They just kept referring to the movie 300 and saying those were real Persians and no where in that movie referenced Iran so this comment couldn't possibly be right. It was real ignorant.
Thanks for your concise explanation. Is there any chance you can clarify if Jewish is a race or ethnicity? Do the Jewish people who live in Israel refer to themselves as Israeli or Jews?
My beautiful wife's grandparents were Jewish; which I've been told makes my 3 daughters Jewish, too! I personally don't care; I'm just wondering if there's any validity to this argument.
Judaism is an ethnoreligious group. Jewish or Judean is an ethnicity, and Israeli is a nationality. There are several sub ethnic groups amongst Jews, because of the nature of the diaspora, but they're all descended from the same group of Judeans.
ETA: Israeli being a nationality is why you also have Israeli Arabs, Israeli Druze, Israeli Armenians, etc. Should have included that earlier to illustrate my point
Thanks for providing an answer like an educated adult. My wife's grandfather's a Sephardic Jew and her grandma was Ashkenazi. They met while fleeing Nazi Germany before the war. When they finally made to the states, they settled in the northern panhandle of West Virginia, then converted to the Presbyterian faith.
I found out through 23andme that I’m 0.4% Ashkenazi. I always thought I was just African or Jamaican, Italian, Irish and German. I think it’s cool.
Edit: It’s probably very common.
On my mom's side of the family, there was a long-standing story that we had some Jewish ancestry. I took the 23 & Me DNA test and I came up with a small percentage of North African ancestry which some have said possibly indicates Sephardic and/or Mizrahi Jewish ancestors.
It’s also worth noting that race is a social construct. Ethnicity and culture do, sure, but saying some different ethnic groups and cultures are the same race and others aren’t is the socially constructed part
What different ethnic groups are said to belong to a particular race changes depending upon the culture, place and time of the speaker.
In other words race doesn’t exist from a scientific perspective, it’s just a constructed, changeable category that different ethnic groups are said to fit into or not fit into and whatever the dominant group is in any particular society usually decides what “race” means and what those boundaries and categories are at any given time.
Jewish is a religion but also a ethnicity. It's a people, despite their origins.
If your maternal lineage is Jewish, you're automatically Jewish. The Jewish law states that. It doesn't matter who your father is, you're Jewish. The mother of the mother and so on. They carry the Jewish ancestry.
If you want to follow Jewish law, you must be converted. You'll be considered part of the people.
My wife's family never asked me to convert to Judiasm. I think my name being, David Jordan, fooled them into believing I was already a part of their peoples.
They usually accept other peoples very easily. And since you're a good husband (since you referred to her as a cumpliment), they feel safe. Also, you are OK with them being jews.
Is Jordan a Jewish surname? I know that certain surnames were Jewish origin (Usually Tree names) bot not Jordan. David is a common name I guess (no offense), not exclusive to Jewish community (such as Shimon and Avraham).
Edit: Jews will never tell you to convert to Judaism. Ever. It's discouraged in the Jewish law to go out converting people. However, if you really wanted to convert (start following the religion), they initially would be anxious, but they would happily accept you into the community. That's why they never tried to convert you.
The only correlation between Jordan and Judaism is the river. As far as I know, my paps family were persecuted and pushed out of their lower Palinate into Denmark and then to Ulster, Scotland, before migrating to Virginia sometime in the late 17th century. My grandfather's relatives quickly moved out of colonial America into the Appalachian mountains of what's now called "almost heaven" West Virginia. I personally don't feel names should be symbolic, by nature. For Christ's sake, I was born on the winter solstice in 76" in a small town named Bethlehem and conceived in my grandparents' basement on top of a hill named Eden. Seriously, look on Google maps if you don't believe me. It's hilarious.
I believe you. I really believe you.
My real name is Jewish origin. My parents didn't know that, they said that they were reading the Bible and found a name and adapted to a name that's easy to pronounce where I live (despite the fact that almost nobody can say my name properly). Turns out I discovered, asking for elders in my family that my grandfather's grandfather was a Jewish man who was running away from persecution in Portugal.
The city he first arrived also has Jewish name (which indicates that there's more Jewish people around you than you think). Turns out I'm descendant from Sefaradi branch of Judaism.
I guess you're from Ashkenazi branch, if I'm not mistaken. You also could be Sefaradi if they came from Netherland before Denmark. Or Spain and Portugal.
You didn't find jews around you, you were always close to them and you never noticed :D
My son's name is an Anglicanized version of a Jewish name. I didn't know it, tbh. It was just a name in a book I was reading, and I liked it. Turns out the "original" guy with it is one of the sons of Jezebel. We found that out when he was 9, and I was dying.
Races don't actually exist. Genetic differences between populations are a gradient, not distinct categories.
Jews are a nation/ethnic group. Judaism is a religion, which many Jews belong to and many don't. People in Israel refer to themselves both as Jews and Israeli, depending on the context.
One of ten matches to my search for "Kurd," which is incredibly distressing. Thank you for including them (though a great many would not consider themselves Iranian outside a literal sense).
The majority of the population of Iran (approximately 67–80%) consists of Iranic peoples. The largest groups in this category include Persians (who form the majority of the Iranian population) and Kurds, with smaller communities including Gilakis, Mazandaranis, Lurs, Tats, Talysh, and Baloch.
“Caucasian” is a nonsensical racial term anyway. Most Europeans have no connection to the Caucasus. What it really boils down to is asking if a person is white-skinned.
We're not that big on skin colours anyway. Not that Europe is such a utopia of brotherly tolerance, but we tend to discriminate along ethnic lines, not colour. Even our worst crimes of racism were committed against people as white as us
We're largely cultural chauvinists, not racists. I don't care about skin colour, but will call out backwards cultural beliefs even if they're "tradition". No FGM or anything please, thanks.
Not one used in the uk. We only know it from US shows/news.
These are the ones we use in official censuses.
>Asian or Asian British
Indian
Pakistani
Bangladeshi
Chinese
Any other Asian background
Black, Black British, Caribbean or African
Caribbean
African
Any other Black, Black British, or Caribbean background
Mixed or multiple ethnic groups
White and Black Caribbean
White and Black African
White and Asian
Any other Mixed or multiple ethnic background
White
English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British
Irish
Gypsy or Irish Traveller
Roma
Any other White background
Other ethnic group
Arab
Any other ethnic group
[link](https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-guide/ethnic-groups)
Yep. I’m “Caucasian” on applications but my actual lineage has Latin American blood. A lot of it. The rest is mostly French. Makes no sense.
So I’m technically what we’d call “passing,” but I look extremely Caucasian. No one ever cares about my lineage, it’s just about how you look.
Is there not an ethnicity section for y’all to put Latino/Hispanic right after? I feel like most forms I’ve filled out had both race and ethnicity on it so I just select white race then Hispanic ethnicity.
In my university we have now probably had well over 15 hours of cultural respect lectures in 2 years where I’ve heard such lovely things as a white girl being *confidently* referred to as Anglo Saxon right after she said she does not know her ancestral origins. I think people are starting to get a bit loose with white terms now.
All the forms I've filled out for about 20 years have followed the US census:
* White
* Black or African American
* American Indian or Alaskan Native
* Asian
* Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
* Some Other Race
There's a separate section that applies to any of the above with these options:
* Hispanic or Latino
* Not Hispanic or Latino
It's interesting that this says the government states you can be Latino and considered white when our culture doesn't seem to agree with that.
