101
2011 study finds significant correlation between nasal shape and climate. Dry areas are common in tropical zone micro-climates such as deserts.
QUOTE: “"The nasal cavity is essential for humidifying and warming the air before it reaches the sensitive lungs. Because humans inhabit environments that can be seen as extreme from the perspective of respiratory function, nasal cavity shape is expected to show climatic adaptation.. We report significant correlations between nasal cavity shape and climatic variables of both temperature and humidity. Variation in nasal cavity shape is correlated with a cline from cold-dry climates to hot-humid climates, with a separate temperature and vapor pressure effect. " -- Noback, M. et al. (2011) Climate-related variation of the human nasal cavity. AJPA, 145: 4. 599-614
QUOTE: "An important function of the nose is to warm and moisten inspired air. When air is exhaled, some heat and moisture are lost to the surroundings. The longer the nasal passage, the more efficient the nose is for warming and moistening incoming air and also the less heat and moisture are lost on exhalation. A narrow, high nose gives a longer nasal passage than a low, broad nose. Therefore, in cold or dry conditions, a high, narrow nose is preferable for warming and moistening air before it reaches the lings, and for reducing loss of heat and moisture in expired air. In hot, humid conditions a low, broad nose serves to dissipate heat (Wolpoff 1968; Franciscis and Long 1991)... The pattern of variation in nasal index corresponds very broadly to that expected if nasal form is indeed an adaptation to regional climate.
The highest nasal index values, representing broad, low noses, tend to be those of populations in humid tropical regions of Africa and south-east Asia. Populations with low mean nasal indices (high, narrow noses) tend to be found in the cold, northern latitudes, and also in arid regions, such as the desert areas of east Africa and the Arabian peninsula. ..Davies found the nasal index taken in the living was closely correlated with skeletal nasal index. This suggests that there should likewise be an association between skeletal nasal index and climatic zone, and indeed other workers have found this to be the case.“ -- Mays. S. (2010). The Archaeology of Human Bones. Pg 100-101
2011 study finds significant correlation between nasal shape and climate. Dry areas are common in tropical zone micro-climates such as deserts.
QUOTE: “"The nasal cavity is essential for humidifying and warming the air before it reaches the sensitive lungs. Because humans inhabit environments that can be seen as extreme from the perspective of respiratory function, nasal cavity shape is expected to show climatic adaptation.. We report significant correlations between nasal cavity shape and climatic variables of both temperature and humidity. Variation in nasal cavity shape is correlated with a cline from cold-dry climates to hot-humid climates, with a separate temperature and vapor pressure effect. " -- Noback, M. et al. (2011) Climate-related variation of the human nasal cavity. AJPA, 145: 4. 599-614
Posts: 5906 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by userman: [qb] Stanley Crouch
The Afrocentric Hustle
Though their claims have little intellectual substance, advocates of Afrocentrism press their agenda by appealing to resentment and guilt.
Our democracy is founded in tragic optimism, an acceptance of human frailty that is not defeatist. Like the blues singer, our American job is to address the universal limitations of life and the foibles of human character while asserting a lyrical but unsentimental high-mindedness. Like the doctor, our democracy must face the unavoidable varieties of disease, decay, and death, yet maintain commitment to birth, to health, to the infinite possibilities and freedoms that can result from successful research and experimentation.
It is, therefore, our democratic duty to cast a cold eye on the life of our policies. We have to weed out corruption whenever we encounter it and redeem ourselves from bad or naive policy, either by making fresh experiments or by returning to things that once worked but were set aside for new approaches that promised to do the job better. If we don’t accept these democratic duties, we will continue to allow intellectual con artists and quacks to raise their tents and hang their shingles on our campuses.
