Are Arabs and Iranians white? Census says yes, but many disagree - LA Times

[Dubious]

With same token, even Pakistanis are mixed. Some white some not. What is the big deal!!

They are def not Caucasians...That is the point!

 

[SorryNotSorry]

Salaam


I think the real sad thing is how many actually try to claim to be white - especially given that it is generally used for Europeans and people of European origin.

By doing so they show they aren't comfortable with being who they are.


...

Spot on.

 

[nahtanbob]

With same token, even Pakistanis are mixed. Some white some not. What is the big deal!!

It boils down to what majority of pakistanis look like

 

[Indos]

How about brown Arabs coming from Yemen ? Are they still considered as White ?

 

[crankthatskunk]

It boils down to what majority of pakistanis look like

White.

They are def not Caucasians...That is the point!

Some of them certainly are. My family is Caucasians, any problem!!

 

[Dubious]

Caucasians

From Central to West Asia?

 

[crankthatskunk]

From Central to West Asia?

Central

 

[Dubious]

Gene Expression


« Open Thread – January 22nd, 2011Portlandia »
Stop using the word "Caucasian" to mean white
By Razib Khan | January 22, 2011 10:34 am
4.4K

About four years ago blogger emeritus RPM of evolgen brought into sharp relief an issue which has nagged me:

Caucasian, literally, refers to people native to the Caucasus, but it has become interchangeable with any number of ‘White’ populations, most of whom trace their ancestry to Europe. One gets the feeling that the term ‘White’ fell out of favor and was replaced by ‘Caucasian’ much like ‘Black’ was replaced by ‘African-American’. But the roots of such terminology are a bit disturbing; it was postulated that the natives of the Caucasus exhibited the idealized physical appearance so the Caucasus were believed to be the birthplace of mankind. The logic behind this idea — the assumption that Whites exhibit the best physical appearance — is implicitly racist. Additionally, we now know our species first appeared in Africa, so the biology isn’t any good either. The connotations of the term Caucasian along with the geographical absurdity of using that term to describe all Europeans or Whites are the two main reasons we should abandon the term.

Up until the late 1990s I had thought of people from the Caucasus mountains when I heard the term, but then I began to reorient my assumption because of its colloquial usage. But as it became more and more popular I got more irritated, because it became obvious that the type of people who now were using the term likely did not know where the Caucasus mountains were. With Ngram Viewer you can check the patterns of popularity over time:




While the older classical physical anthropology terms like “Negroid” and “Caucasoid” fell into disuse after 1960, as you’d expect, “Caucasian” went through a renaissance in the 1990s. I think RPM’s supposition is probably correct, people wanted a pretentious term somewhat less coarse than white, and since most people are geography-challenged, “Caucasian” sounds good if you want to pose as the faux-sophisticate. But here’s the sort of thing that makes me want to tear my hair out, Nativity Story Delights Some, Disappoints Others:

Further enhancing the realism is doubtless the most non-Caucasian cast in Hollywood Bible movie history. Perhaps English in a Bible film will never quite sound the same after The Passion’s visionary use of ancient languages, but Middle-Eastern accents work better than the British or American English common in the past, and may set a new standard for such films.


This is in reference to The Nativity Story, a 2006 film which starred a half-Maori, half-white, actress, as Mary. The realism was presumably because the producers cast non-Europeans, and Palestinians are non-Europeans. Setting aside the fact that genetically the distance between Mary, a Middle Easterner, and a European, is far smaller than that between a European and a half-Maori actress, there’s a big geographical confusion. The Caucasus mountains bound the Middle East on the north, and the real Caucasians are to some extent a liminal Middle Eastern population. This gets really dumbfounding for the stupid people who ask and answer questions of the form “are Armenians white?” on the internet. After all, the Armenians are indubitably Caucasian, and Caucasian is white, right? Compare the subtly of a regular dictionary definition of Caucasian, to the straightforward acknowledgement of the idiocy of the common usage of the term in urban dictionary.