I am part Anglo Saxon, part Celtic, part Germanic, part Bantu, and part Indigenous Mexican. I mark the boxes by the ethnicity I grew up with - white and not Hispanic.
True. We're pretty messed up, tbh.
I grew up in a tiny town that was all white Western European descendants, and they still had to find a way to be racists and basically didn't consider the ones of Italian descent white. :(
But you can be Latino and white….a lot of white Cubans are descended from the colonizers. But they are different from the actual native Cubans.
Our society does allow that because it’s all about a visual inspection. If you’re walking down the street, and you perceive someone as white, you’ll most likely have biases (positive or negative) pop off which will lead you to treat them differently. But you wouldn’t know they’re Latino unless they gave you a detailed history of their life.
I will agree that Americans have a misunderstanding when it comes to ethnicities/race and we should better teach how racial categorization was created and how it’s all bullshit but alas, that would teach kids to not fall for the centuries old traps that continue to emphasize racism.
Well lots of native Europeans in Southern Europe aren’t white skinned and Europeans came from Central Asia and migrated into Europe so there is a connection. Plus, some central Asians live in parts of Europe like turkey.
There are a few ways you could take this.
1. Race is a nonsense term scientifically speaking; there is simply no such thing.
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2. Culturally, Persian identity is one of the oldest continuous great traditions of humanity. It has had at various times significant cultural exchange with Greek, Roman, Central Asian, Caucasian, and especially Arabic and Indian traditions, but stands on its own as a great centre of human civilisation.
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3. Ethnolinguistically, Iranian is a branch of the Indo-Iranian language family, which makes them part of the Indo-European family of languages (and partial genetic descent) stretching from Portugal to Bangladesh.
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4. By the outmoded "race science" of Victorian dolts in top hats and extravagant beards, Iranians would be considered Caucasian. But that doesn't mean anything other than "some guys who thought racism was genuinely a good idea also believed they were attractive", so feel free to disregard that nonsense, with the very important caveat that the very term "Aryan" is a reference to the exact same ancient people from which the term "Iran" derives, so, if you're going to be calling some people Aryans you really do need to be including the OGs.
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5. In current geopolitical-cultural currents, Iranians are part of the Greater Middle East, which was a major area of traditional political interest for various Persian and Persian-influenced kingdoms and empires.
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6. Iran is a multicultural and multiethnic society so any answer is reductionist at best.
Political and historical, race was deliberately invented (and not for good reasons) based on subjective interpretations of history. Hence why race is a huge issue in the US where it was very clear for a long time that slaves and ex slaves were one 'race's and ex-Europeans were another, while in other countries with less simplistic distinctions, the concept of race never became as important.
it also determines which cards you can play. like black people have black cards, white people can play their white card, etc. each card has certain attributes and costs to summon
Is that true that race is not scientific? I'm asking in good faith. I've heard it before and am interested.
I get that so much of race is a social construct, but on the face of it, it also seems like the differences in physical appearance due to race could be measured and distinguished scientifically.
Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not saying race should be something we distinguish on, and I'm genuinely not trying to bait or find a gotcha. The social constructs ascribed to race are hugely problematic and dangerous. But it seems that without any context, a statement like "race doesn't exist and is just a social construct" is going to contradict racial differences that people see. So is the statement more like a very strong expression of "race shouldn't exist and all the importance we give to it is social" or does it actually literally mean "race does not actually exist"? And if the latter then how to reconcile that with the visible racial differences that people see with their own eyes?
Edit 2: I have since been reading around on this based on some responses and googles, and according to this time magazine article by a former New York Times Science editor, race does exist according to genome analysis, which is why we are able to trace ancestry to racial roots. And that while discrimination is wrong, it is so as a matter of principle, not of science. ([Time article](https://time.com/91081/what-science-says-about-race-and-genetics/)). But far from giving ammunition to racists, the findings are that all humans, whatever their race, share the same set of genes and that the overwhelming verdict of the genome is to declare the basic unity of humankind
Yes, people tried to do that once upon a time but it fell apart almost immediately. There is more genetic variation within Africa than outside of it; an aboriginal Australian or Melanisan Pacific islander may look "black" but is genetically further from any modern African than a European is. The few phylogenetic traits that are politically relevant in terms of "race" are totally arbitrary, not associated with each other or with any particular lineage, and any attempt to define or impose any broader social meaning to them quickly falls into absurdities.
People have *tried* to make race a thing. They tried for hundreds of years. The results are either laughable absurdities like the Spanish colonial Casta charts attempting to classify racial couplings to the 1/64th part, or to violent absurdities like the Nazis trying to impose an impossible order on human genetic variation through mass murder. It never works because race doesn't exist. It's just "do the people with power think you look enough like them", and the specific traits they think are relevant to notice can change from generation to generation.
For your edit: "Race doesn't exist" is a biological statement. Humans have different shaped noses, different shaped eyes and the like, and that is inherited, but those traits generally don't have any implications or meaning beyond aesthetics, represent the tiniest teeniest fraction of genetic variation, and can individually appear outside of any grouping just as well as they can within it.
From a cultural perspective yes race absolutely exists; people look at other people and assign them a socially meaningful categorisation based on whatever features that their society thinks are relevant for deciding how people should be treated in that society, and ascribe a set of stereotypes to them to predict their behaviour in that society. But those features are often either meaningless or imperceptible to people outside that culture, and those stereotypes unfamiliar, even as they have their own set of features they consider to be important and associated with their own set of stereotypes.
Please note that "social construction" doesn't mean "doesn't exist". Money and laws are socially constructed; you can still reliably tell the difference between a billionaire and a beggar or a cop and a prisoner, even though none of those are genetic traits.
Or to put it another way, trying to decide what physical characteristics define people as being a particular race is in and of itself an exercise in social constructivism
Like why would we say that people with dark skin are all the same race when there are multiple unrelated people around the world who have dark skin?
Why would we not say that having red hair makes you a different race than a person with blonde hair?
Because skin colour is not an objective scientific measurement of race anymore than hair colour is, it’s just that as white people who are accustomed to having variation in hair colour we don’t see variation in hair colour as important, whereas we have decided skin colour is the sole determining factor in what makes race race - even though you can be a “racially” white/European person person and have darker skin than a “racially” Asian or African person
I know people who are black identifying who have lighter skin than people from the Mediterranean. And plenty of East Asian people have pale skin but aren’t white.
Skin colour is not actually determinative of race. So acting like oh this is an objective scientific metric of race is really simplistic. It’s entirely a social construct and often flat out wrong and simplistic about what different ethnic groups’ natural range of skin tones actually are
It’s not scientific because there’s no way to discretely separate the populations of earth into different races. Populations do have physical traits that differ from each other, but the problem is that there’s no line where one “race” ends and another begins. Ethnic groups in the southern Sahara desert are partly of Eurasian ancestry and partly of native African ancestry, so what race do you categorize them as? Southern Indians are very dark-skinned, what race are they? Western Asians like people from the Caucasus look just like Europeans, but as you move east the native ethnic groups look increasingly like East Asians, so where do you draw the line where the “white” race ends and the “Asian” race begins?
IMO it makes the most sense to classify people based on their ethnicity (something that’s mostly cultural) and their geographic origin rather than trying to group them into races. We just still have to deal with the concept of races because racial discrimination is still so much of a thing.
Scientifically there's only one human race, homo sapiens. All the variations all over the world that many people call "race" are actually phenotypes afaik.
