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Demographics Poll: What is your race/ethnicity?

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  • gorgonzolagorgonzola Member Posts: 3,864
    @Balrog99 i gave an insightful to your comment even if homo sapiens is the species and not the race.
    i gave insightful cause to talk of races outside of a scientific academical and unbiased discussion imo is really dangerous, as in the history of humanity it had lead so often to racism, slavery and that kind of atrocities.
    @Alonso as told before in the topic to have all the pink skin races merged in an hypothetical white race but the hispanic/latins out of it is and artificial and cultural way to see the thing.
  • semiticgoddesssemiticgoddess Member Posts: 14,903
    Hispanic doesn't mean from Spain necessarily. It's a mix of white, black, and Native American that tends to be prominent in Spanish speaking areas in the Americas. A person from Spain would generally just be white.
  • gorgonzolagorgonzola Member Posts: 3,864
    edited March 2019
    yep, the problem is that i had a friend from argentina with white skin and blue eyes and a friend from peru with those chineese like eyes and some friends from colombia in which you can clearly see some indio characteristics. all of them was "hispanic" even if their genetic pools were completely different.
    race is all about genetics, not about the area where a person is born.
    EDIT: and when the area a person is coming from is taken in account only in some cases, but not in others, to be born in english speaking areas in the americas goes not grant to black people being of white race, using the area of provenience as criteria to set a race shows itself as even more wrong.
    it is a cultural heritage of a nation that had slavery in modern times and that in my life time had segregation, a cultural heritage that imho should get rid of, as well as should get rid of KKK.

    i would really prefer if the concept of hispanic race would not be used at all.
  • AlonsoAlonso Member Posts: 806
    My last message was quite tongue in cheek. I'm quite certain my race is white. I know how the word Hispanic is used in the US, but it never ceases to amuse me, because in Spain we use it all the time to talk about ourselves (the Spanish word is "hispano").

    By the way, where are you from, @gorgonzola?
  • gorgonzolagorgonzola Member Posts: 3,864
    i am a maccaroni, italian.
  • AlonsoAlonso Member Posts: 806
    Mi sono recentemente innamorato di una donna di Firenze e ho iniziato a imparare l'italiano. Ma non ha funzionato, quindi ho smesso di imparare l'italiano perché mi ha reso triste.
  • gorgonzolagorgonzola Member Posts: 3,864
    Mi ex novia ha vivido 3 años en España.
    Ella habla muy bien español.
    Hace 3 años se fue con un músico, despues de 15 años vivimos juntos,
    Me entristeció, pero con ella aprendí un poco de español. :)
  • semiticgoddesssemiticgoddess Member Posts: 14,903
    i speak english okay i guess
  • lroumenlroumen Member Posts: 2,538
    @semiticgod time for a language poll ;)
  • gorgonzolagorgonzola Member Posts: 3,864
    edited March 2019
    post cancelled
  • Cabal82Cabal82 Member Posts: 76
    Im Czech, but with half Slovakian ancestry. Granpa and grandma from mothers side came to the western part of Czech republic from Slovakia after WW2. Father was Czech.
  • MonoCanallaMonoCanalla Member Posts: 291
    It´s quite obvious that Spanish count as Not-Hispanic White, as it was intended in the poll. Now, in the countries considered to host the "Hispanic" category (almost all America) truly present different degrees of blood mix that allows for many different ethnicites. Just saying Not-Hispanic White can also be found outside Europe (just think in Leo Messi for example).
  • BlastbackBlastback Member Posts: 54
    Scottish Irish and Welsh. So Celtic. Very very Celtic.
  • AlonsoAlonso Member Posts: 806
    Blastback wrote: »
    Scottish Irish and Welsh. So Celtic. Very very Celtic.

    But is that a race? I mean, when I was living in Ireland everybody thought I was a local when they saw me (and before I opened my mouth, of course). There's absolutely no physical trait that distinguishes me from an Irishman, yet all my ancestors have been born in Spain for many generations.
  • semiticgoddesssemiticgoddess Member Posts: 14,903
    The Palestinians and Israelis are basically the same race in terms of genetics and physical traits, but we still call them distinct groups for identity reasons. Same goes for Indians and Pakistanis (though to a lesser extent, I think). A lot of ethnic groupings are like that.
  • AlonsoAlonso Member Posts: 806
    The Israelis are just the nationals of Israel, they're not a race at all. They're mostly white, but they are also black and all the other colours. There's nothing racial about them.
  • semiticgoddesssemiticgoddess Member Posts: 14,903
    Ethnic Jews and Palestinians, then. I suppose I shouldn't have used Israeli as a synonym for ethnic Jews, since Israel is a multi-racial state.

    The white ancestry among the Jews tends to come from centuries of interbreeding with European populations (don't know about the black population; I thought the Jews mostly just scattered across Eurasia), but the root Jewish ancestry comes from the same lines and soil as Palestine. The Hebrew Bible often mentions them living on adjacent lands and occasionally warring with various other non-Jewish Semitic groups.

