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Basic Color Terminology: An Analogy to Race
In my time on The Apricity Forum, and beyond for that matter, I’ve found that many take issue with my perception of race. For this reason, I thought it’d be ameliorative to explain my position by comparing race to basic color terms.
To begin,
“color terms can be organized into a coherent hierarchy and there are a limited number of universal basic color terms which begin to be used by individual cultures in a relatively fixed order. This order is defined in stages I-VIII.”
Belonging to stage VII,
“English contains eleven basic color terms: 'black', 'white', 'red', 'green', 'yellow', 'blue', 'brown', 'orange', 'pink', 'purple', and 'grey'”.
Conversely, in stage VIII,
“Italian, Russian and Hebrew have twelve basic color terms, each distinguishing blue and light blue. A Russian will make the same red / pink and orange / brown distinctions, but will also make a further distinction between sinii and goluboi, which English speakers would call dark and light blue. To Russian speakers, sinii and goluboi are as separate as red and pink, or orange and brown”.
Seeing as stage VIII distinguishes between dark blue and light blue – while stage VII languages don’t – which color term hierarchy should we follow? The one with more or less color distinctions.
Similar to color term hierarchies, human racial typologies are based on observable distinctions.
“European medieval models of race generally mixed Classical ideas with the notion that humanity as a whole was descended from Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three sons of Noah, producing distinct Semitic (Asiatic), Hamitic (African), and Japhetic (Indo-European) peoples”.
In contrast, German anthropologist
“Johann Friedrich Blumenbach divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls), and called them:
• the Caucasian or white race. Blumenbach was the first to use this term for Europeans, but the term would later be reinterpreted to also include Middle Easterners and South Asians.
• the Mongolian or yellow race, including all East Asians.
• the Malayan or brown race, including Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders.
• the Ethiopian or black race, including all sub-Saharan Africans.
• the American or red race, including all Native Americans”.
Today, however, many people believe genetic clustering is the best way to infer races.
“Clusters of individuals are often geographically structured. For example, when clustering a population of East Asians and Europeans, each group will likely form its own respective cluster based on similar allele frequencies. In this way, clusters can have a correlation with traditional concepts of race and self-identified ancestry…[even though ] genetic clusters do not typically match socially defined racial groups; many commonly understood races may not be sorted into the same genetic cluster, and many genetic clusters are made up of individuals who would have distinct racial identities”.
Moreover, “there is more genetic variation within self-identified racial groups than between them”.
Insomuch as race is analogous with basic color terminology, then it would go without saying that, just like color, races are better categorized along observable characteristics such as phenotype and morphology, considered holistically.
The color brown for instance is approximately 58.8% red, 29.4% green, and 0% blue. Rather than searching the RGB code for the color brown though, one knows the hue simply by looking at it, although the shade may be categorized differently from ‘brown’ depending on the model being employed.
By the same token, rather than administering a DNA test, a person with dark skin, tightly curled hair, eyes dark brown with yellowish cornea; a nose more or less broad and flat; and large teeth", would most likely be categorized as Negroid.
How about Melanesians though. They kind of look Negroid, should they be lumped together with Sub-Saharan Africans? Under a “stage VII” framework, the answer would be yes, but under “stage VIII”, no. Nevertheless, I’ve noticed that many users become enraged at the notion of using a typology different from that with which they’re familiar.
In any case, race is different from ethnicity, heritage, nationality, lineage, etcetera, as the latter dimensions are based on ancestry, citizenship, and other masked characteristics.
I assume some will contend that these parts of our identity can be observed through food, customs, tradition, and so on, yet based on looks alone, a level of uncertainty arises concerning how to group an individual. That’s the beauty of race.
Under the framework I’m outlining, I believe race should be a quick, short-hand benchmark used to categorize individuals, whereas genetics should be used “for characterizing the general structure of genetic variation among human populations, to contribute to the study of ancestral origins, evolutionary history, and precision medicine”.
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Originally Posted by renaissance12
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