161-499: White is a racial classification of people generally used for those of mostly European ancestry . It is also a skin color specifier, although the definition can vary depending on context, nationality, ethnicity and point of view. Description of populations as "White" in reference to their skin color is occasionally found in Greco-Roman ethnography and other ancient or medieval sources, but these societies did not have any notion of
322-689: A White or West Eurasian race among a small set of human races and imputed physical, mental, or aesthetic superiority to this White category. These ideas were discredited by twentieth-century scientists. In 1758, Carl Linnaeus proposed what he considered to be natural taxonomic categories of the human species. He distinguished between Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens europaeus , and he later added four geographical subdivisions of humans: white Europeans , red Americans , yellow Asians and black Africans . Although Linnaeus intended them as objective classifications, his descriptions of these groups included cultural patterns and derogatory stereotypes. In 1775,
483-569: A racial designation," and that the replacement of White with yellow as a description came through pseudoscientific discourse. A three-part racial scheme in color terms was used in seventeenth-century Latin America under Spanish rule. Irene Silverblatt traces "race thinking" in South America to the social categories of colonialism and state formation : "White, black, and brown are abridged, abstracted versions of colonizer, slave, and colonized." By
644-444: A Persian subject, and it may be that the young Herodotus heard local eyewitness accounts of events within the empire and of Persian preparations for the invasion of Greece , including the movements of the local fleet under the command of Artemisia I of Caria . Inscriptions recently discovered at Halicarnassus indicate that Artemesia's grandson Lygdamis negotiated with a local assembly to settle disputes over seized property, which
805-521: A White race or pan-European identity. The term "White race" or "White people", defined by their light skin among other physical characteristics, entered the major European languages in the later seventeenth century, when the concept of a "unified White" achieved greater acceptance in Europe , in the context of racialized slavery and social status in the European colonies. Scholarship on race distinguishes
966-473: A boy living on the island of Samos, to which he had fled with his family from the oppressions of Lygdamis, tyrant of Halicarnassus and grandson of Artemisia. Panyassis , the epic poet related to Herodotus, is reported to have taken part in a failed uprising. The Suda also states that Herodotus later returned home to lead the revolt that eventually overthrew the tyrant. Due to recent discoveries of inscriptions at Halicarnassus dated to about Herodotus's time, it
1127-547: A change in skin color. Similarly, the Rigveda uses krsna tvac "black skin" as a metaphor for irreligiosity. Ancient Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks and Minoans generally depicted women as having pale or white skin while men were depicted as dark brown or tanned. As a result, men with pale or light skin, leukochrōs (λευκόχρως, "white-skinned") could be considered weak and effeminate by Ancient Greek writers such as Plato and Aristotle . According to Aristotle "Those whose skin
1288-452: A concept devised by Mark Shriver and Tony Frudakis , is not an objective measure of the biological aspects of race as Shriver and Frudakis claim it is. She argues that it is actually just a "local category shaped by the U.S. context of its production, especially the forensic aim of being able to predict the race or ethnicity of an unknown suspect based on DNA found at the crime scene". Recent studies of human genetic clustering have included
1449-591: A concept often translated as "race" was associated with supposed common descent from the Yellow Emperor , and used to stress the unity of ethnic groups in China. Brutal conflicts between ethnic groups have existed throughout history and across the world. The first post- Graeco-Roman published classification of humans into distinct races seems to be François Bernier 's Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l'habitent ("New division of Earth by
1610-404: A debate over how genetic variation is organized, with clusters and clines as the main possible orderings. Serre & Pääbo (2004) argued for smooth, clinal genetic variation in ancestral populations even in regions previously considered racially homogeneous, with the apparent gaps turning out to be artifacts of sampling techniques. Rosenberg et al. (2005) disputed this and offered an analysis of
1771-471: A definite Scottish influence in that region, while the Canterbury Association recruited settlers from the south of England, creating a definite English influence over that region. In the 1870s, MP Julius Vogel borrowed millions of pounds from Britain to help fund capital development such as a nationwide rail system, lighthouses, ports, and bridges, and encouraged mass migration from Britain. By 1870
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#17331051405111932-405: A great deal more diversity than elsewhere and that diversity should decrease the further from Africa a population is sampled. Hence, the 85% average figure is misleading: Long and Kittles find that rather than 85% of human genetic diversity existing in all human populations, about 100% of human diversity exists in a single African population, whereas only about 60% of human genetic diversity exists in
2093-646: A historical topic more in keeping with the Greek world-view: focused on the context of the polis or city-state. The interplay of civilizations was more relevant to Greeks living in Anatolia, such as Herodotus himself, for whom life within a foreign civilization was a recent memory. Before the Persian crisis, history had been represented among the Greeks only by local or family traditions. The "Wars of Liberation" had given to Herodotus
2254-517: A host of other similarities and differences (for example, blood type) that do not correlate highly with the markers for race. Thus, anthropologist Frank Livingstone's conclusion was that, since clines cross racial boundaries, "there are no races, only clines". In a response to Livingstone, Theodore Dobzhansky argued that when talking about race one must be attentive to how the term is being used: "I agree with Dr. Livingstone that if races have to be 'discrete units', then there are no races, and if 'race'
2415-716: A large multiethnic population in the United States, and "detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity – as opposed to current residence – is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population." Witherspoon et al. (2007) have argued that even when individuals can be reliably assigned to specific population groups, it may still be possible for two randomly chosen individuals from different populations/clusters to be more similar to each other than to
2576-404: A literary critic of Augustan Rome , listed seven predecessors of Herodotus, describing their works as simple unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends, sometimes melodramatic and naïve, often charming – all traits that can be found in the work of Herodotus himself. Modern historians regard the chronology as uncertain, but according to
2737-635: A locus-by-locus analysis of variation to derive taxonomy, it is possible to construct a human classification system based on characteristic genetic patterns, or clusters inferred from multilocus genetic data . Geographically based human studies since have shown that such genetic clusters can be derived from analyzing of a large number of loci which can assort individuals sampled into groups analogous to traditional continental racial groups. Joanna Mountain and Neil Risch cautioned that while genetic clusters may one day be shown to correspond to phenotypic variations between groups, such assumptions were premature as
2898-401: A product of the colonial enterprises of European powers from the 16th to 18th centuries which identified race in terms of skin color and physical differences. Author Rebecca F. Kennedy argues that the Greeks and Romans would have found such concepts confusing in relation to their own systems of classification. According to Bancel et al., the epistemological moment where the modern concept of race
3059-684: A professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee : Before the age of exploration, group differences were largely based on language, religion, and geography. ... the European had always reacted a bit hysterically to the differences of skin color and facial structure between themselves and the populations encountered in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (see, for example, Shakespeare's dramatization of racial conflict in Othello and The Tempest ). Beginning in
3220-413: A race for political reasons. When people define and talk about a particular conception of race, they create a social reality through which social categorization is achieved. In this sense, races are said to be social constructs. These constructs develop within various legal, economic, and sociopolitical contexts, and may be the effect, rather than the cause, of major social situations. While race
