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| quote: | Originally posted by Palladium
nunca le he entendido a su sig. 
explicacion...por favor  |
Aquí está la explicación que buscas. Te recomiendo que lo leas todo. Es interesante e informativo:
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Sincerely, I can't find a reason to believe in it[race], neither socially nor biologically. |
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The main problem with "race" is that its concept is deeply flawed. By the way, there are parts that I shamelessly nicked from Wikipedia for convinience sake.
1. History
Ethnocentrism is a quite interesting feature that, according to some, is common to all societies. Groups often have the tendency of seeing things their way (naturally), and labelling themselves as the "right ones" (once again, that's quite natural). The Christian faith, back in the time when America had just been discovered, used to say all natives had no soul, and they had to be saved. There was a clear concept of "us" and "them".
Fast forward to the XVII century. The Europeans had been to Africa, America, to the Far East and pretty much everywhere else simply because Europe sucked and they wanted to check if there was a descent place somewhere. They never really agreed on that but they were having some interesting conclusions:
The first published classification of humans into distinct races seems to be Francois Bernier's Nouvelle division de la terre par les differents especes ou races qui l'habitent ("New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it"), published in 1684. Bernier distinguished four "races":
- Europeans, including South Asians and North Africans
- Far Easterners and Native Americans
- Sub-Saharan Africans
- Lapps
It did make sense to him. Arabs and Europeans don't look that much different. White skin (or a bit tanned, if you count Mediterranean people), deep eyes and so on. Both Far Easterners and Native Americans had faces that seemed "flat" and "round" to Europeans, and their eyes were narrower too. Sub-saharan Africans had incredibly darker skins, and they had this really cool hair. And, yes, there were the Lapps, also known as Finns. Their difference? Your guess is as good as mine.
It was not precise (at all), but highly political. All the differences mentioned have little relationship with any other heritable characteristics, not to mention the striking differences that also happen inside these races (such as eye colour among the Europeans). Racial purity has no clear biological meaning, and it was difficult as hell to know what borderline individuals were. Indeed, typological model wasn't a good idea. The phenotype of an individual organism is either its total physical appearance and constitution, or a specific manifestation of a trait, such as size or eye color, that varies between individuals. Phenotype is determined to some extent by genotype, or by the identity of the alleles that an individual carries at one or more positions on the chromosomes. Many phenotypes are determined by multiple genes and influenced by environmental factors. Thus, the identity of one or a few known alleles does not always enable prediction of the phenotype. The interaction between genotype and phenotype has often been described using a simple equation:
genotype + environment -> phenotype
Besides, the Finns felt left-out. Time to move on.
The racial differences were so obvious that no one could ever agree on what the difference was but, boy, were scientists eager to find it. Among the 19th-century naturalists who defined the field were Georges Cuvier, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz, Charles Pickering (Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution, 1848), and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Cuvier enumerated three races, Pritchard seven, Agassiz eight, and Pickering eleven. Heh. Blumenbach division was quite popular though:
- the Caucasian, or white race, to which belong the greater part of the European nations and those of Western Asia
- the Mongolian, or yellow race, occupying Tartary, China, Japan, etc.
- the Ethiopian, or black race, occupying most of Africa (except the north), Australia, New Guinea and other Pacific Islands
- the American, or red race, comprising the Indians of North and South America
- the Malayan, or brown race, which occupies the islands of the Indian Archipelago
Then people realised the "red race" was too similar to the "yellow race". It's a shame it didn't result in the rise of the "orange race", instead they later realised the Malayan were Mongolian too. Then we were left with 3 groups:
- Caucasoid
- Negroid
- Mongoloid (lol)
Mongoloid meant something completely different back then, I know. It was soon improved by an American anthropologist called Mr. Coon.
- Negroid or Congoid
- Caucasoid
- Mongoloid
- Australoid
- Capoid
Stereotypes galore, Coon tried too hard. He assigned even some populations on the northern fringe of sub-Saharan Africa to a broadly defined Caucasoid race, leading to charges that peoples with recorded ancient civilizations were being defined out of the black race, in order to depict the remaining "Congoid" race as lacking in culture.
Coon and his work were widely accused, even at the time, of obsolete thinking or outright racism, but some of his terminology continues in use to a lesser degree even today, even though the "-oid" terms now have offensive connotations [1], perhaps because his liberal opponents who de-emphasized the significance and definability of race, naturally did not introduce any superseding classification to drive them out of use. In addition to references in legitimate scientific discussion, Coon's macro-racial classification, as well as his detailed list of European "subraces", is popular with racist groups who agree with the existence of distinct racial types, and is widely reproduced on "white nationalist" websites.