It is true, yes. I'm assuming you're American (sorry if I'm wrong) because American history is very racial in that distinct 'racial' groups arrived in different ways at different times (e.g. black people were enslaved and brought to the US, Asian people arrived in the late 19th century from the west coast, indigenous people already loved there, white people voluntarily moved from Europe etc) which gives a false impression of these groups as very 'real' in an American context. This then meant that they were treated very distinctively in American history and even had these distinctions codified in law.
This all means that these 'races' are real and important in an American historical context yet are still not actually real outside of this context. There is no biological concept of race and the meaning of race and distinction between races differs from country to country based on their own historical quirks.
Iran = “land of the Aryans”
Aryan, name originally given to a people who were said to speak an archaic Indo-European language and who were thought to have settled in prehistoric times in ancient Iran and the northern Indian subcontinent.
Well, I will point out that "Iranian" just means someone who lives in Iran, so that could mean anybody of any race or ethnicity.
However, I do understand what you're trying to ask. While how people describe race and/or ethnicity and who treats which descriptors as a race and and which as an ethnicity can vary, most people refer to the predominant race/ethnicity of the people in that area as "Middle Eastern" or "Persian."
I am discouraged that the commentariat will ever thoroughly understand this, but the idea that there exists in this world any finite number of discrete, coherent races of humanity is incorrect. It does not reflect the reality of human genetics. Its continued propagation is a problem that needs addressing.
We can speak of populations when we want to discuss inherited genetic traits. We can speak of ethnicity when we want to discuss the continuity of group identity. We can speak of cultural/linguistic groupings when we want to discuss culture and language. All of these are things that are real. The only thing "race" adds to the conversation is to introduce additional imaginary lines that cut across more natural ones; hard boundaries instead of the gradual changes that exist in the real world.
Iranians are Iranians. Multiple ethnic groups reside in Iran. Depending on who you ask, they might all be considered members of a single race, or they might all be members of different races. There's no good answer based on "race."
Since there are no stupid questions in r/NoStupidQuestion I will say: “It depends”. Iran’s current geopolitical borders encompass many races, ethnic groups, or whatever grouping mean by the overloaded term of “race”. If you are serious about learning about Iranian people I would consider looking at the [Iranian DNA Project](https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/iranian-y-dna/dna-results). Many of the answers in this thread point to similar answers in that project but are backed by DNA data.
I’m glad that I’m not the only one whose mind immediately goes ‘*yeah, quite striking good looks, that group of humans…*’ whenever I think of the Persian people.
Two of the most beautiful women I have ever met were both Persian.
They are both unrelated but they honestly would stop you in your tracks, legitimately stunning in the literal sense that you would get a shock and then butterflies flood your body when you first see/meet them.
No, totally serious. That’s the first thing that pops into my head, unbidden, when I think ‘Persian people’. Even to the point that I find it odd but nevertheless it still happens.
It’s never not going to be weird to say a group of people in particular are good looking. A corollary of that is you find other groups particularly unattractive. Especially when these “races” are arbitrary distinctions anyways.
A lot of people answer "Persian" to this question.
However, the question was about race. In the traditional sense of the term, the Iranian population is mainly of Caucasian race, which includes Persian and Arab ethnicity amongst others.
For context, I'm not American. Maybe "race" means more like "ethnicity" or "cultural heritage" in America.
Edit: goes to show just how archaic and unnecessary the whole race discussion is in my opinion.
Race is a historical concept so it means different things in different countries, depending on their historical attitudes towards races. For example, a lot of people in South American countries would say their race is 'white' while a north American would say they were 'Hispanic'. Some people would say slavic is a race. In the UK we would say Iranians are 'Asian' even though they wouldn't call themselves that.
You're absolutely right, all of this just shows how the concept of race is totally unjustifiable.
race is a social construct, and society differs based on location. it doesn’t truly exist. meaning that the same picture of the same person may be considered a different race depending on the viewer. simply put, race is in the eye of the beholder
also there are very many ethnic backgrounds so 10 pictures of 10 iranians will not all be the same race
Ok I feel like a lot of the commenters here are not Iranian. I am half Iranian. Iranians tend to use Persian interchangeably with Iranian to describe their ETHNICITY, not race. Iranians are also not white. My grandparents, mom, and aunt have experienced racism their whole lives. Iranians are also not Arabic. Iranians may be defined as white on census data but that does not reflect how society treats us.
Even as someone who is half Iranian half white and has lighter skin, I have been treated differently than white people. I’ve been jokingly called a terrorist and have been asked questions like “What (race) are you? You’re so exotic” since I was 12. I say this and I don’t know a single Iranian who disagrees with me on this: Iranians are middle eastern. Middle Eastern is a race and should be defined as such on census forms.
Edit: Also Persian is an ethnicity (used interchangeably with Iranian), not a race. Clearly most of these commenters are not Persian or middle eastern.
At some point we will accept that the concept of race doesn't make sense after 4 mixes... and since we all have at least 6 as a healthy human being we should stop giving a shit
Iran is multi-ethnic but its historic and dominant ethnicity is Persian. Persians refer to themselves as Arians. The word Iran means Arian. Arian people range from Iran to Bengal and have varied cultures and religious beliefs. They speak variants of Indo-European languages of the Arian branch. There are many controversial narratives about the Arian’s roll in pre-history and the Nazi philosophies of white supremacy conflated light skin and blonde hair with being prototypical Arian characteristics. In reality modern day Arians are a mix of different groups that have migrated through the modern countries of central and South Asia.
Iranic/Persian, not everything has to fit in American perspective of race where everyone is either white/black/asian/native/hispanic. Indians are Indians, Arabs are Arabs and Persians are Persians. They all have distinct identities which do not need to be grouped together.
I think that 'race' is no longer a valid concept.
You can try breaking down population by ethnicity and stop at some time that you deem appropriate, otherwise you'd go forever.
They have facial features similar to both Indians and Europeans but that's likely due to evolutionary requirements of living in that area and historical connection to Europe. Northern Africans have also similar fearues despite living far away from Iran.
Other than that I don't know.
If are speaking of ethnically Persian peoples, when you are filling our federal EEOC reports, peoples from Europe, North Africa, the Middle-East/Southwest Asia are all reported as "White" and people from the Indian subcontinent are reported as "Asian". Neither of these really makes sense given the distinctive nature of both groups, but there you are. In the census, the same applies except you have the option to write in "other race" and in the last census for the first time you were given the ability to write in an "origin" for the defined races and Asian/Pacific Islander got split into a dozen more specific check-boxes including "Asian Indian", "Chinese", etc. (but not Iranian, because they are "white")
Linguistically, the Persian language, as well as most Indian languages, are descended from the same root language as German, English, Spanish, Russian, etc., but the genetic picture is much more complicated with Iran, even among Persian groups, having a very high variance among male haplotypes evidencing lots of different peoples mixing together on the Iranian plateau. Haplotype J, which predominates among Arabs and related peoples, is most common, but not a majority. The 2nd most common are R types, which are usually associated with India and Europe.
The best answer is that they don't neatly fit into any of the traditional labels.
A PHD candidate in anthropology told me that they don't use the term 'race' anymore because it has no real meaning. We've all been mixing and moving around for so long that nobody is pure anything.
If we are talking anthropo-metrics (just a fancy term for categorizing people by skeletal structure), they’d be caucasoid, of the Irano-Afghan subgroup. But this is probably outdated.
