"White People"

[ArmoBarbi]

Your HELL wedding? So you've been THAT BAD!! I'm not sure I can make it, so far I'm only available for heaven weddings...


Ok back to "white people"... Wino just a quick question.
On the applications/forms where it asks for your nationality are you one of those people who puts 'other' and writes 'Armenian' next to it lol? Cause you know, my high school HISTORY TEACHER laughed at this Armenian student in our class when she put 'other' for nationality on this survey we were doing... He said Armenians are white. So seriously, how do you answer that?

When I first came to US (at eleven) I wasnt familiar with the different groups on those forms, and when I had to fill one out in class I wasnt sure what they even meant! I was learning English mind you... I had to ask a teacher and she told me to put the one with European in it. lol

They didnt have "white non-hispanic" like most I see now. Anyway, Ive learned since then of course, but Im so glad that the teacher knew what she was talking about!

[Krikor Ant]

First. I would like to introduce mayself.

I am an armenian from Venezuela. My grandparents are from Gurun/Sivas in central Anatolia. I have been checking the site for some time, so I finally decided to post in here.

About this tread:

It is quite funny. Because as far as I know there are only four main "races":

white
black
yellow
red (american indians)

There is not "armenian" race....... armenian is an ethnic group.
Those who are saying that our culture is middle eastern forgot a very special thing. That our ancestors fought and died for........ something that is very important...... our RELIGION. we are CHRISTIANS.

Beside that we speak an indoeuropean language......... our history, after the crusades, has been linked to Europe........ and we as armenians never wanted to be identificated with arabs, turks or kurds.......... never.......

I know that now in the states it is "cool" to be black or anything else but white............. but you have to accept the facts.......... It is our past and you cant change it just because you want......... My ancestors died because they didnt fit into the "turkish o arab" muslim culture......... while french, english, russian and even some germans tried to protect them.....

Btw. when the arabs captured the last armenian kingdom where did our las king go????.......... Paris.......... where is he buried .......... in Paris........ who paid his rescue to the mameluks......... the king of Castile (or Aragon, Im not sure)............ In the XVII, XVIII century who claimed the armenian trone, but never got it, as descendant of the lasta armenian ruler, and the pakradunis????........... the dukes of Lorreine...........

Who crowned Leon I king of Cilicia????....... the archbishop of Mainz........
Long time ago........... all of Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Siria was part of Europe............ but now we armenians are the only survivals of that "wide" Europe................ All along the history of Europe we have always been seen as part of it.......... check and read our history once again.

Only the US has that vision of a "short" Europe, and it is just for political reasons....... the US doesnt want a strong and united Europe, so the want to convince those europeans, that are on the border line that they are not, so the wont join, eventualy the E.U.......... thats the reason.

I have heard even somo sources that claim that half Ukraine is not part of "Europe"......... what we must know is that Europe is not a geografical term, since there is no fisical diferences between Europe an Asia. Europe is a cultural, political and most of all...... HISTORICAL......term........ a group of countries and people that are quite diferent form each other (a greek and an irish are VERY diferent) but that share comun roots and past.

[loseyourname]

Mouse, now that loser enlightened me, I think that you look black. What do you know, Armenians must not be white after all. Eh, you learn something new everyday.

You guys are a bunch of dern fools. Moroccans are hardly black. In fact, the Moroccans I've known have olive skin and green or blue eyes.

[nunechka]

look people... all i have to say is this... in my fathers words "THOSE EUROPEAN WHITE PEOPLE WERE MONKIES ON TREES, WHEN ARMENIANS WERE PHILOSOPHERS, SCIENTISTS, LINGUISTS, ARTISTS, ETC..."

we are not like them, we are not this artificial "white"... we ARE THE orignial, Indigenous PEOPLE of that LAND! we are from the CAUCASIAS, we ARE FROM MEDITERNANIA! WE ARE NOT from some GOD forsaken scandinavian, IVANIAN (RUSSIAN), GERMIC, or any other culture. WE ARE ARMENIAN! the reason we associate ourselves with europe is because it is POWERFUL and mostly populated with good, intelligent, progressive people... HOWEVER! get it through your HEAD! the ARMENIANS and the GREEKS are the same in this respect... we have more in commen with GREEKS! then any european culture, and GREEKS! dont give a SH!T if someone says, YOU ARE NOT WHITE! because they KNOW WHAT THEY ARE!, they are also the same! MEDITERANIAN! CAUCASIAN!

YOU people, have the THICKEST SKULLS i have ever seen...

and you, NEW PERSON! from venesuela, it isnt "cool" to be black or white, or blue or green... ITS THE PERCEPTION of people, that armenians are not WHITE! and since in the US things are either black or white, well which side are you going to pick? the fact of the matter is that ARMENIANS were the first people along with the greeks, and the persians to inhabit the lands, for natural reasons or cultivation, and such...

anony you should stay out of this conversation, this is for grownups... now go, run along and play with the other childern, not in this forum...

