Are 'white people' very "light skinned" 'black people'?

In the sense that squares are four-sided triangles, yes.

My roots started in England with King Henry the VIII.

What choo talkin bout fool. Aye a honky tru & tru. Aint no denying it bro, hey throw me some skin mother fucker~ Dash it all, one has heard everything now don’t you know old bean.

I think race is a very lazy way of categorizing people. There really is a continuum of colors, sizes, etc.

How do we classify ignorance?

unlikely. i can’t jump.

and, to wit, humanity centered in the Fertile Crescent and spread from there.

Sure, why not? Sounds good to me. People are people.

Yes, just as ‘black people’ very “dark skinned” ‘white people’.

@john65pennington: Don’t you think King Henry (ahem) VIII had parents? And his parents had parents? Etc.?

No. Being black comes with cultural things being white doesn’t and vice versa.

black people have a very thin inky pigment under their skin, other than that we are practically identical.

we are all humans, all members of the human race. any other kind of ‘race’ is just being picky in my opinion.

From Remember the Titans:

Big Ju: What you doin’ man?
Louie Lastik: Eatin’ lunch.
Big Ju: I see you eatin’ lunch, but why you eatin’ over here? Why not go eat over there and eat with your people?
Louie Lastik: Man, I don’t have any people. I’m with everybody, Julius.
Petey Jones: Yeah, he’s just a light-skinned brother.
Big Ju: Yeah, and I’m a dark-skinned cracker.

If I am a very light skinned black man then I am in fact a very light skinned black man. So light skinned that I burn in the winter sun.

My girlfriend had an uncle who lived as a white doctor his entire adult life. No one knew he was a black man.

People are just people.

“You mean I’m going to stay this color?!?” ~Steve Martin The Jerk

::blinks:: Some of them are, actually. Ask Martin Gore.

@JLeslie It was fairly common, especially during the days of slavery and Jim Crow, for light-skinned “black” people to try to “pass” for white people.

@Yetanotheruser It seems crazy to even have to state it that way, a black man who lived as a white man. Obviously he had white skin. Her family was descended from slaves and slave owners. My girlfriend was one of the darker people in her family.

If anyone follows their family history far enough back, you will (to the best of our current understanding) arrive at an African ancestor, and that ancestor will likely have dark skin. Dark skin likely became a selective advantage as soon as our primate ancestors lost much of their body hair. Light skin was an adaptation that enabled humans to survive in the lower sunlight exposure of northern latitudes. Changes in skin pigmentation would occur in relatively few generations, given the selective pressures at play.

@JLeslie I know what you mean. I have become more aware of this, not only in US history in general, but specifically in my wife’s family history since we got married in the late 1980’s.

I’m not feeling well and my brain isn’t functioning at full capacity, but my thought is about the genetic markers that can link our heritage back in time. Wired magazine had an article on it a while back and I would be interested in knowing the results in regards to this question. If what we’ve pieced together about human evolution is true, I would imagine that we all originally came from the same “race”. Skin pigment didn’t begin to differ that much until hominins spread throughout the world and encountered different climates, temperatures, and degrees of sun exposure.

@Harp if you look at my waistline, you’ll trace me back to Aunt Jemima.

african doesn’t mean dark-skinned. protohuman ancestors may have had dark skins or light skins or either at various times. AFAIK no one knows. anyway “black” and “white” has more of a cultural meaning (to 2010s people) than a scientific one.

one theory BTW speculates that Neanderthals had light skin and blonde or red hair and interbred with early humans.

We can’t really know. We are all Humans and that is for sure. However , some one brought up the point, if we came out of Africa, were we actually black to begin with, or were we a Tan and White and Black people are just extremes of the original pigment we had?

@Ria777 Neanderthals had already been in Europe for about a quarter of a million years before Homo sapiens made their way north from Africa (the Neanderthals were not ancestors of Homo sapiens, as you may know). The genetic samples that indicated genes for red hair in Neanderthals were 43–50,000 years old, hundreds of thousands of years after the migrations. Considering that a complete change of complexion from dark to light skin (or vice versa) can happen in as few as 100 generations, this tells us nothing about what complexion the African ancestors of Neanderthals had in Africa. We have hardly any fossils and no genetic information for African Neanderthals.

Don’t think it really matters…we are all human beings…that’s what matters.