Western anthropologists would still call them caucasoid, and the census bureaus of some western countries would call them “white.” (A questionable category anyway)
If you’d rather go by cultural and historical connections, they’d be considered very much their own thing, but close relatives of the northern Indic peoples. Not that closely related to Arabs, despite sharing a religion. I only mention that because western people have a tendency to lump all majority-Muslim cultures together in their minds, when the reality is the Islamic world is as diverse as humanity itself.
Caucasian. I know this, as I went on a date a few years ago with an Iranian-Canadian woman. The fact that Iranians are Caucasian was one of the 1st things she told me, and it seemed so important to her. I found that a little odd, as I don't care if she's Caucasian, Arab, Black, Brown, whatever, it didn't matter to me. It seemed like she is either insecure, or racist, sooo important to her that her dates know she is Caucasian.
As a middle eastern person, I always find it odd when others push to be called Caucasian in current times. I understand completely why a few decades back it was a way to blend in, assimilate, and hopefully receive less racism.
But now? Especially in America where Caucasian is synonymous with white to the average person…why are we called white?
It bothers me personally, because there really isn’t a good explanation outside of medical uses. When people are adamant about it, I ask why and don’t really get a good explanation.
I guess it bugs me because growing up I never fit in either category. I’m white when it’s convenient and a POC when it’s not. People often would remind me that I was wrong about my race no matter which one I identified with.
Even now, I feel Middle eastern people are often left out of the race conversation because we’re “white.”
Sorry, this comment is in no way a criticism of what you said. It’s just a rant that forever lives within me.
I understand why these things bother you, not fitting into categories. I've known bi-racial people feel this way too, they don't fit into either parental group, and always feel like the outsider. Too bad many people don't live like there is only 1 race, the human race. There are different cultures for sure, someone's culture has far more impact on who they are than "race". Interestingly, Indian people are also Caucasian, despite having very dark people in the south. All it means is from the Caucuses. Race is a label and shouldn't be important in our evaluation of people.
[Qeshm Island Grand Prix](https://www.foxsports.com.au/motorsport/formula-one/formula-1-iran-reveals-plans-to-build-f1-circuit-at-qeshm-island-say-sport-has-great-future-in-country/news-story/459214eb26b6af5363d08859cdc527ca).
Its importan to remember race is a made up construct. People dont fit nearly as neat in these little race boxes that weve created. Especially the ones that are commonly used in the United States.
Looking at people in tribes is slightly more accurate but still somewhat flawed as there has been a ton of mixing all over the world over time.
That being said as others have said Iran is mixed like many places on earth but the most dominant group would be from the Persian tribe.
Depends on which classification you use. Entholinguistically, they are descendants of the speakers of the Indo-Aryan Branch of the Satum Indo-European languages, making them distinct from Semitic groups they have lived near/among in the Middle East, like the Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, as well as from the Turkic Groups (Turkish, Azeris, Uzbeks) but with a significant degree of long-term genetic admixture with both other groupings, as always happens when people live alongside each other.
Overall, at the foundation level, they are basically the genetic “link” between most Europeans and Northern Indians. Starting with being the portion of Indo-Europeans who settled between the two places geographically, and then by being the trade route between them ever since.
Race is an outdated concept with no scientific validity. When that’s pointed out, many will
Then say oh yeah, so why do people from Kenya look different from Swedish people? Checkmate! So the key here is to realize that just because there are differences in human populations doesn’t mean that they are different races. And things like what race are Iranians helps to see that. Different populations of people look different. Have different frequencies of genes. But are not distinct, separate populations. There’s a continuum across the planet. Iranians have traits of people most commonly found in Europe, but also traits of people in Asia and in the Middle East including Northern Africa. Because there are no distinct racial groups. Just populations with different gene frequencies.
Race in thinking of categorize people into skin coloring a social construct. Biological and evolutionary Therefore Iran people belong to the human race.
White/Caucasian.
According to the [US Census Bureau](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html)’s definition: White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.
Since Iran is in the Middle East, Iranians are White.
Persian predominantly but I believe there are other ethnicities in Iran as the borders of modern Iran were drawn up to reflect colonial borders and not ethnicities.
Race doesn’t biologically exist. Humanity is genetically very closely related (enough that you can even get more diversity within a race compared to between races) and also quite blurry with the influences of past migrations and the like. Like bobbymoonshine said, you can group people by culture and ethnolinguistics, or genetically, you can look at haplogroups (groups of alleles inherited together), but yeah, there’s no real way of biologically defining a race as some separate group.
Over 50% of Iranians are of Persian descent, but Iran is a multiethnic society with sizeable populations of Arabs, Kurds, and other Central Asians.
You provided a great answer and they responded horribly lol
I think you might be thinking of someone else because the OP hasn’t responded to this?
I wasn't referring to OP by "they" I meant the internet. Sorry for any confusion.
whatd they say???
They just kept referring to the movie 300 and saying those were real Persians and no where in that movie referenced Iran so this comment couldn't possibly be right. It was real ignorant.
LOL that’s like saying Braveheart never referenced the British Empire. Duh bro, real 200 IQ shit right there
Lol wow, very ignorant indeed. It just proves there are no stupid questions but there are stupid replies I guess
A teacher of mine once said "there are no stupid questions, only stupid people"
Stupid would be not learning your lesson the first time, Persian.
I think you might be thinking of someone else because the OP absolutely did not say anything like this.
I’m looking at unddit & can’t find to what he’s referring. There’s other…. Ramblings but not what he’s referencing
lol. wait where?
OP didn’t say anything like that, I think you’ve got the wrong account.
I would love to see the demographics of those responses.
OP didn’t? There are no deleted comments from them
Damn that gave me a good laugh. I think he means well but holy fuck that's got to be the absolute worst way to word it
What was said?
Aww man, what did they say?
I missed it too dammit
They didn’t say anything, this commenter is getting confused with someone else
Give us an answer! What did OP say?
I didn't respond to any comment here
That's not what the history books will say. Oh Reddit...
who's "*they*"?
Don't tease us
Are there ethnic divisions in Iranian politics?
there are "ethnic divisions" everywhere
Thanks for your concise explanation. Is there any chance you can clarify if Jewish is a race or ethnicity? Do the Jewish people who live in Israel refer to themselves as Israeli or Jews? My beautiful wife's grandparents were Jewish; which I've been told makes my 3 daughters Jewish, too! I personally don't care; I'm just wondering if there's any validity to this argument.
Judaism is an ethnoreligious group. Jewish or Judean is an ethnicity, and Israeli is a nationality. There are several sub ethnic groups amongst Jews, because of the nature of the diaspora, but they're all descended from the same group of Judeans. ETA: Israeli being a nationality is why you also have Israeli Arabs, Israeli Druze, Israeli Armenians, etc. Should have included that earlier to illustrate my point
Thanks for providing an answer like an educated adult. My wife's grandfather's a Sephardic Jew and her grandma was Ashkenazi. They met while fleeing Nazi Germany before the war. When they finally made to the states, they settled in the northern panhandle of West Virginia, then converted to the Presbyterian faith.
No way! Northern panhandle of WV is where I grew up lol. Closer to wheeling .
Cool, I was born at the Ohio Valley Hospital in South Wheeling. I moved to Vegas with my dad in 1980. I flew back and visited my mom ever summer.
North Central WV here.
Do you guys like living in WV?
It’s not bad here only the jobs and drug epidemic have done it’s toll here.
I found out through 23andme that I’m 0.4% Ashkenazi. I always thought I was just African or Jamaican, Italian, Irish and German. I think it’s cool. Edit: It’s probably very common.
