It certainly depends on your definition.
First off, "White" as a racial designation is perhaps the most useless of all definitions available. To say "Black" or "African" (meaning sub-Saharan) makes sense for the most part, because most people who would fall under that definition have an ancestry that is vastly mixed and entirely untraceable. The African cultural heritage in the United States is an amalgamation of many different concepts that stretch all across Africa, due to the nature of African "colonization" of the new world. Not to be offensive in the least, but an "African Festival" simply is not the same kind of animal as a Greek or Polish festival, as such a festival largely deal with an entirely reconstructed culture that you really could not find in any one location in Africa.
In many circles "White" has traditionally been used to mean peoples who are, in some way descended from Indo-European stock (which actually includes Persians and many in India). Though even this definition is just a fiction, because most people who now speak an Indo-European language are actually mostly descended from the original pre-Indo-European inhabitants of a region, or some group that moved in later.
If you are going to define "White" as a skin color, then where does anyone from the Mediterranean fit into that scope? Today, we include Italians, Greeks, and the Spanish under this codex, but that was not always so. In fact, in many places, Italians were still considered "colored" well into the 20th century.
So, do we include people from the Northern shores of the Mediterranean "White" because they are Europeans? Pretty shallow, since there has been so much movement around that region over the past thousands of years that your average Sicilian is likely to carry genetic markers from people as far away as Egypt, Morocco, Spain, Crimea, Denmark, or Turkey.
If we are to take this term to mean "Christian" then you could fire a cannonball down any city street in Britain at mid-day and likely not hit a single person who is a practicing Christian.
So, then are we talking about places that are historically Christian? Well, there is not place in the world that is more "historically Christian" in the world than the Middle East.
My point is, racial designations are, and always will be, utterly arbitrary, and wholly dependent on the fashions of the times. Ethnic designations have some weight, because they carry with them certain identities, but there is no such thing as a "race" as such.
THANK YOU!!!
Why am I not surprised that such a cogent response came from the keyboard of Soulty?
Enough with these absurd "race" threads.
'White' is a meaningless and collectivistic term that denotes nothing other than the melanin levels in one's skin.
Not even. It denotes
nothing.
Poll