Katie Melua, a real Caucasian

This matters to me in a concrete manner. In my post on Assyrians below I avoided the term “Caucasian,” because I didn’t want to confuse people. But this is getting ridiculous. I now believe that a population movement from the trans-Caucasian region due to demographic expansion has probably had a major impact on both Europe and South Asia. But I’ve been avoiding terming these people “Caucasians,” lest I just muddy the waters because of the disjunction between colloquial usage and coherency. But that’s what people from the Caucasus are! So I’m changing my practice, and using the term as I really want to use it. If people get confused, and they show up in the comments, I will “correct” them as I’m wont to do. For those readers who have qualms about the coarseness of “white,” and the genericness of “European, how about the term “Aryanoids”? It will still make you sound smarter to the herd. And, it’s just as stupid and also derived from a scientific tradition which is in disrepute. But it has the convenience that it doesn’t correspond to anything real in this world.


http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/g...he-word-caucasian-to-mean-white/#.XJ5z9VUzbIU

Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?


By Shaila Dewan

• July 6, 2013

AS a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries. It has long been entirely unmoored from its geographical reference point, the Caucasus region. Its equivalents from that era are obsolete — nobody refers to Asians as “Mongolian” or blacks as “Negroid.”

And yet, there it was in the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. The plaintiff, noted Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in his majority opinion, was Caucasian.

To me, having covered the South for many years, the term seems like one of those polite euphemisms that hides more than it reveals. There is no legal reason to use it. It rarely appears in federal statutes, and the Census Bureau has never put a checkbox by the word Caucasian. (White is an option.)

The Supreme Court, which can be more colloquial, has used the term in only 64 cases, including a pair from the 1920s that reveal its limitations. In one, the court ruled that a Japanese man could not become a citizen because, although he may have been light-skinned, he was not Caucasian. In the other, an Indian was told that he could not become a citizen because, although he may have been technically Caucasian, he was certainly not white. (A similar debate erupted more recently when the Tsarnaev brothers, believed to be responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, were revealed to be Muslims from the Caucasus.)

The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.”

In 1889, the editors of the original Oxford English Dictionary noted that the term Caucasian had been “practically discarded.” But they spoke too soon. Blumenbach’s authority had given the word a pseudoscientific sheen that preserved its appeal. Even now, the word gives discussions of race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you step out of your “vehicle” instead of your car.

“If you want to show that you’re being dispassionate then you use the more scientific term Caucasian,” Ms. Painter said.

Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears “Caucasian.” “Most of the folks who work in this field know that it’s a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,” she said. “I think it’s a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that’s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.”

There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.” She added, “White turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we used to think it was.”

There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro, colored, octaroon. There are not a lot of options for whites. In Texas, they say Anglo. And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a “creepy-*** cracker.”

IN the South, I was often asked about my ethnic origins, and I had a ready answer. “My father is from India,” I would recite, phrasing it in such a way as to avoid being mistaken for an American Indian. “And my mom is white.” Almost invariably, if I was speaking to black people, they would nod with understanding. If I was speaking to white people, I would get a puzzled look. “What kind of white?” they would ask. Only when I explained the Norwegian, Scottish and German mix of my ancestry would I get the nod.

I theorized that this was because blacks understood “white” as a category, both historical and contemporary — a coherent group that wielded power and excluded others. Whites, I believed, were less comfortable with that notion.

But Matthew Pratt Guterl, the author of “The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940,” had a different take. “They’re trying to trace your genealogy and figure out what your qualities are,” he said. “They’re looking in your face, they’re looking in the slope of your nose, the shape of your brow. There’s an effort to discern the truth of the matter, because all whitenesses are not equal.” In other words, they weren’t rejecting the category, they were policing its boundaries.

Such racial boundaries have increasingly been called into question in the debate over affirmative action, once regarded as a form of restitution to descendants of slaves, but now complicated by all sorts of questions about who, exactly, is being helped. “What if some of them aren’t poor, what if some of them don’t have American parentage, what if some of them are really stupid?” Ms. Painter, the historian, asked. “There’s all kinds of characteristics that we stuff into race without looking, and then they pop out and we think, ‘I can’t deal with that.’ ”

Doubtless, this society will continue to classify people by race for some time to come. And as we lumber toward justice, some of those classifications remain useful, even separate from other factors like economic class. Caucasian, though? Not so much.


Shaila Dewan is an economics reporter for The New York Times.


https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/sunday-review/has-caucasian-lost-its-meaning.html

I dont think the colour of your skin matters as much as your attitude / manners/ and what makes you a human!

So, quit discussing who looks more green than the martian and accept your skin tone comfortably!