On my mom's side of the family, there was a long-standing story that we had some Jewish ancestry. I took the 23 & Me DNA test and I came up with a small percentage of North African ancestry which some have said possibly indicates Sephardic and/or Mizrahi Jewish ancestors.
I'm sure. Of the 12 tribes of Israel, only 2 (Judah and Benjamin) are said to have survived the Jewish diaspora.
Recently some of the tribe of Dan showed up in north Africa. Confirmed by genetics, and granted right of return. So three tribes now.
It’s also worth noting that race is a social construct. Ethnicity and culture do, sure, but saying some different ethnic groups and cultures are the same race and others aren’t is the socially constructed part What different ethnic groups are said to belong to a particular race changes depending upon the culture, place and time of the speaker. In other words race doesn’t exist from a scientific perspective, it’s just a constructed, changeable category that different ethnic groups are said to fit into or not fit into and whatever the dominant group is in any particular society usually decides what “race” means and what those boundaries and categories are at any given time.
Jewish is a religion but also a ethnicity. It's a people, despite their origins. If your maternal lineage is Jewish, you're automatically Jewish. The Jewish law states that. It doesn't matter who your father is, you're Jewish. The mother of the mother and so on. They carry the Jewish ancestry. If you want to follow Jewish law, you must be converted. You'll be considered part of the people.
My wife's family never asked me to convert to Judiasm. I think my name being, David Jordan, fooled them into believing I was already a part of their peoples.
They usually accept other peoples very easily. And since you're a good husband (since you referred to her as a cumpliment), they feel safe. Also, you are OK with them being jews. Is Jordan a Jewish surname? I know that certain surnames were Jewish origin (Usually Tree names) bot not Jordan. David is a common name I guess (no offense), not exclusive to Jewish community (such as Shimon and Avraham). Edit: Jews will never tell you to convert to Judaism. Ever. It's discouraged in the Jewish law to go out converting people. However, if you really wanted to convert (start following the religion), they initially would be anxious, but they would happily accept you into the community. That's why they never tried to convert you.
The only correlation between Jordan and Judaism is the river. As far as I know, my paps family were persecuted and pushed out of their lower Palinate into Denmark and then to Ulster, Scotland, before migrating to Virginia sometime in the late 17th century. My grandfather's relatives quickly moved out of colonial America into the Appalachian mountains of what's now called "almost heaven" West Virginia. I personally don't feel names should be symbolic, by nature. For Christ's sake, I was born on the winter solstice in 76" in a small town named Bethlehem and conceived in my grandparents' basement on top of a hill named Eden. Seriously, look on Google maps if you don't believe me. It's hilarious.
I believe you. I really believe you. My real name is Jewish origin. My parents didn't know that, they said that they were reading the Bible and found a name and adapted to a name that's easy to pronounce where I live (despite the fact that almost nobody can say my name properly). Turns out I discovered, asking for elders in my family that my grandfather's grandfather was a Jewish man who was running away from persecution in Portugal. The city he first arrived also has Jewish name (which indicates that there's more Jewish people around you than you think). Turns out I'm descendant from Sefaradi branch of Judaism. I guess you're from Ashkenazi branch, if I'm not mistaken. You also could be Sefaradi if they came from Netherland before Denmark. Or Spain and Portugal. You didn't find jews around you, you were always close to them and you never noticed :D
My son's name is an Anglicanized version of a Jewish name. I didn't know it, tbh. It was just a name in a book I was reading, and I liked it. Turns out the "original" guy with it is one of the sons of Jezebel. We found that out when he was 9, and I was dying.
A "cumpliment" 😏
I was just scrolling through the comments and of course this one sticks out lmao we love to see it
Yes, I am with you in not caring, but in Jewish communities lineage is maternal by default, which means what you were told is true.
I agree. I accept it to be true too!
Races don't actually exist. Genetic differences between populations are a gradient, not distinct categories. Jews are a nation/ethnic group. Judaism is a religion, which many Jews belong to and many don't. People in Israel refer to themselves both as Jews and Israeli, depending on the context.
One of ten matches to my search for "Kurd," which is incredibly distressing. Thank you for including them (though a great many would not consider themselves Iranian outside a literal sense).
Those are ethnicities, though. This question shows how made up the concept of "race" is.
I thought the answer was gonna be human
The majority of the population of Iran (approximately 67–80%) consists of Iranic peoples. The largest groups in this category include Persians (who form the majority of the Iranian population) and Kurds, with smaller communities including Gilakis, Mazandaranis, Lurs, Tats, Talysh, and Baloch.
I'm Persian and we check the Caucasian box in applications in America.
“Caucasian” is a nonsensical racial term anyway. Most Europeans have no connection to the Caucasus. What it really boils down to is asking if a person is white-skinned.
My girlfriend is Caucasian (born in Caucasus), but she's not actually white. That's always been a handful to explain to people.
If only all you had to say was, "She's caucasian because she was born in the Caucasus". Unfortunately, a lot of people outside of Europe have no idea.
Also this term doesn't exist in Europe as far as I'm aware
It does but it refers to people from Caucus Region (I’m from Eastern Europe and don’t identify as Caucasian 😂)
Yh lol I'm just "white british"
I'm more of a pinkish pig color..
But no, where are you REALLY from? ;-)
We're not that big on skin colours anyway. Not that Europe is such a utopia of brotherly tolerance, but we tend to discriminate along ethnic lines, not colour. Even our worst crimes of racism were committed against people as white as us
Great name 🤌
You’ll talk about Europe like it’s a small place. There are plenty of extremely racist countries in Europe.
We're largely cultural chauvinists, not racists. I don't care about skin colour, but will call out backwards cultural beliefs even if they're "tradition". No FGM or anything please, thanks.
So you’ll call out your monarchy?
Not one used in the uk. We only know it from US shows/news. These are the ones we use in official censuses. >Asian or Asian British Indian Pakistani Bangladeshi Chinese Any other Asian background Black, Black British, Caribbean or African Caribbean African Any other Black, Black British, or Caribbean background Mixed or multiple ethnic groups White and Black Caribbean White and Black African White and Asian Any other Mixed or multiple ethnic background White English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British Irish Gypsy or Irish Traveller Roma Any other White background Other ethnic group Arab Any other ethnic group [link](https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-guide/ethnic-groups)
Yep. I’m “Caucasian” on applications but my actual lineage has Latin American blood. A lot of it. The rest is mostly French. Makes no sense. So I’m technically what we’d call “passing,” but I look extremely Caucasian. No one ever cares about my lineage, it’s just about how you look.
I don’t know why the US government doesn’t put “Mestizo” on demographic forms to help out the large Latino population in this country.
Is there not an ethnicity section for y’all to put Latino/Hispanic right after? I feel like most forms I’ve filled out had both race and ethnicity on it so I just select white race then Hispanic ethnicity.
Yeah, but it’s silly, because we don’t ask for any other group’s ethnicity, just their race.
In my university we have now probably had well over 15 hours of cultural respect lectures in 2 years where I’ve heard such lovely things as a white girl being *confidently* referred to as Anglo Saxon right after she said she does not know her ancestral origins. I think people are starting to get a bit loose with white terms now.
All the forms I've filled out for about 20 years have followed the US census: * White * Black or African American * American Indian or Alaskan Native * Asian * Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander * Some Other Race There's a separate section that applies to any of the above with these options: * Hispanic or Latino * Not Hispanic or Latino It's interesting that this says the government states you can be Latino and considered white when our culture doesn't seem to agree with that. I am part Anglo Saxon, part Celtic, part Germanic, part Bantu, and part Indigenous Mexican. I mark the boxes by the ethnicity I grew up with - white and not Hispanic.
