Talk:White people/Mediation

message: :Hello everyone. You may have learned that  made a request to the mediation cabal here. I have taken the case, but I may need help from other mediators later, as this is my first case. The problem, as I understand, is that  wants to add information about the genetic side of the "White race". We will discuss this in greater detail below.
===What you should know about your mediator===
* I do have a biased opinion, but I will remain neutral in this mediation.
* I am a user, just like you, but I am not interested in correcting this article (aside from grammer errors).
===Rules for this mediation===
* No personal attacks
* Assume good faith
* Neutral Point of View Please read this, as it will likely be very important in this mediation
* All opinions are welcome and encouraged; breaking policies is not.
===Agreed?===
:If you agree with the above rules, and have read "Neutral Point of View", you may sign below. Only sign if you will be participating. Anyone may join in the mediation.
:Participants
*Lukas19 17:52, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Mediators
*AndonicO Talk 18:06, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Welcome

message: :If you agree with the above rules, and have read "Neutral Point of View", you may sign below. Only sign if you will be participating. Anyone may join in the mediation.
:Participants
*Lukas19 17:52, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Mediators
*AndonicO Talk 18:06, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Agreed?

message: :Please see Talk:White people/Mediation/Archive1 for the comments previously posted here. Please do not edit the archive. | AndonicO Talk | Sign Here 19:17, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments before Mediation

message: :Please see Talk:White people/Mediation/Archive2 for the comments previously posted here. Please do not edit the archive. | AndonicO Talk | Sign Here 19:17, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: New Issue

message: :Please see Talk:White people/Mediation/Archive3 for the comments previously posted here. Please do not edit the archive. | AndonicO Talk | Sign Here 19:11, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thulean keeps harassing parties involved in this case 

message: :The comments previously posted here have been moved to Talk:White people/Mediation/Archive4. Please do not edit the archive. | AndonicO Talk | Sign Here 19:13, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Read [[WP:NPOV]] so mediation can begin. 

message: :The comments that were posted here have been moved to Talk:White people/Mediation/Archive5. Please do not edit the archive. | AndonicO Talk | Sign Here 19:16, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: It's been a week!

message: :Edditor wrote the following in an archive, so I'll add it here instead. AndonicO Talk | Sign Here 16:00, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Comment

message: *
1) Add genetic section. Only stuff which mentions whites directly should be added here.
2) Add a part about blondism and link it to main article about blonds.
3) Add pics of whites. Lukas19 17:55, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: {{user2|Lukas19}}

