Re: racist vs racialist?

Amanda wrote:
>Basically, place-of-ancestral-origin is the *only* way to communicate
>racial
>distinctions.  All other words just map back onto that.  We do, however,
>need a way to distinguish place-of-ancestral-origin from place-of-personal-
>origin and culture-one-belongs-to.
I beg to differ. Speaking of place-of-ancestral-origin kind of invites the
question "ancestral origin at what depth of time?". Unless all racial
groupings by some miracle arose simultaneously, I can't see how you could
satisfyingly answer that except by going back to the last common ancestor,
which'd rather kill the idea since it'd land us all on the same (presumably)
Africa place.

If we're to have some consistent definition on racial membership, I'm afraid
we shall have to rely on eiher phenotypical data (measuring skulls, skin
hue, etc), or DNA groupings (which, I'm told will correlate poorly with the
traditional racial divisions).


                                                              Andreas

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