3381-505: A racial or social grouping, from a diverse and often conflicting range of political and cultural perspectives; in anti-racism activism in France, from right-wing political dialogue or propaganda, and other sources. Whites in France have been studied with regard the group's historical involvement in French colonialism ; how "whites in France have played a major international role in colonizing areas of
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#17331051405113542-449: A randomly chosen member of their own cluster. They found that many thousands of genetic markers had to be used in order for the answer to the question "How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?" to be "never". This assumed three population groups separated by large geographic ranges (European, African and East Asian). The entire world population
3703-406: A result believed "that the war would be in no way different from having to fight with women." Classicist James H. Dee states "the Greeks do not describe themselves as 'White people' – or as anything else because they had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves." People's skin color did not carry useful meaning; what mattered is where they lived. Herodotus described
3864-461: A sample of 40 populations distributed roughly evenly across the Earth's land surface, Xing & et al. (2010 , p. 208) found that "genetic diversity is distributed in a more clinal pattern when more geographically intermediate populations are sampled". Herodotus Herodotus ( Ancient Greek : Ἡρόδοτος , romanized : Hēródotos ; c. 484 – c. 425 BC)
4025-608: A shift towards greater use of White as a legal category alongside a hardening of restrictions on free or Christian blacks. White remained a more familiar term in the American colonies than in Britain well into the 1700s, according to historian Theodore W. Allen . Western studies of race and ethnicity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed into what would later be termed scientific racism . Prominent European pseudoscientists writing about human and natural difference included
4186-458: A social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today's racial constructs are real". In response to Reich, a group of 67 scientists from a broad range of disciplines wrote that his concept of race was "flawed" as "the meaning and significance of the groups is produced through social interventions". Although commonalities in physical traits such as facial features, skin color, and hair texture comprise part of
4347-477: A test for admittance, a test used in practice to exclude people from Asia, Africa, and some European and South American countries, depending on the political climate. Although they were not the prime targets of the policy, it was not until after World War II that large numbers of southern European and eastern European immigrants were admitted for the first time. Following this, the White Australia Policy
4508-432: A title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero , and the " Father of Lies " by others. The Histories primarily cover the lives of prominent kings and famous battles such as Marathon , Thermopylae , Artemisium , Salamis , Plataea , and Mycale . His work deviates from the main topics to provide a cultural, ethnographical , geographical, and historiographical background that forms an essential part of
4669-680: A version of the Histories written by "Herodotus of Thurium", and some passages in the Histories have been interpreted as proof that he wrote about Magna Graecia from personal experience there (IV, 15,99; VI, 127). According to Ptolemaeus Chennus , a late source summarized in the Library of Photius , Plesirrhous the Thessalian, the hymnographer, was the eromenos of Herodotus and his heir. This account has also led some historians to assume Herodotus died childless. Intimate knowledge of some events in
4830-510: A young Thucydides happened to be in the assembly with his father, and burst into tears during the recital. Herodotus observed prophetically to the boy's father: "Your son's soul yearns for knowledge." Eventually, Thucydides and Herodotus became close enough for both to be interred in Thucydides's tomb in Athens. Such at least was the opinion of Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides . According to
4991-405: Is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable, scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways. While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race
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5152-447: Is a natural taxonomy of the human species, because multiple other genetic patterns can be found in human populations that crosscut racial distinctions. Moreover, the genomic data underdetermines whether one wishes to see subdivisions (i.e., splitters) or a continuum (i.e., lumpers) . Under Kaplan and Winther's view, racial groupings are objective social constructions (see Mills 1998 ) that have conventional biological reality only insofar as
5313-408: Is also observed for many alleles that vary from one human group to another. Another observation is that traits or alleles that vary from one group to another do not vary at the same rate. This pattern is referred to as nonconcordant variation. Because the variation of physical traits is clinal and nonconcordant, anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries discovered that the more traits and
5474-406: Is compatible with the observation that most human genetic variation is found within populations, not between them. It is also compatible with our finding that, even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population." Anthropologists such as C. Loring Brace ,
5635-618: Is consistent with a tyrant under pressure. His name is not mentioned later in the tribute list of the Athenian Delian League , indicating that there might well have been a successful uprising against him some time before 454 BC. Herodotus wrote his Histories in the Ionian dialect , in spite of being born in a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda , Herodotus learned the Ionian dialect as
5796-499: Is foundational to racism , the belief that humans can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. Social conceptions and groupings of races have varied over time, often involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Modern scientists consider such biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits. Even though there
5957-487: Is frequently criticized for perpetuating an outmoded understanding of human biological variation, and promoting stereotypes. Because in some societies racial groupings correspond closely with patterns of social stratification , for social scientists studying social inequality, race can be a significant variable . As sociological factors, racial categories may in part reflect subjective attributions, self-identities , and social institutions. Scholars continue to debate
6118-486: Is generally assumed that he died not long afterwards, possibly before his sixtieth year. Herodotus would have made his researches known to the larger world through oral recitations to a public crowd. John Marincola writes in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the Histories that there are certain identifiable pieces in the early books of Herodotus's work which could be labeled as "performance pieces". These portions of
6279-634: Is inherently naive or simplistic. Still others argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies , Homo sapiens sapiens . Since the second half of the 20th century, race has been associated with discredited theories of scientific racism , and has become increasingly seen as a largely pseudoscientific system of classification. Although still used in general contexts, race has often been replaced by less ambiguous and/or loaded terms: populations , people (s) , ethnic groups , or communities , depending on context. Its use in genetics
6440-416: Is much more complex and studying an increasing number of groups would require an increasing number of markers for the same answer. The authors conclude that "caution should be used when using geographic or genetic ancestry to make inferences about individual phenotypes". Witherspoon, et al. concluded: "The fact that, given enough genetic data, individuals can be correctly assigned to their populations of origin
6601-648: Is not necessarily any evolutionary significance to these observed differences, so this form of classification has become less acceptable to evolutionary biologists. Likewise this typological approach to race is generally regarded as discredited by biologists and anthropologists. In 2000, philosopher Robin Andreasen proposed that cladistics might be used to categorize human races biologically, and that races can be both biologically real and socially constructed. Andreasen cited tree diagrams of relative genetic distances among populations published by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza as
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6762-478: Is now Lebanon , Israel , Palestine and Jordan ) and Libyans, but considerably lighter than the Nubians (modern Sudan ). The assignment of positive and negative connotations of White and Black to certain persons date to the very old age in a number of Indo-European languages , but these differences were not necessarily used in respect to skin colors. Religious conversion was sometimes described figuratively as