[winoman]

American Anthropological Association
Statement on "Race"

(May 17, 1998)

The following statement was adopted by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, acting on a draft prepared by a committee of representative American anthropologists. It does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of "race." We believe that it represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists.

In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.

Physical variations in any given trait tend to occur gradually rather than abruptly over geographic areas. And because physical traits are inherited independently of one another, knowing the range of one trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture. Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different indigenous peoples in tropical regions. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective.

Historical research has shown that the idea of "race" has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that "race" as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.

From its inception, this modern concept of "race" was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Thus "race" was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used "race" to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences.

As they were constructing US society, leaders among European-Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each "race," linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians. Numerous arbitrary and fictitious beliefs about the different peoples were institutionalized and deeply embedded in American thought.

Early in the 19th century the growing fields of science began to reflect the public consciousness about human differences. Differences among the "racial" categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed that Africans, Indians, and Europeans were separate species, with Africans the least human and closer taxonomically to apes.

Ultimately "race" as an ideology about human differences was subsequently spread to other areas of the world. It became a strategy for dividing, ranking, and controlling colonized people used by colonial powers everywhere. But it was not limited to the colonial situation. In the latter part of the 19th century it was employed by Europeans to rank one another and to justify social, economic, and political inequalities among their peoples. During World War II, the Nazis under Adolf Hitler enjoined the expanded ideology of "race" and "racial" differences and took them to a logical end: the extermination of 11 million people of "inferior races" (e.g., Jews, Gypsies, Africans, homosexuals, and so forth) and other unspeakable brutalities of the Holocaust.

"Race" thus evolved as a worldview, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior. Racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into "racial" categories. The myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined. Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors.

At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call "culture." Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are.

It is a basic tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior. The American experience with immigrants from hundreds of different language and cultural backgrounds who have acquired some version of American culture traits and behavior is the clearest evidence of this fact. Moreover, people of all physical variations have learned different cultural behaviors and continue to do so as modern transportation moves millions of immigrants around the world.

How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society. The "racial" worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called "racial" groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.

[winoman]

AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race
Published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 101, pp 569-570, 1996
PREAMBLE
As scientists who study human evolution and variation, we believe that we have an obligation to share with other scientists and the general public our current understanding of the structure of human variation from a biological perspective. Popular conceptualizations of race are derived from 19th and early 20th century scientific formulations. These old racial categories were based on externally visible traits, primarily skin color, features of the face, and the shape and size of the head and body, and the underlying skeleton. They were often imbued with nonbiological attributes, based on social constructions of race. These categories of race are rooted in the scientific traditions of the 19th century, and in even earlier philosophical traditions which presumed that immutable visible traits can predict the measure of all other traits in an individual or a population. Such notions have often been used to support racist doctrines. Yet old racial concepts persist as social conventions that foster institutional discrimination. The expression of prejudice may or may not undermine material well-being, but it does involve the mistreatment of people and thus it often is psychologically distressing and socially damaging. Scientists should try to keep the results of their research from being used in a biased way that would serve discriminatory ends.

POSITION
We offer the following points as revisions of the 1964 UNESCO statement on race:

1. All humans living today belong to a single species, Homo sapiens, and share a common descent. Although there are differences of opinion regarding how and where different human groups diverged or fused to form new ones from a common ancestral group, all living populations in each of the earth's geographic areas have evolved from that ancestral group over the same amount of time. Much of the biological variation among populations involves modest degrees of variation in the frequency of shared traits. Human populations have at times been isolated, but have never genetically diverged enough to produce any biological barriers to mating between members of different populations.

2. Biological differences between human beings reflect both hereditary factors and the influence of natural and social environments. In most cases, these differences are due to the interaction of both. The degree to which environment or heredity affects any particular trait varies greatly.

3. There is great genetic diversity within all human populations. Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogenous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.

4. There are obvious physical differences between populations living in different geographic areas of the world. Some of these differences are strongly inherited and others, such as body size and shape, are strongly influenced by nutrition, way of life, and other aspects of the environment. Genetic differences between populations commonly consist of differences in the frequencies of all inherited traits, including those that are environmentally malleable.

5. For centuries, scholars have sought to comprehend patterns in nature by classifying living things. The only living species in the human family, Homo sapiens, has become a highly diversified global array of populations. The geographic pattern of genetic variation within this array is complex, and presents no major discontinuity. Humanity cannot be classified into discrete geographic categories with absolute boundaries. Furthermore, the complexities of human history make it difficult to determine the position of certain groups in classifications. Multiplying subcategories cannot correct the inadequacies of these classifications.

