Talk:White people

a lapsus calami?

"Raj Bhopal and Liam Donaldson state that white people are not a heterogeneous group"- don't they claim that "populations described as White... are heterogenous"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by AmirOnWiki (talk • contribs) 21:02, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Zenedin Zidane?

Issnt Zezo of algerian ethnicity? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.210.47.104 (talk) 09:41, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Black People are more important???

Why the article "Black People" is blocked and "White People" not? Or both should be blocked or both shouldn't.

Turks are mixed phenotypically

Hello there. I am a Turk and I notice on the article there is a quote which says "brownish as the southern Europeans, Turks". I think it would be better to include an excerpt from the book "The Turks Today" by Andrew Mango. He describes the racial situation of the Turks perfectly: "The Turkish nation took shape in the centuries of Seljuk and Ottoman power. The nomadic Turkish conquerors did not displace the original local inhabitants: Hellenized Anatolians (or simply Greeks), Armenians, people of Caucasian origins, Kurds, and - in the Balkans - Slavs, Albanians and others. They intermarried with them, while many local people converted to Islam and 'turned Turk'. They were joined by Muslims from the lands north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus, by Persian craftsmen and Arab scholars, and by European adventurers and converts, known in the West as renegades. As a result, the Turks today exhibit a wide variety of ethnic types. Some have delicate Far Eastern, others heavy local Anatolian features, some, who are descended from Slavs, Albanians or Circassians, have light complexions, others are dark-skinned, many look Mediterranean, others Central Asian or Persian. A numerically small, but commerically and intellectually important, group is descended from converts from Judaism. One can hear Turks describe some of their fellow countrymen as 'hatchet-nosed Lazes' (a people on the Black Sea coast), 'dark Arabs' (a term which includes descendants of black slaves), or even 'fellahs'. But they are all Turks."

Obviously the whole of this piece may be too much. But maybe the final part that explicitly describe the range of phenotypes one can find amongst the Turks would fit well into this article?

However one thing that must be established is that Turks do not call themselves white, regardless of phenotype. Maybe some members of the Turkish diaspora identify themselves as white to fit into the racial categories of the West, but in Turkey itself there is only one racial/ethnic self-description and that is Turk. Whether fair skinned with staight blonde hair or olive skinned with curly black hair, Turks call themselves Turk. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.193.167.69 (talk) 11:04, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

AUSTRALIAN SECTION TO BE RE-WRITTEN:

The section on Australia should be re-writtten. This article is about the contemporary usage of the term "white". The Australian Census does not categorise people in terms of race. The Australian section has just given a brief history of European immigration to Australia and a breif history of the White Australia Policy. The usage of the term "white" remains subjective to opinion in Australia. Generally speaking it is used in a much narrower term than most other Western nations. Often it socially excludes Mediterranean Europeans and non-European Caucasoids. The ethnic slur "Wog" often is used to denote Southern Europeans and Near East people. I don't care what some people think. the word wog in Australia IS a connotation for non-whiteness. If you don't wish to agree, then see where the White Australian article re-directs you to!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.169.37.244 (talk) 09:20, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Skin pigmentation in different populations

Why are the pictures representing a gradient of skin pigmentation that is not scientific. This article seems to rely on old beliefs based on speudo science. Here Celtic populations are presented as the lightest while accordint=g to the only 21st century objective study carried out about skin pigmentation they just have an average skin pigmentation, just like Spaniards or even darker, who are supposed to be, as Southern Europeans much darker according to popular belief and pseudoscience. In any case, Celtic populations are among the lightest people, of course, but not among the lightest in Europe, just about average. The Reference about Mediterraneam, again, is based on cheap, simplistic terminology of 19th century spseudoscience. Just look at the values for Mediterranean Europe, represented here by Spain, and North africa, for example.

See:

http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/chem/faculty/leontis/chem447/PDF_files/Jablonski_skin_color_2000.pdf

If are too lazy to read it here is a summary. The link is to a page that is controversial but the summary is good. In fact you can check it in the original paper if you are diligent. I include it here for those too lazy. You can also see some shocked reactions that reflect the preconceived vision of reality and its reactions before facts.

http://racialreality.blogspot.com/2006/01/skin-reflectance-of-selected-world.html

In short, this article continues to be based on the same type of pseudoscience, often influenced by political propaganda, ignoring objective science. Again, the degrees of lightness represented by the pictures do not represent objective reality but the preconceived view of the world of some users here. this preconceived view of relaity is probably also influenced by the fact that people confuse hair and eye color with real skin pigmentation. Bembo.

By the way, I see that all this is based on the old fashioned, abandoned, von Luschcan Scale.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Luschan%27s_chromatic_scale

No more comments. It seems that just another article used for propaganda.

In the meantime you may continue to ignore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrophotometry

Bembo. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.55.201.11 (talk) 15:45, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

look, Wikipedia has lots of articles on obsolete stuff. The von Luschan scale article isn't "propaganda" any more than the phlogiston article.

Also, what is obsolete is the claim of racial categories based on pigmentation. This is different from saying that measuring pigmentation is obsolete. It is, of course, perfectly possible to measure the skin pigmentation of any given individual. You will just not be able to determine that individual's "race" based on that measurement. The Fitzpatrick types are exactly that: a scale for measuring sking pigmentation in individuals, not for "racial" purposes but purely as a matter of dermatology, notably in order to assess that individual's risk of skin cancer.

People need to stop jumping from "skin pigmentation" to "race". Skin pigmentation is a perfectly objective feature -- in an individual, not in a population, as a population doesn't have "a skin", it has as many skins as it has members. --dab (𒁳) 17:02, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

I agree with you, still, the Von Luschan Scale, which is obsolete, is clearly given more importance than the spectophotometry studies, which are now used as objective studies of skin pigmentation, therefore, the highlighting of one and the almost hiding of the other is a clear example of cherry picking of information of the worst kind and therefore has to do with two possible causes: 1. Ignorance on the subject. 2. An agenda that tries to distort the real state of things in a given discipline. The latter is a clear type of propaganda. Bembo.