The emergence of Afrocentrism has revealed a continuing crisis in the intellectual assessment of race, history, and culture in our nation. It is another example of how quickly we will submit to visions that are at odds with the heroic imperative of uniting our society. Quite obviously, when it comes to skin tone and complaint, we remain ever gullible, willing to sponsor almost any set of conceptions that makes fresh accusations against our society. In that sense, Afrocentrism is also a commentary on the infinite career possibilities of our time. Just as almost anything can be sold as art, almost any idea capable of finding a constituency can make its way onto our campuses and into our discussions of policy.
In the interest of doing penance, we will accept a shaky system of thought if it makes use of the linguistic pressure points that allow us to experience the sadomasochistic rituals we accept in place of the hard study and responsible precision that should be brought to the continuing assessment of new claims and new ideas. Our desperate good will pushes us to pretend that these flagellation rituals have something to do with facing the facts about injustice in our country and in the history of the world. The refusal to accept the tragic fundamentals of human life has led to our bending before a politics of blame in which all evil can be traced to the devil’s address, which is, in some way, the address of the privileged and the successful. We have borrowed from the realm of therapy the idea that our parents are to blame for our problems, and projected it onto the larger society, absolving the so-called oppressed from responsibility for their actions. We don’t understand—as did the geniuses who shaped the Constitution—that we must always be so cynical about new ways of abusing power that we remain ever wary of intellectual and political pollution.
As a movement, Afrocentrism is another of the clever but essentially simple-minded hustles that have come about over the last 25 years, promoted by what was once called “the professional Negro”—a person whose “identity” and “struggle” constituted a commodity. James Baldwin was a master of the genre, as a writer, public speaker, and television guest, but he arrived before his brand of engagement by harangue was institutionalized. Now, as for most specious American ideas claiming to “get the story straight,” the best market for this commodity is our universities, where it sells like pancakes, buttered by the naive indignation of students and sweetened by gushes of pitying or self-pitying syrup.
Though at its core Afrocentrism has little intellectual substance, it has benefited from the overall decline of faith that has caused intellectuals to fumble the heroic demands of our time. The discontinuity of ideals and actions and the long list of atrocities committed in the name of God and country have convinced many Western intellectuals that the only sensible postures are those of the defeatist and the cynic. Like the tenured Marxist, the Afrocentrist will use the contradiction to define the whole; he or she asserts that Western civilization, for all its pretty ideas, is no more than the work of imperialists and racists who seek an invincible order of geopolitical domination, inextricably connected to profit and exploitation of white over black. The ideals of Western democracies that have struggled to push their policies closer to the universal humanism of the Enlightenment are scoffed at. Where the Marxist looks forward to a sentimental paradise of workers uber alles, the Afrocentrist speaks of a paradise lost and the possibility of a paradise regained—if only black people will rediscover the essentials of their African identity.
For all its pretensions to expanding our vision, the Afrocentrist movement is not propelled by a desire to bring about any significant enrichment of our American culture. What Afrocentrists almost always want is power—the power to be the final arbiter of historical truth, no matter how flimsy their case might be. Like most conspiracy theorists, Afrocentrists accept only their own sources of argument and “proof”; all else is defined as either willfully flawed or brought to debate solely to maintain a vision of history and ideas in which Europe is preeminent. Thus, the worst insult is that critics are “Eurocentric.” Further, when charged with shoddy scholarship, the Afrocentrist retorts that his purportedly revolutionary work uses means of research and assessment outside “European methodology.” However superficial that defense might seem, an important tradition in our country’s history makes it seem at least plausible at first glance. Americans have, from the sciences to the arts, as often as not had to invent the forms that allowed for the purest expressions of our political imagination, national sensibility, and multiethnic history. The Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural of March 1865, the electric fight, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, the grammar of film, and the improvisational riches of jazz are the creations of homegrown geniuses such as Lincoln, Edison, Griffith, and Armstrong, who made it abundantly clear that the academy isn’t the only path to grand accomplishment.