message: *
In the least days, while this mediation got started, I have put forward two proposals in the main talk page. 
1.- One of them, that I proposed earlier (long before this conflict) but was rejected is to make White people a simple disambiguation page, with links to other relevant (more precise and less disputed) articles such as Caucasoid race, European, White American, White British, etc. 
I think it would be a lesser evil if there's no other good solution. This article is a target of certain ideologically motivated and politically organized people and has a very long historial of vandalism and harsh disputes. 
2.- The other is more constructive and was sumarized this way:
1. Definition: there's no consensual/universal definition of "white". Therefore the following should be mentioned (at least):
:# White as Caucasoid (anthropometric/genetic approach)
:# White as Western Eurasians (including North Africans) (US census and other official definitions)
:# White as European/European ancestry only (UK census??, some white nationalist groups)
:# White as skin tone (some Latin American census, cultural concepts in India, in the other extreme: Nordicist theories)
:# White people (Bai) of China (this was well documented but somehow erased)
2. Delimitations: there's no consensual/universal delimitation of whiteness:
:# One drop rule (traditional US segregationist approach: all that is not purely "white" is something else)
:# The other one drop principle (Latin America: all that is minimally "white" is fully or partly white)
:# etc. (there are surely other theories)
3. History of the concept of whiteness. This was deleted too in the edit war. It is nevertheless a rather modern concept associated to European overseas expansion, though it can also be argued that it is rooted in Ancient Near Eastern/Mediterranean contacts with black people in Nubia and beyond. This section is very important.
4. Genetics, phenetics, variability and visibility (exposed areas are normally darker) of pygmentation. This is very important because many percieve whiteness as matter of skin tone. Summarily exposed and linking to relevant articles when they exist.
:*Blondisms (as a subset of extreme whiteness traits)
All this should be summarized on top.
Then local/regional sections, not too extensive, should adress the basics in each country/region and link to the respective articles/sections when they exist.
It is as important to mention where official/semi-official criteria exist as well and where there's no such criteria. Many countries have an anti-racialist policy in census and do not ask for "race" at all, considering it somehow an obsolete and dangerous matter.
There should be no generical demographics, distribution or simmilar sections, because the very borders of whiteness are unclear and disputed and therefore such sections could tend to promote certain POVs.
...
This was replied by Psychohistorian with an alternative:
:"White as Caucasoid (anthropometric/genetic approach)" I think a review of the anthropological data is a good idea, but it needs to be an unbiased review and the fact is that the overwhelming majority of anthropological research points out that race has no objective existence.
:I suggest a slightly different approach. I suggest that we first contain the dispute to as small a section of the article as possible. So, the breakdown would be
::1. Genetics evidence for/against the existence of white people as an objective group (including discussing skin color)
::2. Constructions of 'white people' in social policy
:::1. In the US (history of the term from the founding of the country, including Jim Crow laws, segregation, the whitening of German, Irish, Jews, etc., affirmative action, and so forth)
:::2. In Great Britain and Europe (again focusing on the historical evolution of the term, Orientalism, and "Dark Africa")
:::3. China (mentioning the Bai and how they've come to be called white people)
:::4. Latin America (the evolution of the 'other one drop rule')
That I don't oppose. Yet I have some doubts: I agree with making clear that the concepts of race are barely if at all supported by genetics and biology but, if this is not agreed, I'd prefer to extend the section explaining the complex genetics of Europeans and their unavoidable strong links to West Asia (and other regions) making clear that Europeans can't be separated from West Asians under any biological argument and that the closest thing to a West Asian is a European. All very well documented so no white supremacist can come and say the opposite on grounds that it is not sourced.
My proposal also met certain approval by Thulean, not without differences in the small type. 
For more details, see Talk:White people#Proposal
...
Some other stuff that I've been doing in the meantime is to document white populations (as far as possible) in Latin America, in order to avoid further disputes in the issue. You can find the details in Talk:White people#Argentina/ Brazil and Uruguay. Yet some countries like Venezuela don't seem to have any sort of racial classification in their census. This seems to be also the case in Europe, North Africa, West and South Asia, with the only exception of the UK. The cultural or censal standards for race attribution may also be variable, for instance in the USA, despite the theory of the "one drop", people with some Native American (specially) or Afroamerican blood (less frequently) are often considered white . It's quite confuse actually. 
...
Another important thing I'm on refers to what is actually more basic: NPOV or Verifiability. Psychohistorian and the letter of the policies says that both are equally important, yet the custom (what is an implicit communitarian consensus) is that likely but undocumented material is respected (even if tagged as "citation needed" or with the template of lack of sources). Likely but unverified material is not normally deleted in 24 hrs. after notice but, if appropiate, rebuked in the talk page, replaced by something better or duly documented. That's possitive application of Wikipedia guidelines and policies and not what Thulean or DT have done shielded on the letter of Verifiability, which is merely destructive and POV-pushing. 
All this is based in the principle of assuming good will. But also has its intuitive grounds in general law, where custom and usage applies where law (policies) has no answer. And most people accept and apply it even without being conscious of it. Exception: wikilawyerists and ill-faithed editors with an agenda, which in many cases are one and the same. 
...
Another thing I've done is checking Thulean's alleged sources from his latest versions of the article. Most or all of them don't support his claims but in very oblicuous manner at most and the result heavily biases the article towards an Anglo-American or Eurocentric POV. Something that is aginst the spirit and the letter of Wikipedia guidelines and policies. 
...
So in order to be constructive I ask as basic principle of agreement that the article is drafted and (re)built based in WP:NPOV and that we leave the small type of Verifiability for a second stage, that we focus in building an article whose contents are acceptable for all: whites, non-whites and mixed whites, for white nationalists as for anti-racialists... and that, over all, attempts to be objective and include all reasonable existent POVs on what is white people. 
If we achieve this, even in form of skeleton, we can go then to he small print of verifiability and search and document all that can be done in this sense, using that work to correct the errors in the draft and improve the overall article.
If we would be able to do that and add some good images of whites, mestizos and mulattoes, representing the diversity of the white peoples: blondes and darker, you know. We could even make it a featured article eventually. Of course it requires a cooperative constructive job and not just sabotage and POV-pushing. 
...
Btw, I'm thinking it should maybe moved to "White peoples", because there's no such thing as a single white people (except maybe in the mind of white nationalists). 
...
Something more: I just found this excellent material: Wikipedia:NPOV dispute. Sad that I hadn't stumbled on it earlier as it could maybe have helped a little. 
::The vast majority of neutrality disputes are due to a simple confusion: one party believes "X" to be a fact, and — this party is mistaken (see second example below) — that if a claim is factual, it is therefore neutral. The other party either denies that "X" is a fact, or that everyone would agree that it is a fact. In such a dispute, the first party needs to re-read the Neutral Point of View policy. Even if something is a fact, or allegedly a fact, that does not mean that the bold statement of that fact is neutral.
::Neutrality here at Wikipedia is all about presenting competing versions of what the facts are. It doesn't matter at all how convinced we are that our facts are the facts. If a significant number of other interested parties really do disagree with us, no matter how wrong we think they are, the neutrality policy dictates that the discussion be recast as a fair presentation of the dispute between the parties.
Bold type is mine, just to emphasize what has been wrongly done by some. --Sugaar 22:16, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: {{user2|Sugaar}}