In Blumenbach's day, physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., went hand in hand with declarations of group moral character, intellectual capacity, and other aptitudes. The "fairness" and relatively high brows of "Caucasians" were held to be apt physical expressions of a loftier mentality and a more generous spirit. The epicanthic folds around the eyes of "Mongolians" and their slightly sallow outer epidermal layer supposedly bespoke a crafty, literal-minded nature. The dark skin, relatively sloping craniums and other common traits among "Ethiopians" were taken as wholesale proof of a closer genetic proximity to the other great apes, even though the skin of chimpanzees and gorillas beneath the hair is whiter than the average "Caucasian" skin, that the thin lips characteristic of "Caucasians" are actually closer in form to the lips of lower primates, that "high foreheads" can be seen in orangutans and some monkey species, and that the straight and relatively profuse body hair of Europeans is considerably more "ape-like" than the sparse, tightly curled body hair of "Ethiopians". By Coon's day, group physical characteristics were, for the most part, unhitched from assessments of group character and aptitude, and, since then, those maintaining the mere reality of physical group traits are often suspected of carrying the old malign racism.
We weren't doomed though. Remember Darwin? Yep, that one. In his book dealing with the origins of race from 1871, The Descent of Man, noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many "races" there actually were (Darwin was himself a monogenist on the question of race, believing that all humans were of the same species and finding "race" to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction between groups):
Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty- three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shows that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.
1.3 Personal notes on historical characteristics of race
Out of all these people, at least Darwin did make sense. Races are not something that actually exists, but rather something some people strive to implement. One explanation for that could be the natural existense of some cognitive biases, which lead to an exaggerated focus on small differences rather than the common features. Let's check, shall we?
Tom Cruise - Probably no one here, who acknowledges the existence of races, would label him as anything other than Caucasian so I'm going with that. Green eyes, brown hair, fair skin... Caucasians are usually known for being tall, aren't they? Heh, let's ignore this part. His skin is white nonetheless and that's what matters, isn't it?
George Clooney - He's of American-Irish descent. Caucasian? Yeah, could be. He's got the same nose structure as Tom Cruise (although Tom's nose is more rounded in the end). His got this tanned skin, darker hair colour and darker eye colour but yeah, caucasian nonetheless, right? I mean, it wouldn't make sense to place him and Mr. Cruise in different races, right? Other than height, hair colour and eye colour, they aren't much different.
- Wherever Clooney fits, we should include Antonio Banderas too. Same hair colour, same skin colour, same eye colour... some people would argue he's "Latin" though, whereas Clooney isn't. Appearently, no matter how similar you look, if you're born in another country, that could mean you belong to a whole new race. If so, should we still use personal traits as basis? Meh, go figure.
[url=http://www.imdb.com/gallery/mptv/1406/Mptv/1406/21726_0134.jpg?path=pgallery&path_key=Reeves,%20Keanu]Keanu Reeves - He was born in Lebanon, wasn't he? He's not Arab though, (Hey, doesn't Banderas look quite Arab too?) so unlike Banderas, his birthplace doesn't seem to change anything here. He's Caucasian, right? I mean, look at him and look at the previous guys. Although he's quite different from Clooney (I give you that), he's not much different from Tom Cruise or any other black-haired Caucasian. Never mind his Chinese ancestry.
Jet Li - A funny thing about Asian people is that they're usually called "yellow", while their skin colour is any closer to yellow than the skin colour of other races. It was a reference to the fellow Chinese ladies who used to wash their clothes in the Yellow River and their clothes had this "yellow" hue. Heck, I've seen Japanese blooded people whose skin colour was a lot darker than my skin, and Japanese people whose skin colour was lighter than mine. Appearently, thanks to the human ability to get tanned, skin colour is not a good way to measure races. Hair colour, black. Eye colour, brown. Not different from many Caucasians, is it? Some people would still want to label him as Asian because of his full-moon face (although it's somewhat common among Caucasians as well) and his narrow eyes. If eye shape were a good way of distinguishing people, we wouldn't be able to distinguish Africans from Caucasians, as their eye shape aren't as different as they are among their own groups. Unless someone tell me that "Asians" have something completely exclusive and that is uniform among other groups, they're Caucasians as well.
Vin Diesel - We already concluded that having a tanned skin is not enough to group someone in another race. Hair colour? The same as Reeves and Clooney and Banderas. Eye colour? Once again, the same as Reeves, Clooney and Banderas. His nose is more rounded, and reminds me of Tom Cruise's nose as well. Weird, isn't this a "negro" feature? Noses are usually very different even from family members, so we can't really base our views on that. Caucasian. Next.
[url=http://www.imdb.com/gallery/granitz/2477/Events/2477/ChrisTucke_Pimen_2782282_400.jpg?path=pgallery&path_key=Tucker,%20Chris%20(I)]Chris Tucker[/img] - If his sking was lighter, he wouldn't be much different from Vin Diesel, would he? By now, I don't think it's necessary to explore all his personal traits and come to the conclusion that the differences are not enough to label him into another race, right? Yeah, he's caucasian too.
However, I could've found at least 3 races among these people or, if I were a picky bastard, one different race per person.
2. Socially
After reading that much, you might ask yourself - why do people call me ? Simply because it's a social construction, or social construct, which according to the school of social constructionism, is an idea which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society. Unfortunately though, this sort of social construct isn't really benefical to society. Want an example of how races can vary among different countries and how someone born "black" could die "white"?