6923-514: Is now called scientific racism . After the Nazi eugenics program, along with the rise of anti-colonial movements, racial essentialism lost widespread popularity. New studies of culture and the fledgling field of population genetics undermined the scientific standing of racial essentialism, leading race anthropologists to revise their conclusions about the sources of phenotypic variation. A significant number of modern anthropologists and biologists in
7084-794: Is now known that the Ionic dialect was used in Halicarnassus in some official documents, so there is no need to assume (like the Suda ) that he must have learned the dialect elsewhere. The Suda is the only source placing Herodotus as the heroic liberator of his birthplace, casting doubt upon the veracity of that romantic account. As Herodotus himself reveals, Halicarnassus, though a Dorian city, had ended its close relations with its Dorian neighbours after an unseemly quarrel (I, 144), and it had helped pioneer Greek trade with Egypt (II, 178). It was, therefore, an outward-looking, international-minded port within
7245-615: Is now made to classify people according to skin color. As at the 2016 census, it was estimated by the Australian Human Rights Commission that around 58% of the Australian population were Anglo-Celtic Australians with 18% being of other European origins, a total of 76% for European ancestries as a whole. According to the 2023 New Zealand census 67.8% or 3,383,742 people identified with a European ethnic origin, down from 70.2% in 2018, and 90.6% in 1966 . In 1926 , 95.0% of
7406-602: Is on account of the many strange stories and the folk-tales he reported that his critics have branded him "The Father of Lies". Even his own contemporaries found reason to scoff at his achievement. In fact, one modern scholar has wondered whether Herodotus left his home in Greek Anatolia , migrating westwards to Athens and beyond, because his own countrymen had ridiculed his work, a circumstance possibly hinted at in an epitaph said to have been dedicated to Herodotus at one of his three supposed resting places, Thuria : Herodotus
7567-411: Is to say, found in diverse groups of people at different frequencies; (3) what was not cultural or polymorphic was principally clinal – that is to say, gradually variable over geography; and (4) what was left – the component of human diversity that was not cultural, polymorphic, or clinal – was very small. A consensus consequently developed among anthropologists and geneticists that race as
7728-496: Is too dark are cowardly: witness Egyptians and the Ethiopians. Those whose skin is too light are equally cowardly: witness women. The skin color typical of the courageous should be halfway between the two." Similarly, Xenophon of Athens describes Persian prisoners of war as "white-skinned because they were never without their clothing, and soft and unused to toil because they always rode in carriages" and states that Greek soldiers as
7889-422: Is understood to be a social construct by many, most scholars agree that race has real material effects in the lives of people through institutionalized practices of preference and discrimination . Socioeconomic factors, in combination with early but enduring views of race, have led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups. Racial discrimination often coincides with racist mindsets, whereby
8050-715: Is used as an 'explanation' of the human variability, rather than vice versa, then the explanation is invalid." He further argued that one could use the term race if one distinguished between "race differences" and "the race concept". The former refers to any distinction in gene frequencies between populations; the latter is "a matter of judgment". He further observed that even when there is clinal variation: "Race differences are objectively ascertainable biological phenomena ... but it does not follow that racially distinct populations must be given racial (or subspecific) labels." In short, Livingstone and Dobzhansky agree that there are genetic differences among human beings; they also agree that
8211-629: The Xanthochroi or "light Whites" of Northern Europe with the Melanochroi or "dark Whites" of the Mediterranean. Although modern neo-Nazis often invoke Nazi iconography on behalf of White nationalism , Nazi Germany repudiated the idea of a unified White race, instead promoting Nordicism . In Nazi propaganda, Eastern European Slavs were often referred to as Untermensch (subhuman in English), and
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#17331051405118372-557: The Aethiopians as black and the Thracians as having red hair and blue eyes. In his description of the Scythians, Hippocrates states that the cold weather "burns their white skin and turns it ruddy." The term "White race" or "White people" entered the major European languages in the later seventeenth century, originating with the racialization of slavery at the time, in the context of
8533-524: The Alcmaeonids , a clan whose history is featured frequently in his writing. According to Plutarch , Herodotus was granted a financial reward by the Athenian assembly in recognition of his work. Plutarch, using Diyllus as a source, says this was 10 talents . In 443 BC or shortly afterwards, he migrated to Thurii , in modern Calabria , as part of an Athenian-sponsored colony . Aristotle refers to
8694-585: The Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Spanish Empire . It has repeatedly been ascribed to strains of blood, ancestry, and physical traits, and was eventually made into a subject of pseudoscientific research, which culminated in scientific racism , which was later widely repudiated by the scientific community. According to historian Irene Silverblatt, "Race thinking… made social categories into racial truths." Bruce David Baum, citing
8855-562: The Byzantine Suda , an 11th-century encyclopedia which possibly took its information from traditional accounts. Still, the challenge is great: The data are so few – they rest upon such late and slight authority; they are so improbable or so contradictory, that to compile them into a biography is like building a house of cards, which the first breath of criticism will blow to the ground. Still, certain points may be approximately fixed ... Herodotus was, according to his own statement, at
9016-486: The Euphrates to Babylon . For some reason, possibly associated with local politics, he subsequently found himself unpopular in Halicarnassus, and sometime around 447 BC, migrated to Periclean Athens – a city whose people and democratic institutions he openly admired (V, 78). Athens was also the place where he came to know the local topography (VI, 137; VIII, 52–55), as well as leading citizens such as
9177-543: The France national football team after he suggested that 7 of the 23-player squad were White. In 2020, French politician Nadine Morano stated that French actress Aïssa Maïga , who was born in Senegal , should "go back to Africa " if she "was not happy with seeing so many white people in France". According to the 2022 Irish census, 4,444,145 or 87.4% of the total population declared their race as “ White Irish ” and Other White, this
9338-516: The INED and INSEE for Whites in France has been analyzed, from some academic perspectives, as masking racial issues within the country, or a form of false racial color blindness . Writing for Al Jazeera , French journalist Rokhaya Diallo suggests that "a large portion of White people in France are not used to having frank conversations about race and racism." According to political sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva , "whites in France lie to themselves and
9499-455: The Out of Africa and Multiregional models). In the early 20th century, many anthropologists taught that race was an entirely biological phenomenon and that this was core to a person's behavior and identity, a position commonly called racial essentialism . This, coupled with a belief that linguistic , cultural, and social groups fundamentally existed along racial lines, formed the basis of what
9660-759: The Peloponnesian War on the abduction of some prostitutes – a mocking reference to Herodotus, who reported the Persians' account of their wars with Greece , beginning with the rapes of the mythical heroines Io , Europa , Medea , and Helen . Similarly, the Athenian historian Thucydides dismissed Herodotus as a story-teller. Thucydides, who had been trained in rhetoric , became the model for subsequent prose-writers as an author who seeks to appear firmly in control of his material, whereas with his frequent digressions Herodotus appeared to minimize (or possibly disguise) his authorial control. Moreover, Thucydides developed
9821-565: The Persian Empire , and the historian's family could well have had contacts in other countries under Persian rule, facilitating his travels and his researches. Herodotus's eyewitness accounts indicate that he traveled in Egypt in association with Athenians, probably sometime after 454 BC or possibly earlier, after an Athenian fleet had assisted the uprising against Persian rule in 460–454 BC. He probably traveled to Tyre next and then down