message: *
*First, sorry if I'm a bit late, by time zone is Eastern European and I'm busy at home in the evenings, I have three very small children to get fed and put to bed etc.
*Well, my initial instinct would be to delete the page altogether, or have a redirect to Caucasian people or something like that. I think Sugaar's suggestion about a disambig page is excellent. I support Sugaar's suggestion for a disambig page.
*Failing that I am happy with the proposals outlined by Sugaar and would support them. 
*I don't think we can say that white people represent a biomedically defined "race" because there is no evidence for this from genetics, there are exemplary sources that clearly show that population sampling methods introduce artificial discontinuities to genetic evidence. So for example if people are distributed into populations then they appear to form cohesive groups. When geographic sampling is used, then peoples do not fall into "races" or "discrete groups" but rather form a continuum of variability.Evidence for Gradients of Human Genetic Diversity Within and Among Continents David Serre and Svante Pääbo. Genome Research 14:1679-1685, 2004 This paper concludes It has recently been claimed that "the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level" (Risch et al. 2002). Our results show that this is not the case, and we see no reason to assume that "races" represent any units of relevance for understanding human genetic history. In clinical practice, the "classification" of people into "races," as recently suggested (Risch et al. 2002; Burchard et al. 2003), could perhaps have some justification as a proxy for differences in environmental and other factors of relevance for public health or to help identify rare disease alleles (Phimister 2003). However, in the absence of other knowledge, most alleles influencing susceptibility to disease or outcome of medical interventions cannot be expected to show significantly different frequencies between "races." The paper is a direct response to a paper published that does indeed recomend the categorisation of people into "races" for medical reasons.Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease Neil Risch, Esteban Burchard, Elad Ziv and Hua Tang Genome Biology 2002, 3:comment2007.1-2007.12 Taken together these papers show that there is no consensus in the biomedical community for the classification of people into races, in the interests of neutrality I don't think this issue should be addressed in this article, it's proper place for a detailed discussion is in the Race article.
*I don't think we can claim a "common ancestry" for "white people", this is predicated on the assumption that all white people come from Europe, and seems to be based on the OED definition. But the OED definition doesn't actually say this, it says:
# A man belonging to a race having naturally light-coloured skin or complexion: chiefly applied to those of European extraction,OED definition of "white man" OED online. so it's not exclusively of European extraction. This definition is OK as it stands, but we should not distort what it actually says. Definitions also need to be put into the context of other definitions as well, we cannot rely on a single definition, for example:
# Merriam-Webster online gives 2a: being a member of a group or race characterized by light pigmentation of the skin b: of, relating to, characteristic of, or consisting of white people or their culture.Definition of white Merriam-Webster online.
#Wiktionary says Of Caucasian race
#The Free Dictionary says 7. A politically ultraconservative or reactionary person. 4.  also White Of or belonging to a racial group having light skin coloration, especially one of European origin: voting patterns within the white population.
:So the whole common ancestry thing is predicated on the assumption that "white people" only applies to people of European descent, this is not a neutral proposition. This is not to say that it can't be included, but we must not imply that this is anything other than a cultural/political point of view. I do not support a statement that all "white people" have a common ancestry.
*White people do not form a unified culture, maybe in the USA they do, but in Europe there are very big differences between cultures. I'm British, but I live in Finland, these are culturally different, I work with two Russian people, their culture is different again. French, German, Italian, British and Spanish people are all culturally unique. To claim that "white people" have a common culture is to imply that "white people" form a single ethnic group, while this may be a point of view held by some, it is certainly not neutral, and I might add that it is probably a tiny minority point of view. I do not support a statement that all "white people" form a single cultural group.
