Historical origins of the White Race

Pardon the title; this post is in response to a person searching for "what age does the white civilization date back to." In actual fact, there are no historical origins, nor is there a White Race per se.

Allow me to explain myself.

The current tendency to section off humanity into a handful of official racial groupings is only the last phase in a compulsion that stretches back into the mists of time. I, for example, am defined as "white" as if by some unwritten law of the Medes and the Persians (who didn't bother with such vagaries as Race but were much focused on Ethnicity), under which Michael Jackson, who is more white even in death than I ever will be in life, is still considered B[lack].

I find this simply incredulous. No one looking at Michael Jackson, without knowing any of his background, would ever suspect him of being black--a racial identity which he spent considerable sums of money to extinguish. But because he started out his entertainment career as Black, and only gradually became white, he was tarred for life with the Black brush. I pity the man.

All this is to say that the reason why there are no historical origins to the White Race is because until recent millennia, there was no such thing as a White Race. Europe of 2000 years ago was much like Africa of 200 years ago, in which one identified himself by tribal rather than national affiliation, and anyone not a member of one's own or an allied tribe was as much a foreigner as anyone else, regardless of how closely their skin tone resembled that of an olive in any of its various stages of edibility.

So, without any history to go on, we must indulge in a little speculation. My readers, I trust, will understand my unwillingness to partake of the historical fallacy that the ancient Egyptians were Black and their slaves White. It was not at all that simple, but clearly the Egyptians were in contact with peoples of both lighter and darker skin hues than their own. Furthermore, it is also clear that the darkest skin tones were located to the South of Egypt, and the lightest ones to the West. How did this come to be? Here's my theory.

We start with fact: On the ark with Noah were his three sons: Japeth, Ham, and Shem. Once they got off the ark, they started reproducing with their respective wives, resulting in at least 32 grandchildren. Obviously those grandchildren had to marry each other, so within 100 years, the genetic pool was thoroughly mixed between the three progenitors. There were no races as such, but the thousands of humans at that time concentrated in Shinar would have contained in themselves all the genetic potential we now have today. They probably ranged in color from pale white to ebony, and it is only theoretically possible that these were concentrated in any specific family lines. Although tradition tells us that Ham was black and Japheth was white, this could very well be accounted for as wishful thinking by their respectively monochromatic descendants.

When God scattered the nations at Babel, some went North and some went South. The Northerners had to cope with the Ice Age still gripping Europe, and as a result of the severely depleted sunshine, only very fair-skinned members of the Northern Nations survived. The rest died with the defective bone structure characteristic of rickets, and we now know them as Neanderthals. With black genes now extinct in Europe, 'European' became synonymous with 'White'.

Southerners, on the other hand, had to be able to endure the scorching sunshine of the lower latitudes. Blacks were not bothered by this, so they kept going south until the sun began once again to drop in the sky. Having adapted to the hot tropics, they slowed their advance when they reached the higher latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. The southernmost latitudes of Africa were then settled by transplanted Northerners, who then moved north to meet them, resulting in the mixed-colour Xhosian peoples. Ironically, these are now considered 'black' and their mixed-race descendants as 'coloured.'

With the whitest people having headed north and the blackest south, the rest headed East, filling the rest of the world with people of every shade between. Due to the relative strength of black genes, whites tended to be subsumed into the black population wherever they were an insignificant minority; for example, the Jewish tribes of Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. Whites, on the other hand, have long seemed reluctant to accept blacks into their genetic ranks, although that has been gradually changing; most descendants of Thomas Jefferson's grandfather are known today as white, whether by a "white" wife or a "black" mistress*.

White Race? It's a misnomer--nothing but a euphemism for a person of overwhelmingly Ice-Age Europe ancestry. White civilization? There is no such thing. Civilization dates back to before there was any distinction of races identifiable today.

*I should add that the DNA evidence available cannot distinguish between children fathered by Jefferson himself, or by one of his agnate relatives. I'm siding here with those who identify Thomas Jefferson as the father of at least some of Sally Heming's children. At any rate, the point I'm making is the same: most of Sally's descendants who attained adulthood were able to pass as white.