Talk:Race in ancient history

Reason for this article
So, Moreschi goes ahead with his draft of a replacement of the old Race of ancient Egyptians article. Well, I am ok with being bold, but I would suppose that it is obvious that I would like to keep the content about which we have been battling the last two weeks on the talk page. But at least there is some movement at this article now, so I don't want to keep Moreschi from working on it by starting a new discussion. I had a different idea on my mind for the article anyway. I will push this through, even if it is the last thing I'll do on Wikipedia (which is rather likely, since I've grown tired own all these discussions.) Zara1709 (talk) 21:11, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

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scope?
I appreciate the necessity for discussing the stuff in this article, but how do we define its scope? Is this about At this point, the article does irresponsibly conflate these topics, and although I respect that a lot of valid material is being addressed here, I feel it should be tagged as problematic wrt WP:SYN as it stands. --dab (𒁳) 09:45, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
 * notions of "race" in the remote past (say, in Classical Antiquity)? Beware of anachronisms here. It isn't clear whether the term "race" can be applied to any pre-modern ethnography. We can discuss ancient writers commenting on what we today would call "racial affinities". WP:SYN is looming here, and we need clear secondary sources to base this on
 * or is it about modern discussion of "race" based on claims about ancient history? That's entirely within the realm of WP:FRINGE ethnic nationalism and it shouldn't be conflated with a serious discussion of the topic of the history of ethnography.


 * The article would be about the second point. However, a discussion of pseudo-historic accounts of races in ancient history that his based on the work of academic historians about these ideologies is not 'fringe'. Let me give a concrete example: Richard Walther Darré claimed, among other, that the Nordic Race colonized South America. That of course, is false and if someone would make an article using Darré as reference, that would be 'fringe'. But then there is an academic historian (Lutzhöft) who has written a book about the claims of Darré and others. Citing that book (in the proper context) would not be 'fringe'. There certainly are enough historians who discuss these topics. And if we're having an article on one pseudo-history of race, then we might as well discuss all pseudo-histories of race in that article. I understand your concerns about about original synthesis, but actually my history book says that these varying theories are basically the same:

"Is this [speculation about a black race in ancient history] nothing but a new and wild variation on the theme of the 'pan' fictional theories, such as the pan-Germanism, pan-Nordic, pan-Slavism, pan-Semitism and pan-Turanism cultivated in the nineteenth century? Is this not merely another version of the nineteenth-century racist works, which invoked the 'mystery of race' as the deciding factor in human history? Indeed, the motivation of Afrocentrism was to erase the image of the downtrodden black race and to combat white racist theories; yet, instead of refuting those doctrines, it seems to have adopted their premises and principles. In other words, Afrocentrism embraced racial postulates in order to turn them upside down. Instead of engendering anti-black racism, such theories became a source of pride for the Afrocentrist, who turned them into doctrines lauding the positive attributes of the black race. Black racism became a message of superiority and redemption, and the victims of racial doctrines now argue that race is the organic and biological basis of human history." (Yaacov Shavit, History in Black, p. 27)


 * Shavit uses a lot of rhetorical questions, and I haven't read the whole book yet, but I think that this statement is definite. I know that this line of argument is currently not included in the article, but that should be be only an intermittent state. I don't mind the 'original synthesis' tag that much, but if you agree I would like to replace it with something like 'under construction' or so. Zara1709 (talk) 15:26, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

if this is just about Afrocentrism, let it be discussed at Afrocentrism. The proper place to discuss "race in ancient history" is Race_(classification_of_human_beings). Any standalone article with this title would need to be a bona fide sub-article of that section, not a coat-racking article about Afrocentrism. I do encourage you to discuss History in Black in a standalone article on the book, in the article on Afrocentrism, or elsewhere. But an article entitled "race in ancient history" should actually discuss race in ancient history, not pseudohistorical ideology. --dab (𒁳) 15:06, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

sure, "Afrocentrism" is just white racism turned upside down and two centuries delayed. It isn't "better" or "worse" than any other racialist ideology, it simply needs to be discussed in terms of racialist ideologies, not in terms of being a bona fide "hypothesis" or "historiography" or "cultural identity". It's racism, and if it serves as a "noble lie" giving courage and identity to people, this just goes to illustrate why racism is so hard to eradicate: it actually feels good to those embracing it. You need character, moral fibre and education before you are able to drop it. --dab (𒁳) 15:18, 3 February 2009 (UTC)