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#17331051405119982-587: The Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair and the Egyptians – quite like the Colchians – as melánchroes ( μελάγχροες , " dark-skinned ") and curly-haired . He also gives the possibly first reference to the common Greek name of the tribes living south of Egypt, otherwise known as Nubians , which was Aithíopes ( Αἰθίοπες , "burned-faced"). Later Xenophanes of Colophon described
10143-569: The Suda , he was buried in Macedonian Pella and in the agora in Thurii. Herodotus announced the purpose and scope of his work at the beginning of his Histories: Here are presented the results of the inquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among
10304-588: The naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach asserted that "The white color holds the first place, such as is that of most European peoples. The redness of the cheeks in this variety is almost peculiar to it: at all events it is but seldom to be seen in the rest". In the various editions of his On the Natural Variety of Mankind , he categorized humans into four or five races, largely built on Linnaeus' classifications. But while, in 1775, he had grouped into his "first and most important" race "Europe, Asia this side of
10465-431: The one-drop rule used in the 19th-century United States to exclude those with any amount of African ancestry from the dominant racial grouping, defined as " white ". Such racial identities reflect the cultural attitudes of imperial powers dominant during the age of European colonial expansion . This view rejects the notion that race is biologically defined. According to geneticist David Reich , "while race may be
10626-457: The world , they speculated about the physical, social, and cultural differences among various human groups. The rise of the Atlantic slave trade , which gradually displaced an earlier trade in slaves from throughout the world, created a further incentive to categorize human groups in order to justify the subordination of African slaves . Drawing on sources from classical antiquity and upon their own internal interactions – for example,
10787-420: The " degenerative hypothesis " of racial origins. He claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian inhabitants of Asia, and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors such as the sun and poor diet. He consistently believed that the degeneration could be reversed in a proper environmental control and that all contemporary forms of man could revert to the original Caucasian race . Between
10948-582: The 1500s, Europeans began to develop what became known as "scientific racism," the attempt to construct a biological rather than cultural definition of race ... Whiteness, then, emerged as what we now call a "pan-ethnic" category, as a way of merging a variety of European ethnic populations into a single "race" ... . In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "East Asian peoples were almost uniformly described as White, never as yellow." Michael Keevak's history Becoming Yellow , finds that East Asians were redesignated as being yellow-skinned because "yellow had become
11109-524: The 16th century, when it was used to refer to groups of various kinds, including those characterized by close kinship relations. By the 17th century, the term began to refer to physical ( phenotypical ) traits, and then later to national affiliations. Modern science regards race as a social construct , an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning. The concept of race
11270-585: The Australian colonies, Great Britain and Ireland, Germany (forming the next biggest immigrant group after the British and Irish), France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United States, and Canada. In the 1860s, the discovery of gold started a gold rush in Otago. By 1860 more than 100,000 British and Irish settlers lived throughout New Zealand. The Otago Association actively recruited settlers from Scotland, creating
11431-575: The Caucasian label, while Thomas Henry Huxley (1870) classified the same populations as Mongoloid, and Lothrop Stoddard (1920) classified as " brown " most of the populations of the Middle East , North Africa and Central Asia, and counted as "White" only the European peoples and their descendants, as well as some populations in parts of Anatolia and the northern areas of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Some authorities, following Huxley (1870), distinguished
11592-539: The Dutch. The discovery of diamonds and gold led to a greater influx of English speakers who were able to develop the mining industry with capital unavailable to Afrikaners. They have been joined in more subsequent decades by former colonials from elsewhere, such as Zambia and Kenya , and poorer British nationals looking to escape famine at home. Both Afrikaners and English have been politically dominant in South Africa during
11753-613: The Ganges, and all the country situated to the north of the Amoor, together with that part of North America, which is nearest both in position and character of the inhabitants", he somewhat narrows his "Caucasian variety" in the third edition of his text, of 1795: "To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as
11914-775: The Human Genetic Diversity Panel showing that there were small discontinuities in the smooth genetic variation for ancestral populations at the location of geographic barriers such as the Sahara , the Oceans, and the Himalayas . Nonetheless, Rosenberg et al. (2005) stated that their findings "should not be taken as evidence of our support of any particular concept of biological race ... Genetic differences among human populations derive mainly from gradations in allele frequencies rather than from distinctive 'diagnostic' genotypes." Using
12075-527: The Mediterranean and up the Nile into Africa. From one end of this range to the other, there is no hint of a skin color boundary, and yet the spectrum runs from the lightest in the world at the northern edge to as dark as it is possible for humans to be at the equator. In part, this is due to isolation by distance . This point called attention to a problem common to phenotype-based descriptions of races (for example, those based on hair texture and skin color): they ignore
12236-485: The West came to view race as an invalid genetic or biological designation. The first to challenge the concept of race on empirical grounds were the anthropologists Franz Boas , who provided evidence of phenotypic plasticity due to environmental factors, and Ashley Montagu , who relied on evidence from genetics. E. O. Wilson then challenged the concept from the perspective of general animal systematics, and further rejected
12397-407: The ancient account, these predecessors included Dionysius of Miletus , Charon of Lampsacus, Hellanicus of Lesbos , Xanthus of Lydia and, the best attested of them all, Hecataeus of Miletus . Of these, only fragments of Hecataeus's works survived, and the authenticity of these is debatable, but they provide a glimpse into the kind of tradition within which Herodotus wrote his own Histories . It
12558-505: The anthropologist Stephen Molnar has suggested that the discordance of clines inevitably results in a multiplication of races that renders the concept itself useless. The Human Genome Project states "People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other." Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan argue that human races do exist, and that they correspond to
12719-579: The audience. It was conventional in Herodotus's day for authors to "publish" their works by reciting them at popular festivals. According to Lucian , Herodotus took his finished work straight from Anatolia to the Olympic Games and read the entire Histories to the assembled spectators in one sitting, receiving rapturous applause at the end of it. According to a very different account by an ancient grammarian, Herodotus refused to begin reading his work at
12880-437: The basis for a phylogenetic tree of human races (p. 661). Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks (2008) responded by arguing that Andreasen had misinterpreted the genetic literature: "These trees are phenetic (based on similarity), rather than cladistic (based on monophyletic descent, that is from a series of unique ancestors)." Evolutionary biologist Alan Templeton (2013) argued that multiple lines of evidence falsify
13041-453: The beginning of his work, a native of Halicarnassus in Anatolia , and it is generally accepted that he was born there around 485 BC. The Suda says his family was influential, that he was the son of Lyxes and Dryo and the brother of Theodorus, and that he was also related to Panyassis – an epic poet of the time. Halicarnassus was then within the Persian Empire , making Herodotus
13202-416: The categories are chosen and constructed for pragmatic scientific reasons. In earlier work, Winther had identified "diversity partitioning" and "clustering analysis" as two separate methodologies, with distinct questions, assumptions, and protocols. Each is also associated with opposing ontological consequences vis-a-vis the metaphysics of race. Philosopher Lisa Gannett has argued that biogeographical ancestry,
