So according to the US government, Arabs, Persians, Kurdish, etc people are white. Why is this?
In: Other
Many of them identify as white and have a skin tone that is very light.
Not to mention many Middle Easterners migrated from Europe Millenia back.
This just in… US changes how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity. It’s the first revision in 27 years
https://apnews.com/article/race-ethnicity-census-bureau-hispanics-0b2c325b683efd95e8e8e24235654abd
I cant explain. Just wanted to say i also cant explain why they would classify anyone as white at all. Or any other color.
I know my comment here isn’t helpful, but America’s obsession with race is weird. Ethnic grouping is much more accurate and even that doesn’t help cause all in all it doesn’t matter that much. It seems like the US built a few racial classifications and tried to retrofit all the groups in them so that’s why Arabs seem white when that isn’t the case in reality. I find it odd as a non-American when Americans talk about their cultural heritage and they say they’re “white” or any other race. You can’t group them all together, being part of a race completely negates the cultural nuances that create the ethnicities within that race.
The caucuses are in the Middle East. I guess you could also claim Asian descent since so many of the territories conquered by Ghengis have his genes.
People are white, black, or Asian. There are all kinds of sub-sets, but people come in 3 flavors.
Genetically speaking North Africans, Middle Easterners, WASPs, Celts, Chinese, Inuits and all the rest are almost interchangeable. It makes very little sense to differentiate. If you’re going to have a ‘white’ ‘race’ and try to justify it on genetics it makes no sense to disclude any ethnicities beyond the Australo-Melanesians split, and you could argue it makes no sense to disclude the Australo-Melanesians.
The quick answer: our modern concept of race goes back to the work of Johann Blumenbach who classified people not based on the color of their skin but on the shape of their skull. North Africans and Middle Easterners were classified as Caucasian, along with Europeans. The name Caucasian comes from the Caucus Mountains (think Georgia and Armenia) as he saw the people from that region as the archetype of the race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Friedrich_Blumenbach
Any offical form where you can declare yourself to be either White or African-American must be quite confusing for first generation immigrants from Tunesia or Morocco.
Because their skin is quite light. Often, that’s all you need. Unless, for some reason, their eyes have epicanthic folds, you know, like Asian people often have. Really, there are all these weird rules and exceptions to the rules. There has never been one consistent and clear definition of which people count as “white” and which don’t. It’s like how there’s no clear rule deciding where the limit goes between breakfast and lunch (and that’s not even getting into the strange, elusive idea of “brunch”).
Latest Answers