What is your race?

[Viking Berserk]

Originally posted by thorgalaeg

I have blue eyes, but i am from south Spain, am i "aryan"?

Maybe. Spain was once Gothic.

[Viking Berserk]

Originally posted by Sandman


My brother has blue eyes. I have green/brown eyes. Are we different races then?

Well, well... Probably your father has brown eyes.
And your father probably is either latin/greek/ etc...
Or he has relatives far back...

[JohnM2433]

Originally posted by One_Brow
I hav no objection to referring to people as heavily or lightly pigmented, with or without certain eye shapes, etc. It's the attempt to lump several independent characteristics into a concept of "race" that I artificial, useless, and (least importantly) harmful.

Suppose that a large group of people share a certain set of physical and/or genetic traits that is unique to that group, such that everyone in that group has most of those traits, even if many of them don't have them all. What term would you use to refer to such a group? Or would you not refer to them at all?

But upon reflection, I guess that race and ethnicity really have to more do with common ancestry than anything else.

[Faboba]

What happened to Indian or Pakistani or Arab? This poll comes across as very American-themed. Technically 'hispanic' could be considered European ( OK, not really but... what is a Spaniard? Hispanic or European? ) and were only considered as worthy of their own category because they consitute a major ethnic minority in the US, right?

In Scotland there's no hispanics at all, very few blacks and the ethnic minorities which exist are all either Indian, Pakistani or assylum seekers from the Balkans.

Now I'm not saying you should model your poll on Scotland but what I am saying is ethnic treds vary significantly from place to place and... try to think a tad more globally. You've included a whole category for people who consider themselves mixed race between white and black but none for....

Did anyone see that advert for some kind of make-up? I'm pretty sure it's only running in the UK but.... *drool*

You know the one, the one which has girl after girl and starts with

1/2 French, 1/2 ( Manchester is it? )
1/2 Polish 1/2 Glaswegian

Far and away the best unintentionally anti-rascist ad in history. Much the same as any anti-semitic argument can be ended by showing a picture of Natalie Portman....

... sorry.... getting sidetracked.

[JohnM2433]

Originally posted by Viking Berserk
there are differencies between latins and germanics.
u can even see it.

Presumably there are differences between any two ethnic groups. The question is how noticeably they differ, and to what degree. If we're going to try to develop some sort of at least vaguely scientific classification system -- and I'm not convinced that doing so would be a good use of our time -- we should divide groups into races according to how much they differ from each other. That means that if you're going to divide up Caucasians into separate races, you've got to do the same with Negroids, Mongoloids, etc. for the same reason.

So there.

The following would seem to be relevant to your posts:

How come white people don't all look alike?
Who were the Aryans?

[Viking Berserk]

lol latins have darker skin, brown eyes and darker hair.

[Pedrunn]

Am i the only hispanic metiso here?

At least i am proud of being one

[One_Brow]

Originally posted by JohnM2433
Suppose that a large group of people share a certain set of physical and/or genetic traits that is unique to that group, such that everyone in that group has most of those traits, even if many of them don't have them all. What term would you use to refer to such a group? Or would you not refer to them at all?

I would refer to them functionally. If I am interested in studying the interrelationship of two or three traits, I would use those traits (for example, blue-eyed men over 6' tall). If we get up to fifteen or twenty, I might assign labels to specific combantions of traits, or dfferent frequency levels of specific allelles (sp?).

Again, the concept of "race" would only blur my precision.

[Viking Berserk]

Ok... Could you say that in a more understandable way?