13363-428: The claim that "races" were equivalent to "subspecies". Human genetic variation is predominantly within races, continuous, and complex in structure, which is inconsistent with the concept of genetic human races. According to the biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks , By the 1970s, it had become clear that (1) most human differences were cultural; (2) what was not cultural was principally polymorphic – that
13524-543: The clustering would be different. Weiss and Fullerton have noted that if one sampled only Icelanders, Mayans and Maoris, three distinct clusters would form and all other populations could be described as being clinally composed of admixtures of Maori, Icelandic and Mayan genetic materials. Kaplan and Winther therefore argue that, seen in this way, both Lewontin and Edwards are right in their arguments. They conclude that while racial groups are characterized by different allele frequencies, this does not mean that racial classification
13685-466: The collection of racial or ethnic information in 1978, and the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), therefore, does not provide census data on White residents or citizens in France. French courts have, however, made cases, and issued rulings, which have identified White people as a demographic group within the country. White people in France are defined, or discussed, as
13846-457: The community retained a thoroughly Dutch character. The Kingdom of Great Britain captured Cape Town in 1795 during the Napoleonic Wars and permanently acquired South Africa from Amsterdam in 1814. The first British immigrants numbered about 4,000 and were introduced in 1820. They represented groups from England , Ireland , Scotland , or Wales and were typically more literate than
14007-537: The concept of a unified, distinguishable "White race" as a social construct with no scientific basis. According to anthropologist Nina Jablonski : In ancient Egypt as a whole, people were not designated by color terms ... Egyptian inscriptions and literature only rarely, for instance, mention the dark skin color of the Kushites of Upper Nubia. We know the Egyptians were not oblivious to skin color, however, because artists paid attention to it in their works of art, to
14168-450: The consequence that the number and geographic location of any described races is highly dependent on the importance attributed to, and quantity of, the traits considered. A skin-lightening mutation, estimated to have occurred 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, partially accounts for the appearance of light skin in people who migrated out of Africa northward into what is now Europe. East Asians owe their relatively light skin to different mutations. On
14329-434: The degrees to which racial categories are biologically warranted and socially constructed. For example, in 2008, John Hartigan Jr. argued for a view of race that focused primarily on culture, but which does not ignore the potential relevance of biology or genetics. Accordingly, the racial paradigms employed in different disciplines vary in their emphasis on biological reduction as contrasted with societal construction. In
14490-455: The different species or races which inhabit it"), published in 1684. In the 18th century the differences among human groups became a focus of scientific investigation. But the scientific classification of phenotypic variation was frequently coupled with racist ideas about innate predispositions of different groups, always attributing the most desirable features to the White, European race and arranging
14651-469: The difficulty of defining a population, the clinal nature of variation, and heterogeneity across the genome (Long and Kittles 2003). In general, however, an average of 85% of statistical genetic variation exists within local populations, ≈7% is between local populations within the same continent, and ≈8% of variation occurs between large groups living on different continents. The recent African origin theory for humans would predict that in Africa there exists
14812-612: The extent that the pigments at the time permitted. The Ancient Egyptian ( New Kingdom ) funerary text known as the Book of Gates distinguishes "four groups" in a procession. These are the Egyptians , the Levantine and Canaanite peoples or "Asiatics", the " Nubians " and the "fair-skinned Libyans ". The Egyptians are depicted as considerably darker-skinned than the Levantines (persons from what
14973-439: The festival of Olympia until some clouds offered him a bit of shade – by which time the assembly had dispersed. (Hence the proverbial expression "Herodotus and his shade" to describe someone who misses an opportunity through delay.) Herodotus's recitation at Olympia was a favourite theme among ancient writers, and there is another interesting variation on the story to be found in the Suda : that of Photius and Tzetzes , in which
15134-422: The first genuinely historical inspiration felt by a Greek. These wars showed him that there was a corporate life, higher than that of the city, of which the story might be told; and they offered to him as a subject the drama of the collision between East and West. With him, the spirit of history was born into Greece; and his work, called after the nine Muses, was indeed the first utterance of Clio . Though Herodotus
15295-500: The first years of the Peloponnesian War (VI, 91; VII, 133, 233; IX, 73) suggests that he returned to Athens, in which case it is possible that he died there during an outbreak of the plague. It is also possible he died in Macedonia instead, after obtaining the patronage of the court there; or else he died back in Thurii. There is nothing in the Histories that can be dated to later than 430 BC with any certainty, and it
15456-670: The former, and a more liberal view on race by the latter. Today, all humans are classified as belonging to the species Homo sapiens . However, this is not the first species of homininae : the first species of genus Homo , Homo habilis , evolved in East Africa at least 2 million years ago, and members of this species populated different parts of Africa in a relatively short time. Homo erectus evolved more than 1.8 million years ago, and by 1.5 million years ago had spread throughout Europe and Asia. Virtually all physical anthropologists agree that Archaic Homo sapiens (A group including
15617-406: The frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant 'constellation'". Leonard Lieberman and Rodney Kirk have pointed out that "the paramount weakness of this statement is that if one gene can distinguish races then the number of races is as numerous as the number of human couples reproducing". Moreover,
15778-815: The genetic classification of ecotypes , but that real human races do not correspond very much, if at all, to folk racial categories. In contrast, Walsh & Yun reviewed the literature in 2011 and reported: "Genetic studies using very few chromosomal loci find that genetic polymorphisms divide human populations into clusters with almost 100 percent accuracy and that they correspond to the traditional anthropological categories." Some biologists argue that racial categories correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype ), and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. The distribution of genetic variants within and among human populations are impossible to describe succinctly because of
15939-563: The globe such as the African continent ." They have been described as a privileged social class within the country, comparatively sheltered from racism and poverty. Der Spiegel has reported how "most white people in France only know the banlieues as a kind of caricature". Banlieues , outer-city regions across the country that are increasingly identified with minority groups, often have residents who are disproportionately affected by unemployment and poverty. The lack of census data collected by
16100-487: The group, and rhetoric surrounding Whites in France experiencing poverty have been, at times, utilised by various right-wing political elements in the country. University of Lyon 's political scientist Angéline Escafré-Dublet has written that "the equivalent to a White backlash in France can be traced through the debate over the purported neglect of the 'poor Whites' in France". In 2006, French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen suggested there were too many "players of colour" in
16261-437: The haplotype for beta-S hemoglobin , on the other hand, radiate out of specific geographical points in Africa. As the anthropologists Leonard Lieberman and Fatimah Linda Jackson observed, "Discordant patterns of heterogeneity falsify any description of a population as if it were genotypically or even phenotypically homogeneous". Patterns such as those seen in human physical and genetic variation as described above, have led to
16422-439: The historical process of exploration and conquest which brought Europeans into contact with groups from different continents, and of the ideology of classification and typology found in the natural sciences. The term race was often used in a general biological taxonomic sense , starting from the 19th century, to denote genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype. The modern concept of race emerged as