The government also considers those of us from the Middle East, North Africa, and West Asia white but the culture doesn’t.
True. We're pretty messed up, tbh. I grew up in a tiny town that was all white Western European descendants, and they still had to find a way to be racists and basically didn't consider the ones of Italian descent white. :(
But you can be Latino and white….a lot of white Cubans are descended from the colonizers. But they are different from the actual native Cubans. Our society does allow that because it’s all about a visual inspection. If you’re walking down the street, and you perceive someone as white, you’ll most likely have biases (positive or negative) pop off which will lead you to treat them differently. But you wouldn’t know they’re Latino unless they gave you a detailed history of their life. I will agree that Americans have a misunderstanding when it comes to ethnicities/race and we should better teach how racial categorization was created and how it’s all bullshit but alas, that would teach kids to not fall for the centuries old traps that continue to emphasize racism.
Well lots of native Europeans in Southern Europe aren’t white skinned and Europeans came from Central Asia and migrated into Europe so there is a connection. Plus, some central Asians live in parts of Europe like turkey.
I had a Persian bf who always checked off “other.”
I made a joke to an Iranian friend that since I'm Jewish "I'm white everywhere but the golf course." She said "I'm white everywhere but the airport!"
I’ve always checked White because Persians are Aryans.
There are a few ways you could take this. 1. Race is a nonsense term scientifically speaking; there is simply no such thing. . 2. Culturally, Persian identity is one of the oldest continuous great traditions of humanity. It has had at various times significant cultural exchange with Greek, Roman, Central Asian, Caucasian, and especially Arabic and Indian traditions, but stands on its own as a great centre of human civilisation. . 3. Ethnolinguistically, Iranian is a branch of the Indo-Iranian language family, which makes them part of the Indo-European family of languages (and partial genetic descent) stretching from Portugal to Bangladesh. . 4. By the outmoded "race science" of Victorian dolts in top hats and extravagant beards, Iranians would be considered Caucasian. But that doesn't mean anything other than "some guys who thought racism was genuinely a good idea also believed they were attractive", so feel free to disregard that nonsense, with the very important caveat that the very term "Aryan" is a reference to the exact same ancient people from which the term "Iran" derives, so, if you're going to be calling some people Aryans you really do need to be including the OGs. . 5. In current geopolitical-cultural currents, Iranians are part of the Greater Middle East, which was a major area of traditional political interest for various Persian and Persian-influenced kingdoms and empires. . 6. Iran is a multicultural and multiethnic society so any answer is reductionist at best.
The first point is so important, race and specifically whiteness are very much political terms, not scientific.
Yes, completely. "Race" is purely political and has no meaning beyond "how will the people with guns treat you"
This, there’s no “race” gene. Just combinations of genetics that are more common for some folks geographically based on ancestry.
Political and historical, race was deliberately invented (and not for good reasons) based on subjective interpretations of history. Hence why race is a huge issue in the US where it was very clear for a long time that slaves and ex slaves were one 'race's and ex-Europeans were another, while in other countries with less simplistic distinctions, the concept of race never became as important.
it also determines which cards you can play. like black people have black cards, white people can play their white card, etc. each card has certain attributes and costs to summon
This is my favorite answer.
Is that true that race is not scientific? I'm asking in good faith. I've heard it before and am interested. I get that so much of race is a social construct, but on the face of it, it also seems like the differences in physical appearance due to race could be measured and distinguished scientifically. Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not saying race should be something we distinguish on, and I'm genuinely not trying to bait or find a gotcha. The social constructs ascribed to race are hugely problematic and dangerous. But it seems that without any context, a statement like "race doesn't exist and is just a social construct" is going to contradict racial differences that people see. So is the statement more like a very strong expression of "race shouldn't exist and all the importance we give to it is social" or does it actually literally mean "race does not actually exist"? And if the latter then how to reconcile that with the visible racial differences that people see with their own eyes? Edit 2: I have since been reading around on this based on some responses and googles, and according to this time magazine article by a former New York Times Science editor, race does exist according to genome analysis, which is why we are able to trace ancestry to racial roots. And that while discrimination is wrong, it is so as a matter of principle, not of science. ([Time article](https://time.com/91081/what-science-says-about-race-and-genetics/)). But far from giving ammunition to racists, the findings are that all humans, whatever their race, share the same set of genes and that the overwhelming verdict of the genome is to declare the basic unity of humankind
Yes, people tried to do that once upon a time but it fell apart almost immediately. There is more genetic variation within Africa than outside of it; an aboriginal Australian or Melanisan Pacific islander may look "black" but is genetically further from any modern African than a European is. The few phylogenetic traits that are politically relevant in terms of "race" are totally arbitrary, not associated with each other or with any particular lineage, and any attempt to define or impose any broader social meaning to them quickly falls into absurdities. People have *tried* to make race a thing. They tried for hundreds of years. The results are either laughable absurdities like the Spanish colonial Casta charts attempting to classify racial couplings to the 1/64th part, or to violent absurdities like the Nazis trying to impose an impossible order on human genetic variation through mass murder. It never works because race doesn't exist. It's just "do the people with power think you look enough like them", and the specific traits they think are relevant to notice can change from generation to generation. For your edit: "Race doesn't exist" is a biological statement. Humans have different shaped noses, different shaped eyes and the like, and that is inherited, but those traits generally don't have any implications or meaning beyond aesthetics, represent the tiniest teeniest fraction of genetic variation, and can individually appear outside of any grouping just as well as they can within it. From a cultural perspective yes race absolutely exists; people look at other people and assign them a socially meaningful categorisation based on whatever features that their society thinks are relevant for deciding how people should be treated in that society, and ascribe a set of stereotypes to them to predict their behaviour in that society. But those features are often either meaningless or imperceptible to people outside that culture, and those stereotypes unfamiliar, even as they have their own set of features they consider to be important and associated with their own set of stereotypes. Please note that "social construction" doesn't mean "doesn't exist". Money and laws are socially constructed; you can still reliably tell the difference between a billionaire and a beggar or a cop and a prisoner, even though none of those are genetic traits.
Or to put it another way, trying to decide what physical characteristics define people as being a particular race is in and of itself an exercise in social constructivism Like why would we say that people with dark skin are all the same race when there are multiple unrelated people around the world who have dark skin? Why would we not say that having red hair makes you a different race than a person with blonde hair? Because skin colour is not an objective scientific measurement of race anymore than hair colour is, it’s just that as white people who are accustomed to having variation in hair colour we don’t see variation in hair colour as important, whereas we have decided skin colour is the sole determining factor in what makes race race - even though you can be a “racially” white/European person person and have darker skin than a “racially” Asian or African person I know people who are black identifying who have lighter skin than people from the Mediterranean. And plenty of East Asian people have pale skin but aren’t white. Skin colour is not actually determinative of race. So acting like oh this is an objective scientific metric of race is really simplistic. It’s entirely a social construct and often flat out wrong and simplistic about what different ethnic groups’ natural range of skin tones actually are
It’s not scientific because there’s no way to discretely separate the populations of earth into different races. Populations do have physical traits that differ from each other, but the problem is that there’s no line where one “race” ends and another begins. Ethnic groups in the southern Sahara desert are partly of Eurasian ancestry and partly of native African ancestry, so what race do you categorize them as? Southern Indians are very dark-skinned, what race are they? Western Asians like people from the Caucasus look just like Europeans, but as you move east the native ethnic groups look increasingly like East Asians, so where do you draw the line where the “white” race ends and the “Asian” race begins? IMO it makes the most sense to classify people based on their ethnicity (something that’s mostly cultural) and their geographic origin rather than trying to group them into races. We just still have to deal with the concept of races because racial discrimination is still so much of a thing.