2.1 Race in the United States
In the United States since its early history, Native Americans, African-Americans and European-Americans were classified as belonging to different races. But the criteria for membership in these races were radically different. The government considered anyone with "one drop" of "Black blood" (or indigenous African ancestry) to be Black. In contrast, Indians were defined by a certain percentage of "Indian blood" due in large part to American slavery ethics. To be White, one had to have "pure" White ancestry. These differing criteria for assignation of membership to particular races had relatively little to do with biology and far more to do with White supremacy?the social, geopolitical and economic agendas of dominant Whites vis-a-vis subordinate Blacks and Native Americans?and racism. At the time, Blacks were valuable commodities as slaves; and Native Americans, whose vast lands were the ultimate target of acquisition in a doctrine of Manifest Destiny, were subject to marginalization and multiple episodic localized campaigns of extermination.
According to such anthropologists as Gerald Sider, the goal of such racial designations was to concentrate power, wealth, privilege and land in the hands of Caucasians in a society of White hegemony and White privilege (Sider 1996; see also Fields 1990). Using the "one drop" rule, it was easy for someone to be categorized as Black. The offspring of an African slave and a White master or mistress was considered Black. Significant in terms of the economics of slavery, such a person also would be a chattel slave, adding to the wealth of the slaveowner. By comparison, it was harder for someone to be classified as Indian. A person of Indian and African parentage automatically was classified as Black. By contrast, the offspring of only a few generations of miscegenation between Indians and Whites likely would not have been considered Indian at all?at least not in a legal sense. Indians could have treaty rights to land, but because an individual with one Indian great-grandparent no longer was classified as Indian, they lost any legal claim to Indian land. The irony is that the same individuals who could be denied legal standing because they were "too White" to claim property rights, were still Indian enough to be considered as "breeds," stigmatized for their Native American ancestry. In an economy that benefited from slave labor, it was useful to have as many Blacks as possible. Conversely, in a nation bent on westward expansion, it was advantageous to diminish the numbers of those who could claim title to Indian lands by simply defining them out of existence. At a time when Whites wielded power over both Blacks and Indians and widely believed in their inherent superiority over people of color, it is no coincidence that the hardest racial group in which to prove membership was the White one.
2.2 Race in Brazil (where everything becomes a bit blurred)
Compared to 19th-century United States, 20th-century Brazil was characterized by a relative absence of sharply defined racial groups. This pattern reflects a different history and different social relations. Basically, race in Brazil was biologized, but in a way that recognized the difference between ancestry (which determines genotype) and phenotypic differences. There, racial identity was not governed by a rigid descent rule. A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only two categories to choose from. Over a dozen racial categories would be recognized in conformity with the combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and no one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred to appearance, not heredity.
One of the most striking consequences of the Brazilian system of racial identification was that parents and children and even brothers and sisters were frequently accepted as representatives of opposite racial types. In a fishing village in the state of Bahia, an investigator showed 100 people pictures of three sisters and were asked to identify the races of each. In only six responses were the sisters identified by the same racial term. Fourteen responses used a different term for each sister. In another experiment nine portraits were shown to a hundred people. Forty different racial types were elicited. It was found, in addition, that a given Brazilian might be called by as many as thirteen different terms by other members of the community. These terms are spread out across practically the entire spectrum of theoretical racial types. A further consequence of the absence of a descent rule was that Brazilians apparently not only disagreed about the racial identity of specific individuals, but they also seemed to be in disagreement about the abstract meaning of the racial terms as defined by words and phrases. For example, 40% of a sample ranked moreno claro as a lighter type than mulato claro, while 60% reversed this order. A further note of confusion is that one person might employ different racial terms to describe the same person over a short time span. The choice of which racial description to use may vary according to both the personal relationships and moods of the individuals involved. The Brazilian census lists one's race according to the preference of the person being interviewed. As a consequence, hundreds of races appeared in the census results, ranging from blue (which is blacker than the usual black) to green (which is whiter than the usual white).
Consequently, people change their racial identity over their lifetimes. To do so is not the same as "passing" in the U.S. It does not require the secrecy and the agonizing withdrawal from friends and family that are necessary in the United States and among Indians of highland Latin America. In Brazil, passing from one race to another can occur with changes in education and economic status. Moreover, a light-skinned person of low status is considered darker than a dark-skinned person of high status.
So, although the identification of a person by race is far more fluid and flexible in Brazil than in the U.S., there still are racial stereotypes and prejudices. African features have been considered less desirable; Blacks have been considered socially inferior, and Whites superior. These white supremacist values seem to be an obvious legacy of European colonization and the slave-based plantation system. The complexity of racial classifications in Brazil is reflective of the extent of miscegenation in Brazilian society, which remains highly, but not strictly, stratified along color lines.
2.3 Personal notes on social characteristics of race
If a person can change their race during their lifetime (as it happens in Brazil) than there's something wrong with it, don't you Ihink? I myself am "white" in Brazil but I`d become "Latino" in the United States... just comes to show how weak the whole concept it.
3. Biologically
Only 16% of biologists believe in race. Should mean something, shouldn't it? |
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