Re: OT Academia (was Re: Dr. Gunn)

On Wed, 10 Jul 2002 07:30, J Y S Czhang wrote:
<snip>
>     BTW I am skeptical of racial categories like "White" and "Caucasian"...
> these classifications have always been rather conveniently flexible
> ::recalling the intensity and prevalence of both British and American WASP
> prejudice against the Jews, Irish and Italians in the late 19th and early
> 20th centuries::
>
>     I will go so far to say that the idea of a "White Race" is _perhaps_ a
> myth. And one that should probably be discarded.
>     Do "of European ancestry" or "Eurogen" sound like reasonable
> alternatives in order to describe ancestral origins/biocultural background
> (instead of so-call "racial categories")?
As a matter of fact, "European" was the catch-all term for human beings of
European ancestry in PNG when I was there as a kid.  "White" was another one,
though already sounding somewhat absurd as PNG raced towards Independence.
Then I read in the early 80s that the sub-Sahara Africans tended to lump
Eauropeans together with Arabs etc, as "Whites", because they all lacked the
deeper shades of brown - and the absurdity struck me so powerfully I haven't
been able to take such things seriously ever since.

Of course the "White Race" is a myth - it's like all the other "Catch-alls"
so beloved of modern myth-makers.  "Race" itself is one of those myths,
totally absurd because ancestry and physical features don't go hand in hand,
more like foot in mouth.

"biocultural background" sounds to me like a decent and intelligible
replacement for a much-abused and hardly-understood pigeonholing.

Of course, I'm hoping for the release of genetically-modified organisms into
the environment so that after a while we'll have blue-skinned men with green
faces, black-skinned men with yellow polka dots, purple-skinned men with
orange stripes, and of course, white-skinned (yes, real white, not pasty
brown with red undertones) men with purple stripes and orange polka-dots.

Wesley Parish

>
> Hanuman Zhang, Sinogen and sympathetic supporter of the Beige Race
> Liberation Front and their tongue-firmly-in-cheek struggle to have a
> "Beige/Multi-Racial" category in/on US census polls and all other public
> documents
>
Of course, I would be delighted if you could explain to your fellow Americans
why we need genetically modified organisms in the environment, and why
genuinely white-skinned men with purple stripes and orange polka dots are an
urgent necessity. <;^)

> ~§~
>
>     "To live is to scrounge, taking what you can in order to survive. So,
> since living is scrounging, the result of our efforts is to amass a pile of
> rubbish."
>                             - Chuang Tzu/Zhuangzi, China, 4th Century BCE
>
>     "The most beautiful order is a heap of sweepings piled up at random."
>                             - Heraclitus, Greece, 5th Century BCE
>
> Ars imitatur Naturam in sua operatione.
>     [Latin > "Art is the imitation of Nature in her manner of operation."]
>
> " jinsei to iu mono wa, kinchou na geijyutsu to ieru deshou "
>     [Japanese > "one can probably say that 'life' is a precious artform"]
--
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."