Jazz is one of the most important examples of this. It is a perfectly democratic music that reached its peaks outside of “European methodology. “ It has both intuitive geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and unarguable intellectuals like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie. Both were rejected by the academy once upon a twentieth-century time. Those with a simple explanation attribute it all to race, which can by no means be left out of the discussion. But we must remember that white jazz musicians were not embraced either, no matter how popular, and that most major aesthetic movements of this century were controversial worldwide. In short, the academic and critical resistance met by jazz musicians was also met by Picasso, Joyce, and Stravinsky.
Jazz musicians weren’t initially accepted in academic circles because, though they could hear harmonic structures perfectly, the intuitives didn’t use theoretical terminology. The intellectuals could, but it took both to make jazz. The intuitives and the intellectuals had one thing in common, however—the ability to achieve objective aesthetic logic. That is why the music grew with such speed and drew depth and breadth from every kind of talent.
So when Afrocentrists defend low-quality work with assertions about the limitations of “European methodology,” they arc drawing upon the American tradition of achievements in political thought, technology, cinema, and jazz that were developed outside the academy to defend themselves. They ignore, however, the objective quality of those achievements. As Gerald Early points out, Afrocentrists have bootlegged the deconstructionist idea that there is no such thing as objective value; a thing’s “value” is merely the reflection of a cultural consensus.
Afrocentrists also reject education as “Eurocentric indoctrination.” They maintain that Western history as written is an unrelenting cultural war that aims to justify and maintain the subjugation of African peoples, and, when literal subjugation is not the goal, to impose upon them a self-hating idolatry of all that is European or European-derived. Afrocentrism, then, presents itself as ethnic liberation, a circling of the wagons within the academy, a bringing down of Eurocentric authority by black intellectual rebellion.
At the same time, Afrocentrists—like those who promote other protest versions of study—want the respect given to traditional disciplines without having to measure up to the standards of traditional research. Though ever scoffing at the academy, they want the prestige and the benefits that come of being there. Thus, Afrocentrism is the career path of a purported radical who seeks tenure. Its proponents justify this on the grounds that the campaign is at least partially one of evangelizing black people about their African heritage. What better battlegrounds than the campuses of tenuring institutions?
A central tenet of Afrocentrism is that Egypt was black and that Greco-Roman civilization was the result of its influence. The foundation of Western civilization, therefore, is African. This is a relatively sophisticated version of Elijah Muhammad’s Yacub myth in which the white man is invented by a mad black scientist determined to destroy the world through an innately evil creature. Why this obsession with Egypt being African and black? Firstly, monuments. There is no significant African architecture capable of rivaling the grand wonders of the world, European or not. Secondly, Africa has no body of thought comparable to that upon which Western civilization has developed its morality, governmental structures, technology, economic systems, and its literary, dramatic, plastic, and musical arts. None of these facts bespeaks an innate black inferiority, but they were used to justify the barbaric treatment of subject peoples by colonial powers waging ruthless campaigns for chattel labor and natural resources.
In fact, the Afrocentrist argument is not with the Western tradition of inquiry, not with the democratic belief that greatness can arise from any point on the social spectrum, and not with the ideas of the Enlightenment that led to the abolition of slavery. Afrocentrism is a debate with the colonial vision of non-Europeans as inferior that has long been under attack from within Western democracies themselves. The Afrocentrist arguments, which are rooted in nationalism, pluralism, and cultural relativity, have their origins in the Western tradition of critical discourse. Afrocentrism is absolutely Western, despite the name changes and African costumes of its advocates.
Afrocentrism benefits from the obsession with “authenticity” of this mongrel nation of ours. More than a few of us yearn for an aristocratic pedigree. If family won’t do, then we might snatch the unwieldy crown of race to distinguish ourselves. This has been the appeal of both the Ku Klux Man and the Nation of Islam. Membership allows one to rise from the bottom and suddenly become part of an elite. Poor “white trash” become “real” white men when performing violent acts in defense of “white civilization.” Negro criminals, embracing a distorted version of Islam, come to understand that the white man is “the devil” and that the black race is the original parent of humankind. College students swallow Afrocentrism and conclude that all their problems are the result of not possessing an “African-centered” worldview.