16583-681: The hostility between the English and Irish powerfully influenced early European thinking about the differences between people – Europeans began to sort themselves and others into groups based on physical appearance, and to attribute to individuals belonging to these groups behaviors and capacities which were claimed to be deeply ingrained. A set of folk beliefs took hold that linked inherited physical differences between groups to inherited intellectual , behavioral , and moral qualities. Similar ideas can be found in other cultures, for example in China , where
16744-524: The idea of a phylogenetic tree structure to human genetic diversity, and confirm the presence of gene flow among populations. Marks, Templeton, and Cavalli-Sforza all conclude that genetics does not provide evidence of human races. Previously, anthropologists Lieberman and Jackson (1995) had also critiqued the use of cladistics to support concepts of race. They argued that "the molecular and biochemical proponents of this model explicitly use racial categories in their initial grouping of samples ". For example,
16905-521: The individuals and ideologies of one group come to perceive the members of an outgroup as both racially defined and morally inferior. As a result, racial groups possessing relatively little power often find themselves excluded or oppressed, while hegemonic individuals and institutions are charged with holding racist attitudes. Racism has led to many instances of tragedy, including slavery and genocide . In some countries, law enforcement uses race to profile suspects. This use of racial categories
17066-411: The influence of the soil and the temperature, together with the mode of life, have the greatest influence". Blumenbach's conclusion was, however, to proclaim all races' attribution to one single human species. Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., depended on environmental factors, such as solarization and diet. Like other monogenists , Blumenbach held to
17227-422: The large and highly diverse macroethnic groups of East Indians, North Africans, and Europeans are presumptively grouped as Caucasians prior to the analysis of their DNA variation. They argued that this a priori grouping limits and skews interpretations, obscures other lineage relationships, deemphasizes the impact of more immediate clinal environmental factors on genomic diversity, and can cloud our understanding of
17388-443: The largest groups of social relevance, and these definitions can change over time. Historical race concepts have included a wide variety of schemes to divide local or worldwide populations into races and sub-races. Across the world, different organizations and societies choose to disambiguate race to different extents: The establishment of racial boundaries often involves the subjugation of groups defined as racially inferior, as in
17549-484: The largest of which by European birthplace were: 15,082 from the United Kingdom, Italy (13,361) and Serbia (5,935). Among racial origins for the non-Maltese, 58.1% of all identified as Caucasian. Race (human categorization) Race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society . The term came into common usage during
17710-607: The last two decades of the 18th century, the theory of polygenism , the belief that different races had evolved separately in each continent and shared no common ancestor, was advocated in England by historian Edward Long and anatomist Charles White , in Germany by ethnographers Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster , and in France by Julien-Joseph Virey . In the US, Samuel George Morton , Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz promoted this theory in
17871-571: The late nineteenth century, the Colonial/State and later federal governments of Australia restricted all permanent immigration to the country by non-Europeans. These policies became known as the " White Australia policy ", which was consolidated and enabled by the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 , but was never universally applied. Immigration inspectors were empowered to ask immigrants to take dictation from any European language as
18032-561: The least diverse population they analyzed (the Surui, a population derived from New Guinea). Statistical analysis that takes this difference into account confirms previous findings that "Western-based racial classifications have no taxonomic significance". A 2002 study of random biallelic genetic loci found little to no evidence that humans were divided into distinct biological groups. In his 2003 paper, " Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy ", A. W. F. Edwards argued that rather than using
18193-419: The level of alleles and allele frequencies. Nature has not created four or five distinct, nonoverlapping genetic groups of people. Another way to look at differences between populations is to measure genetic differences rather than physical differences between groups. The mid-20th-century anthropologist William C. Boyd defined race as: "A population which differs significantly from other populations in regard to
18354-424: The matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks. His record of the achievements of others was an achievement in itself, though the extent of it has been debated. Herodotus's place in history and his significance may be understood according to the traditions within which he worked. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. Dionysius of Halicarnassus ,
18515-596: The mid-19th century. Polygenism was popular and most widespread in the 19th century, culminating in the founding of the Anthropological Society of London (1863), which, during the period of the American Civil War, broke away from the Ethnological Society of London and its monogenic stance , their underlined difference lying, relevantly, in the so-called "Negro question": a substantial racist view by
18676-531: The mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, race scientists, including most physical anthropologists classified the world's populations into three, four, or five races , which, depending on the authority consulted, were further divided into various sub-races. During this period the Caucasian race , named after people of the Caucasus Mountains but extending to all Europeans, figured as one of these races and
18837-510: The mid-nineteenth century, there were few restrictions on immigration, although members of ethnic minorities tended to be assimilated into the Anglo-Celtic populations. People of many nationalities, including many non-White people, emigrated to Australia during the goldrushes of the 1850s. However, the vast majority was still White and the goldrushes inspired the first racist activism and policy, directed mainly at Chinese immigrants . From
18998-497: The mid-seventeenth century, the novel term español ("Spaniard") was being equated in written documents with blanco , or "White". In Spain's American colonies, African , Native American ( indios ), Jewish , or morisco ancestry formally excluded individuals from the "purity of blood" ( limpieza de sangre ) requirements for holding any public office under the Royal Pragmatic of 1501. Similar restrictions applied in
19159-554: The military, some religious orders, colleges, and universities, leading to a nearly all-White priesthood and professional stratum. Blacks and indios were subject to tribute obligations and forbidden to bear arms, and black and indio women were forbidden to wear jewels, silk, or precious metals in early colonial Mexico and Peru. Those pardos (people with dark skin) and mulattos (people of mixed African and European ancestry) with resources largely sought to evade these restrictions by passing as White. A brief royal offer to buy
19320-448: The modern concept from pre-modern descriptions, which focused on physical complexion rather than the idea of race. Prior to the modern era , no European peoples regarded themselves as "White", but rather defined their identity in terms of their religion, ancestry, ethnicity, or nationality . Contemporary anthropologists and other scientists, while recognizing the reality of biological variation between different human populations, regard
19481-420: The more human groups they measured, the fewer discrete differences they observed among races and the more categories they had to create to classify human beings. The number of races observed expanded to the 1930s and 1950s, and eventually anthropologists concluded that there were no discrete races. Twentieth and 21st century biomedical researchers have discovered this same feature when evaluating human variation at
19642-612: The narrative and provides readers with a wellspring of additional information. Herodotus was criticized in ancient times for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment. He retorted that he reported what he could see and was told. A sizable portion of the Histories has since been confirmed by modern historians and archaeologists . Modern scholars generally turn to Herodotus's own writing for reliable information about his life, supplemented with ancient yet much later sources, such as
19803-473: The non-Māori population reached over 250,000. Other smaller groups of settlers came from Germany, Scandinavia, and other parts of Europe as well as from China and India, but British and Irish settlers made up the vast majority and did so for the next 150 years. White people in France are a broad racial-based, or skin color -based, social category in French society. In statistical terms, the French government banned
