The Race Card

[Ibby]

Originally Posted by jimhelm

Muslims, though.... I have never thought of them as a race. Unless you actually mean Middle Easterners. What race are those folks anyway?

Well, I'm sure you're mostly kidding, but it's actually a fun question so I'm gonna take it seriously. It depends on how you define "race." to some people, there's white, black, asian, native american (some divide north and south, some don't), and aboriginal australian. Oceanic/polynesian people get lumped in with either asian or australian. most of the world would disagree with that. For example, most Africans wouldn't consider everyone with dark skin to be part of the same race - and to some extents, that's true, based on some genetic markers. However, ethnic extraction is a better question, I think. European "whites" are the most ethnically unified "race" - eastern europeans, scandinavians, germans, brits, all are more related to eachother than, say, people from far-reaching sides of africa, even if (to us) africans look more alike than russians and irish do. Every other "race" is wildly more varied, and to try to lump them all in as one THING is just stupid. But speaking to broad ethnic divisions among majority-muslim populations, there's Arabs, who populate much of the middle east, and hail originally from the Levant and the Arabian peninsula, and now also populate most of North Africa; Persians, who live in what's now Iran; Kurds, who live across Kurdistan in north Iraq and Turkey; and Turkic peoples who originally hail from central Russia, but now reside across Turkey and central asia. Outside the Middle East, ethnic groups with large Muslim populations include the Indus Valley peoples, who make up the Muslim population of India and Pakistan, and the south asian peoples who make up Indonesia and Malaysia.