Defining "Whiteness": The RIGHT Way

Watchin the muthafuckin orient express righ now. I wish the west hadn't fallen, but it did. It did and we are Doctor Frankenchud.

Walk into basically every introductory social science course these days, and the instructor will probably have to go on this utterly uneducated and stupid spiel about how biologists don’t believe race exists, and how race is merely a “social construct”, i.e. what race you belong to depends on the social situation, not the genetic or phenotypic character. This is usually done through a series of intentional omissions of truth and intentional ignorance on behalf of the professors. In my experience, through a combination of using piss poor, decades old studies which analyze a small amount of alleles, and extrapolating from this certain truths which would make various other taxonomic categories equally moot. Also, this idea that the “experts” think race does not exist is really quite wrong, especially internationally, but I can’t make this entire post about debunking race denialism.

So, much of the argument of these race denialists is, “perceptions of race vary across the world, therefore race isn’t real”. It’s a bit of a circular argument. Of course people in the respective fields will not formulate an agreed upon notion of race when much of the biological establishment denies the existence of such a thing, or at least feels compelled not to vouch for its existence.

Just to clarify, clinal variation has never been a standard for avoiding the subspeciation, and in many cases speciation, of animals. Plenty of separate species can reproduce and create fertile offspring. Some even have general admixture with each other, ex: Bison and Cattle, “Red Wolves”, Polar and Brown Bears, et cetera. Hell, what about the genus Homo? Neanderthals and even pre-Neanderthal (in terms of the dating of their branching off) populations could breed with humans, form clines with them, what not. Obviously can still talk about “Neanderthals” and not call them “socially constructed”, even though Neanderthals did already have Human DNA before the ultimate contact event.

Also, HBD does actually line up well with self-identified race at least in western countries (which is what you should care about anyways. If you haven’t noticed, white people are really good at science). I don’t care what “Brazilian notions of race” are. What have Brazilians ever contributed to the world except for women shaking their tits and men kicking soccer balls? BUUUUT once again, I digress!

The point of this is really, let’s say I am dictator of the world. Yes! Initiate operation Africa… 80 Nuclear Bomb in African Rift Valley… New massive island in Indian ocean. Hmm, maybe spread Bill Gates biovirus which targets ovaries of Turd World womyn. Yes, this… I will be the savior of humanity, and they will hate me for it. Fuuuckkkk… But aside from all that, how would I, oh great and intelligent ME, define the so-called social geist of “Whiteness” in biological sense?

Well, there’s always— I just saw tits. I just saw tits. Sorry it’s midnight. I didnt see naked tits, I saw boobs pressed against shirt and they looked larger than I expected. Epic Win!

Well, there’s always the easy route of “West Eurasian” or “Caucasoid”, a genetic category which exists by virtue of Germans being more genetically similar to Arabs than to Chinamen. But I’m going to go the hard route, and consider “White People” to be synonymous with “Europeans”.

When you split humanity into 3 components, you get the “East Eurasian” component, the “West Eurasian” component, and the “Sub-Saharan African” component. It isn’t until you split it into 9 components, that West Eurasian splits into a European and a MENA component. As far as I know, all European populations at K=9 have the ‘European’ component as their highest.

“Caucasoid” still exists, just like “mammals” still exist despite there also existing various different mammals. But, I find this more subtle level to be more meaningful insofar as the population history of… Well, mankind, is concerned. Because, the divide which typifies Europeans and Middle Easterners is a less pronounced, but deeper divide than that which typifies West and East Eurasians. It’s also just more intuitively recognizable. “West Eurasia” is hard to relate to the actual world, but Europe is much more recognizably a thing with some degree of shared history and character (at least to people on the physical peripheries of Europe like the Greeks and Romans, and outsiders like the Hebrews).

But, I don’t think it is wise to base Human Biodiversity off of computer-generated genetic clusters. You can already see here, that the clusters are not entirely reflective of any particular ancient groups. Much of it is reflective of randomly high genetic drift for certain populations and doesn’t necessarily reflect phenotypic variance or “deep” ancestry. So, let’s get a little deeper into determining the gap here.

In the case of the split between Europeans and West Asians, it is reflected in the mysterious “Basal Eurasian” component present in ancient Epipaleolithic Natufians, Anatolians, and Iranians (I prefer the term Zagrosian). There may also be something called “Ancient North African” sparsely present in Natufians which acts as a “basal basal Eurasian”, but I don’t want to get too into that. Point is, Natufians are very basal, and very drifted from other populations. I’ve also heard some speculation that Zagrosians have some sort of East Eurasian pull unexplainable by Ancient North Eurasian DNA (which Zagrosians had in some capacity) but it’s extremely speculative. The non-basal component of Zagrosians seems to be mostly some sort of early West Eurasian population, but Zagrosians are also very basal-rich. Maybe it is just ANE, it isn’t really relevant to the point I am trying to make here. Middle Eastern populations are typified by their significantly stronger affinity to the two most Basal populations, Natufian and Zagrosian. In Continental Europe, these two groups constitute — at most (in Southern Italy and the Greek Islands) still significantly less than their combined constitution of the least rich Middle Eastern countries (Ex: Georgians). European genetic variation is not entirely, but almost entirely explained by the differing proportions of Anatolian DNA, which is around a 30:70 split between something “basal” and something similar to Western Hunter Gatherers. The amount of Natufian in Italians is hardly any more than the amount of East Asian in Northern Russians (by which, let me clarify, I mean *far* north. Like, the arctic coast, presumably settled by Slavs during the days of Novgorod. This area is the most East Asian Russians, not relatively recent Russian settlers in Siberia who have not had much time to mix).