19964-514: The other hand, the greater the number of traits (or alleles ) considered, the more subdivisions of humanity are detected, since traits and gene frequencies do not always correspond to the same geographical location. Or as Ossorio & Duster (2005) put it: Anthropologists long ago discovered that humans' physical traits vary gradually, with groups that are close geographic neighbors being more similar than groups that are geographically separated. This pattern of variation, known as clinal variation,
20125-416: The other races along a continuum of progressively undesirable attributes. The 1735 classification of Carl Linnaeus , inventor of zoological taxonomy, divided the human species Homo sapiens into continental varieties of europaeus , asiaticus , americanus , and afer , each associated with a different humour : sanguine , melancholic , choleric , and phlegmatic , respectively. Homo sapiens europaeus
20286-456: The past; due to the controversial racial order under apartheid , the nation's predominantly Afrikaner government became a target of condemnation by other African states and the site of considerable dissension between 1948 and 1991. There were 4.6 million Whites in South Africa in 2011, down from an all-time high of 5.2 million in 1995 following a wave of emigration commencing in the late twentieth century. However, many returned over time. In
20447-400: The philosophers Jonathan Kaplan and Rasmus Winther, and the geneticist Joseph Graves , have argued that the cluster structure of genetic data is dependent on the initial hypotheses of the researcher and the influence of these hypotheses on the choice of populations to sample. When one samples continental groups, the clusters become continental, but if one had chosen other sampling patterns,
20608-408: The policing and disproportionate incarceration of certain groups. Groups of humans have always identified themselves as distinct from neighboring groups, but such differences have not always been understood to be natural, immutable and global. These features are the distinguishing features of how the concept of race is used today. In this way the idea of race as we understand it today came about during
20769-667: The population was of European descent. The establishment of British colonies in Australia from 1788 and the boom in whaling and sealing in the Southern Ocean brought many Europeans to the vicinity of New Zealand . Whalers and sealers were often itinerant, and the first real settlers were missionaries and traders in the Bay of Islands area from 1809. Early visitors to New Zealand included whalers, sealers, missionaries, mariners, and merchants, attracted to natural resources in abundance. They came from
20930-475: The position in the political spectrum of the person – where European ethnic groups and nations labeled or treated other Europeans as members of another, somehow "inferior race". Between the Enlightenment era and interwar period, the racist worldviews fit well into the liberal worldview, and they were almost general among the liberal thinkers and politicians. Definitions of White have changed over
21091-674: The possible species H. heidelbergensis , H. rhodesiensis , and H. neanderthalensis ) evolved out of African H. erectus ( sensu lato ) or H. ergaster . Anthropologists support the idea that anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) evolved in North or East Africa from an archaic human species such as H. heidelbergensis and then migrated out of Africa, mixing with and replacing H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis populations throughout Europe and Asia, and H. rhodesiensis populations in Sub-Saharan Africa (a combination of
21252-878: The previous generation had known it – as largely discrete, geographically distinct, gene pools – did not exist. The term race in biology is used with caution because it can be ambiguous. Generally, when it is used it is effectively a synonym of subspecies . (For animals, the only taxonomic unit below the species level is usually the subspecies; there are narrower infraspecific ranks in botany , and race does not correspond directly with any of them.) Traditionally, subspecies are seen as geographically isolated and genetically differentiated populations. Studies of human genetic variation show that human populations are not geographically isolated. and their genetic differences are far smaller than those among comparable subspecies. In 1978, Sewall Wright suggested that human populations that have long inhabited separated parts of
21413-626: The privileges of Whiteness for a substantial sum of money attracted fifteen applicants before pressure from White elites ended the practice. In the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, the designation English or Christian was initially used in contrast to Native Americans or Africans. Early appearances of White race or White people in the Oxford English Dictionary begin in
21574-403: The race concept, this linkage is a social distinction rather than an inherently biological one. Other dimensions of racial groupings include shared history, traditions, and language. For instance, African-American English is a language spoken by many African Americans , especially in areas of the United States where racial segregation exists. Furthermore, people often self-identify as members of
21735-523: The races. Blumenbach also noted the graded transition in appearances from one group to adjacent groups and suggested that "one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them". From the 17th through 19th centuries, the merging of folk beliefs about group differences with scientific explanations of those differences produced what Smedley has called an " ideology of race". According to this ideology, races are primordial, natural, enduring and distinct. It
21896-651: The recent 2021 census of Hong Kong, 61,582 people identified as white representing 0.8% of the total population. In the Far East at Southeast Asia , in the Philippines , a genetic study by the National Geographic , shows that 5% of the population are Southern Europeans that had arrived due to the Spanish colonization of the archipelago, most of which are Spanish Filipinos The recent 2021 Australian census does not use
22057-592: The relationship between genes and complex traits remains poorly understood. However, Risch denied such limitations render the analysis useless: "Perhaps just using someone's actual birth year is not a very good way of measuring age. Does that mean we should throw it out? ... Any category you come up with is going to be imperfect, but that doesn't preclude you from using it or the fact that it has utility." Early human genetic cluster analysis studies were conducted with samples taken from ancestral population groups living at extreme geographic distances from each other. It
22218-577: The relatively under-developed economic status of Eastern European countries such as Poland and the USSR was attributed to the racial inferiority of their inhabitants. Fascist Italy took the same view, and both of these nations justified their colonial ambitions in Eastern Europe on racist, anti-Slavic grounds. These nations were not alone in their view; during the long nineteenth century and interwar period , there were numerous cases – regardless of
22379-468: The research seem independent and "almost detachable", so that they might have been set aside by the author for the purposes of an oral performance. The intellectual matrix of the 5th century, Marincola suggests, comprised many oral performances in which philosophers would dramatically recite such detachable pieces of their work. The idea was to criticize previous arguments on a topic and emphatically and enthusiastically insert their own in order to win over
22540-548: The river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa." Blumenbach quotes various other systems by his contemporaries, ranging from two to seven races, authored by the authorities of that time, including, besides Linnæus, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon , Christoph Meiners and Immanuel Kant . In the question of color, he conducts a rather thorough inquiry, considering also factors of diet and health , but ultimately believes that "climate, and
22701-460: The same country. Some countries do not ask questions about race or colour at all in their census. The social definition has also been added where possible. White Dutch people first arrived in South Africa around 1652. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, some 2,000 Europeans and their descendants were established in the region. Although these early Afrikaners represented various nationalities, including German peasants and French Huguenots ,
22862-463: The seventeenth century. Historian Winthrop Jordan reports that, "throughout the [thirteen] colonies the terms Christian , free , English , and white were ... employed indiscriminately" in the seventeenth century as proxies for one another. In 1680, Morgan Godwyn "found it necessary to explain" to English readers that "in Barbados , 'white' was 'the general name for Europeans.'" Several historians report