    I always found it interesting that the Hebrew Bible mentions these other groups and their scattered religions, because so many of them are no longer extant. To my knowledge, the only surviving religion from that time period is Judaism; the Abrahamic traditions have since displaced all the other faiths in the Middle East. The Hebrew Bible is one of the only sources that refers to those extinct cultures.
  • gorgonzolagorgonzola Member Posts: 3,864
    semiticgod wrote: »
    The Palestinians and Israelis are basically the same race in terms of genetics and physical traits, but we still call them distinct groups for identity reasons. Same goes for Indians and Pakistanis (though to a lesser extent, I think).
    originally the population of the indian sub continent was of dravidian race, then the north of india was invaded by the arians. there had been other invasions like the one from the moguls, the muslims, but had less influence on the race, the genetics.
    even if the arian invasion happened long time ago the result can be seen even now, there is a clear difference in the traits of the north and south india population, and all the languages used in the north and their alphabet are deeply rooted in the sanskrit, the language of the arians, while in the south they still use dravidic languages and alphabets. even the people that in north india uses urdu as language, so uses an arabic alphabet, uses a language that is still deeply rooted in sankrit, even if contaminated by arabic.
    the india-pakistan division is only a political/religious thing that has nothing to do with races. a person whose origin is the pakistani punjab state share the same genetics and language of an other whose origin is from the indian punjab. but they have completely different genetics and language from let's say a tamil, whose origin is dravidic.

    what you tell is certainly true for the pakistanis and the indians living in the north west of india, or for the population of the former east pakistan, now an independent nation, and the people of the north east of india, they are both bengali. but we can certainly not assume that all the indians have the same physical traits and genetics.



  • kanisathakanisatha Member Posts: 1,308
    semiticgod wrote: »
    The Palestinians and Israelis are basically the same race in terms of genetics and physical traits, but we still call them distinct groups for identity reasons. Same goes for Indians and Pakistanis (though to a lesser extent, I think). A lot of ethnic groupings are like that.

    Hence the separate terms of race, ethnicity and nationality. Unfortunately here in the US, the word 'race' is incorrectly used in every context. So you are absolutely correct. English, Scottish, Irish are ethnicites, not races. They're also simultaneously nationalities. Indian and Pakistani, however, are nationalities. Corresponding ethnicities would be Punjabi, Sindhi, Maratha, Gujarati, Bengali, etc.
  • semiticgoddesssemiticgoddess Member Posts: 14,903
    These days scholars believe the Indo-Aryans migrated into the subcontinent rather than invaded it. There was probably some violence involved, in that there invariably is, but we don't have archaeological evidence of mass death around that time.
  • FinneousPJFinneousPJ Member Posts: 6,455
    White as a fresh snow
  • BlastbackBlastback Member Posts: 54
    Alonso wrote: »
    Blastback wrote: »
    Scottish Irish and Welsh. So Celtic. Very very Celtic.

    But is that a race? I mean, when I was living in Ireland everybody thought I was a local when they saw me (and before I opened my mouth, of course). There's absolutely no physical trait that distinguishes me from an Irishman, yet all my ancestors have been born in Spain for many generations.

    Race vs ethnicity. Honestly we humans are ridiculous when it comes to categorizing ourselves. :)
  • gorgonzolagorgonzola Member Posts: 3,864
    i clearly see the difference between ethnicity and nationality, one is based on genetics and the other on the place where one is born.
    i fail to see a real difference between race and ethnicity if not for the fact that the race concept has been much more used for racist purposes while ethnicity is more a scientific approach to what is basically the same thing, the origin of your genes.
    and further more has to be told that only a little percentage of the human population has something like a clearly defined ethnicity, groups that for geographical or other reasons don't have contamination from other different gene pools. the higher cast in the north or south india is a good example, even if the ethnicity is different between the 2, cause to marry an outcast or a person of inferior cast makes the person loose his cast, so every brahmin has parents, grandparents and all the ancestors that are brahmins. or the eskimo people and some other peoples had few contamination. but on average the most of humanity has not pure ethnicity, we are all mongrels.
  • semiticgoddesssemiticgoddess Member Posts: 14,903
    The caste system is a curious example. DNA testing has found that there has been a remarkably low level of interbreeding between the castes over the generations, suggesting that the system was highly rigid even into the distant past.
  • gorgonzolagorgonzola Member Posts: 3,864
    yep, probably it was not so strong and rigid during the buddhist period that is like 2500 years ago and did not last much, but was strong and well established before it and become strong again as india shifted again toward hinduism.
  • tbone1tbone1 Member Posts: 1,985
    The greatest race is The Indianapolis 500. Just ask Fernando Alonso.
  • gorgonzolagorgonzola Member Posts: 3,864
    @kanisatha i stand corrected, in my previous posts i used the word ethnicity instead of race, but i don't edit them cause is clear that i was referring to the genetic identity.
  • kanisathakanisatha Member Posts: 1,308
    No problem @gorgonzola. :) I've seen publications by well-known academics who have gotten some of these terms mixed up. It happens to the best of us, the wrong usage of the word 'nation' when speaking of a state (i.e. country) being the most common one of these. I try to be as correct as I can with my terminology in my classes but sometimes mess up too. But it's especially cool when, on account of having heard me go on and on about people using the wrong words, one of my students corrects me.
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