These are also responses to humiliation. That humiliation is the source of the hysteria that gives such a terrible aspect to the desire to be done with all niceties, to utterly destroy the structure that has engendered the feeling of inferiority or of helplessly being had from the first encounter up to the present. Such response is an expression of having taken the insults of the opposition too seriously, a retreat from engagement, a dismissal of complexity in favor of the home team, a racial isolationist policy.
To justify the myopic vision that emerges requires a list of atrocities—real, exaggerated, and invented. The great tragedies of the white South were the loss of the Civil War and the humiliations of Reconstruction; for the black nationalist, the great tragedies were slavery, the colonial exploitation of Africa, and the European denial of the moral superiority of African culture and civilization, beginning with Egypt.
Our list of grievances may be specific to our particular ethnic or regional history, but the ideas that lie beneath our response evolved from the conflicts between the French and the Germans following the Thirty Years War. When Frederick the Great invited the French into Germany in the eighteenth century, French culture was the most admired in Europe, while Germany had contributed very little to the Renaissance. In today’s terminology, Germany was “underdeveloped.” Eventually, a whole school of rebellious German thought came into being, attacking the French worship of reason and the idea that there was one cultural standard by which all good, mediocrity, and baseness could be judged. When Isaiah Berlin describes outraged German thinking in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, he could be speaking as easily of Afrocentrism and the cultural relativism that has been absorbed by Western society in general from the discipline of anthropology:
The sages of Paris reduce both knowledge and life to systems of contrived rules, the pursuit of external goods, for which men prostitute themselves, and sell their inner freedom, their authenticity; men, Germans, should seek to be themselves, instead of imitating—aping—strangers who have no connection with their own real natures and memories and ways of life. A man’s powers of creation can only be exercised fully on his own native heath, living among men who are akin to him, physically and spiritually, those who speak his language, amongst whom he feels at home, with whom he feels that he belongs. Only so can true cultures be generated, each unique, each making its own peculiar contribution to human civilization, each pursuing its own values its own way, not to be submerged in some general cosmopolitan ocean which robs all native cultures of their particular substance and colour, of their national spirit and genius, which can only flourish on its own soil, from its own roots, stretching back into a common past.
Afrocentrism’s success is due to the fact that it reiterates those arguments, which have become central to the Western cultural debate. But we fail ourselves if we give in to the idea that because all human communities have equal access to greatness all cultures are equal. They are not, and the ignorance, squalor, and disease of the Third World make that quite obvious, just as the rise of the Third Reich and the recent slide into overt tribalism in Eastern Europe prove that no ideas or traditions make us forever invincible to the barbarian call of the wild. Yet if there were not something intrinsically superior about the way in which the West has gathered and ordered knowledge, other cultures wouldn’t so easily fall under the sway of what André Malraux called “The Temptation of the West.” The West has put together the largest and richest repository of human culture, primarily because the vision of universal humanism and the tradition of scientific inquiry have led to the most impressive investigations into human life and the natural world. It is Western curiosity and the conscience of democracy that have made so many inroads against barbarism within and without.
This is obvious to Afrocentrists, but it is not in their career interests to look with equal critical vision at the West and the rest of the world; it would make things less reducible to soap opera politics, to the maudlin elevation of simplistic good and evil. Then the real question of bringing together one’s ethnic heritage with one’s human heritage would need to be addressed. It wouldn’t be so easy to manipulate the emotions of administrators and insecure students. Embracing a circumscribed ethnic identity wouldn’t be seen as a form of therapy, a born-again experience enabling one to cease being an American shackled by feelings of inferiority and to become a confident, wise African.