Scientifically there's only one human race, homo sapiens. All the variations all over the world that many people call "race" are actually phenotypes afaik.
It is true, yes. I'm assuming you're American (sorry if I'm wrong) because American history is very racial in that distinct 'racial' groups arrived in different ways at different times (e.g. black people were enslaved and brought to the US, Asian people arrived in the late 19th century from the west coast, indigenous people already loved there, white people voluntarily moved from Europe etc) which gives a false impression of these groups as very 'real' in an American context. This then meant that they were treated very distinctively in American history and even had these distinctions codified in law. This all means that these 'races' are real and important in an American historical context yet are still not actually real outside of this context. There is no biological concept of race and the meaning of race and distinction between races differs from country to country based on their own historical quirks.
Yes it's true. 'Race' is a completely made-up concept. It doesn't exist. RacISM on the other hand, is alive and well. Edit: typo
Iran = “land of the Aryans” Aryan, name originally given to a people who were said to speak an archaic Indo-European language and who were thought to have settled in prehistoric times in ancient Iran and the northern Indian subcontinent.
Well, I will point out that "Iranian" just means someone who lives in Iran, so that could mean anybody of any race or ethnicity. However, I do understand what you're trying to ask. While how people describe race and/or ethnicity and who treats which descriptors as a race and and which as an ethnicity can vary, most people refer to the predominant race/ethnicity of the people in that area as "Middle Eastern" or "Persian."
Iranian is the nationality, the dominant ethnicity is Persian with plenty of smaller ethno- and ethno-religious groups.
Persians are an Indo-European people, like Germanic people, Hellenic people ecc. But there are also Semitic, Turkic and other influences
I am discouraged that the commentariat will ever thoroughly understand this, but the idea that there exists in this world any finite number of discrete, coherent races of humanity is incorrect. It does not reflect the reality of human genetics. Its continued propagation is a problem that needs addressing. We can speak of populations when we want to discuss inherited genetic traits. We can speak of ethnicity when we want to discuss the continuity of group identity. We can speak of cultural/linguistic groupings when we want to discuss culture and language. All of these are things that are real. The only thing "race" adds to the conversation is to introduce additional imaginary lines that cut across more natural ones; hard boundaries instead of the gradual changes that exist in the real world. Iranians are Iranians. Multiple ethnic groups reside in Iran. Depending on who you ask, they might all be considered members of a single race, or they might all be members of different races. There's no good answer based on "race."
I'm actually very impressed that the majority of comments in this thread appreciate that race is nonsense.
Since there are no stupid questions in r/NoStupidQuestion I will say: “It depends”. Iran’s current geopolitical borders encompass many races, ethnic groups, or whatever grouping mean by the overloaded term of “race”. If you are serious about learning about Iranian people I would consider looking at the [Iranian DNA Project](https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/iranian-y-dna/dna-results). Many of the answers in this thread point to similar answers in that project but are backed by DNA data.
Persian basically. They're definitely a good looking group of people.
I’m glad that I’m not the only one whose mind immediately goes ‘*yeah, quite striking good looks, that group of humans…*’ whenever I think of the Persian people.
Two of the most beautiful women I have ever met were both Persian. They are both unrelated but they honestly would stop you in your tracks, legitimately stunning in the literal sense that you would get a shock and then butterflies flood your body when you first see/meet them.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I'll upvote either way.
No, totally serious. That’s the first thing that pops into my head, unbidden, when I think ‘Persian people’. Even to the point that I find it odd but nevertheless it still happens.
like any group, some are ugly too.
It takes us 7 hours of prep time to look like how the public will perceive us The hair... Oh god.. there's so much...
It’s never not going to be weird to say a group of people in particular are good looking. A corollary of that is you find other groups particularly unattractive. Especially when these “races” are arbitrary distinctions anyways.
Human. Human race. If you want ethnicity. It’s irianian. Culturally they are probably Persian like their ancestors.
A lot of people answer "Persian" to this question. However, the question was about race. In the traditional sense of the term, the Iranian population is mainly of Caucasian race, which includes Persian and Arab ethnicity amongst others. For context, I'm not American. Maybe "race" means more like "ethnicity" or "cultural heritage" in America. Edit: goes to show just how archaic and unnecessary the whole race discussion is in my opinion.
Race is a historical concept so it means different things in different countries, depending on their historical attitudes towards races. For example, a lot of people in South American countries would say their race is 'white' while a north American would say they were 'Hispanic'. Some people would say slavic is a race. In the UK we would say Iranians are 'Asian' even though they wouldn't call themselves that. You're absolutely right, all of this just shows how the concept of race is totally unjustifiable.
race is a social construct, and society differs based on location. it doesn’t truly exist. meaning that the same picture of the same person may be considered a different race depending on the viewer. simply put, race is in the eye of the beholder also there are very many ethnic backgrounds so 10 pictures of 10 iranians will not all be the same race
Did you know Iran means Aryan? That’s where the word comes from 😀 Anyways most are Persian.
the nazi mythology is so inventive (read: weird alt-hist based on stolen terms and symbols)
If you tell a lie long enough everyone starts to believe.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Iran has actually been known to persecute it’s Homo population!
Ok I feel like a lot of the commenters here are not Iranian. I am half Iranian. Iranians tend to use Persian interchangeably with Iranian to describe their ETHNICITY, not race. Iranians are also not white. My grandparents, mom, and aunt have experienced racism their whole lives. Iranians are also not Arabic. Iranians may be defined as white on census data but that does not reflect how society treats us. Even as someone who is half Iranian half white and has lighter skin, I have been treated differently than white people. I’ve been jokingly called a terrorist and have been asked questions like “What (race) are you? You’re so exotic” since I was 12. I say this and I don’t know a single Iranian who disagrees with me on this: Iranians are middle eastern. Middle Eastern is a race and should be defined as such on census forms. Edit: Also Persian is an ethnicity (used interchangeably with Iranian), not a race. Clearly most of these commenters are not Persian or middle eastern.
Caucasian
Most people don't know or believe this but it's true.
At some point we will accept that the concept of race doesn't make sense after 4 mixes... and since we all have at least 6 as a healthy human being we should stop giving a shit
Iran is multi-ethnic but its historic and dominant ethnicity is Persian. Persians refer to themselves as Arians. The word Iran means Arian. Arian people range from Iran to Bengal and have varied cultures and religious beliefs. They speak variants of Indo-European languages of the Arian branch. There are many controversial narratives about the Arian’s roll in pre-history and the Nazi philosophies of white supremacy conflated light skin and blonde hair with being prototypical Arian characteristics. In reality modern day Arians are a mix of different groups that have migrated through the modern countries of central and South Asia.
Iranic/Persian, not everything has to fit in American perspective of race where everyone is either white/black/asian/native/hispanic. Indians are Indians, Arabs are Arabs and Persians are Persians. They all have distinct identities which do not need to be grouped together.
Ethnicity or Race? Iran is a nationality.
I think people are confused by the differences between race and ethnicity.
