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

J Y S Czhang scripsit:

>     Hmm, some of the first Cantonese to encounter "White-skinned", Pigment-
> Impaired Folk thought these so-call "Caucasians" were ghosts, too...
If Alex Haley is to be believed, so did his African ancestors.

>     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.
*All* racial categories are social only, without biological foundation.
In every case, the genetic variability within a group is much larger
than the variability separating it from other groups.

If all of humanity were destroyed except any one small ethnic group, 80%
of human genetic variation would still be preserved.

>     Do "of European ancestry" or "Eurogen" sound like reasonable alternatives
> in order to describe ancestral origins/biocultural background (instead of
> so-call "racial categories")?
Sounds good to me.  In Grandmother Little Bear Woman's latest story suite,
_Birthday of the World and Other Stories_, the term "Chi-An" is used for
people of Chinese ancestry.

> 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
Sounds good to me, as father of an "Other" (a brown-skinned person of
Hispanic descent who has no Spanish language or culture).

Avery Brooks, the actor who played Sisko on ST:DS9, insists on being
called brown rather than black.

--
One art / There is                      John Cowan <jcowan@...>
No less / No more                       http://www.reutershealth.com
All things / To do                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
With sparks / Galore                     -- Douglas Hofstadter

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