*We should include information about skin colour in it's proper biological context. For example we can mention that genetic variation in humans is mainly within group, with a small degree of genetic variation between groups (depending upon how one arbitrarily defines one's "group" or "population" it comes to ~90% within group and ~10% between group).understanding Genetic Variation NIH. But it is true to say that for skin colour the opposite is true, that 90% of variation is seen between groups, with 10% within group, this is ascribed to skin colour being under strong selective pressure, rather than evidence of a big genetic difference between groups. That is that in places where people get a lot of strong sunlight there is also a stong selection for protection against burning, skin cancer etc. There is little or no selection in temperate areas, but there may be selection for vitamin D production in people with light skin colour in areas with less sunlight.Approximately 10% of the variance in skin color occurs within groups, and ∼90% occurs between groups (Relethford 2002). This distribution of skin color and its geographic patterning—with people whose ancestors lived predominantly near the equator having darker skin than those with ancestors who lived predominantly in higher latitudes—indicate that this attribute has been under strong selective pressure. Darker skin appears to be strongly selected for in equatorial regions to preventsunburn, skin cancer, the photolysis of folate, and damage to sweat glands (Sturm et al. 2001; Rees 2003). A leading hypothesis for the selection of lighter skin in higher latitudes is that it enables the body to form greater amounts of vitamin D, which helps prevent rickets (Jablonski 2004). However, the vitamin D hypothesis is not universally accepted (Aoki 2002), and lighter skin in high latitudes may correspond simply to an absence of selection for dark skin (Harding et al. 2000). Because skin color has been under strong selective pressure, similar skin colors can result from convergent adaptation rather than from genetic relatedness. Sub-Saharan Africans, tribal populations from southern India, and Australian Aborigines have similar skin pigmentation, but genetically they are no more similar than are other widely separated groups. Furthermore, in some parts of the world in which people from different regions have mixed extensively, the connection between skincolor and ancestry has been substantially weakened (Parra et al. 2004). In Brazil, for example, skin color is not closely associated with the percentage of recent African ancestors a person has, as estimated from an analysis of genetic variants differing in frequency among continent groups (Parra et al. 2003).The Use of Racial, Ethnic, and Ancestral Categories in Human Genetics Research Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group; National Human Genome Research Institute. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 77:000–000, 2005.
*In summary I don't think it represents a neutral point of view to write this article as if only people of European ancestry are "white people". If this article needs to exist at all it needs to reflect all points of view. There is no accepted definition for "white people" and it has different meanings in different cultures. In Europe racial identity is far less common than in the USA, I have never been asked what "race" I belong to, I would probably not identify as belonging to any "race". I think we should remove all references to genetics, there is no consensus in the biomedical community about categorising people into "races", and when people are so categorised they usually refer to caucasians, which includes people from the Indian subcontinent. Some studies in the USA use self identitified "ethnicity or race", the paper quoted in the article asked participants to identify as one of four groups white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic.Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies by Hua Tang, Tom Quertermous, Beatriz Rodriguez, Sharon L. R. Kardia, Xiaofeng Zhu, Andrew Brown, James S. Pankow, Michael A. Province, Steven C. Hunt, Eric Boerwinkle, Nicholas J. Schork, and Neil J. Risch. Am J Hum Genet v.76(2); Feb 2005. These are arbitrary groups named by the scientists conducting the study. If the designers of the study had designated the "white" group as "Caucasian" or "European" then it would still have given the same result. I therefore think it does not really belong in this article. All we can say is that this term was chosen by some Americans to identify the group to which they belong. The genetic results are open to interpretation, and I have provided a cite to a paper that indicates that there are systemic problems with using "population" based sampling techniques. Another paper states that Furthermore, in some parts of the world in which people from different regions have mixed extensively, the connection between skincolor and ancestry has been substantially weakened.
Alun 07:55, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: {{user2|Wobble}}