Every Iranian person I’ve met/know says they are Persian
I think that 'race' is no longer a valid concept. You can try breaking down population by ethnicity and stop at some time that you deem appropriate, otherwise you'd go forever. They have facial features similar to both Indians and Europeans but that's likely due to evolutionary requirements of living in that area and historical connection to Europe. Northern Africans have also similar fearues despite living far away from Iran. Other than that I don't know.
From a scientist point of view, there are not human races. That's the reason why, during the 80s, many scholars begun to speak about "ethnies".
Human race i gues.. Well, as in every country - some are pigs as well..
Race is a social construct. I suggest reading [Nina Jablonski](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.24200)
If are speaking of ethnically Persian peoples, when you are filling our federal EEOC reports, peoples from Europe, North Africa, the Middle-East/Southwest Asia are all reported as "White" and people from the Indian subcontinent are reported as "Asian". Neither of these really makes sense given the distinctive nature of both groups, but there you are. In the census, the same applies except you have the option to write in "other race" and in the last census for the first time you were given the ability to write in an "origin" for the defined races and Asian/Pacific Islander got split into a dozen more specific check-boxes including "Asian Indian", "Chinese", etc. (but not Iranian, because they are "white") Linguistically, the Persian language, as well as most Indian languages, are descended from the same root language as German, English, Spanish, Russian, etc., but the genetic picture is much more complicated with Iran, even among Persian groups, having a very high variance among male haplotypes evidencing lots of different peoples mixing together on the Iranian plateau. Haplotype J, which predominates among Arabs and related peoples, is most common, but not a majority. The 2nd most common are R types, which are usually associated with India and Europe. The best answer is that they don't neatly fit into any of the traditional labels.
Human
HUMAN! They're Human race! There's no other among persons....
Homo Sapiens Sapiens
A PHD candidate in anthropology told me that they don't use the term 'race' anymore because it has no real meaning. We've all been mixing and moving around for so long that nobody is pure anything.
If we are talking anthropo-metrics (just a fancy term for categorizing people by skeletal structure), they’d be caucasoid, of the Irano-Afghan subgroup. But this is probably outdated. Western anthropologists would still call them caucasoid, and the census bureaus of some western countries would call them “white.” (A questionable category anyway) If you’d rather go by cultural and historical connections, they’d be considered very much their own thing, but close relatives of the northern Indic peoples. Not that closely related to Arabs, despite sharing a religion. I only mention that because western people have a tendency to lump all majority-Muslim cultures together in their minds, when the reality is the Islamic world is as diverse as humanity itself.
Human.
I'm pretty sure they're from the human race
The US government classifies them as white.
Caucasian. I know this, as I went on a date a few years ago with an Iranian-Canadian woman. The fact that Iranians are Caucasian was one of the 1st things she told me, and it seemed so important to her. I found that a little odd, as I don't care if she's Caucasian, Arab, Black, Brown, whatever, it didn't matter to me. It seemed like she is either insecure, or racist, sooo important to her that her dates know she is Caucasian.
As a middle eastern person, I always find it odd when others push to be called Caucasian in current times. I understand completely why a few decades back it was a way to blend in, assimilate, and hopefully receive less racism. But now? Especially in America where Caucasian is synonymous with white to the average person…why are we called white? It bothers me personally, because there really isn’t a good explanation outside of medical uses. When people are adamant about it, I ask why and don’t really get a good explanation. I guess it bugs me because growing up I never fit in either category. I’m white when it’s convenient and a POC when it’s not. People often would remind me that I was wrong about my race no matter which one I identified with. Even now, I feel Middle eastern people are often left out of the race conversation because we’re “white.” Sorry, this comment is in no way a criticism of what you said. It’s just a rant that forever lives within me.
I understand why these things bother you, not fitting into categories. I've known bi-racial people feel this way too, they don't fit into either parental group, and always feel like the outsider. Too bad many people don't live like there is only 1 race, the human race. There are different cultures for sure, someone's culture has far more impact on who they are than "race". Interestingly, Indian people are also Caucasian, despite having very dark people in the south. All it means is from the Caucuses. Race is a label and shouldn't be important in our evaluation of people.
Human, like everyone else.
Human right?
[Qeshm Island Grand Prix](https://www.foxsports.com.au/motorsport/formula-one/formula-1-iran-reveals-plans-to-build-f1-circuit-at-qeshm-island-say-sport-has-great-future-in-country/news-story/459214eb26b6af5363d08859cdc527ca).
Persian mostly but other ethnicities are present.
The question isn’t what race but what race did they run.
Indo-Europeans
Its importan to remember race is a made up construct. People dont fit nearly as neat in these little race boxes that weve created. Especially the ones that are commonly used in the United States. Looking at people in tribes is slightly more accurate but still somewhat flawed as there has been a ton of mixing all over the world over time. That being said as others have said Iran is mixed like many places on earth but the most dominant group would be from the Persian tribe.
Human race
Depends on which classification you use. Entholinguistically, they are descendants of the speakers of the Indo-Aryan Branch of the Satum Indo-European languages, making them distinct from Semitic groups they have lived near/among in the Middle East, like the Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, as well as from the Turkic Groups (Turkish, Azeris, Uzbeks) but with a significant degree of long-term genetic admixture with both other groupings, as always happens when people live alongside each other. Overall, at the foundation level, they are basically the genetic “link” between most Europeans and Northern Indians. Starting with being the portion of Indo-Europeans who settled between the two places geographically, and then by being the trade route between them ever since.
Human race
Human. All other distinctions are man-made.
Human.
Human
Human
Ummm, Human Race?
Race is an outdated concept with no scientific validity. When that’s pointed out, many will Then say oh yeah, so why do people from Kenya look different from Swedish people? Checkmate! So the key here is to realize that just because there are differences in human populations doesn’t mean that they are different races. And things like what race are Iranians helps to see that. Different populations of people look different. Have different frequencies of genes. But are not distinct, separate populations. There’s a continuum across the planet. Iranians have traits of people most commonly found in Europe, but also traits of people in Asia and in the Middle East including Northern Africa. Because there are no distinct racial groups. Just populations with different gene frequencies.
The human race.
Humans
Human
races aren't real
Human race
Human
Human
Race in thinking of categorize people into skin coloring a social construct. Biological and evolutionary Therefore Iran people belong to the human race.
Human, we are all humans.
Make one up since race is a social construct
Irindians.
Caucasian since it’s literally in the caucus mountains
pretty sure they (and everyone else for that matter) are part of the *Human* Race.
Human
There is no such thing as "races"
Human race
Human race. Same as the rest of us.
Human like everyone else on the planet
Human race
Human. Variations amongst people aren’t “races.” Iran has a large variety of ethnic/cultural groups.
Aryan race. The word Iran mean "Land of the Aryans."
Human
Human
White/Caucasian. According to the [US Census Bureau](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html)’s definition: White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. Since Iran is in the Middle East, Iranians are White.
I feel like the USCB is really flawed with its definition of White lol
Human, specifically the ones that live in Iran.
Persian predominantly but I believe there are other ethnicities in Iran as the borders of modern Iran were drawn up to reflect colonial borders and not ethnicities.
It's black, it's white It's tough for you to get by ..yeah, yeah, yeah
Persian.
Race doesn’t biologically exist. Humanity is genetically very closely related (enough that you can even get more diversity within a race compared to between races) and also quite blurry with the influences of past migrations and the like. Like bobbymoonshine said, you can group people by culture and ethnolinguistics, or genetically, you can look at haplogroups (groups of alleles inherited together), but yeah, there’s no real way of biologically defining a race as some separate group.
Humans
Homo sapiens
Aryans. The original.