23023-411: The social sciences, theoretical frameworks such as racial formation theory and critical race theory investigate implications of race as social construction by exploring how the images, ideas and assumptions of race are expressed in everyday life. A large body of scholarship has traced the relationships between the historical, social production of race in legal and criminal language, and their effects on
23184-470: The son of Sphynx lies; in Ionic history without peer; a Dorian born, who fled from slander's brand and made in Thuria his new native land. Yet it was in Athens where his most formidable contemporary critics could be found. In 425 BC, which is about the time that Herodotus is thought by many scholars to have died, the Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes created The Acharnians , in which he blames
23345-491: The term “white” on their census form, therefore results showed 54.7% of the population identifying with a European ancestry. From 1788, when the first British colony in Australia was founded, until the early nineteenth century, most immigrants to Australia were English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish convicts . These were augmented by small numbers of free settlers from the British Isles and other European countries. However, until
23506-1080: The true patterns of affinity. In 2015, Keith Hunley, Graciela Cabana, and Jeffrey Long analyzed the Human Genome Diversity Project sample of 1,037 individuals in 52 populations, finding that diversity among non-African populations is the result of a serial founder effect process, with non-African populations as a whole nested among African populations, that "some African populations are equally related to other African populations and to non-African populations", and that "outside of Africa, regional groupings of populations are nested inside one another, and many of them are not monophyletic". Earlier research had also suggested that there has always been considerable gene flow between human populations, meaning that human population groups are not monophyletic. Rachel Caspari has argued that, since no groups currently regarded as races are monophyletic, by definition none of these groups can be clades. One crucial innovation in reconceptualizing genotypic and phenotypic variation
23667-443: The use of the race concept to classify people, and how the race concept is used, is a matter of social convention. They differ on whether the race concept remains a meaningful and useful social convention. In 1964, the biologists Paul Ehrlich and Holm pointed out cases where two or more clines are distributed discordantly – for example, melanin is distributed in a decreasing pattern from the equator north and south; frequencies for
23828-423: The work of Ruth Frankenberg , states, "the history of modern racist domination has been bound up with the history of how European peoples defined themselves (and sometimes some other peoples) as members of a superior 'white race'." Alastair Bonnett argues that "white identity", as it is presently conceived, is an American project, reflecting American interpretations of race and history. According to Gregory Jay,
23989-403: The world by proclaiming that they do not have institutional racism in their nation." Sociologist Crystal Marie Fleming has written; "While many whites in France refuse to acknowledge institutionalized racism and white supremacy , there is widespread belief in the specter of 'anti-white racism'". Accusations of anti-White racism, suggestions of the displacement of, or lack of representation for,
24150-571: The world should, in general, be considered different subspecies by the criterion that most individuals of such populations can be allocated correctly by inspection. Wright argued: "It does not require a trained anthropologist to classify an array of Englishmen, West Africans, and Chinese with 100% accuracy by features, skin color, and type of hair despite so much variability within each of these groups that every individual can easily be distinguished from every other." While in practice subspecies are often defined by easily observable physical appearance, there
24311-483: The years, including the official definitions used in many countries, such as the United States and Brazil . Through the mid to late twentieth century, numerous countries had formal legal standards or procedures defining racial categories (see cleanliness of blood , casta , apartheid in South Africa , hypodescent ). Below are some census definitions of White, which may differ from the social definition of White within
24472-558: Was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus , part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum , Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria , Italy. He wrote the Histories , a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars , and was the first writer to apply a scientific method to historical events. He has been described as " The Father of History ",
24633-407: Was a decline from 92.4% in 2016 and 94.24% in 2011 . People who identified as “White Irish” in 2022 were 3,893,056 or 76.5% of the total population, a decline from 87.4% in 2006. As of the 2021 census, 89.1% self-identified as Caucasian racial origin. Maltese -born natives make up the majority of the island with 386,280 people out of a total population of 519,562. However, there are minorities,
24794-686: Was described as active, acute, and adventurous, whereas Homo sapiens afer was said to be crafty, lazy, and careless. The 1775 treatise "The Natural Varieties of Mankind", by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach proposed five major divisions: the Caucasoid race , the Mongoloid race , the Ethiopian race (later termed Negroid ), the American Indian race , and the Malayan race , but he did not propose any hierarchy among
24955-400: Was formally renounced by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2023. Modern scholarship views racial categories as socially constructed, that is, race is not intrinsic to human beings but rather an identity created, often by socially dominant groups, to establish meaning in a social context. Different cultures define different racial groups, often focused on
25116-628: Was further argued that some groups may be the result of mixture between formerly distinct populations, but that careful study could distinguish the ancestral races that had combined to produce admixed groups. Subsequent influential classifications by Georges Buffon , Petrus Camper and Christoph Meiners all classified "Negros" as inferior to Europeans. In the United States the racial theories of Thomas Jefferson were influential. He saw Africans as inferior to Whites especially in regards to their intellect, and imbued with unnatural sexual appetites, but described Native Americans as equals to whites. In
25277-492: Was incorporated as a formal category of both pseudoscientific research and, in countries including the United States, social classification. There was never any scholarly consensus on the delineation between the Caucasian race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid one, including the populations of East Asia. Thus, Carleton S. Coon (1939) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under
25438-538: Was invented and rationalized lies somewhere between 1730 and 1790. According to Smedley and Marks the European concept of "race", along with many of the ideas now associated with the term, arose at the time of the scientific revolution , which introduced and privileged the study of natural kinds , and the age of European imperialism and colonization which established political relations between Europeans and peoples with distinct cultural and political traditions . As Europeans encountered people from different parts of
25599-727: Was relaxed in stages: non-European nationals who could demonstrate European descent were admitted (e.g., descendants of European colonizers and settlers from Latin America or Africa ), as were autochthonous inhabitants (such as Maronites , Assyrians and Mandeans ) of various nations from the Middle East, most significantly from Lebanon and to a lesser degree Iraq , Syria and Iran . In 1973, all immigration restrictions based on race and geographic origin were officially terminated. Australia enumerated its population by race between 1911 and 1966, by racial origin in 1971 and 1976, and by self-declared ancestry alone since 1981, meaning no attempt
25760-453: Was the anthropologist C. Loring Brace 's observation that such variations, insofar as they are affected by natural selection , slow migration, or genetic drift , are distributed along geographic gradations or clines . For example, with respect to skin color in Europe and Africa, Brace writes: To this day, skin color grades by imperceptible means from Europe southward around the eastern end of
25921-535: Was thought that such large geographic distances would maximize the genetic variation between the groups sampled in the analysis, and thus maximize the probability of finding cluster patterns unique to each group. In light of the historically recent acceleration of human migration (and correspondingly, human gene flow) on a global scale, further studies were conducted to judge the degree to which genetic cluster analysis can pattern ancestrally identified groups as well as geographically separated groups. One such study looked at
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