message: *
There seems to be a growing consensus in the article to not discuss genetics at all, but to discuss who is and who is not considered "white" in various parts of the world and how the term's meaning changes from place to place.  I'm glad to see that growing consensus and fully support it.  It allows us to push debates like *this* one over to other articles.
But one thing that I would like to see made clear is that "white people" does not mean "people of light colored skin" - at least not in any part of the world that I know of.  An albino nubian in New York is not called a "white person".  A Bai does not have lighter colored skin than do those others in China who are not considered "white people".   Oh, and I'd like it made explicit by the policy gods that dictionaries are not reliable sources.-Psychohistorian 12:34, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: {{user2|Psychohistorian}}

message: *
1)I think the article should give an opening sentence that says the definition of white people white race, whites has varied in different times and places.  
2)History in SociologyThe article should then go into the history of the concept of white people.  The concept started in Europe when Europeans conceptualized racial lines along different Christian religious denominations and nations.  Since they were all Christian, they viewed Jews as distinctly not part of their group.  Only when they came to America did they assert that they were a single white race.  At first, they saw the blacks and Indians as heathens, but after they converted to Christianity they thought differently.  They then used color as the primary distinction of racial difference.  This also occured in Australia as well with the aborigines.  On a similar note, this section would discuss the way more Europeans began to be seen as white in Australia, Canada and the US as other European groups assimilated to Anglo culture.  The concept of the white race was fundamental in European colonization of the darker peoples of British India, so we can discuss the white race here too.  I think the use by the Chinese to refer to a Chinese ethnic group would be in this section.
3)Contemporary in SociologyMention that after it expanded to include all of Europe, it stopped there for most people.  I have citations that say in the USA and Canada a white person is thought of as being a person of European descent.  In this section we can also discuss legal definitions of white in USA, Canada, Australia and UK.  We must also mention here that White supremacist groups do not consider Jews, race-traitors and Muslims to be white.  The discussion on the reverse one-drop rule in Brazil should go in this section.
4)History in Physical AnthropologyThe history section should also mention that Blumenbach considered Caucasian to be represented by the color white and Carleton S. Coon sometimes called the Caucasoid race the white race.  After mentioning some people consider the white race to mean Caucasian or Caucasoid, it would be proper to link to these articles and not discuss the matter further.   Arthur de Gobineau considered the white race to be Europeans while Middle Easterns, North Africans, South Asians, Central Asians were not white.  
5)Contemporary in Physical Anthropology Most anthropologists disagree that race exists objectively today although some think it exists.  When we cite people who think the White race exists, they must actually say "white" and not Caucasoid/Caucasian.  If a source says they think the white race is proved by genetics, we then could link to the European genetics article.  A summary would not express the full range of debate.  Arthur Kemp's conception of white should go here, since he conceives his definition as a physical anthropology one.
6)Light physical trait discussion This section would discuss the cline of light colored eyes, hair and skin color in European populations with citations from anthropologist Peter Frost.  This lightness is commonly associated with the concept of white people.  Also we would discuss the evolution of light coloration in Europe here.
7)Gallery Gallery of free-use images with an analysis of who is white under which definitions.  Example pictures would be a Euro-Jew, Anglo, non-Anglo/North-Euro, white-looking South-Euro, black-looking South Euro, race traitor(Bill Clinton), white-looking Middle Eastern, black-looking Middle Eastern, white-looking Mulatto, black-looking Mulatto, white-looking South Asian, black-looking South Asian.  
8)Population Population numbers under all definitions of White to keep the article NPOV.  I will make a map for this.--Dark Tichondrias 01:06, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: {{user2|Dark Tichondrias}}

message: :I thank all of you for your comments. We shall wait a day or so, to allow for other users interested in adding their comments. Then, we will begin what is hopefully the last phase of medation. | AndonicO Talk | Sign Here 13:10, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: {{user2|Edditor}}

message: I have been witch-hunted impunely and got a probably very unjust block. I just cannot discuss in such conditions. 
I have tried to be constructive, pedagogic, dialogant... but all is useless. So guess that, in the end, after a couple more editors have been displaced, Thulean will write the article alone. 
Of course, I guess someone will come later and just nuke it because it's ultra-POV... but in any case, it will be someone else. 
I'm done with defending NPOV and the spirit of Wikipedia in this article. --Sugaar 04:32, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Red line: I retire from this mediation and anything in relation with the article 

message: It is embarrassing how Nordicists and White Supremacists ( and their acolytes of other Non-White Supremacist ideologies) are controlling this article with the consent of some Wiki administrators. Something smells rotten in the state of wikipedia. I have said it more than once. They will burn out everyone to control the article. It has little hope for me. From now on I will not participate in this discussion anymore. It makes no sense to me, but I will keep an eye on it and will revert any Nordicist propaganda. I urge Sugaar and others to do the same. Veritas et Severitas 14:13, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  '''Something smells rotten in the state of Wikipedia.'''