(ZagrosPlusNatuf is a combination of both Zagrosian and Natufian into one percentage. It isn’t a single component)

Even when Yamnaya is excluded as a component altogether, you can still see a the distinction between Europeans and the Middle East, particularly in those two components:

Also visible is the rather stark contrast in Western and Eastern Hunter Gatherer. Georgians and Iranians understandably have some EHG, although are still beaten out by every European population save for Sardinians (who are the most genetically similar to Anatolian Farmers). You may notice the random WHG in Moroccans. Also noticeable is the contrast in Anatolian. The least Anatolian populations of Europe, like Norwegians and Belarusians, are among the most Anatolian when compared to Middle Easterners. The Southern European populations who are otherwise more similar to the Middle Easterners, completely blow them out of the water.

My point really is, the European peoples collectively represent an outcrop of ancestry from the ancient West Eurasian Hunter Gatherer populations. There is no such deep equivalent to West Eurasians, as basal Eurasians by definition are neither East nor West Eurasian. Albeit, Basal Eurasians also recombined with West Eurasians tens of thousands of years ago, so they weren’t as drifted from West Eurasians back then as, say, West Eurasians are now from Aboriginals or whatever.

People may find a retort in this: that Ancient North Eurasians are NOT West Eurasian, but are in fact around 20-30% descended from some sort of East Eurasian source. This, on its surface, makes sense. However, the problem is, the East Eurasian source we speak of here is an extremely ancient one, not long from the divergence of West Eurasians from East Eurasians entirely. I believe reading once that it was around 2,000 years after the divergence, that this event took place?

In fact, the Initial Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of Europe may have been very early members of the East Eurasian lineage, which we see in the Bacho Kiro sample from IUP Europe. Certain Aurignacian samples actually have a stronger affinity to East Asians than any of the Ancient North Eurasian samples do, which would be chocked up to ancestry from these IUP Europeans by razors. It’s possible to me that at least a good chunk of the affinity with Tianyuan among Ancient North Eurasians is the product of mixture with either Aurignacians or directly with these IUP Europeans, but my point more broadly is: It isn’t really relevant. The admixture event was so early into Out of Africa that I see plenty of studies model Ancient North Eurasians as a completely self-derived lineage of West Eurasian, usually because it is just how the algorithm for the graphs make it to be (these are called qpGraphs, and if you see them in a study keep in mind that they’re just parsimonious models. Several qpGraphs can be generated that are different from one another, they aren’t necessarily saying “this path is the correct path”). Point being, Ancient North Eurasians are no more genetically different in no more novel a way than Paleolithic European Hunter Gatherers were from Mesolithic European Hunter Gatherers.

Keep in mind, at this early in time there was no “East Asian” phenotype. I don’t think that developed until relatively late. An example of this would be the Jomon people of Japan, who descended partly from a much earlier split off of the East Asian tree. People falsely assumed they were secret White people, but genetic studies have shown that isn’t the case at all. In fact, they appear to have some sort of Australoid pull. They look like White people because basically convergent evolution, and they themselves were already heavily admixed with the more typical “Asian” lineage we associate with Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.

In modern Europeans, either way, this would be petit.

But there still is the question: How much X, Y, and Z is too much?

Well, I usually go by what percentages of X, Y, and Z are normal in Europe today, and have been normal in the past.

Sub-Saharan African: Anything over 1/16th, equivalent to 6.25%, I would hesitate to consider White. Sub-Saharan African frankly has had no genetic impact on Europe in the entirety of European history, except for extremely trace amount

Native American/East Asian: Anything over 1/8th, equivalent to 12.5%. This already exceeds all European populations excluding the Saami and Volga Urals and Tatars, who are obviously something ‘other’… A wedge from the east driven into Europe relatively recently. This is generous once you also consider that European populations with East Asian tend to derive it from Siberian, which is considerably closer to Europeans than either Native Americans (due to drift) and East Asians proper (due to lack of ANE). I would say this is roughly also the case for Indians. Someone who is a quarter Indian, ehhh, I just think we can all agree that such a person is not white

MENA/SouthCentralAsia: Depends on exactly what ethnic group we’re talkin bout here. Sort of have to take it case by case. Maybe even incorporate phenotyp… After all, speciation is seldom actually determined by genetics. Most species were considered before we even knew how to measure genetics

Things like “European” and “West African” and “East Asian” in this context are more like directions or dimensions rather than discrete objects, but we as societies have to delineate them for any real analysis of them to be made worth. With an agreed upon system of races this is something which becomes very internally consistent, as the heterogeneity of groups can just be compared to other defined groups (think: It wouldn’t make sense to have Germans be one of the 3 races of Earth, but it might mak sense to have Germans be one of the 70 races of Earth, or whatever). Also, “Whitest” doesn’t mean “Best Whites”. I don’t know if I’d call Lithuanians the Best Whites, I like them, don’t get me wrong. I like Lithuanians. But, the best? And certainly I don’t think Poles are better than Frenchmen. I’m really not a huge fan of Polish civilization. No offense to my Polacks. I don’t dislike Poles, but I understand why their neighbors would have some contempt for them. Sorry. White people can view other White people in certain positive or negative ways and still acknowledge the broader thing of “European-ness”. This is something very important to acknowledge especially in the American context. Athenians considered all other Greeks to be definitively inferior to themselves, but it would have been a fringe opinion to not consider such peoples Greek. Most Americans considered all Europeans to be White, but just didn’t like various weird and less developed types of Europeans, especially those who happened to be arriving in America. I’ll make a post about that some other time, but the idea that the Irish or Italians were not considered White is one of the noble lies of Amerikwa. I’m have a few drinks so I will not continue, but if you guys have any questions on who I consider white ask me in the comments