Generally, the traits used to characterize a population are either independently inherited or show only varying degrees of association with one another within each population. Therefore, the combination of these traits in an individual very commonly deviates from the average combination in the population. This fact renders untenable the idea of discrete races made up chiefly of typical representatives.

6. In humankind as well as in other animals, the genetic composition of each population is subject over time to the modifying influence of diverse factors. These include natural selection, promoting adaptation of the population to the environment; mutations, involving modifications in genetic material; admixture, leading to genetic exchange between local populations, and randomly changing frequencies of genetic characteristics from one generation to another. The human features which have universal biological value for the survival of the species are not known to occur more frequently in one population than in any other. Therefore it is meaningless from the biological point of view to attribute a general inferiority or superiority to this or to that race.

7. The human species has a past rich in migration, in territorial expansions, and in contractions. As a consequence, we are adapted to many of the earth's environments in general, but to none in particular. For many millennia, human progress in any field has been based on culture and not on genetic improvement.

Mating between members of different human groups tends to diminish differences between groups, and has played a very important role in human history. Wherever different human populations have come in contact, such matings have taken place. Obstacles to such interaction have been social and cultural, not biological. The global process of urbanization, coupled with intercontinental migrations, has the potential to reduce the differences among all human populations.

8. Partly as a result of gene flow, the hereditary characteristics of human populations are in a state of perpetual flux. Distinctive local populations are continually coming into and passing out of existence. Such populations do not correspond to breeds of domestic animals, which have been produced by artificial selection over many generations for specific human purposes.

9. The biological consequences of mating depend only on the individual genetic makeup of the couple, and not on their racial classifications. Therefore, no biological justification exists for restricting intermarriage between persons of different racial classifications.

10. There is no necessary concordance between biological characteristics and culturally defined groups. On every continent, there are diverse populations that differ in language, economy, and culture. There is no national, religious, linguistic or cultural group or economic class that constitutes a race. However, human beings who speak the same language and share the same culture frequently select each other as mates, with the result that there is often some degree of correspondence between the distribution of physical traits on the one hand and that of linguistic and cultural traits on the other. But there is no causal linkage between these physical and behavioral traits, and therefore it is not justifiable to attribute cultural characteristics to genetic inheritance.

11. Physical, cultural and social environments influence the behavioral differences among individuals in society. Although heredity influences the behavioral variability of individuals within a given population, it does not affect the ability of any such population to function in a given social setting. The genetic capacity for intellectual development is one of the biological traits of our species essential for its survival. This genetic capacity is known to differ among individuals. The peoples of the world today appear to possess equal biological potential for assimilating any human culture. Racist political doctrines find no foundation in scientific knowledge concerning modern or past human populations.

[winoman]

and more...

The notion of race is nearly as problematic from a scientific point of view as it is from a social one. European physical anthropologists of the 17th and 18th centuries proposed various systems of racial classifications based on such observable characteristics as skin color, hair type, body proportions, and skull measurements, essentially codifying the perceived differences among broad geographic populations of humans. The traditional terms for these populationsCaucasoid (or Caucasian), Mongoloid, Negroid, and in some systems Australoidare now controversial in both technical and nontechnical usage, and in some cases they may well be considered offensive. (Caucasian does retain a certain currency in American English, but it is used almost exclusively to mean “white” or “European” rather than “belonging to the Caucasian race,” a group that includes a variety of peoples generally categorized as nonwhite.) The biological aspect of race is described today not in observable physical features but rather in such genetic characteristics as blood groups and metabolic processes, and the groupings indicated by these factors seldom coincide very neatly with those put forward by earlier physical anthropologists. Citing this and other pointssuch as the fact that a person who is considered black in one society might be nonblack in anothermany cultural anthropologists now consider race to be more a social or mental construct than an objective biological fact.

[nunechka]

i am with winoman on this one...

[winoman]

Ok back to "white people"... Wino just a quick question.
On the applications/forms where it asks for your nationality are you one of those people who puts 'other' and writes 'Armenian' next to it lol?

lol - yeah - have to admit I've doen this before...and it created a bit of controversy at one time as I was listed in minority category and I insisted on keeping such based on my (persecuted etc) Armenian background...now I just check "other" if its offered...and if it isn't I ussually take issue...lol...(actually I ussualy don't much care about it either way...)

[nunechka]

its probabyl better to do this when the census comes around so that we can get a better number for the population of armenians, this is actually what ASBAREZ advised us to do in 1990... plus we shouldn't be lumped in the same category as those extra wonderful southern whites who would linch and kill us if they had their way, they would even through us out of this country, because we are immigrants... isnt that great? LOL!