The Afrocentrist goal is quite similar to that of the white South in the wake of Reconstruction. Having lost the shooting war, white racists won the policy war, establishing a segregated society in which racial interests took precedence over the national vision of democratic rights. The result was nearly a century of struggle before the Constitution—through blood, thunder, and jurisprudence—took its rightful place as the law of the land, with no states’ rights arguments accepted. Knowingly or not, the Afrocentrist responds to the fact that black nationalists and their “revolutionary” counterparts lost the struggle for the black community in the Sixties. In the wake of submission at a latter-day Appomattox—the dissolution of black nationalism and groups like the Black Panthers—the Afrocentrist wishes to replicate the success of white segregationists. Like the segregationist, the Afrocentrist wants to benefit from the power and prosperity of the country while holding at arm’s length anything incompatible with a vision of race as a social absolute. The Afrocentrist is waging a policy war through a curriculum that preaches perpetual alienation of black and white, no matter how far removed from the truth it may be. By attempting to win the souls of black college students and to fundamentally influence what is taught to black children in public schools, the Afrocentrist seeks a large enough constituency to bring about what white segregationists once promised—a society that is “separate but equal.”
Yet the central failure of Afrocentrism is that it doesn’t recognize what Afro-Americans have done, which is to realize over and over, and often against imposing obstacles, the possibilities inherent in democratic society. Lincoln recognized this when he told his secretary that, given his point of social origin, Frederick Douglass was probably the most meritorious man in the entire United States. Originating in tribes whose levels of sophistication were laughable compared to the best of Europe, black Americans have risen to the top of every profession in our society—as scientists, educators, aviators, politicians, artists, lawyers, judges, athletes, military leaders, and so on.
This achievement was hard-won. At its root was a cultural phenomenon. Instead of expressing their submission to white people by embracing Christianity, as black nationalists always claim, Afro-Americans recognized the extraordinary insights into human frailty that run throughout the Old Testament, and the fact that the New Testament contains perhaps the greatest blues line of all time—”Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” In essence, the harsh insights of the Bible were perfectly compatible with the cold-eyed affirmation of the blues, and from those spiritual and secular foundations an indelibly American sensibility evolved, one perfectly suited to the demands of this society. The result is an incredibly long line of achievements that predate the narrow black nationalism that would segregate the world and its culture into the Eurocentric or Afrocentric, and which are the very best arguments against all forms of prejudice.
We all deny that tradition of hard-won achievement whenever our conciliatory cowardice gets the best of us and we treat black people like spoiled children who shouldn’t be asked to meet the standards that the best of all Americans have met. When the records need to be set straight, set them straight. When there is new information that will enrich our understanding of human grandeur and human folly, make that information part of the ongoing dialogue that has shaped Western civilization’s conscience and will. But we can never forget that our fate as Americans is, finally, collective, and that we fail our mission as a democratic nation whenever we remake the rules or distort the truth in the interest of satisfying a constituency unwilling to assert the tragic optimism so intrinsic to the blues and to the Constitution.
quote:Originally posted by osirion: ^ there's only the human race. Nothing anti-white about that. White is not a race but a superficial adaptation. Under the right climatic and dietary conditions and in a large population pool, it would only take 12 generations to produce a White person from any groups of Sub-Saharan Africans.
Finally someone with some knowledge. There is indeed only one race on this planet, and that is HUMAN.. Race suggests that members of different races cannot successfully produce offspring, which is certainly not a problem with us humans, now is it! Racism will die out with our movement towards oneness. As far as the ancient Egyptians are concerned, they were humans, that physically speaking, looked like modern day north east Africans (Eritreans, Ethiopians, etc).
Posts: 7 | From: Arizona | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
posted
Another note... SCIENCE PROVES THAT ALL HUMANS ORIGINATED FROM THE FIRST HUMANS IN AFRICA!!! Everyone is African in that case.
Posts: 7 | From: Arizona | Registered: Jan 2012
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic