Racism [Archive] - Page 2 - The Project Avalon Community Forum

Mark

6th June 2019, 16:33

This discussion is long and fraught. I'm not interested in who had it worse off than who and derailing this thread and its current direction with that discussion. I'll just leave this as a proof of the validity and "supremacy" of individual and group perspective and how it is always complicated and multi-faceted. Drumpf is a fan of Frederick, as we all know. This was his experience of this issue. I will defer to his judgement, as he was actually enslaved, himself.

Were the Irish slaves? Frederick Douglass and his Irish awakening (https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2018/0919/994839-frederick-douglass-ireland-slaves/)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40716&d=1559838095

Analysis: how a 1845 trip to Ireland helped the anti-slavery campaigner to refine his thinking in regard to human rights

By Christine Kinealy (https://www.qu.edu/on-campus/institutes-centers/irelands-great-hunger-institute.html#aboutthedirector), Quinnipiac University (https://www.qu.edu/)

The first anniversary of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia proved to be largely uneventful (https://www.rte.ie/news/us/2018/0813/984702-protest-washington-dc/), the small showing being attributed to the alt-right being divided and its leadership in disarray. But while racism might not have appeared on the streets in August 2018, as it had done a year earlier (https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2017/0812/896937-virginia-farright-rally/), it remains all too visible at some of the highest levels of American society.

The same weekend as the rally, Kellyanne Conwa (http://twitter.com/KellyannePolls)y, counsellor to President Donald Trump, struggled (https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/12/politics/kellyanne-conway-white-house-staff/index.html) when asked to name a prominent African American in the White House. Days later, the President (http://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump) publicly referred to an African American woman as "a dog" (https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1029329583672307712?lang=en). And only weeks earlier, Kanye West (http://twitter.com/kanyewest) caused controversy when he claimed that American slavery "sounds like a choice" (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kanye-west-says-400-years-of-slavery-sounds-like-a-choice-628849/). He also seemed surprised that it had lasted for 400 years. Where are the role models for positive race relations?

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40717&d=1559838101

In February 2017, President Trump famously said at a Black History Month event (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-african-american-history-month-listening-session/) that "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognised more and more, I notice". His use of the present tense led people to suspect that the President did not know who Douglass was or that he was long dead.

Yes, Frederick Douglass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass) is long dead but his words, actions and humanity remain relevant in these troubled times. In particular, his relationship with Ireland, a country defined by its poverty and recurring famines, forced him to redefine his own views on race, oppression and social justice.

A "transformative" visit to Ireland

In 1845, the 27-year-old runaway slave sailed from Boston to the port of Liverpool. Douglass had escaped from slavery seven years earlier and his primary motive for leaving the U.S. was to avoid being seized and returned to his previous "owner." Under legislation passed in 1793, he was deemed to be a "fugitive slave," even in the free Northern states. Moreover, the publication of his autobiography in May of that year - the best-selling Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_of_the_Life_of_Frederick_Douglass,_an_American_Slave) —had put him at even greater risk of recapture.

Two days after landing in England, Douglass sailed to Dublin. He visited with the intention of spending four days in the city to arrange a publication of his Narrative. but the warmth of the welcome meant that he stayed for four months. In his own words, Douglass’s stay in Ireland proved to be "transformative."

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40718&d=1559838106

On arrival, Douglass wrote to his mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, informing him that he was "safe in old Ireland, in the beautiful city of Dublin". After a few weeks in the country, he elaborated by saying that for the first time in his life, he felt himself to be not simply free, but an equal. "I find myself not treated as a color, but as a man."

At the same time, Ireland perplexed Douglass. As an Anglophile, he had to confront Ireland’s position as a British colony and as a country in which Catholics, the vast majority of the population, were second class citizens. Catholics had only gained the right to be members of the British parliament as recently as 1829, but his Irish hosts, who were Quakers, continued to be denied that right.

Douglass’s visit coincided with the campaign to restore an Irish parliament and to repeal the Act of Union of 1800. The Repeal movement was led by the charismatic Daniel O’Connell, also an outspoken critic of American slavery. Ironically for Douglass, he was in a country where, for the first time in his life, he felt truly free, yet he was surrounded by people who were agitating for their own political independence.

At the time, Irish nationalists frequently used the term "slavery" when describing their condition. As a former slave, and now a fugitive slave, Douglass had a first-hand understanding of the inhumanity of slavery. Despite the extreme poverty of many Irish people and their subjugation to Britain, Douglass rejected the use of the terms slave or slavery to describe Ireland’s history or situation.

During his time in Ireland Douglass gave almost 50 lectures, during which he avoided engaging with Irish politics directly. However, while lecturing in Limerick in November, he addressed the issue of Irish "slavery" head-on, declaring that he had "met with the objection that slavery existed in Ireland, and that therefore there was no necessity for describing its character as found in another country (hear, hear). My answer is, that if slavery existed here, it ought to be put down, and the generous in the land ought to rise and scatter its fragments to the winds (loud cheers)."

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40719&d=1559838112

But there was nothing like American slavery on the soil on which Douglass now stood. While he agreed that Irish people were oppressed, he did not believe that they were slaves. He went on to explain that the Irish, unlike slaves, had the freedom to marry, to protest, to move around and to emigrate.

In contrast "Negro-slavery consisted not in taking away a man’s property, but in making property of him, and in destroying his identity—in treating him as the beasts and creeping things. GOD had given the negro a conscience and a will, but his conscience was no monitor to him, for he had no power to exercise his will—his master decided for him not only what he should eat and what he should drink, what he should wear, when and to whom he should speak, how much he should work, how much and by whom he is to be punished—he not only decided all these things, but what is morally right and wrong.

"The slave must not even choose his wife, must marry and unmarry at the will of his tyrant, for the slave-holder had no compunction in separating man and wife, and thus putting as under what GOD had joined together."

READ: When Frederick Douglass came to Ireland - in his own words (https://www.rte.ie/culture/2018/0913/993490-when-frederick-douglass-came-to-ireland-in-his-own-words/)

Douglass made the case for differentiation even more forcefully following his return to the US: "the Irishman is poor, but he is not a slave. He may be in rags, but he is not a slave. He is still the master of his own body … The Irishman has not only the liberty to emigrate from his country, but he has liberty at home. He can write, and speak, and cooperate for the attainment of his rights and the redress of his wrongs."

During his time in Ireland, Douglass refined his own thinking in regard to human rights. To him, the Irish were not slaves, but he could empathise with their poverty, political marginalisation and negative stereotyping. Born a slave in 1818, Douglass died in 1895 as a champion of human rights and social justice. His words remain relevant and vibrant today and, just as he never forgot Ireland, Ireland continues to remember and revere Frederick Douglass. More importantly, in these troubled and divided times, Douglass is a role model for healing and uniting.

Professor Christine Kinealy (https://www.qu.edu/on-campus/institutes-centers/irelands-great-hunger-institute.html#aboutthedirector) is director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute (https://www.qu.edu/on-campus/institutes-centers/irelands-great-hunger-institute.html) at Quinnipiac University. Her latest publication is Frederick Douglass and Ireland: In His Own Words (https://www.routledge.com/Frederick-Douglass-and-Ireland-In-His-Own-Words/Kinealy/p/book/9780815380634)

Mark

6th June 2019, 16:47

This one is very interesting. It was probably the least "biased" of the articles I could find and I thought it could very well add a more balanced perspective by delving into the actual political conditions that led to the wholesale movement of Irish into the Caribbean.

Were thousands of Irish people sold as slaves? (https://ireland-calling.com/irish-slaves/)

Thousands of Irish people were subjected to years of abuse and cruelty after being sold as slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries. That is the claim made by London based historians and authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh.

The two men have written a book, White Cargo, which says that one of the darkest periods in Irish history may have been swept under the carpet for centuries.

The book details how thousands of Irish men, women and children were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean and America to work as labourers during the 17th and 18th centuries.

There was a term at the time known as indentured servants. This meant that labourers would work for their employers for free for a fixed length of time in return for being granted their freedom and given some land at the end of their service. Many Irish people travelled to America and the Caribbean under these terms.

Many of them were treated badly and even betrayed at the end of their service when the landowner reneged on the deal.

However, Jordan and Walsh claim that the cruelty and injustice went further than this. They say many of these indentured servants were effectively slaves. They also believe that thousands more Irish people were transported to the Caribbean from the 1600s up to the 1800s, not to work as indentured servants, but to be sold into a lifetime of slavery.

Henry VIII wanted to regain control of Ireland

The atrocity began towards the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Britain claimed sovereignty over Ireland following the Norman invasion a few centuries earlier. In actual fact, Ireland was still separated into several family clans and mini-kingdoms and was difficult to govern. Many of the Anglo-Norman settlers had inter-married and formed allegiances with the native Irish clans. The British had even raised the concern that the Norman settlers had become ‘more Irish than the Irish’!
King Henry VIII

Henry VIII decided to address the issue. He declared himself ‘King of Ireland’ and granted several positions of Irish nobility to English settlers. He wanted to control Ireland from afar, and alter their customs and cultures to make them more English. The main stumbling block with this was his Protestant religion, with most of Ireland being Catholic. Henry used force to take control of large areas in Ireland.

His invasion into Ireland was continued by his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I. During this same period, British sailors had begun capturing native Africans and selling them as slaves to New World settlers in the Americas.

Britain needed to get rid of Irish political prisoners

Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Britain finally defeated the Irish rebels at the Battle of Kinsale. This victory left more than 30,000 Irish soldiers as political prisoners. Britain tried to solve the problem of what to do with them by creating a policy of banishment. The Irish soldiers were forced to leave their country, with many moving to Spain and France to join foreign armies.

However, this enforced banishment wasn’t enough. Thousands of rebels remained in Ireland and the British needed to find a way to get rid of them. James I had inherited the crown from Elizabeth, and he ordered the transportation of Irish prisoners to work as labourers. At the time, slavery was not considered barbaric and cruel. Thousands of men were being taken from Africa and sold into slavery in America. It was a profitable business.

The first record of Irish people being sold in this way comes from 1612 when a group of men were sold to settlers in South America. It is highly likely that similar events took place before this though, as records of Irish matters in this period are scarce.

The demand for labour was high in the Americas and the Caribbean, as European settlers began to set up new communities. Regular trips to Africa to purchase people to be sold into slavery were taking place by the 1620s. However, the trips were expensive, and the people had to be purchased.

In 1625, the British made it law that Irish political prisoners should be transported and sold to English settlers in America and the Caribbean. The policy was a profitable one for the British sailors, but there were not enough prisoners to keep up with the demand. To combat this, any minor infringement became punishable by transportation. Rogue gangs also roamed the streets in Ireland searching for potential kidnapping targets that could also be transported. Jordan and Walsh describe the Irish people at this time as “nothing more than human cattle”.

Cromwell finally crushed the Irish resistance

A group of Irish clans rose up to fight the British in 1641. Oliver Cromwell stamped this out with a brutal and violent sweep across the country, fully establishing his rule by 1652. Irish land was taken and given to British settlers. Those Irish that hadn’t been slaughtered were made to work as peasants for their new landlords. Any Irish resistance was dealt with by transportation.

Jordan and Walsh believe that thousands of Irish people were transported over the next hundred years, even for minor crimes.

The journeys were highly dangerous for the Irish captives. Overcrowding and disease were major problems on the ships and life was cheap. The book, White Cargo, describes how on one voyage, more than 1,000 captives were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean to make sure the crew had enough food to complete the journey after the ship had run into difficulty.

The Irish were cheap to buy for the Caribbean settlers. A price of 900lbs of cotton was the standard amount paid. The African slaves were more expensive, averaging around three or four times that amount. This made the lives of Irish slaves less valuable to the landowners, and they suffered terrible cruelties because of this.

Any disobedience or attempt at escape was punished with severe brutality. Slaves would be bound by the hands and lifted before their feet were set alight. Heavy beatings and thrashings were also commonplace. The Irish labourers in Barbados were known as ‘Redlegs’, because their fair skin would burn more rapidly than those of their dark skinned counterparts.

Women raped to produce more cheap labour

Jordan and Walsh also highlight another horrific act that took place on these new settlements. The settlers would breed with the female workers, to produce more cheap labour. The child would be under the ownership of the settlers, and the mothers would rarely leave their children in such conditions, even after their terms of labour had expired. Another method settlers used to produce cheap labour was to breed the Irish women with the African men. The resulting skin tone of the offspring was more valuable to landowners in the slave markets.

This practice was made illegal in 1681, not because of the horrific acts of rape and dehumanisation, but because the cheap labour being produced was not in the interest of British slave traders.

Back in Ireland, the Jacobite Wars ended in 1691 with William of Orange finally defeating James II’s armies. This again, left thousands of Irish Catholics unwilling to accept the rule of the Protestants. They were given the opportunity to leave the country for France. Around 30,000 Irish people took this opportunity and they became known as the Wild Geese. Most of those that refused were transported to labour camps.

The United Irishmen’s unsuccessful 1798 Rebellion created the opportunity for the British to ship thousands more Irishmen and women overseas, with Australia now also a common destination.

The sequence finally ended in 1839, when Britain finally decided to end their involvement in the slave trade.

There is little documentary evidence to support many of the claims made in White Cargo. It is possible that this because the events were never recorded or the records have been deliberately lost over the years to protect the British reputation.

Whether the Irish labourers were transported and sold as slaves is unproven. What is certain is the suffering and brutality they endured at the hands of the European settlers.

Mark

6th June 2019, 17:12

This is an epic thread; I've enjoyed contemplating all the various perspectives and comments. So much rich conversation has ensued it's hard to add anything useful to the conversation, but perhaps the best attempt is to define racism as precisely as possible and then clarify how commonly employed definitions are problematic.

Thank you for your clarity of mind and being able to "see" beyond the things that are working to obscure clear thought and communication. You've raised some excellent points that do indeed help to clarify the issues at hand.

Racism is a social problem; it is a humanitarian problem; it is a spiritual problem.

This is how I see it as well. Which is why I believe it is the issue that, once we have collectively come to the realization of how it affects our very perceptions of reality as well as our communications, the doorway will open to moving through and beyond it, which is what the future of this human family must be if a critical number of us are to survive the coming times.

Unfortunately--and here is the elephant in the room: cultural institutions have weaponized and co-opted the phenomena to advance political agendas to foment tribal tensions and divisions, as DNA and others have eloquently pointed out. Racism has thus been used to ascribe victimizing attributes to groups at large and has summarily rendered other groups at large to victims. This dialect is both a conscious and subconscious inculcation in the collective psyche that serves to de-individualize persons accordingly per their group affiliation. So humanitarians tackling the problem in good faith will often find pushback against the elephant in the room, or from those who simply resist being de-individualized, regardless of the validity or fallacy of the underlying reality.

Nothing to add, really, just love how well this is stated. Exactly. Clear communication becomes impossible under this scenario.

In other words, I would submit racism has become an emotionally charged enigma in our Western society and is rarely understood for what it is. The pushback by President Trump (and his supporters) against political correctness, for example, has nothing to do with an underlying proclivity for racism or sexism as much as it characterizes a protest against weaponizing social injustice prevalent in society to advance agendas entirely unrelated to social injustice.

It mobilizes populations who are not aware of the deeper issues, yes. And, those mobilized populations then internalize the external definitions of the problem/issue and embody them, never realizing they are serving another and more malevolent cause. The agendas that are "entirely unrelated to social injustice" are commonly considered to be the globalizing agenda, the somnabulation and dehumanization processes being assayed against national populations and others under a multitude of different programmatic fronts. What other agendas would you include?

I'm suggesting this later characteristic is blatant racism in the extreme but not a structural problem in society ; at the risk of advancing a provocative generalization, I submit for consideration that the structural racism that currently exists in society has nothing or little to due to White Supremacy or because folks of a certain race belief en masse (either consciously or subconsciously) that their race is superior. Something else is going on, and we should discuss what it is. But we should discuss the root problem, not a fallacy.

Is the root problem, as you see it, the weaponization of "racism" to serve these other agendas?

Those who make you believe otherwise, or even more generally that racial hatred is rampant in our culture, e.g. CNN, MSM, and even some in academia who weave together slanted studies that suggest all three are on the rise, have a political agenda and are magicians of sort performing slight-of-hand tricks. They are provocateurs with agenda.

Ok. This one bears some discussion. As someone who travels the country regularly, I can speak to this from direct experience. When you say that racial hatred is not rampant in our culture, are you speaking of general, sanitized American culture? Are you speaking to the institutionalization and historic reality of redlining, segregation, loans and employment? Or are you speaking specifically to individual and ethnic prejudice expressed negatively and viciously?

Their tactics work very well to silence folks who do not directly experience racial marginalization (to challenge the claim would serve to provide evidence supporting it) and on the flip side, work even better to solicit for a mass condemnation of the claim and thus validating it (this is the path of least resistance to take, and who wouldn't, if true?). Falling in line signals virtue to their marginalized brothers and sisters and bestows validity to its reality. But this is a false a paradigm that doesn’t address the root issues. Either case plays right into the hands of the provocateurs.

The root issue, being, again - if I am understanding you correctly - the deployment of skin color as a front to obscure deeper goals?

In other words, I would submit for consideration, and this is just my humble view on the matter, that White Nationalism, White Supremacy, and Racial Hatred are not structural problems in society.

I would ask you the same as above, in regards to institutional forms of repression against select minority groups. Do you not consider these structural/institutional?

The more important point, in my view, is that it would appear we are all being misled to advance the fomentation of identity politics and to align ourselves accordingly, which is insidious and dangerous, and frankly, is actually creating and deepening the racial divide.

Absolutely.

This is an especially difficult discussion to have, because it is very hard to talk about racism without talking about the politics of group identity. And it’s equally hard to talk about the politics of group identity without employing an oppressed vs. oppressor narrative. I strongly believe the dynamic of structural racism is a byproduct of cultural propensity that has been inflicted upon all of us, regardless of one’s group identity. We are all subjects of the yolk of culture the moment we enter the world, as individuals, and to its various structural problems that cause tribal divisions, inequality, and ethnic marginalization. Perhaps if we begin to view the dynamic as such rather than as a dialectical struggle between racial groups can we have more productive and fruitful discussions about specific ways to raise awareness to rectify social injustice and racial marginalization.

Amazing contribution. Thank you for taking the time to assist in the honing of this discussion, taking us to a deeper and more formative level.

Lifebringer

6th June 2019, 17:37

It started after the conquering of Native Americans/Y'srealites that were brought here by the Medes after they were released. They listened to the prophets and left crossing the seas. Their tribe is GAD one of the sons of Y'acob. He told them the prophecy of Enoch about the last days and how the sons would be led by the flesh. He told them to resist the temptations of the flesh, or you will be "ensnared." Prophecy told them of the Eagle and they would watch the seas for this prophecy's entrance to know they would be punished by the Most High for building idols/totem poles.
I've been sojourning in truth of our history. Moms Gad by her Father and My Dad is Yudah of the kingdom through Mandinca tribe. Our blood line in EU stretches back to a family royal crest in Ireland. Lots of "revealing going on" but you won't get the answers you seek, trusting those who always hide truth. We've been awakened by the Holy Spirit to bare witness to the world's treatment of the chosen seed of Abraham, Isaac and Yacob. Esau and Yacob are brothers of their father Isaac. Born red and hairy, he's still our brother who hates us to this day. NOT all are touched by this spirit, but those that are... are causing us to pray to Our Creator for a rest from this mental mind torture of living in two worlds. One wicked and one among our tribes laws given through Moses during the "first exodus." This is the 2nd one and what you are seeing in the weather is Yah's mighty precise hand taking all they took from us from them. Sorry but HE said HE would and HE is.
The awakening is a revealing understanding of the laws and scripture as the prophets did through Christ/Yahshuah.
It's really a experience to pick up from where they shut off the history before the slave ships and Atlantic Slave Trade.
We are sealed now.... He is gonna send the chariots for us to be out of the lands of the enemy HE means to punish. Bill I saw I told you things. And just as I know just two weeks ago the price of a tomatoe will be close to 4 dollars to buy, I saw from inside the chariot and a presence with with me.
We've decided to listen to Him and rely on Him. He is our redeemer and evidently the turning of the curses has started. The crops are not going to survive this storm session of the Most High Yah. We cannot rely on man because they haven't done anything to stop our children from being murdered as the police hold themselves not guilty. The daughters of Zion and Yudah mourneth and have been heard. The vibration and tossing seas are about to happen. Get to high land like the Mts you are near. If it was good enough for Reuben, it will be good enough high ground for you. The US will be split in 3 places. The MS river and great lakes will merge. and the canary island side of the volcano will slide causing a tsunami. Get flotation pool noodles for a dollar. Something to keep you from being drowned by keeping you boyant in the waters. Make sure you have some sort of long corded rope attached to toss on a tree branch and save yourself from a waterfall from the raging waters.
Racism was created after the captivity to justify enslavement of the darker races by labeling like animals with the same rights as animals/no rights.
Our children fed to alligators, our men's private parts taken after hanging for a souveneir. Burned alive. Yet they still think this will go unpunished and never even apologizing. YOU and I both know, that no stone... goes 'unturned."
Shalawam Bill.

Mark

6th June 2019, 17:53

The racist comment is the proposition that the white race is sociopathic. If you want to talk about various aspects of “western” culture that are sociopathic, then I think that could lead to a more productive conversation without labeling an entire race.

I accept that your comments were intended to refer to a toxic culture, and not a general race of people, if that’s what you meant to say. I think that T Smith has some really good comments regarding the root causes of racism that would be really interesting to hear some discussion about.

Got it. I accept your understanding as valid. It is a relic of language and, as you sort of evoked earlier, academic training, to speak in gross generalizations. Adding "some" to these statements would be more accurate and more meaningful and less evocative. I do not accept the generalization in my statement as being tantamount to racism. I could go bolded phrase by bolded phrase and explain my underlying meaning and intent but I'd rather move forward with accepted terminology and a commitment to being as specific as possible in the future when engaging in this discussion so as not to unduly inflame by crass generalizations.

My point about the sociopathy of any culture that cultivates perspectives that require the denigration and subjugation of any complete or partial population was my point. It is a burning question, I think, one that deserves some consideration.

Clarifying it, is difficult. Words are hard. Maybe pictures can help.

EDIT: I've been told by a Mod not to post the images directly. One can click on the link to get to them.

Pictures at GettyImages (https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/lynching?sort=mostpopular&mediatype=photography&phrase=lynching&license=rf,rm&page=1&recency=anydate&suppressfamilycorrection=true) of historic lynching community events.

Can we agree that these images are showing sociopathic/psychopathic behavior? By large groups? Are you aware of the historicity of these types of events? Of lynching (https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america)? The fact that the "crimes" were often not commiserate with the punishment, if valid at all? Can we speak of the Black Codes (https://www.crf-usa.org/brown-v-board-50th-anniversary/southern-black-codes.html) and Jim Crow (https://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/a-brief-history-of-jim-crow) as being evidence of sociopathy/psychopathy in action?

Ernie Nemeth

7th June 2019, 13:23

The roots of racism is based in nationalality. After a thousand years these nations do in fact represent different races. And it should be cherished. We are not all the same.

When the talk of racism turns to historical records one must consider the attitudes of the day and their underlying factors, primarily the ignorance and dogmatic ideologies that were rampant in times past (I would argue not much has changed since).

We've argued this back and forth with my black friends over the years. I have always felt the need to appologize for white people and to distance myself from the racist stigma attached to all whites.

I don't appologize anymore. I had nothing to do with it and I do not endorse it. There is no more I can do.

Whites have been used just as much as any other race. Why shouldn't we be proud of what us peons have accomplished in the name of our masters?

Also, the way I have interpreted the available data, sketchy as it is, is that we are different races probably from diffetent planets in this galaxy or nearby ones. We were placed here together for some sort of purpose probably not much to do with our own best intetests. We are an experiment as best I can figure.

greybeard

7th June 2019, 14:33

Mark

7th June 2019, 15:09

The roots of racism is based in nationalality. After a thousand years these nations do in fact represent different races. And it should be cherished. We are not all the same.

So what is ethnicity, if nations represent races? What is the definition of a nation? Where do people come from?

When the talk of racism turns to historical records one must consider the attitudes of the day and their underlying factors, primarily the ignorance and dogmatic ideologies that were rampant in times past (I would argue not much has changed since).

Right. And the "historical record" goes back to a second ago, as all that is past is history. Times past are times present and future. Those same ideologies and their children remain present, just technologically enabled now.

We've argued this back and forth with my black friends over the years. I have always felt the need to appologize for white people and to distance myself from the racist stigma attached to all whites.

I don't appologize anymore. I had nothing to do with it and I do not endorse it. There is no more I can do.

I hear you. Whenever a white friend of mine tries to apologize, I always ask why. The epigenetics of it is not a conscious inheritance, although the responsibility of working through that endowment is incumbent upon each of us and there is a level of deteminism there, although free will and the conscious manipulation of materiality underlies and is the solution. We change ourselves and we change the world.

Whites have been used just as much as any other race. Why shouldn't we be proud of what us peons have accomplished in the name of our masters?

All is as it should be. I would not be here if the past hadn't happened as it had. None of us would. Seeing the past through the lens of the present moment and the world as it currently exists, is the only way to be able to see beyond the limitations into the realms of potentiality and envision and way "there" from "here". Living that though, is easier said than done, especially for the majority of souls caught up in the world who can conceive of no way beyond the morass.

Also, the way I have interpreted the available data, sketchy as it is, is that we are different races probably from diffetent planets in this galaxy or nearby ones. We were placed here together for some sort of purpose probably not much to do with our own best intetests. We are an experiment as best I can figure.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40726&d=1559920130

One galactic race of beings that can interbreed. One people. The universe, if not multiverse, across. Wouldn't that be something?

Mark

7th June 2019, 15:25

“Race science” is on the rise in academia and being used to justify racism in broader society (https://qz.com/africa/1630899/race-science-by-academics-being-used-to-justify-societys-racism/)

By Lesley Le Grange, Stellenbosch University (https://qz.com/author/lesley-le-grange-stellenbosch-university/) May 30, 2019
Distinguished Professor of Curriculum Studies, Stellenbosch University

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40727&d=1559920726

There has been justified outrage about a recently published—and hastily retracted—academic article (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13825585.2019.1598538) written by academics from Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

The article suggested that “coloured” women in South Africa “present with low cognitive function and which is significantly influenced by education”. Coloured is a racial classification legalized during apartheid for people of “mixed race”. This allegedly low cognition was also linked to unhealthy lifestyle behaviors.

A myriad of articles have been written that criticize the authors’ work, and take aim (https://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/news/stellenbosch-study-on-coloured-women-draws-on-colonial-stereotypes-22166233) at their university’s ethics committee for allowing the study to be conducted. They have been accused of racial essentialism; of methodological flaws (https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2019-04-25-study-on-coloured-womens-intelligence-scientifically-flawed-says-professor/); and of connecting race with medical conditions (https://www.timeslive.co.za/ideas/2019-04-25-racist-medical-myths-persist-with-sas-diseased-apartheid-mentality/).

There’s one particularly important concept that’s been given a lot of attention in the debates – the notion of “race science” (https://www.businesslive.co.za/rdm/lifestyle/2018-03-01-jonathan-jansen-evidence-of-the-persistence-of-racial-science-is-all-around-us), which is also called scientific racism. The article and the opprobrium that followed are a reminder that race and racism are still deeply embedded in science, and must be exorcised.

This can only be achieved by decolonizing modern western science. By “decolonize”, I mean “decenter” rather than destroy modern western science. It must be stripped of the epistemological and methodological privileges it enjoys. It must be placed on the same plane (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11159-007-9056-x) as other approaches to knowledge and research. In this way, it can be compared equitably with other ways of knowing. If this approach becomes commonplace, then new knowledge spaces will be created. In these spaces, those from different knowledge traditions can produce new knowledge through the negotiation of trust. They can apply different lenses and ask different questions that won’t lead them to racialized ways of thinking and operating. But, this will require a willingness to accept that modern western science is one way and not the only way of understanding the natural world.

Over the years progress has been made to excise racism from science or to compensate those who were victims of scientific racism. One example is the compensation of the families of the African American men who were denied diagnosis and treatment for syphilis in the well-known Tuskegee study (https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm). Another is the universal acceptance of the principle in ethics that states “do no harm” (https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/first-do-no-harm-201510138421). However, this has not arrested enduring racism in science.

Race science rising

Race science concerns the use of science as a vehicle to advance racist agendas, or where race is used as a variable in science for the purpose of labeling certain groups of people negatively or defining them in deficit terms.

There are many examples of this in history. Carolus Linnaeus, who developed the modern system of classifying living things, classified Khoisan (first nations people of southern Africa) as Homo monstrosus (https://fyp.uoregon.edu/sites/fyp2.uoregon.edu/files/malefijt_1968.pdf): monstrous or abnormal people. And in 1937 (https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/opinion/2019/2019-05/study-signals-enduring-racism-in-science.html), scientists in the Zoology Department at Stellenbosch University used 80 measurements to confirm the category “coloured man” as distinctive from “white man”.

British science journalist Angela Saini points out (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/18/race-science-on-the-rise-angela-saini?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Email) that race science is on the rise again internationally. And, she argues, it’s being advanced in subtle ways by well-educated people who wear smart suits. This includes academics at leading universities around the world. It’s important to be alive to the dangers of race science because it can be used to justify racism in broader society. But it continues to exist because it is part of a system of thought that I call modern western science. I’m referring here to science embedded in Eurocentrism: a way of thinking that prioritized anything from the western world – and particularly from Europe – and that was spread and entrenched through colonization (http://dro.deakin.edu.au/view/DU:30000550).

Given its original site of production, this school of thought necessarily centers European history. Through its various incarnations, an ideal identity of human was formed that is male, white, heterosexual, able-bodied – and this is a screen against which others are declared different. Positing others as “different” (and inferior) opened the door to race science.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40728&d=1559920878

Of course, modern western science did not develop free from the influence of other knowledges. Through colonizing places, it picked up certain ideas and approaches from different countries or regions. For example, Indigenous peoples in North America helped settlers to treat life-threatening scurvy through the application of tonics made from conifer needles, which were rich in Vitamin C.

However, such knowledges were absorbed into a western cultural archive and represented in western terms. For example, the pain-reliever Aspirin was first discovered by Indigenous people—they used willow bark (https://theconversation.com/how-indigenous-knowledge-advances-modern-science-and-technology-89351), which contains the active ingredient from which Aspirin was created. More importantly, modern western science has not paid homage to the influence of other knowledge systems.

There is no denying that modern western science has brought some benefits to humanity. But this does not mean it shouldn’t be interrogated and, as I suggested earlier, de-centered. The upshot of this would be the democratization of science in two ways. First, by broadening who participates in the production of scientific knowledge; and second, by broadening what counts as science. This would help to root out race science.

Science has always been and will always remain the product of human will and intention. Scientific knowledge will always be culturally and historically produced. And if we are to speak in any sense about objectivity in science, this must be produced by science that is multicultural and not universal.

Lesley Le Grange (https://theconversation.com/profiles/lesley-le-grange-281833), Distinguished Professor of Curriculum Studies, Stellenbosch University (http://theconversation.com/institutions/stellenbosch-university-1439)

AutumnW

7th June 2019, 19:25

Despite the fact that the four Bushmen come from neighbouring parts of the Kalahari, their genetic diversity is astounding. Pick any two and peer into their genomes and you’d see more variety than you would between a European and an Asian.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2010/02/17/africas-genetic-diversity-revealed-by-full-genomes-of-a-bushman-and-

Hope this link works. So yes, I hope that anybody reading this article fully appreciates how it supports Rahkyt.

You wouldn't refer to different breeds of dogs as 'races' for example. You could possibly think of the different breeds as different ethnicities. WE regard the difference in the breeds as being superficial and to a degree, environmental. For example, spitz breeds with longer thicker fur were bred from Northern dogs. And hound dogs have short thinner coats for obvious reasons . They are genetically pretty identical to Spitz dogs.

Ernie Nemeth

7th June 2019, 21:24

You've asked some good questions there, Rahkyt. I had to look up the various definitions, they were illuminating...and it higlights an interesting fact: the words and their definitions are virtually interchangeable!

ethnicity: ethnic quality

ethnic: a member of a minority group who retains the custom, language or social views of the group; heathen; of or relating to large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin

race: a family, tribe, people or nation belonging to the same stock; a class or kind of people unified by community of interests, habits, or characteristics; an actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species

racial: of, or relating to, or based on, a race

racism: the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race; racial prejudice or discrimination

nation: nationality; a community of people composed of one or more nationalities and possessing a more or less defined territory and government

nationality: national character; a legal relationship involving allegiance on the part of an individual and protection on the part of the state; people having a common origin, tradition, and language and capable of forming or actually constituting a nation-state; political independence or existence as a separate nation

All from my trusty Merriam Webster's Dictionary (tenth edition)

We may be confusing the definitions and ascribing different meanings to the words when the words are actually synonyms.

What we are actually talking about is race as defined by the color of the skin. And racism as defined as the general deprivation of visible minorities.

T Smith

8th June 2019, 15:41

It mobilizes populations who are not aware of the deeper issues, yes. And, those mobilized populations then internalize the external definitions of the problem/issue and embody them, never realizing they are serving another and more malevolent cause. The agendas that are "entirely unrelated to social injustice" are commonly considered to be the globalizing agenda, the somnabulation and dehumanization processes being assayed against national populations and others under a multitude of different programmatic fronts. What other agendas would you include?

Mostly the globalizing agenda, as the larger umbrella over it, but also a subset within, which comes directly out of the Frankfurt school. The Frankfurt school and its thinkers (who have become very influential in academia, and who are producing droves of unwitting foot soldiers for the cause) embrace a specific ideology that seeks to dismantle the various cultural institutions of Western civilization. I would argue most of these philosophers do not have malevolent intentions, per se; they likely believe in a just society, a utopia of sorts, and most definitely believe that in so achieving utopia the ends justify the means. In other words, the Frankfurt school embraces a sort of post-modernist variation of the Marxist utopia, which has tremendous appeal, especially to those who can be convinced without too much controversial evidence that Western civilization has done a very good job marginalizing and disenfranchising them. A very effective tactic is to employ various social injustices Western civilization has produced against itself, of which "racism" is but one its tools.

Simplified, the Frankfurt school is basically a social engineering program that seeks to achieve a completely classless society. The basic pushback against this school of thought, however, is not just academic; it has already played out in reality. Namely, we know it is impossible to create a classless society without employing tremendous force against the people and without errecting an authoritarian tyranny, and ultimately employing mass genocide as means to justify the ends.

Is the root problem, as you see it, the weaponization of "racism" to serve these other agendas?

I'm not sure if this is the "root" problem, but it is definitely a big problem. It aligns groups and tribes against each other which exacerbates the root problem instead of encouraging creative cooperation among groups and tribes to eradicate it.

Those who make you believe otherwise, or even more generally that racial hatred is rampant in our culture, e.g. CNN, MSM, and even some in academia who weave together slanted studies that suggest all three are on the rise, have a political agenda and are magicians of sort performing slight-of-hand tricks. They are provocateurs with agenda.

Ok. This one bears some discussion. As someone who travels the country regularly, I can speak to this from direct experience. When you say that racial hatred is not rampant in our culture, are you speaking of general, sanitized American culture? Are you speaking to the institutionalization and historic reality of redlining, segregation, loans and employment? Or are you speaking specifically to individual and ethnic prejudice expressed negatively and viciously?

I'm speaking to individual and ethnic prejudice expressed negatively and viciously. I would say the former examples of racism you have cited, to the degree that we can document and and demonstrate are prevalent in culture, are structural, but not founded on hatred.

The root issue, being, again - if I am understanding you correctly - the deployment of skin color as a front to obscure deeper goals?

Yes. The deployment of skin color as a front to obscure deeper goals. But more specifically, the deployment of skin color to incite those who have been disenfranchised and marginalized, because of skin color, to create the tension necessary to dismantle institutions of Western Civilization that have been in a state of progressive development since, say, the Magna Carta.

Deployment of skin color, btw, to clarify, is not just deployed against persons with brown or black skin, but also white.

In other words, I would submit for consideration, and this is just my humble view on the matter, that White Nationalism, White Supremacy, and Racial Hatred are not structural problems in society.

I would ask you the same as above, in regards to institutional forms of repression against select minority groups. Do you not consider these structural/institutional?

Yes. It is a multi-varied equation. But I would say the various forms of repression are mostly structural. I also believe it is something that is ultimately correctional.

T Smith

8th June 2019, 18:53

Can we agree that these images are showing sociopathic/psychopathic behavior? By large groups? Are you aware of the historicity of these types of events?

The pictures are very hard to look at. They should trigger an emotional response from any functioning person who is not sociopathic... But here's the thing we should look at underlying these specific type of emotional triggers. Given we agree in principal that only one with a sociopathic sensibility could endure these types of pictures without experiencing remorse or emotions ranging from rage to sorrow, does that necessarily imply that every single onlooker in the mob of people depicted are sociopathic, or even society at large is sociopathic?

In my humble opinion, the answer is categorically, no. And here's why. The historical photos depict something I alluded to earlier, namely a condition of structural racism instilled en masse that we should not conflate with sociopathy, or hatred, or delusions of racial superiority. And we should certainly not cast a wide net of sociopathy (as far as I could tell, most of the onlookers to the crimes were white) upon an entire group of people, based on skin color, even though one can easily cite the photos as specific evidence of such. Exploiting historical injustice is a very sophisticated tactic employed by social engineers who understand very well how to employ operant conditioning en masse to manipulate specific types of responses desirable to advance a deeper, or even an entirely hidden agenda.

In my view, something deeper is going on in the photos than the obvious crimes being committed. They depict a type of unconsciousness inculcated via social programing that renders people of all creeds and colors utterly unconscious and capable of executing atrocious crimes against humanity. I chose my words carefully. These are crimes against humanity, and not just crimes against a certain ethnic race.

To be clear, all this merits repeating. I'm saying we should not underestimate the power of structural programing; it renders people utterly unconscious. But that's something entirely different from sociopathy. We also have the luxury of a higher degree of consciousness (thus better resolution of reality) looking at the photos today due to what advancements our society has attained in its struggle to raise awareness and understanding of structural racism. So onlookers today may better see the blatant racism of the photos (some see racial hatred, malevolence of the white race, mass sociopathy, etc.,) but the point is, I would submit society at large is more conscious today of structural racism than we were then. Moreover, we still have a long way to go and to a large degree we are still unconsciousness.

To provide a specific example, I would argue, as a conscious observer (or put more accurately , as a more conscious observer), I see savage violence and murder in those photos, based on race, and likely only based on race, but the unconscious, i.e. the people who sanctioned en masse and who were assessors to the crimes in real time, see something entirely different. They likely see a black man who raped a white woman (innocence or guilt is irrelevant to the reality they see), or they see a thief who stole food or property from a white person, or they see a person of color who committed some other unthinkable crime commensurate with a death sentence. In other words, their resolution of reality is highly spurious and skewed. To be clear, I should point out I'm not condoning their collective judgments or lack thereof; I'm simply saying the mob depicted in the photos, and without implying any other value judgment to the observation, is a group of unconscious actors. And of course all of this is structural racism, e.g. the victims are all guilty until proven innocent, especially when their crimes are waged against whites; often they are totally innocent and framed of crimes they did not commit (the latter is blatant racism and sometimes even blatant hatred, but on the individual level, not en masse), and sometimes the victims' only real crime has been the color of their skin. The takeaway is the unconscious cannot see the so-called "real" crime, which we all understand is a non-crime, simply because they are utterly unconscious.

Joe is absolutely right. None of us truly own our own minds outright...it is a very dangerous aspect of the human condition. And most of us, regardless of color or creed, have no original thought. If the truth be told, in my estimation, this is at the root of structural racism.

In my humble opinion, we need to cultivate individuals (not groups) to think critically and in a Descartesian sort of way, especially if we are trying to unravel specific social injustices prevalent in society that have been perpetrated and propagated by utterly unconscious actors. And we certainly need to develop a recognition of the traps of further programing and conditioning and learn how to avoid them.

Kind Regards,

T Smith

AutumnW

8th June 2019, 20:40

Strat

8th June 2019, 20:55

T Smith

8th June 2019, 21:10

T Smith,

I think that whole societies can have sociopathic traits, particularly when it comes to the treatment of the 'other.' Empathy is not extended to those who are judged as that different, belonging to a different tribe...etc... And if empathy is not extended and repulsion added to the mix it can become horribly cruel. This is best exemplified in atrocities of war, but it can happen within a culture as well.

Currently our treatment of domesticated farm animals in agri-business wins awards for sociopathic behavior. Those who eat meat, in an unconscious way, are no different than Germans who didn't give a thought as to where Jews, Poles, Gypsie, the disabled, were disappearing to, during the Holocaust.

Yes, societies can have sociopathic traits, but that doesn't mean whole societies are technically "sociopathic", per se. It means they are operating in full unconscious mode, or in quasi-conscious mode at best, but nonetheless are in denial (as in the examples you cite).

The difference is, as I see it, one can't cure a sociopath by raising her or his awareness. Sociopaths are unable to experience empathy as the result of her or his biochemical constitution. The same society, at large, that is in denial or seemingly sociopathic about one set of circumstances can be very empathic on another set of circumstances.

The issue of not extending empathy to others judged as different dissipates almost immediately (save for those who are truly sociopathic) when one comes to the epiphany that supposed differences are spurious and founded on an ignorant understanding of reality.

AutumnW

8th June 2019, 21:26

Those who eat agri-business meat have been fully exposed to information about how these operations function. Turning a blind eye to suffering because those that suffer are 'other,' and regarded as inferior, (in this case, animals )represents empathy being withheld or not felt. You could definitely say that it is quasi-conscious, or even a form of mild cognitive dissonance.

I don't have an issue with meat eaters, provided they know where their meat is sourced from. Otherwise I regard them as exhibiting cultural sociopathy. This form of sociopathy belongs to the whole realm of, 'out of sight, out of mind.' It also holds true for those Amnesty International advocate for. Does it mean the people engaged in willfull blindness are sociopathic? Likely not clearly so. It's the culture, as a whole.

AutumnW

8th June 2019, 21:31

Those who eat meat, in an unconscious way, are no different than Germans who didn't give a thought as to where Jews, Poles, Gypsie, the disabled, were disappearing to, during the Holocaust.

I don't agree with this at all, but it would be interesting to have folks walk through the industrial style (for lack of a better term) farms and see if they chose their meat differently thereafter. Ya know, like how Patton made citizens walk through concentration camps.

Germans were stressed, had been shat on by foreign powers, demoralized and etc... They didn't WANT to know what happened to people they considered weak, inferior, part of their past problems...on and on. But fascism with an emphasis on strength, vitality, survival of the fittest and other mythologies, encouraged cruelty because it encouraged aversion and revulsion.

As far as people being taken through an agribusiness facility as a way of changing behavior...yes...it would work for some. I agree completely.

Anyway, BACK ON TOPIC There are enough animal rights threads on the forum. Sorry I derailed. Its a topic that's been on my mind...a lot...as I am currently changing my diet in the hopes I will be healthier and less sociopathic:blushing:

T Smith

8th June 2019, 22:04

Germans were stressed, had been shat on by foreign powers, demoralized and etc... They didn't WANT to know what happened to people they considered weak, inferior, part of their past problems...on and on.

Not sure the German people considered Jews and Gypsies weak, inferior, etc. Maybe the braintrust of the Nazi party did, but I would say even the outer ranks of the Nazi party were simply automatons who knew not what they did. Regardless, Germans and Nazis are not the same thing. For the most part it is human nature to fall in line rather than resist, even when you know something is immoral and wrong.

AutumnW

8th June 2019, 22:16

T-Smith,

Most Germans became Nazis after Hitler came to power. It's understandable. He gave them hope and jobs. Sound familiar? And then, yes, they were susceptible to all of the brainwashing and ego stroking that being an Aryan entailed. They were very human, but their culture which had been historically quite open and cultivated and likely pretty humane became very sociopathic.

Sociopaths and psychopaths as individuals are all shadow and ego, all the time, though they manage to hide it some of the time, depending on the situation. Sociopathic traits in a society can be overt or covert or a mix of both. Shadow and light, conscious and unconscious and sometimes both at the same time about the same topic.

That being said, I think we are improving. More people are aware and working for a better world. I have hope

Wind

9th June 2019, 13:46

When it comes to eating (factory produced) meat I would suggest that people were educated and shown in schools how the meat in neat packages are really prepared. I think it might be too traumatic to show such horrific factory conditions to children, but at least teenagers should know how they're participating in with the mass slaughter and then make a choice if they want to continue on that path. I certainly never saw anything like that in school and when I first discovered such material I was so shocked that I started to contemplate on becoming a vegetarian. Another thing that turned me into a vegetarian was when I got my dog. He reminds me of a pig so what's the difference between him and pigs? I wouldn't want to eat either. Then again, I was never that much into meat eating anyways so it was somewhat easy to stop doing that. I could sacrifice my selfishness so others wouldn't have to so suffer so much.

Mike

9th June 2019, 19:05

quick mod note: i just included this in Star Mariner's recent thread 'Diversity Is Not Strength' thread and thought it might be relevant here too.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

thanks for opening up this discussion star mariner.

i think i would say *forced* diversity isn't strength. but i do understand why it is encouraged sometimes.

nuanced topic. exclusivity certainly isn't the solution either.

devil's advocate here: ever since the jordan peterson phenomena began, we've been having this conversation about identity politics. what are "identity politics"? without looking it up, it would seem to be that it is a term used to describe a group or groups of people who use sex and race and sexual orientation to curry favor and/or use victimhood to push forward various agendas.

and there is certainly some of that going on.

other concepts that peterson has introduced to the mass consciousness are:
1)equality of outcome: tyrannically forcing equity amongst people of all races and sex and sexual orientation in the workplace, universities, athletics, clubs, groups, so forth.
2)equality of opportunity: giving everyone the same opportunities and the freedom to choose

2 seems the reasonable route, but what if certain groups aren't getting equal opportunity? what then???

well, then they are forced to play "identity politics" because their group or groups have been unfairly treated and discriminated against.

to play devil's advocate here again, it appears some folks are forced to play identity politics as a result of various institutions identifying them solely as their group...be it color, sex, sexual orientation etc

they may not be getting "equal opportunity" and therefore have no choice but to stand up for themselves. when they do, they are ridiculed and their movement slapped with accusatory labels, like "identity politics".

sometimes it seems like an underhanded and sneaky way of using language to suggest something noble is instead sinister and agenda-driven.

take race, for example. when this argument is made against someone like a ben shapiro or a crowder or whoever, they will generally jump in and demand stats and pie charts and study results proving that discrimination exists..as if something like racism would be overtly written into legislation

in the words of comic bill burr: "..real racism is quiet, it's subtle...people look around first, make sure the coast is clear....there's disclaimers involved, like "you know i'm not racist but (fill in group name followed by f#cked up conversation)..that's how it goes down

he goes on: (paraphrase)..."there's not gonna be any white guys standing up in a swimming pool saying, "...there's negros in the pool!! does anyone approve of this?? i work down the street at the bank...can i get fired immediately please!"

xvMoF4lAwmw

T. Smith's last paragraph sums up very coherently my feelings as well:

It's so very important to raise awareness of the agenda underlying cultural Marxism without unintentionally employing it as a tacit apology for legitimate racism and sexism. It's a slippery slope.

AutumnW

10th June 2019, 02:30

Thanks Mike. That was excellent. Hard to fathom those who say that racial prejudice against African Americans doesn't exist. Ben Shapiro's such a dweeb.

Ernie Nemeth

10th June 2019, 16:13

You cannot legislate racism out of existence.

I have been contemplating the similarity of the definitions I last posted. Those definitions show how racism is institutionalized. The more I consider the roots of racism the more it becomes apparent that racism is and was invented as an excuse to justify immoral acts perpetrated against minorities within larger groups.

Racism is just one form of this. Stereotypes are also an expression of this dynamic, just as laws designed to curtail the actions of particular groups within society.

There is also the novelty factor to account for - so the first encounter with a race that has visible differences will become the basis for explaining superiority.

Racism is a means to excuse the exclusivity of a society.

Now that natiionhood is under attack, institutionized racism has to be abolished.

That is why the proud pure races of Europe are currently under attack. It is these sort of nations that invented racism in the first place...

Pam

10th June 2019, 20:43

T Smith,

I think that whole societies can have sociopathic traits, particularly when it comes to the treatment of the 'other.' Empathy is not extended to those who are judged as that different, belonging to a different tribe...etc... And if empathy is not extended and repulsion added to the mix it can become horribly cruel. This is best exemplified in atrocities of war, but it can happen within a culture as well.

Currently our treatment of domesticated farm animals in agri-business wins awards for sociopathic behavior. Those who eat meat, in an unconscious way, are no different than Germans who didn't give a thought as to where Jews, Poles, Gypsie, the disabled, were disappearing to, during the Holocaust.

Amen!!! This is the sad truth that few are willing to look at. If animals don't have a personal attachment ( a pet, companion animal, service animal ect.) to humans many can just put the blinders on and forget the suffering involved in having it placed all neatly wrapped in the grocery store. How would many feel having a farm factory of animals that looked like their favorite dog or cat being tortured?

AriG

14th June 2019, 13:37

This undoing whiteness yoga horse manure makes me want to vomit. I am assuming this is in California?

ulli

14th June 2019, 15:26

While in Hongkong I lived with a Chinese family. Each family member had their good and bad days. All were simply human. When I got back to London white people suddenly looked pink and had big noses. Then I lived in Barbados, for years, immersed in West Indian culture, and also white wealthy culture. There I stayed in the homes of many of my black friends. Prejudice was undeniable, both sides were hyper, but the worst was from white Americans towards me whom they considered a white priviledge person. So I find now that today’s racism is policing whites more than the original racism. These racial police seem to like to fan the flames. Like sixties radical feminism, which actually ended up being counter-productive because of the rude manners of the militant end of the spectrum.

Ernie Nemeth

14th June 2019, 15:40

Ya. And dont forget...brown eyed people are superior to blue eyed. Bunch of bs

T Smith

14th June 2019, 16:31

In this class we will:

have a discussion around the pathology of whiteness .....

Whiteness is [B]not a pathology. Hard for me to take anything past this assertion seriously.

If one paid tuition for this class she or he should demand their money back.

TomKat

15th June 2019, 18:34

Morton believed that people could be divided into five races and that these represented separate acts of creation. The races had distinct characters, which corresponded to their place in a divinely determined hierarchy. Morton’s “craniometry” showed, he claimed, that whites, or “Caucasians,” were the most intelligent of the races. East Asians—Morton used the term “Mongolian”—though “ingenious” and “susceptible of cultivation,” were one step down. Next came Southeast Asians, followed by Native Americans. Blacks, or “Ethiopians,” were at the bottom. In the decades before the Civil War, Morton’s ideas were quickly taken up by the defenders of slavery.

Of course, every "race" is a variation of brown, from almost black to almost white. There is no red or yellow race.
Not surprisingly, skin color mythology was started by a German:

http://www.8asians.com/2011/05/09/why-are-asians-yellow/

"Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), one of the founders of what some call scientific racism theories, came up with the five color typology for humans: white people (the Caucasian or white race), more or less black people (the Ethiopian or black race), yellow people (the Mongolian or yellow race), cinnamon-brown or flame colored people (the American or red race) and brown people (the Malay or brown race). Blumenbach listed the “races” in a hierarchic order of physical similarities: Caucasian, followed by American, followed by Mongolian, followed by Malayan, followed by Ethiopian."

Ernie Nemeth

23rd June 2019, 16:09

Just an observation...

There are visible differences in the races that no one had to invent. There are indeed different hues of skin color, anyone can see that for themselves. Each race has various ethnicities, these were also not invented. Most of these had to do with isolation and common bonds either because of ideology or war. After thousands of years each race subdivided into the many countries now on our map. The countries vary in degree in terms of race, with most modern countries being conglomerations of different races.

Europe is an exception. In Europe most races are almost exclusively white, and due to long-standing regional borders, the main differences between the countries is not race but language. Even though the german's call themselves a race, as does every other country, in fact they are one race that has subdivided over many centuries of cohesion.

So my point is that race has many connotations, many interpretations, not all to do with strict definitions and precise nomenclature.

We are all one race - human. Yes. We are many races defined by physical borders. Yes. One of the ways to define race is by skin color. Yes. Another way of defining race is by language. Yes.

Culture, race, society, country, religion, ideology, history, myth, legend, and more are used as means to divide and instill hatred to ensure the race of humanity never unites to rid itself of its masters - an alien race from the stars!(perhaps?...)

Mark

6th July 2019, 19:17

Excellent discussion on such an important topic. Since I've been gone, in thinking about how this thread has progressed and what Bill's original intent was, I believe that how folks have assayed these questions and challenges has been directly in line with the spirit of Project Avalon. There is no "final say" or "ultimate answer" there are only the variations we bring as humans, part of a greater family of beings who have chosen to traverse this vale of tears simultaneously. I offer this article in the spirit of recognition of that shared journey.

Why We Confuse Race and Ethnicity (https://consciousstyleguide.com/why-we-confuse-race-ethnicity-lexicographers-perspective/)

A Lexicographer’s Perspective

On our evolving understandings of racial categorization and cultural identity.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=41021&d=1562439564

Dictionaries sometimes provide an opportunity for users to tell more about what certain words should mean as opposed to what they do mean. Take race and ethnicity. The online dictionary at Merriam-Webster allows users to leave comments on entries, and the most common comment by far on the entry for ethnicity is that people are looking it up to determine how it’s distinguished from race. The most common comment on the entry for race is essentially “Okay, but what is race, then?”

The reality is that the words race and ethnicity have a significant amount of overlap in terms of their general use. Race is the older word, dating back to the 1500s, and for most of its history, it referred to groups of people who shared a common ancestor, culture, or cultural marker (such as language or religion): “the English race,” “the Scottish race,” “the Jewish race.”

But starting in the late 1700s, physiologists and anthropologists began using the word race to refer to a more formalized categorization of people that was based on physical characteristics, not necessarily shared ancestry or culture. “Physical characteristics” included everything from skin color to head shape to perceived temperament and intelligence (both of which were thought to have a biological basis). Nineteenth-century anthropologists divided humanity up into anywhere from three to twelve categories and ascribed physical, psychological, social, and intellectual attributes to each category.

But just because a word gains a new meaning doesn’t mean that the old meanings go away. By the start of the twentieth century, race referred to groups of people who shared a common ancestor, groups of people who shared a common culture or cultural marker, and the anthropological categories of people divided primarily by physical appearance. And while those meanings seem distinct enough presented in isolation, it could be hard to tell just which meaning of race was being used:

It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this life together—a longing which shall never perish from the earth . . . . This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up while my race continues. (Mark Twain, “Eve’s Diary,” The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories, 1906)

English had furnished all the raw materials for a correction, and out of them was coined the word ethnicity. The Oxford English Dictionary has one citation, from 1772, for ethnicity, where it’s a translation of the Spanish etnicidad, but the word doesn’t appear again until the early twentieth century, in a book condemning the idea that common ethnic or cultural identity is deterministic of character or personality:

To regard every individual of an ethnic group as having primarily the characteristic nature of that group, as if affiliation with it invested him with a particular kind of ethnicity which then determined his nature, is contrary to the doctrine that each individual structure is primary. (Isaac B. Berkson, Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study, 1920)

Ethnicity is built off the much earlier ethnic, which was used from the 1700s onward as an adjective to refer to national affiliation; both words trace back to the Greek word for “nation.” But the term ethnicity didn’t take off right away. Race was the preferred term—until the word began to get skunked.

Skunked is the term that linguists use to refer to the process by which a formerly neutral word gains negative connotations and suddenly becomes fraught (or completely unacceptable) in general use. For the word race, lots of twentieth-century events and movements contributed to that skunking: Nazi atrocities bolstered by nineteenth-century anthropological ideas of “racial purity” and the fitness of the White race over other races; institutional structures that relied on the pseudoscience of “racial disparities” to separate society into “white” and “colored”; the various civil rights movements—like the NAACP, the National Congress of American Indians, UnidosUS (formerly National Council of La Raza), and the Japanese American Citizens League—that kept demanding we confront the realities of what it’s like to live in non-white skin in the U.S. The word race itself showed up more often in contexts that highlighted social problems: “race riot,” “racial discrimination,” “race relations,” “racial tensions,” “playing the race card.” Even today, while some people claim we live in a “post-racial” society, that nineteenth-century pseudoscience around race still affects our daily lives. For instance, a 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America examines how ideas around the pain tolerance thresholds of White and Black patients—ideas that have their root in nineteenth-century concepts of race—continue to have an impact on Black people and how their pain is managed in a clinical setting.

While these nineteenth-century ideas around race have been challenged, we still continue to hash out what, exactly, constitutes race. Nowhere is this tension more obvious than in the U.S. Census, which provides interesting (if somewhat behind-the-times) evidence for tracking the complexities of race and ethnicity. In the 230 years that the census has been running, race has expanded from three categories (free Whites, all other free persons, and enslaved people) to fifteen, including “other.” But in 1980, the U.S. Census began asking all respondents, regardless of how they answered the question on race, to identify whether they had Hispanic origins—categorizing it as an ethnicity, not a race. (Current studies by the Pew Research Center show that many census respondents who identify as Hispanic in origin consider that to be both their race and ethnicity.)

Lexically speaking, this one event seems to be the thing that nudged the word ethnicity into general use; since the 1980s, use of ethnicity has increased dramatically. And the word race? It has more volume of use than ethnicity, as you’d expect for a word with five hundred more years of established use, but in the last few years, its use has decreased. The Oxford English Dictionary’s usage note at the entry sums up the current state of race in reference to those divisions of humanity distinguished by physical characteristics:

In recent years, the associations of race with the ideologies and theories that grew out of the work of 19th-cent. anthropologists and physiologists have led to the word often being avoided with reference to specific ethnic groups. Although it is still used in general contexts, it is now often replaced by terms such as people(s), community, etc.

But lexical takes on race and ethnicity make the issue of what actually constitutes race and ethnicity seem much simpler than it actually is. In 2003, California Newsreel (in conjunction with PBS) broadcast a TV series called Race: The Power of an Illusion and asked four professors to tease out the differences between race and ethnicity. All four had different responses. Some felt race was a single unifying categorization based primarily on physical appearance while ethnicity was a cultural connection. Others felt that race was more an identifier of origin while ethnicity was a social, cultural, or linguistic bond. Others felt that race and ethnicity were both movable feasts and relied more on how power structures categorize and operate against people. In other words, some of the people groups that today are racially coded as White (and given the privileges of a White person) have been considered less than White or other than White in the past, particularly when anti-immigration sentiment was sweeping the nation. In more recent years, enough people have protested the Census Bureau’s reductive view of ethnicity that federal officials are considering combining the race question with the ethnicity question for the 2020 Census. That we know the two are somehow different but related is clear from the lexical side of things again: The most common use of ethnicity in print, and one of the most common uses of race in print, is in the phrase “race and ethnicity.”

So when should you use race and when should you use ethnicity? A survey of the major dictionaries of English gives some basic guidance when talking generally about race and ethnicity. Most of them agree that the word ethnicity is most often used of a person’s cultural identity, which may or may not include a shared language, shared customs, shared religious expression, or a shared nationality (especially outside that nation’s borders). And most dictionaries agree that race is often used to describe one of several very broad categories that people are divided into that are biologically arbitrary yet considered to be generally based on ancestral origin and shared physical characteristics (especially skin color).

There’s one more thing that dictionaries tell us, though it’s mostly subtext and only apparent in qualifiers like often and generally and especially. Race and ethnicity as labels can change not just from speaker to speaker but from context to context. Someone born to Japanese parents in the Bay Area of California and raised in San Francisco may identify racially as Asian (a broad category based on ancestral origin and some shared physical characteristics) but ethnically as Japanese, American, Japanese American, or maybe even San Franciscan (a cultural identity that can include shared customs, religion, nationality, or language). Or none of the above. The answer depends on who the speaker is talking to and why the listener is asking.

Bill Ryan

6th July 2019, 20:41

T Smith

7th July 2019, 05:07

Strat

15th August 2019, 04:23

Rahkyt, I'm curious of your opinions on this: https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/jacksonville/teacher-removed-over-message-admonishing-students-who-didnt-stand-for-pledge

amor

16th August 2019, 03:33

Agape

16th August 2019, 06:24

I was brought up on an island and witnessed the ending of the colonial British influence on people of African and European origin. As a small child I saw the differences in the way the two lived and see now that as one of the roots of racism. When I was 8, my mother left us with a very poor family which was integrated with the African community so that she could go away to study. There I learned to see people as colorful souls and individuals. Since everyone was poor, the personalities shone out as memorable, and as a Christian, I saw myself in others and vice versa and learned to treat others as I would wish them to see me and treat me.

On the Internet I read of the man who was influential in devising living conditions for people of African descent in communities with miserable conditions, lacking in services, food stores, near swamps, low to no income or education areas and finally ready access to alcohol, drugs and guns (provided by the White Lodges). When the social rejects from those communities were compared to and by those who lived under opposite conditions, one could see why separation would seem desirable.

Now I understand that the above conditions still exist. Therefore, REPARATIONS to me would be to REVERSE ALL THE ABOVE LIVING CONDITIONS FOR THOSE POOR, PERSECUTED PEOPLE. Create businesses and financing witch is doable for those folks to create employment and lives for themselves, decent accommodations and rent controlled homes and apartments, schools, libraries, etc., so that people are helped up instead of down. The laws of love given by Jesus Christ still help all living and hurt none. These are REPARATIONS.

The worst demon haunting human civilisation at all times has nothing to do with how we look, so true, it’s a demon of economical and cultural inequity.

Millions of gifted, capable people are out there who can’t make it beyond ceaseless work, struggle and fight in order to “achieve” what comparative minority received
for granted.
Sure there are myths ..of superiority running through family lines everywhere, no matter what continent or culture. In Africa or anywhere else, people whose ancestors were “chieftains” and “leaders” are automatically in better situation than the rest.

There are myths of hard workers who become achievers.

There are plenty of other myths about who deserves the funds to become operational in terms of this world.

The way this world does seem to operate is by delegating very small -limited- group of individuals to the “billionaires club”.
The most important decisions to do with running human society are reserved for them.

We all know how much effort is required to move anything substantial in ours and other people’s lives otherwise. No matter what you say or do.
We know how to save lives, how to heal and teach, how to live sustainable and beautiful life but yet
there’s no way to take step forwards through us unless we perform some extraordinary feat charming the “club”.

At the best they will “allow us” to live.

There’s no real competition involved, no reality challenge. The “club game” is insured by huge numbers for those who are in.
Individual failure does not mean anything, or what kind of myth these people cultivate and spread around themselves to charm “common Joe”. They have parents, brothers and uncles :) who won’t let them fall unless they’ve betrayed the “club” itself.

Most of the modern civilisation live in one or another kind of economical and therefor also, existential slavery to those people.
Working for 8 to 16 hours a day to be barely able to pay rent or feed family with two children with very few opting out options.

The myth about Europe, the US or Japan supporting people who won’t participate in mass labour system in unreal.

People all around the world should realise there’s no “human rights” equation between your abilities, purpose on this planet and your income. There’s no social care system taking care of the rest who were left out.

So many people seem to live very poorly in the EU or the UK as well despite having the basics covered. They have certain number of items that became compulsory to fit in and perform family duties, such as cars or savings for dental work and other healthcare above average.
They buy the cheapest food available and wear cloths saved from years back forever.
Most people really can’t operate beyond and above the system run by these billionaires with full operational capacity.

Racism is just a myth in my best judgement that is easily incorporated to the global agenda of wars and ownerships.
Thinking we can own others by holding their life shares forever and “teaching them” who they are is a stealth, heresy, simply a crime.

People are not little children because they grew up in bushes. More often they turn adults with sense of life responsibility much faster than the rest of us.

Do I see any way with it myself , guess I don’t other than it’s unfortunate fate of this human civilisation requiring long time fixes.

Maybe one day even some of those in-line individuals, the wealthiest of the wealthy, the healthiest of the healthy and beautiest of the beautiful ( all tongue in cheek and sour pickle)
will step out of their predestined parallel programming, realise how deep it all goes, the root ignorance of some ancestor who once started it
take a deep breath and ask themselves oh and “Why am I alone on this planet?”

Because now many of the “chosen poor dears” simply don’t know well enough.
They’ll spend millions to fix their noses and other little misfortunes and share billions with their equally underprivileged wives.

They don’t understand there’s no way to get around THEMSELVES and their tall and fat egos. That the damage they’ve implicated and imposed on many people’s characters , lives and fates is unredeemable and that there won’t be anyone to forgive them at the end of the story.

Too sad😢

🙏🌟🙏

On better note I would but wish to say, people of all cultures and colours fall in love with each other, every day which is the sole proof of our common human ancestry

and timelessness of our Spirits.

We exist as tweak of nature
as well as Universal minds.

It’s a fact that no religion can deny to its denizens.

If I think of the amount of Love we naturally have for each of these beautiful people out there it’s overwhelming my brain. It seems to me that if we break the borders of our meditation on Love and Compassion about everyone of the 8 billion people can be given a hand when they need one.
There is abundance of resources ..

this Planet itself is very rich

there are clean technologies that could provide sustainable energy grids all around the globe.

There are medicines that could and should be made accessible to who need them because their so called cost is purely artificial compared to the price of human lives lost.

We are capable of about anything if we give it more Love

❤️

RogeRio

16th August 2019, 13:09

.. Racism, A History -- Documentary series looking at how racism has impacted on people's lifes

1st episode -- The Color of Money

7gESXzTdtro

2nd episode -- Fatal Impacts

8hNiuzX2u3E

3rd episode -- A Savage Legacy

V4sYJdYEsHM

Strat

1st October 2019, 23:25

gs_powered

2nd October 2019, 00:50

I believe the US have the highest regards for teachers as a society stone. I'm thinking back to the presidential speech regarding the civil representant on the Challenger, a female teacher...

I think this goes deep into the American culture and is bound to have different people have different takes on the matter, specially due to the purpose of an educator versus the "politically correctness" he has to limit his teachings to :confused:

Mark

22nd November 2019, 18:51

Kind of revisiting a past question but it just popped up in the news again: Rakhyt, what do you think of this? https://news.wjct.org/post/i-m-not-racist-says-jax-teacher-removed-scolding-students-who-didn-t-stand-pledge

I like your perspective so it's always interesting to get your opinion.

I teach 9th Graders Reading Comprehension. The school I teach at is probably 90% LatinX, maybe 4% Black, 6% White. When we say the Pledge of Allegiance, almost all of the kids stand, almost none will say it out loud. My opinion about this article, I think the teacher was on point, from the perspective of someone who has taken on American nationalism as a way of being. I don't force my kids to say it. Because I understand that they don't necessarily come from a space of experiencing the United States the way the majority population has, or the way I have. A good number of them have parents who don't speak English, and some, in addition to their parents, are Undocumented. I hype America by educating them about it while teaching them to read, exhort its ideals while fully understanding where and how they fail. I prepare them for the world they are going to inhabit, because where they live is almost entirely LatinX and Black, so they have no idea what it's like in the rest of the country. I do.

Rahkyt, I'm curious of your opinions on this: https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/jacksonville/teacher-removed-over-message-admonishing-students-who-didnt-stand-for-pledge

My opinion is that the teacher sunk himself here:

MY POINT? You are all extremely lucky to be living in the U.S.A. If you refuse to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance or our National Anthem (AS SOME PAMPERED ARROGANT CELEBRITIES AND ATHLETES TEND TO DO), are you revealing maturity and wisdom? Actually, you are displaying the opposite.

It is what it is. Some Americans have reason for being upset with the nation even as they live in it and partake of its bounties, blessings, curses and pratfalls daily. Others don't.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

What I'd really like to thank you for personally is how well you've presided over the discussion, even when some members have challenged or questioned you a little with their own perspectives. You've handled everything admirably.

:flower:

This space is worth standing for. There is no other space like it in the AltCom. Thanks for keeping it inviolate.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

We are capable of about anything if we give it more Love

Agape, this entire post was filled with soul. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Mark

22nd November 2019, 18:54

I think this goes deep into the American culture and is bound to have different people have different takes on the matter, specially due to the purpose of an educator versus the "politically correctness" he has to limit his teachings to :confused:

I don't think it is political correctness. That is about done, in America, anyway, thank goodness. I personally like for people to say what they believe and stand by it, so I can see who they are. It is much more honest and lets folks know exactly where they stand. Folks lying and pretending to believe things they don't sucks. This teacher showed his disdain for a bunch of folks trying to peacefully protest police killings with his words, which was problematic. He has a right to believe that athletes can be dumb and he has a right to say that as well. But the childrens' parents also have a right to let the school district know that they don't approve of the nature of the lesson too.

Mark

22nd November 2019, 19:42

It is a NYT article and, therefore, relatively mainstream. What it's import is in our discussion is the acknowledgement that the humanistic view of our oceanic homo sapien sapien family as being exactly the same outside of our group and individual differences, is problematic given the findings of modern DNA studies. That DNA research came out of WWII and Hitler's Germany as well as the Eugenics research done here in the United States during the era of slavery, the Black Codes and Jim Crow eras, continues to form the baseline of modern biological science and that is part of the cost of our current medicinal, genetic advances. It is a truism across the planet that good things come from bad, that a burnt out forest gives rise to new life and that disasters lead to better outcomes, eventually.

There are things in this article that some might want to debate, like the Holocaust and whether it happened or not. I'm more interested in the underlying belief this author seems to be putting forward; that there are real physiological differences that any sort of obscuration of will result in a difficult journey forward for us as a planet, if we can't get beyond the limitations of the past, together. I will add that, for that movement forward to happen, a reconciliation of the past must occur first and, it seems, that is where the world is currently headed, in one fashion or another.

How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’ (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=41868&d=1574451064

In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.

It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.

But over the years this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.

The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.

I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases. For example, we now know that genetic factors help explain why northern Europeans are taller on average than southern Europeans, why multiple sclerosis is more common in European-Americans than in African-Americans, and why the reverse is true for end-stage kidney disease.

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such differences, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and being caught unprepared when they are found.

To get a sense of what modern genetic research into average biological differences across populations looks like, consider an example from my own work. Beginning around 2003, I began exploring whether the population mixture that has occurred in the last few hundred years in the Americas could be leveraged to find risk factors for prostate cancer, a disease that occurs 1.7 times more often in self-identified African-Americans than in self-identified European-Americans. This disparity had not been possible to explain based on dietary and environmental differences, suggesting that genetic factors might play a role.

Self-identified African-Americans turn out to derive, on average, about 80 percent of their genetic ancestry from enslaved Africans brought to America between the 16th and 19th centuries. My colleagues and I searched, in 1,597 African-American men with prostate cancer, for locations in the genome where the fraction of genes contributed by West African ancestors was larger than it was elsewhere in the genome. In 2006, we found exactly what we were looking for: a location in the genome with about 2.8 percent more African ancestry than the average.

When we looked in more detail, we found that this region contained at least seven independent risk factors for prostate cancer, all more common in West Africans. Our findings could fully account for the higher rate of prostate cancer in African-Americans than in European-Americans. We could conclude this because African-Americans who happen to have entirely European ancestry in this small section of their genomes had about the same risk for prostate cancer as random Europeans.

Did this research rely on terms like “African-American” and “European-American” that are socially constructed, and did it label segments of the genome as being probably “West African” or “European” in origin? Yes. Did this research identify real risk factors for disease that differ in frequency across those populations, leading to discoveries with the potential to improve health and save lives? Yes.

While most people will agree that finding a genetic explanation for an elevated rate of disease is important, they often draw the line there. Finding genetic influences on a propensity for disease is one thing, they argue, but looking for such influences on behavior and cognition is another.

But whether we like it or not, that line has already been crossed. A recent study led by the economist Daniel Benjamin compiled information on the number of years of education from more than 400,000 people, almost all of whom were of European ancestry. After controlling for differences in socioeconomic background, he and his colleagues identified 74 genetic variations that are over-represented in genes known to be important in neurological development, each of which is incontrovertibly more common in Europeans with more years of education than in Europeans with fewer years of education.

It is not yet clear how these genetic variations operate. A follow-up study of Icelanders led by the geneticist Augustine Kong showed that these genetic variations also nudge people who carry them to delay having children. So these variations may be explaining longer times at school by affecting a behavior that has nothing to do with intelligence.

This study has been joined by others finding genetic predictors of behavior. One of these, led by the geneticist Danielle Posthuma, studied more than 70,000 people and found genetic variations in more than 20 genes that were predictive of performance on intelligence tests.

Is performance on an intelligence test or the number of years of school a person attends shaped by the way a person is brought up? Of course. But does it measure something having to do with some aspect of behavior or cognition? Almost certainly. And since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.

You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century.

To understand why it is so dangerous for geneticists and anthropologists to simply repeat the old consensus about human population differences, consider what kinds of voices are filling the void that our silence is creating. Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist for The New York Times, rightly notes in his 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” that modern research is challenging our thinking about the nature of human population differences. But he goes on to make the unfounded and irresponsible claim that this research is suggesting that genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.

One of Mr. Wade’s key sources, for example, is the anthropologist Henry Harpending, who has asserted that people of sub-Saharan African ancestry have no propensity to work when they don’t have to because, he claims, they did not go through the type of natural selection for hard work in the last thousands of years that some Eurasians did. There is simply no scientific evidence to support this statement. Indeed, as 139 geneticists (including myself) pointed out in a letter to The New York Times about Mr. Wade’s book, there is no genetic evidence to back up any of the racist stereotypes he promotes.

Another high-profile example is James Watson, the scientist who in 1953 co-discovered the structure of DNA, and who was forced to retire as head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in 2007 after he stated in an interview — without any scientific evidence — that research has suggested that genetic factors contribute to lower intelligence in Africans than in Europeans.

At a meeting a few years later, Dr. Watson said to me and my fellow geneticist Beth Shapiro something to the effect of “When are you guys going to figure out why it is that you Jews are so much smarter than everyone else?” He asserted that Jews were high achievers because of genetic advantages conferred by thousands of years of natural selection to be scholars, and that East Asian students tended to be conformist because of selection for conformity in ancient Chinese society. (Contacted recently, Dr. Watson denied having made these statements, maintaining that they do not represent his views; Dr. Shapiro said that her recollection matched mine.)

What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes. They use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.

This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent. We leave a vacuum that gets filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.

If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong. For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.

So how should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations? It will be impossible — indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd — to deny those differences.

For me, a natural response to the challenge is to learn from the example of the biological differences that exist between males and females. The differences between the sexes are far more profound than those that exist among human populations, reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation. Males and females differ by huge tracts of genetic material — a Y chromosome that males have and that females don’t, and a second X chromosome that females have and males don’t.

Most everyone accepts that the biological differences between males and females are profound. In addition to anatomical differences, men and women exhibit average differences in size and physical strength. (There are also average differences in temperament and behavior, though there are important unresolved questions about the extent to which these differences are influenced by social expectations and upbringing.)

How do we accommodate the biological differences between men and women? I think the answer is obvious: We should both recognize that genetic differences between males and females exist and we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.

It is clear from the inequities that persist between women and men in our society that fulfilling these aspirations in practice is a challenge. Yet conceptually it is straightforward. And if this is the case with men and women, then it is surely the case with whatever differences we may find among human populations, the great majority of which will be far less profound.

An abiding challenge for our civilization is to treat each human being as an individual and to empower all people, regardless of what hand they are dealt from the deck of life. Compared with the enormous differences that exist among individuals, differences among populations are on average many times smaller, so it should be only a modest challenge to accommodate a reality in which the average genetic contributions to human traits differ.

It is important to face whatever science will reveal without prejudging the outcome and with the confidence that we can be mature enough to handle any findings. Arguing that no substantial differences among human populations are possible will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.

David Reich is a professor of genetics at Harvard and the author of the forthcoming book “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past,” from which this article is adapted.

Strat

23rd November 2019, 05:54

Rahkyt, got another question for you. If you want to avoid this because it could potentially set off a firestorm I'll understand, maybe shoot me a PM if so. I think we're all mature enough to handle it though. This may have been addressed already. Anyway,

I've thought a lot about white privileged lately. Initially when this phrase started making the rounds it annoyed me as it does lots of other whites. The more I've thought about it though, I think it's just the word 'privilege' that threw me off. I think it throws off other whites as well. I think it was explained poorly by the media (go figure). At the moment I think I've come to a better understanding. I'll explain then I'd like your 2 cents.

So, being white I never have to experience what I'm about to say: It seems like when someone is born black, they are born into a kind of a club whether they like it or not. Said person will have to obviously deal with a lot, and I don't necessarily mean just racism. Things like being pressured by other blacks. You can be called an uncle tom, you can be too dark (I think this is more an issue with gals) or too light. You have to be part of a political affiliation. You can't do certain things, I've heard Terry Crews rail against this, "Black people don't _________." Like if you wanna go skydiving or whatever. Tracking your ancestry may be impossible. If you happen to like a song and you have good bass in your car and you crank it up, someone will look at you and think "makes sense" whereas for me it's "that guy's music is loud." You need to be a scholar on race relations and when whites ask about black stuff you need to have an informative answer.

None of this is an issue for me or other white folks. As I've thought about this I can understand that alone can be very crazy making. I imagine these are the more minor things. Whites want blacks to 'get over slavery'. Patrice O'Neal said it well, "do you want the Jews to 'get over' the Holocaust?"

-----------------

I suck at writing but some more thoughts:

Call me crazy, but I think whites have a kernel of racism that's hard to get out. The thing is white folks aren't aware of it because even when we truly, honestly think to ourselves if we're racist we don't see it. We think everyone should have equal rights and be nice to each other and enjoy each others company. So how could I be racist?

It doesn't always show itself. It sucks, I have it too to an extent I think. I don't mean being disrespectful or saying things I shouldn't, but just having opinions that are kinda ignorant. You're not aware of it until a circumstances arise.

When speaking of white privilege, whites unintentionally lump all blacks into a category of poor lazy blacks that say this. So the 'debunk' method is to drive through the hood and see how black folks on welfare are living: beer cans stacked up in the trash, rolling a blunt with kids running around and a brand new GMC with aftermarket wheels that have more value than my 20 year old truck. Maybe I get this impression because I live in the south? I dunno. But I think you wouldn't have to go far to find a white guy use that as a debunk method to being accused of being born into privileges.

--------------

Sorry this is all scattered but it's late. I'd be interested to hear your 2 cents. I'm not sure why I'm fascinated in all this, I think it's in part because I'm an armchair (American) historian as well as anthropologist.

Catsquotl

23rd November 2019, 15:58

Call me crazy, but I think whites have a kernel of racism that's hard to get out. The thing is white folks aren't aware of it because even when we truly, honestly think to ourselves if we're racist we don't see it.

White privileged male over here.
That said even though I did not ask for this, It seems these days I have to feel guilty for being one. I won't by the way.
Without ignoring past and present monstrosities taking place because of ethnical, gender or social place in the world. I honestly feel that many many many people are taking offense where none was intended.

It seems that every little politically incorrect view these days is blown out of proportion.
And we all know who the politicians that make the views are anyway..

With Love
Eelco

Strat

23rd November 2019, 17:24

I honestly feel that many many many people are taking offense where none was intended.

Can you elaborate with an example?

EDIT: When I said whites have a kernel of racism I was specifically referring to US Americans. And I'm not sure about that, just a theory. Racism maybe too strong a word I'll admit.

Ernie Nemeth

23rd November 2019, 17:24

You might be a racist in North America because here there is a mix of all races.

But in Europe, with the nations of pure racial stock, where the notion of nationhood was born, how can one be a racist?

That said, living under the specter of racism is uncomfortable and markedly demoralizing. But exactly when did the minority expect to have it any other way? They are the minority. And just like when the majority win an election, the minority must put up with the agenda they do not agree with. What else can be done - civil war every time the minority looses, which is every time, by definition?

And that said leaves one other point. There is no reason in the world why one should not be proud of their heritage. But, to seriously claim that one race is actually genetically superior is demonstrably wrong...and inaccurate.

Everyone belongs to a minority of one. How many are superior to yourself, in your own eyes? Does that make them right - and deserving of more? No.

We are all unique individuals, and as such it is healthy to promote your race. But, the comparison of one race to another and the stereotyping of a race of people is not.

Catsquotl

24th November 2019, 11:35

I honestly feel that many many many people are taking offense where none was intended.

Can you elaborate with an example?

When I point out that black/white/yellow/red man over there, I am just using an obvious name to signify who or what I am pointing to.
From my end I mean no offense. When I am overheard however by the woke crowd however. It is enough to call me a racist.

In earlier feminist days when walkmans were becoming a thing. I have been called a sexist once or twice for calling a walkman a walkman.

When I (as a dutchman) want to celebrate a children's tradition with my kids. The world is falling over black faced helpers of s't nicholas without much regard for the way these helpers were looked upon in my younger years, but only projecting their own view of what they believe black face to represent.

These are just a few, However my views in this are not important. What is important is that all these "examples" seem to attract a larger and larger crowd who dichotomises over them than What was the case a decade ago.
The polarity and willingness to fight for either side is what is harmful in all these things. And yes I suspect an agenda there that is as old as we can remember divide and conquer.

The issues aren't new. Racism, sexism etc etc. Have been there for a long time, and I agree they are vile human traits. It just seems to me that we are fighting harder and harder to prove our point, where we used to discuss and find common grounds in these matters, Going as far as inventing whole new levels of personal guilt trips and Judgemental notions on how " others" should act.

With Love
Eelco

Mark

2nd December 2019, 22:53

Rahkyt, got another question for you. If you want to avoid this because it could potentially set off a firestorm I'll understand, maybe shoot me a PM if so. I think we're all mature enough to handle it though. This may have been addressed already.

I don't mind firestorms. I've been center-adjacent to quite some few here and in other parts and times of my life. In this context, I welcome dissenting views on this topic because the world is watching and this is a conversation little addressed by "both sides" in the AltCom these days. That is increasing, thanks to the balanced nature of PA and the continuing polarization of populations. Clear and direct conversations are necessary with all issues aired and points of contention present for all to see and assess for themselves.

I don't think so, at least, not directly. Thanks for the opening to do so. This is the most important aspect of the question as it addresses the underlying reason why people don't want to accept the overall ramifications of generations of white nationalism and overt supremacy doctrines. Because they feel personally involved and conflicted by association and not by individual merit, and who wants to be at fault for something that began long before they were born, let alone feel responsible for it!

I've thought a lot about white privileged lately. Initially when this phrase started making the rounds it annoyed me as it does lots of other whites. The more I've thought about it though, I think it's just the word 'privilege' that threw me off. I think it throws off other whites as well. I think it was explained poorly by the media (go figure).

It is in the media's interest to create conflict as we in this space know very well. And, they have utilized a programmatic structure to address racial issues just as they have economic issues, for the very simple reason that these are the fundamental dividing forces not only in American society but in global society. Using the word "privilege" as you've determined, is a way to create an automatic "us vs. them" mentality, those with privilege and those without. And for most whites, who are ALSO under the thumb of the 1%, to call their lives privileged is a direct affront, especially because most people consider themselves hard workers or to have earned everything in their lives, so to hear that they didn't, strikes to the very core of their self-esteem and worth.

So, being white I never have to experience what I'm about to say: It seems like when someone is born black, they are born into a kind of a club whether they like it or not.

Ok. Got that. Consider also, that to be born white is to be born into a club. Whether they like it or not.

There are a couple of things to this point that I generally mention when I have this conversation, the first is that how white people experience individuality is generally illusory. The way I know this is because of the many many people I have had the exact same conversations with, almost to the word, about racial issues and individual culpability. "I don't see color", "I'm not like those others", "I was raised to treat everyone equal" and "I treat everybody the same". There are many many others but they all fall into a well-meaning range of comments that show commiseration but little understanding either of the overt signs of racism, its institutional aspect or qualities of expression from the perspective of those experiencing it.

All of these comments speak to a range of thoughts that fall within a well-defined context shared by folks of white skin at cultural, national and international levels. The "individual" thought and behavior intended to show solidary is, in fact, showing collusion with the system and cultural complex that is apparently sub-conscious.

Secondly, such comments are indeed indicative of belonging, of being in the same club as others like you, even if that means there are rooms in that club you don't like to go to, you're still in the general vicinity. White people not doing the work to move beyond it see the world a certain way and in particular see black and brown folks in a certain way which invariably extends to consideration and treatment of said folk. In the same fashion, I am lumped in with gangbangers, drug dealers and professional athletes in the eyes of someone who doesn't know me. I share a sub-culture with them (Hip Hop), I sometimes dress approximately similar (hoodies, high tops, boots), etc.

These clubs are very real and even when we are hanging out of the window looking forward at a new world, some part of ourselves is still adjacent to those other rooms, attitudes and beliefs. At least, we recognize and are familiar with them and their ways by association. This is not guilt by association, it is just club membership. Most people treat folks as individuals in one-on-one interactions. As that number increases though, as the other members of the club coalesce, something happens to that interaction, invariably.

Said person will have to obviously deal with a lot, and I don't necessarily mean just racism. Things like being pressured by other blacks. You can be called an uncle tom, you can be too dark (I think this is more an issue with gals) or too light. You have to be part of a political affiliation. You can't do certain things, I've heard Terry Crews rail against this, "Black people don't _________." Like if you wanna go skydiving or whatever. Tracking your ancestry may be impossible. If you happen to like a song and you have good bass in your car and you crank it up, someone will look at you and think "makes sense" whereas for me it's "that guy's music is loud." You need to be a scholar on race relations and when whites ask about black stuff you need to have an informative answer.

None of this is an issue for me or other white folks. As I've thought about this I can understand that alone can be very crazy making. I imagine these are the more minor things. Whites want blacks to 'get over slavery'. Patrice O'Neal said it well, "do you want the Jews to 'get over' the Holocaust?"

Those are stereotypes for the most part and the thing that isn't, like the tracking of ancestry, has technological solutions that weren't available not so long ago as far as most of us here are concerned. Genetic testing is a relatively recent development. Many black Americans in particular have extensive oral history, these days confirmable by records research at courthouses and in online databases.

I would actually say that all of this (that you mention) is an issue for you and other white folks as well. Check it:

"Said person will have to obviously deal with a lot, and I don't necessarily mean just prejudice. Things like being pressured by other whites. You can be called a N*gger lover, you can be too pale (I think this is more an issue with gals) or too dark. You have to be part of a poltiical affiliation. You can't do certain things, I've heard Robin Williams rail against this, "White people can't ________." Like if you want to go dancing or whatever. Tracking your ancestry may be impossible. If you happen to like a song and you have good tweeters in your car and you crank it up, someone will look at you and think "Makes sense" whereas for me it's "That guy's rock music is blowing out my eardrums." You need to be a scholar on how to be successful and when blacks ask about white stuff you need to have an informative answer."

What do you think of that?

Call me crazy, but I think whites have a kernel of racism that's hard to get out. The thing is white folks aren't aware of it because even when we truly, honestly think to ourselves if we're racist we don't see it. We think everyone should have equal rights and be nice to each other and enjoy each others company. So how could I be racist?

It doesn't always show itself. It sucks, I have it too to an extent I think. I don't mean being disrespectful or saying things I shouldn't, but just having opinions that are kinda ignorant. You're not aware of it until a circumstances arise.

When speaking of white privilege, whites unintentionally lump all blacks into a category of poor lazy blacks that say this. So the 'debunk' method is to drive through the hood and see how black folks on welfare are living: beer cans stacked up in the trash, rolling a blunt with kids running around and a brand new GMC with aftermarket wheels that have more value than my 20 year old truck. Maybe I get this impression because I live in the south? I dunno. But I think you wouldn't have to go far to find a white guy use that as a debunk method to being accused of being born into privileges.

You stated that well enough that I have nothing else to add. Thank for the convo, man.

Mark

2nd December 2019, 23:01

That said, living under the specter of racism is uncomfortable and markedly demoralizing. But exactly when did the minority expect to have it any other way? They are the minority. And just like when the majority win an election, the minority must put up with the agenda they do not agree with. What else can be done - civil war every time the minority looses, which is every time, by definition?

That is the Darwinian perspective, yes, and it has worked in many case studies of similar situations in the past, of a cultural nature, generally speaking. Making this argument, you'd think that, if the tables were turned by the previous minority when they become a majority, they would do the same thing to the people who are currently in the minority.

So ... do y'all believe that black folks across the world will enslave, murder, rape and experiment on white people, if the tables were turned?

There is no reason in the world why one should not be proud of their heritage. But, to seriously claim that one race is actually genetically superior is demonstrably wrong...and inaccurate.

Everyone belongs to a minority of one. How many are superior to yourself, in your own eyes? Does that make them right - and deserving of more? No.

We are all unique individuals, and as such it is healthy to promote your race. But, the comparison of one race to another and the stereotyping of a race of people is not.

Unique huh. Sure. In some ways. But not all.

Strat

2nd December 2019, 23:35

I would actually say that all of this (that you mention) is an issue for you and other white folks as well. Check it:

"Said person will have to obviously deal with a lot, and I don't necessarily mean just prejudice. Things like being pressured by other whites. You can be called a N*gger lover, you can be too pale (I think this is more an issue with gals) or too dark. You have to be part of a poltiical affiliation. You can't do certain things, I've heard Robin Williams rail against this, "White people can't ________." Like if you want to go dancing or whatever. Tracking your ancestry may be impossible. If you happen to like a song and you have good tweeters in your car and you crank it up, someone will look at you and think "Makes sense" whereas for me it's "That guy's rock music is blowing out my eardrums." You need to be a scholar on how to be successful and when blacks ask about white stuff you need to have an informative answer."

What do you think of that?
To be honest, I've never experienced any of these things. When did Robin Williams say white people can't do certain things? A few of my white friends went to clubs to get girls, one of my best friends found his (hispanic) wife there. I don't like clubs, but I wouldn't feel pressured against it or whatever. I don't have tweeters in my truck and I have indeed been planning on upgrading my sound system, but I have never ever felt any criticism/racial stereotyping for blasting my music. Which I do btw. If The Ocean by Zep comes on then god help my eardrums.

I think I would feel a bit of pressure from 1 cousin of mine if I ended up with a black gal, but he can eat a dick if that's the case. I think 50years ago, this would've been more of an issue but where I live in Jax it's very multi cultural.

The only pressure I feel is that I can't criticize or make an observation of a black person without being crucified. Like the no tipping thing at the bar. People want to call bs on that but I would put money on it. Come with me to the pool hall and when a black person tips upon checkout I give you $5, if said person doesn't tip you give me $5. You will go broke. I feel like the eyes are on me now just for making this observation. A hot iron with the word 'racist' is being readied to brand my forehead. Yet it's just an observation. I mean no harm.

Thank for the convo, man.

Absolutely, and right back at ya!

EDIT: While this is an interesting dialogue, and does touch on things that I want to learn about, I inadvertently turned this into a racism thing when I was more curious about the concept of white privilege.

I could've gotten more to the point if I simply asked you if you believed in white privilege, and how would you describe it?

Catsquotl

3rd December 2019, 04:58

Catsquotl

4th December 2019, 00:46

All of these comments speak to a range of thoughts that fall within a well-defined context shared by folks of white skin at cultural, national and international levels. The "individual" thought and behavior intended to show solidary is, in fact, showing collusion with the system and cultural complex that is apparently sub-conscious.

Secondly, such comments are indeed indicative of belonging, of being in the same club as others like you, even if that means there are rooms in that club you don't like to go to, you're still in the general vicinity. White people not doing the work to move beyond it see the world a certain way and in particular see black and brown folks in a certain way which invariably extends to consideration and treatment of said folk. In the same fashion, I am lumped in with gangbangers, drug dealers and professional athletes in the eyes of someone who doesn't know me. I share a sub-culture with them (Hip Hop), I sometimes dress approximately similar (hoodies, high tops, boots), etc.

These clubs are very real and even when we are hanging out of the window looking forward at a new world, some part of ourselves is still adjacent to those other rooms, attitudes and beliefs. At least, we recognize and are familiar with them and their ways by association. This is not guilt by association, it is just club membership. Most people treat folks as individuals in one-on-one interactions. As that number increases though, as the other members of the club coalesce, something happens to that interaction, invariably.

Is an "involuntairy" club membership such a bad thing per se?
When I say I thing people get way too offended these days it is exactly that they deny the very club they belong to. Sure as human beings we are all one, But within this realm of existence we do belong to a specific gender, a skin color, a social layer. And even though as individuals we may believe we are not defined by such trivial differences in our humanity they do give us some sense of who or what we are as we try to grow up and start noticing how these differences shape the way we act, behave and feel about ourselves and the clubs that are familiar to us.

With Love
Eelco

James Newell

4th December 2019, 03:18

Who benefits from racism? Think about it. One could say the racist group that makes the other group(s) wrong or inferior. Then again has a victim ever blamed anyone for an advantage?

Who benefits from racism? Well from my viewpoint it is a person or group that likes to leave mankind divided. That is usually done to keep and assume power and control.

An interesting part of history was mentioned by David Icke on a segment of Infowars.com today. He brought up an interesting point about a satanic cult that spawned from the Jews, than infected Islam, then Christianity, and the West. Keeping people divided by race is just one part of the agenda. The end product is no more humans on this planet. It won't really matter what race you are.
https://banned.video/watch?id=5de7054d4e3b00001cd3545d

Catsquotl

4th December 2019, 03:34

Strat

4th December 2019, 09:04

So ... do y'all believe that black folks across the world will enslave, murder, rape and experiment on white people, if the tables were turned?

The phrasing of the question is somewhat throwing me off but assuming you mean that if it were blacks that took over the world (a la Guns Germs and Steel route) would they enslave whites assuming they had the ability then I assume so. I think this goes with all cultures.

If you mean blacks become the majority, would they suddenly start enslaving whites? Then absolutely not. Times have changed kinda thing. I don't think people have it in them. Well some do but those are like the 1%, ya know, Epstein like folks. I don't necessarily mean wealth but sick in the head.

Bit of a change of topic here:

Do you have any recommended reading for early black history in America? As to the date I'm not sure, but I'm thinking pre 1900s. I'm going to read Uncle Tom's Cabin probably next week. I never got around to it and I just finished HBS's Palmetto Leaves, I never knew she lived like 5min from where I work.

Anyway, I ask cause I'm interested in little cultural tidbits. Like why/how did blacks become so fervently Christian? I would think a Voodoo tradition would be carried over. In the book I just mentioned, she (HBS) says this: "Here, then, they all settled down; and finding, accidentally, that a small central lot was not enclosed in any of the allotments, they took it as an indication that there was to be their church, and accordingly erected there a prayer-booth, where they could hold those weekly prayer-meetings which often seem with the negroes to take the place of all other recreations."

This book is more of a love letter to the Florida outdoors, written in 1872. Still, it made me think that even in movies you do often see blacks erecting their own church and praying to God just as much as other Christians.

Like I said earlier, that's just an interesting 'tidbit' and I'd like to know more. So if you know of any books that have similar information I'd definitely like to know. I plan on getting Michael Twitty's book 'The Cooking Gene'. Heard of it? I'm looking forward to that read.

Oh, and I wanted to promote this guy's youtube channel. It's interesting to hear his perspective on things. From his about page: "Search for Uhuru is a platform which was created to bridge the gap between the Diaspora and Africa."
https://www.youtube.com/user/SearchforUhuru/featured

Mark

4th December 2019, 14:37

To be honest, I've never experienced any of these things. When did Robin Williams say white people can't do certain things?

You may not have, but others have. I just pulled a comedian out of my hat as an example. It could be any of a number of comedians.

A few of my white friends went to clubs to get girls, one of my best friends found his (hispanic) wife there. I don't like clubs, but I wouldn't feel pressured against it or whatever. I don't have tweeters in my truck and I have indeed been planning on upgrading my sound system, but I have never ever felt any criticism/racial stereotyping for blasting my music. Which I do btw. If The Ocean by Zep comes on then god help my eardrums.

I think I would feel a bit of pressure from 1 cousin of mine if I ended up with a black gal, but he can eat a dick if that's the case. I think 50years ago, this would've been more of an issue but where I live in Jax it's very multi cultural.

Ok, this is kind of a case in point. You're taking everything I said as talking about you personally. Individually. When I was making blanket statements. Generalizations. There are always, always, exceptions. It's ok, but this is the problem, writ large. If I'm in a group and people start to talk in generalizations about black people, or tall people, or Vets, since I have experience in those groups I will probably have something to say too. In some sense, a lot of this seems unavoidable just because of how we are as people. So this conversation is a never-ending one. And we will always have individualized examples of how something is not so in general because it is not so for me individually.

The only pressure I feel is that I can't criticize or make an observation of a black person without being crucified. Like the no tipping thing at the bar. People want to call bs on that but I would put money on it. Come with me to the pool hall and when a black person tips upon checkout I give you $5, if said person doesn't tip you give me $5. You will go broke. I feel like the eyes are on me now just for making this observation. A hot iron with the word 'racist' is being readied to brand my forehead. Yet it's just an observation. I mean no harm.

I'm a good tipper. Just like you have never experienced any of the things in my examples. There may be some truth to the reality that a lot of poor people don't tip. A lot of poor people just so happen to be minorities. Multigenerational poverty implants some ways of being. I'll bet if you check that truism across racial lines, you would find a lot of poor indigenous and white folks don't tip well either. The great thing about generalizations is that they are contextually true to a certain extent, but never always and particularly true to every person within the group. Which is true of majority American and minority populations as well as people in nations across the planet.

No harm taken.

Mark

4th December 2019, 14:47

EDIT: While this is an interesting dialogue, and does touch on things that I want to learn about, I inadvertently turned this into a racism thing when I was more curious about the concept of white privilege.

I could've gotten more to the point if I simply asked you if you believed in white privilege, and how would you describe it?

What they call white privilege is the intergenerational culture of in-group benefit, which happens in all cultures where there are majority and minority groups. Here in the USA and in other nations, even in Europe where darker-skinned populations are relatively new (in this era, ALL of Europe was originally populated with dark-skinned Homo Sapiens), the minority groups face the stigma of darker skin in the context of over 100 years of direct and indirect pseudo-scientific categorizations of dehumanization. I would argue that there are subliminal and subconscious imperatives that ALL residents of these nations possess that reinforce these understands across generations so that now, in these days, when tests like the Harvard implicit bias test are taken, even those minorities who are considered to be inferior test positively for belief in their inherent inferiority.

Since that is the case, white privilege is particularly seditious, because the people who want to help others improve their lot in life possess these beliefs as do those whose lot is desirous of improvement!

It is a Machiavellian situation we face and live.

Mark

4th December 2019, 14:55

About as many, As the whites or yellows or red would.
Under the colors of our skins each and every one of us is capable of humanities best and worst.

I believe that is true, all people are capable of everything.

But I don't believe that, given our global history, if power shifted from caucasian control in the USA and the global community to melanated populations, that retribution would be taken in the form of enslavement and genocide of white people. That could happen at the individual level, but not at the collective. There are a lot of angry people on all sides.

I do suspect that if the tables were turned. whites would call out racism the same as blacks do now, And after the dust settled many a black person would feel ill at ease when racism becomes an excuse to call out the so the called privileged whomever is the current ruling color on perceived racism where none was intended and feel .offended by their own perception, same as is happening a lot lately.

Agreed. I hesitate to agree that the situations would be exactly reversed, though, because the nature of African civilizations has been different, historically and culturally, than European civilizations.

Is an "involuntairy" club membership such a bad thing per se?

I wouldn't say so. I do not place value judgments on things that we can't help.

When I say I thing people get way too offended these days it is exactly that they deny the very club they belong to. Sure as human beings we are all one, But within this realm of existence we do belong to a specific gender, a skin color, a social layer. And even though as individuals we may believe we are not defined by such trivial differences in our humanity they do give us some sense of who or what we are as we try to grow up and start noticing how these differences shape the way we act, behave and feel about ourselves and the clubs that are familiar to us.

Agreed without qualification. And, there are soooo many ways that we transcend these clubs and blend over into other clubs, that there are possibilities to belong and connect in ways that transcend our skin color and familial/genetic history. I believe it will only become moreso as these essential classifications become obscured beneath the increasing codification of belonging that world cultures and sub-cultures are experiencing now. So many sub-groups, so many ways to be a part of something with others that may not look like you or even come from the same culture. It is happening every minute of every day online and off. The change are happening with the youth to such an extent now that most of us who do not deal with the kids have no idea what is going on or who they are, really.

Mark

4th December 2019, 15:50

An interesting part of history was mentioned by David Icke on a segment of Infowars.com today. He brought up an interesting point about a satanic cult that spawned from the Jews, than infected Islam, then Christianity, and the West. Keeping people divided by race is just one part of the agenda. The end product is no more humans on this planet. It won't really matter what race you are.

Not a fan of the use of the word, "infected" to describe what could be termed cultural diffusion more accurately. I don't know when, where or how it started but I do know what its results are for the world. I also know that anyone in the world in any group could claim victim status. All people, groups, are aggrieved in some way, shape or form.

The superiority complex that comes from applied intergenerational racism, though, is a very specific form of victimization which leaves both those who practice it and those who it is practiced upon victims. Those who practice racism internalize forms of sociopathy, exemplified by a lack of compassion, dehumanization and separation from other members of the human family. This could be considered to be a result of whatever conspiracy you are talking about, but its effect upon everyday people is very real and impacts the very nature of the soul. Perhaps it can be posited that this is a way to make large groups of people more like the controllers, those who, by their nature, are separate and consider themselves better than and above all other people no matter what they look like or where they come from.

Those whom racism is practiced upon experience lowered self-esteem, stress from living in an environment which is constantly antagonistic, lower life-spans, more health problems, etc. These outcomes, for both populations, are life-denying and are perhaps also epigenetic in nature, affecting populations at the level of gene expression as environmental choices set in across generations. This perhaps means, psychopathy and empathy can be selected for based upon the experiences and lifestyles of one's ancestors.

Perhaps, the divisions we see because of racism are created for this very purpose. After all, elites always require people to serve them. Why not create a large group of people who will do your dirty work for you by attempting to eliminate populations they don't want in the world they wish to create? Shock Troops of the Apocalypse, you might say. People who have been subjected to trauma generation after generation after generation.

After all, race as a biological/political/cultural category was created in the United States in the 1600s amongst a mixture of different global populations that then coalesced in the colonies, and after the rebellions in which Irish, Africans and other indentured and poor folk rose up against the burgeoning agricultural/industrial machine. They began offering the Irish and other European-descended folk jobs on the Slave Patrol which would become the police in a later era, as Overseers, they gave away land and other "privileges" to separate these poor populations by race. Populations that had every economic reason to unite against the will of the controller population, those who sought to consolidate wealth and power at the highest echelons of society, as has been done in every pyramidal society that has ever been.

400 years, for those whose families have been in the USA that long, of having to "pretend" that you are better than other families of humanity. Perhaps, at this point, for those affected by these ways of life, it is no longer pretending, it is an inherent understanding that is as natural as breathing.

It has been a very effective strategy. As now, it has become nigh sub-conscious. And these are very shocking potentialities if they are so. Epigenetics is reminiscent of the social Darwinism of past generations and we must be careful about the kinds of conclusions we come to. The research remains pending, as doing this type of work on humans is very controversial. And do we, really, want to know the answer?

James Newell

4th December 2019, 17:54

If you think you are a body and the color makes a big difference than you got skin in the game of make wrong.
If you know you are a spirit that has a body a lot of this racial difference thing is a belly laugh.

It comes down to que bono(who benefits)? The elite of the planet make their bread and butter on creating differences among mankind. If the vast majority woke up we would know who to really put our attention on to handle.

Ernie Nemeth

4th December 2019, 19:00

So ... do y'all believe that black folks across the world will enslave, murder, rape and experiment on white people, if the tables were turned?

In fact, I do, and history supports my view. Like in South Africa today, for one. Although they are just revisiting an insult delivered to them centuries earlier.

The indoctrinated racist attitude is not only reserved for visible minorities, however. It is equally applied to any distinctive feature of an individual that the majority has taken a dislike to. For example, intelligence on the school ground is reason enough for denigration. Or beauty. Or ugliness. Or physical deformity. Or any particularly frowned upon beliefs. Or wealth. Or lack of wealth. Color of one's car. Address. Friends. Politics. Religion. Any and all minor differences can be and are employed to mark the current distinction between an out-group and the in-group...

Mark

4th December 2019, 19:04

If you think you are a body and the color makes a big difference than you got skin in the game of make wrong.
If you know you are a spirit that has a body a lot of this racial difference thing is a belly laugh.

You are absolutely right. This is the "game" we play. Many believe they are a body. And the rest of us have to live with them and not tell, but show differently, even if that makes no perceptible difference. There is no agreement for a new way of being human in this world, currently. But there will be. Some are able to, truly, laugh at that reality. But most are not.

It comes down to que bono(who benefits)? The elite of the planet make their bread and butter on creating differences among mankind. If the vast majority woke up we would know who to really put our attention on to handle.

Benefit passes down through many layers.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

In fact, I do, and history supports my view. Like in South Africa today, for one. Although they are just revisiting an insult delivered to them centuries earlier.

Your argument is invalid because whites in South Africa as a group are not being subjected to the same strictures and experiences that blacks were subjected to for hundreds of years. Nowhere near it.

The indoctrinated racist attitude is not only reserved for visible minorities, however. It is equally applied to any distinctive feature of an individual that the majority has taken a dislike to. For example, intelligence on the school ground is reason enough for denigration. Or beauty. Or ugliness. Or physical deformity. Or any particularly frowned upon beliefs. Or wealth. Or lack of wealth. Color of one's car. Address. Friends. Politics. Religion. Any and all minor differences can be and are employed to mark the current distinction between an out-group and the in-group...

Sure. This is more than just in-group out-group dynamics. More than culture. The psychology of race has proven that over quite a long time.

James Newell

5th December 2019, 03:55

Slave comes from the root slav which is that area North of Greece and Turkey. So the whites up there were choice meat for the slave block for many centuries. The Roman and Arab slavers were very predominate in enslaving the Slavs and the blacks before and after Mohammand. The Arabs are still openly active slavers in Libya.

Black tribes in Africa regularly enslaved other tribes for Thousands of years. Romans enslaved the Brits, the French enslaved the Arabs and on and on.

The Spaniards enslaved most of South and Central America. Their deeds done to the Indians were horrific.

Seems the Jews were big slavers and brought many hundreds of thousands of blacks to the Americas for several hundred years. That seems to be conveniently forgotten. Seems big money was made on this human trafficking aberration. And still is.

The various American Indigenous tribes enslaved each other regularly. Who had the better army were the slavers.

I guess the point here is this racist thing is a good justifier( an excuse for doing wrong) to treat your fellow man less than a dog. You can do just about anything to another if you make him less.

How to handle all this: A good place to start is try to treat others as you would like to be treated.

Mark

12th December 2019, 17:43

I don't agree with everything this article says, particularly the part about banning certain forms of speech, but I think it forwards the discussion in some other aspects. The discussion itself is where the importance of conversation is, the back and forth when that back and forth is productive and not skewed by cultural conditioning, which is often the downfall of scientific research and has been historically. The possibilitiy of achieving true objectivity is another question worth asking these days, whether science can or cannot move beyond its mooring in cultural norms.

Can science rise beyond the cultures that practice it? When we study each other and ourselves, can the interpretation of incomplete data refrain from drawing conclusions that don't reflect the lived reality of those being studied? Or must science always be denigrated to the level of serving political ends that eventually end up being non life-oriented and reductive in nature rather than expansive and life affirming?

How Can We Curb the Spread of Scientific Racism? (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/how-can-we-curb-the-spread-of-scientific-racism/)
A new book examines the insidious effects of scientific investigations into race

By John Horgan on October 17, 2019

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=41998&d=1575920272

A dozen years ago I flew to Europe to speak at a conference on science’s limits. The meeting’s organizer greeted me with a tirade about James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, who had just stated publicly that blacks are less intelligent than whites. “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours,” Watson told a journalist (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-at-dna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html), “whereas all the testing says not really.”

At first I thought my host, a world-famous intellectual whose work I admired, was condemning Watson. But no, he was condemning Watson’s critics, whom he saw as cowards attacking a courageous truth-teller. I wish I could say I was shocked by my host’s rant, but I have had many encounters like this over the decades. Just as scientists and other intellectuals often reveal in private that they believe in the paranormal, so many disclose that they believe in the innate inferiority of certain groups.

That 2007 incident came back to me as I read Superior: The Return of Race Science (https://www.amazon.com/Superior-Return-Science-Angela-Saini/dp/0807076910) by British journalist Angela Saini (who is coming to my school Nov. 4, see Postscript). Superior is a thoroughly researched, brilliantly written and deeply disturbing book. It is an apt follow-up to Saini’s previous book, Inferior (https://www.amazon.com/Inferior-Science-Wrong-Research-Rewriting/dp/0807010030/ref=pd_cp_14_1/134-3951638-6963651?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0807010030&pd_rd_r=d415b270-1b46-40e1-bb5c-34d158010137&pd_rd_w=sQMVG&pd_rd_wg=SqbOj&pf_rd_p=0e5324e1-c848-4872-bbd5-5be6baedf80e&pf_rd_r=VK3NA4K6PA9DCS3T31QK&psc=1&refRID=VK3NA4K6PA9DCS3T31QK), which explores sexism in science (and which I wrote about here (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/darwin-was-sexist-and-so-are-many-modern-scientists/) and here (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/do-women-want-to-be-oppressed/)). Saini calls “intellectual racism” the “toxic little seed at the heart of academia. However dead you might think it is, it needs only a little water, and now it’s raining.”

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=41999&d=1575920621
Angela Saini. Credit: Henrietta Garden

Saini argues that racism is implicit within the concept of race. “Race is at its heart the belief that we are born different, deep inside our bodies, perhaps even in character and intellect, as well as outward appearance,” she writes. “It’s the notion that groups of people have certain innate qualities” that can “define the passage of progress, the success and failure of the nations our ancestors came from.” Yes, that’s what Watson was saying.

Like sexism, racism is a personal topic for Saini, who is of Indian descent. Growing up in London, she endured abuse from white children, who hurled insults and stones at her and her sister. Racism is hardly unique to white westerners, she acknowledges. Indians, after all, have long engaged in discrimination against each other, as reflected in their notorious caste system. “Every society that happens to be dominant comes to think of itself as the best, deep down,” Saini comments.

But scientific racism--an oxymoron if ever there was one--is a relatively recent, localized phenomenon. It emerged in Europe during the so-called Enlightenment and accelerated after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. “It is no accident that modern ideas of race were formed during the height of European colonialism,” Saini writes, “when those in power had already decided on their own superiority.”

“The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.” That was Kant. Darwin came from a family of abolitionists and was progressive for his era. He nonetheless believed, as Saini puts it, that “men were above women, and white races were above all others.” Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, supported abolition but said, “The highest reaches in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.”

White, male Europeans used race science—embodied in ideologies such as social Darwinism and eugenics--to justify their nations’ conquest, enslavement and extermination of non-white people. Given this appalling history, one would think scientific racism would have vanished long ago. And after World War II it did go underground, for a while. The association of the Nazis with scientific racism complicated its marketing.

Race science has nonetheless recently re-emerged, heartening white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other bigots. Saini shows how wealthy benefactors and organizations such as the Pioneer Fund, founded in the 1930s to promote “race bettermen (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/pioneer-fund)t,” have enabled this resurgence. They fund and help disseminate research—via journals such as Mankind Quarterly and websites such as Unz Review--that supposedly establishes the innate inferiority of certain races.

Those who espouse this ideology call themselves “race realists.” They insist that racial injustice and inequality “isn’t injustice or inequality at all,” Saini explains. “It’s there because the racial hierarchy is real.” Race realists claim that “they are challenging the politically correct wider world by standing up for good science and that those who oppose them are irrational science deniers.”

Race, as Saini shows, has always been an arbitrary way to categorize people, motivated primarily by political rather than scientific goals. Yes, some genetic markers and heritable diseases, like sickle cell anemia, tend to be associated with certain populations, a fact exploited by 23andMe and Ancestry.com and by scientists tracing human evolution. But numerous studies have revealed that there is far more genetic variation within than between races, however they are defined. A 2002 study (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/298/5602/2381) found that 93-95 percent of the genetic variation occurs within rather than between geographically distinct populations.

Given this enormous variability, it is absurd to make gross generalizations, as racists do, about the character and capabilities of certain groups. “The racial categories we are used to seeing on census forms don’t map onto the true picture of human variation,” Saini writes. She herself can be categorized as black, brown or Caucasian. The concept of race “is useless, pernicious nonsense,” geneticist Mark Thomas tells her.

Not all research on race is overtly racist. In fact, many scientists doing race-related research claim that their aim is to help targets of racism. But Saini notes that even well-intentioned race science may be poorly conceived. In 2003 anthropologist Duana Fullwiley asked researchers doing race-related medical studies to define race. “None of them could answer her question confidently or clearly,” Saini says. Race-based research, she fears, can end up subtly reinforcing racist conclusions.

For example, researchers have long sought a biological basis for African-Americans’ relatively high rates of hypertension, which is associated with higher rates of heart disease, stroke and death. I had assumed this to be a case in which race science could be beneficial, because it could lead to improved medical treatments for blacks. But Saini presents evidence that environmental factors—including stress and poverty resulting from discrimination—are the primary causes of African-Americans’ elevated hypertension. Rural Africans, she points out, have low levels of hypertension.

The claim that black Americans’ hypertension stems from their genes “lays the blame for inequality at the feet of biology,” Saini writes. “If poor health today is intrinsic to black bodies and has nothing to do with racism, it’s not anyone’s fault.” Ironically, in the slavery era, scholars justified harsh treatment of blacks by claiming that they were hardier and less sensitive to pain than whites. (These myths persist among medical students, the New York Times recently reported (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/racial-differences-doctors.html).)

Saini also worries about the insidious effects of identity politics and of ancestry testing, which has “helped reinforce the idea that race is real.” “Have pride in where you live or where your ancestors come from if you like,” she says, but “don’t be sucked into believing that you are so different from others that your rights have more value.”

Saini seems to envision a world in which race really does not matter, in which individuals are judged, as Martin Luther King put it, by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. But race poses a paradox. Race should not matter, and yet it does, profoundly, as long as racism endures. As the case of black hypertension shows, race might not be a legitimate biological category, but in a racist society it has measurable biological as well as social consequences.

Superior left me pondering hard questions: Can scientists study race in a way that doesn’t exacerbate racism? Or does all such research, no matter how well-intentioned, subtly reinforce the idea that an individual’s race matters? If scientists do research with the explicit goal of countering racism, are they really scientists, or are they social activists? Finally, can we take pride in our ethnic heritage without being racist?

Superior provides a foundation for discussion of these urgent issues. Saini’s work won’t have any impact on social-injustice warriors, who are beyond moral or rational appeals. “Race realists” have viciously attacked her, as she disclosed in her recent Scientific American column “The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-internet-is-a-cesspool-of-racist-pseudoscience/).” (For a similar view, see this New York Times essay, “Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/opinion/sunday/white-supremacist-recruitment.html).”)

But I believe, and hope, that Superior will provoke others, including progressives, to re-evaluate their attitudes toward race. She has certainly made me re-evaluate my views. I now see research on racial differences in an even more negative light than I once did, which I didn’t think was possible. As long as racism still infects our societies, it confounds attempts to disentangle the relative contributions of genes and environment to racial inequality.

I once suggested that, given the harm done by research on alleged cognitive differences between races, it should be banned (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/should-research-on-race-and-iq-be-banned/). I stand by that proposal. I also agree with Saini that online media firms should do more to curb the dissemination of racist pseudoscience. “This is not a free speech issue,” she writes in Scientific American, “it’s about improving the quality and accuracy of information that people see online, and thereby creating a fairer, kinder society.”

AutumnW

12th December 2019, 18:20

Rahkyt,

Thanks for that. Want to also add that Ancestry.com is an outfit that has strong ties to Mormons. And Mormons, regardless of what any individual will tell you, were overtly racist in the past and likely covertly so today. That's not exclusive to that religion.

I have had some astounding online conversations with very well educated white academics about racial issues in the U.S. For example, Ferguson Missouri riots. The media report on the few weeks of rioting and neglect to inform their viewers about the immediate history of race relations in the town (and many others like it) and forget about the deep history about the region. They won't touch that with a ten foot pole. Dude had no clue about private prisons and slave labor either.

And the alternative right media, like Breibart, surely won't fill that void with their war on "the politically correct" which subsumes many legitimate political racial concerns under the same umbrella as the most extreme nutty causes.

People are so being played, regardless of ethnicity, skin color, etc...

Mark

12th December 2019, 19:19

And the alternative right media, like Breibart, surely won't fill that void with their war on "the politically correct" which subsumes many legitimate political racial concerns under the same umbrella as the most extreme nutty causes.

People are so being played, regardless of ethnicity, skin color, etc...

As is always the case isn't it, people getting played seems like a large part of the human story in general in this Age, at least. The Right does obscure some things just as the Left over-dramatizes others. The media, which is also politics, is really bad about that. Now that I am in the political arena, I see that up close and firsthand. People have assumed I am a Progressive since I ran for office, but I have some views that are waaaaaay beyond any political category as y'all know. I've been and am being attacked on the Left almost as much as I have been on the Right. Such is life when you don't fit in anybody's boxes.

Ernie Nemeth

13th December 2019, 14:28

Rahkyt for President!

all aboard

Mark

13th December 2019, 18:56

Rahkyt for President!

Rahkyt for retirement is more like it. City government is much different from State or Local, it is non-partisan in nature, which suits me just fine. The pressures upon those who run and win are enormous, from citizens and from business interests, which is as it should be I suppose. This is not really the space to discuss local politics as, for me, race does not factor into the equation. But thanks for the vote of confidence! I'm doing my best!

:focus:

Mike

13th December 2019, 19:50

Wait what? Rahkyt for president? I like the sound of that.

I think I'd make a good vice. Let me know if ya need me bro:)

AutumnW

14th December 2019, 01:06

So ... do y'all believe that black folks across the world will enslave, murder, rape and experiment on white people, if the tables were turned?

About as many, As the whites or yellows or red would.
Under the colors of our skins each and every one of us is capable of humanities best and worst.

I do suspect that if the tables were turned. whites would call out racism the same as blacks do now, And after the dust settled many a black person would feel ill at ease when racism becomes an excuse to call out the so the called privileged whomever is the current ruling color on perceived racism where none was intended and feel .offended by their own perception, same as is happening a lot lately.

WIth Love
Eelco

Catsquotyl,

I understand how you feel and think and don't fault you for it but here is the problem. It is really convenient for the dominant class or race, or both to comfort themselves with the "if tables were reversed, we would get the same treatment," idea. This presupposes that whites would have gotten the same treatment by others when it's not been proven in recent centuries.

The moral equivalency idea wraps something horrific in bright tissue paper tied together with the tiniest string of remorse. All this, while forcing a koombaya moment on those who are still experiencing the after shocks of past trauma.

It's okay for people whose culture, race or caste have been dominant through coercion to feel awkward and uncomfortable about it. That is really tiny price to pay for past wrongs.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Wait what? Rahkyt for president? I like the sound of that.

I think I'd make a good vice. Let me know if ya need me bro:)

If not him, then who? He seems to be the best person for the job. I swear he'd make the world a better place.:star:

Catsquotl

17th December 2019, 05:32

Catsquotl,

I understand how you feel and think and don't fault you for it but here is the problem. It is really convenient for the dominant class or race, or both to comfort themselves with the "if tables were reversed, we would get the same treatment," idea. This presupposes that whites would have gotten the same treatment by others when it's not been proven in recent centuries.

The moral equivalency idea wraps something horrific in bright tissue paper tied together with the tiniest string of remorse. All this, while forcing a koombaya moment on those who are still experiencing the after shocks of past trauma.

It's okay for people whose culture, race or caste have been dominant through coercion to feel awkward and uncomfortable about it. That is really tiny price to pay for past wrongs.

before the recent centuries there are accounts of afrikan's using slaves.
The presupposition as you call it is all we have to go on. But knowing how humans behave I guess it's is a save bet to assume the worst in this case. No matter which color is the ruling class. It isn't as much a racial thing as it is a power thing. Those in power feel drawn to it and will miss-use it for personal gain regardless of the consequences. Those who wouldn't usually do not want to be in power or do so very reluctantly.

I am aware as a white so called privileged middle aged male I know saying what I see is convenient. It doesn't make it less true though, Assuming things would be different if some tables were reversed is equally presumptuous.

did you notice I did not say whites would be enslaved by the way, only that they would say they were discriminated against. There is no way of knowing what would have happened if things had played out differently.

feeling awkward and uncomfortable is different from feeling I have to defend my right to simply exists. Like I said I will not apologize for being white, or "privileged" or male, or straight. I will treat others with respect and expect the same in return. No race, religion, caste or clan needed or exempt.

with Love
Eelco

Mark

15th January 2020, 17:10

This article is a good example of how "science" in the form of statistics can create inequalities. Often, not purposefully, just as a function of the way the equations are created. Statistical problems are formulated based upon certain conditions, and lead to the creation of models. Models, just by sheer dint of the fact that we cannot ever completely know reality, are generally inadequate as descriptors of the world as we exist in it. But the process evolves over time and we do better when we know better.

Beyond Racial Bias: Rethinking Risk Stratification In Health Care (https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200109.382726/full/)

Leonard W. D’Avolio (https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hauthor20200109.676999/full/)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42297&d=1579106602

A recent study by Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues in Science (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6464/447) identified a racial bias in a risk stratification algorithm that is used to prioritize patients for care management. Like most algorithms currently in use, it considers past cost to identify individuals most in need of help. Because white people tend to have higher medical expenses, they are prioritized over sicker black patients. The researchers show that if the bias is corrected for, the proportion of black people prioritized for care swings from 17.7 percent to 46.0 percent.

Less than a week later, news of the study appeared in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03228-6), Business Insider (https://amp-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.businessinsider.com/an-algorithm-treatment-to-white-patients-over-sicker-black-ones-2019-10), the Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-regulator-probes-unitedhealth-algorithm-for-racial-bias-11572087601), and Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/how-algorithm-favored-whites-over-blacks-health-care/). The State of New York is investigating and threatening suit (https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-regulator-probes-unitedhealth-algorithm-for-racial-bias-11572087601) against UnitedHealthcare and others that employ such approaches.

While this recent discovery is rightfully gaining attention, it is just one of many known biases and shortcomings of the health care system’s current approach to risk stratification. Obermeyer and his colleagues’ study and the concerns it raised offer an opportunity to carefully consider unintended consequences of the prevalent approaches of stratifying risk to find a new way forward.

Flaws And Unintended Consequences
The algorithms in question are decades-old adaptations of actuarial models. They rely mostly on claims (that is, billing) data as input. With the introduction of managed care in the 1980s, health plans needed a way to prioritize their care management activities. The same approach used to estimate the “risk” of populations was applied to predict individuals’ future health care use.

Soon after these approaches were adapted to help care management teams prioritize their limited resources, researchers began publishing studies that identified deficiencies and unintended consequences. A systematic review (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104511) of 30 risk stratification algorithms appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2011 concluded, “Most current readmission risk prediction models that were designed for either comparative or clinical purposes perform poorly.” Despite these findings, little has been done to address the problem in the past decade. A number of factors contribute to this poor performance:

Reliance On Claims
As the agreed-upon means of justifying reimbursement, claims data are one of the few widely available data standards in health care. However, the disease code assignments in claims files are notoriously inaccurate. While such errors may be less problematic for calculating the cost of a population over the next year, their effects can be amplified when assigning priority to individuals.

Assumption That Past Cost Equals Future Need
Hockey great Wayne Gretzky credits his success to skating to where the puck will be. In contrast, risk stratification algorithms direct care management teams to where the puck was by finding patients who already cost the most. Research has shown that for patients who use large amounts of health care services, the need often is intense yet temporary (https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2014.1186). Algorithms that prioritize those who consumed the most health services in the past are inadvertently prioritizing a number of patients nearing end of life and those whose medical needs are subsiding, thus creating a past-consumption bias.

Use Of One-Size-Fits-All Formulas
Many factors—including the nature and stage or severity of the disease, extent of social support, and number of preventable emergency department visits, hospital admissions, or readmissions—may be indicators of medical need. Yet, traditional risk scores ignore these factors, which can provide important context for prioritizing patients.

This myopic approach leads to a type of condition bias in which the diseases that generate the most health care use are prioritized by risk scores. For example, people on dialysis or with late-stage cancer are more likely to be prioritized over people with early signs of type 2 diabetes because patients suffering from the former are likely to have accrued greater medical expenses than the latter. Yet, the greatest opportunity for clinical and financial impact is often in the earlier stages of disease.

Use of one-size-fits-all formulas also introduces age bias; younger sick people are ignored by most algorithms in favor of older people with more chronic, complex conditions. For example, a child with rising risk of potentially fatal diabetic ketoacidosis is unlikely to be prioritized over a 55-year-old with a chronic condition that has led to intense spending over the past 12 months. This bias is particularly problematic for care management organizations serving high-need Medicaid and dually-eligible (Medicare plus Medicaid eligible) populations with a wide age range.

The Impetus For Change
Providers’ adoption of value-based contracts has led to significant new investments in care management. Organizations are expecting measurable returns from these investments in the form of improved outcomes and reduced medical expenditures. Different levels of care and interventions are being introduced to address specific needs at different times, often outside of the clinic. Examples include remote monitoring programs (https://www.omadahealth.com/), more in-home and telemedicine programs (http://www.mercyvirtual.net/vengagement/) for patients with chronic and complex needs, and community-based palliative care (https://prospero-health.com/). These programs typically are costly to implement, thus raising the stakes for efforts to identify patients who are benefiting most and who are most likely to benefit.

New data from electronic medical records, medical devices, and new technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing are introducing more opportunities to use data to identify the patients most likely to benefit—not necessarily those who cost the most in the past.

The Way Forward
As pointed out by Obermeyer and colleagues, the way forward is not as simple as swapping out one variable for another. Neither is the answer to simply apply new data and new math to the traditional method of risk stratification. To meet the evolving needs of care management and capitalize on access to new data and technology, we need to rethink our approach. The next generation of risk stratification approaches should:

Use All Relevant Data, Not Just The Data That Everyone Else Has
It’s no longer necessary or even appropriate to limit models to the same common denominator data that all institutions have access to (for example, claims). Just as companies such as Amazon and Google use all of the data at their disposal to tailor their approaches to selling books and advertisements to individual consumers, health care can use data to move beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to risk stratification.

For example, Cyft, the analytics company I work for, recently collaborated with a care management organization responsible for the health of a Medicaid population. The care management organization cared for all ages of people with behavioral health needs. However, the state offered a special program for people younger than age 18 with behavioral health needs. Unfortunately, the organization’s risk scoring system did not consider age nor was it designed to detect patterns that would indicate behavioral health need. Without the support of customized risk stratification, referrals to the younger than-18 program were limited to patients already engaged with clinicians who happened to be aware of the state program.

To help the team identify and prioritize those likely to benefit, we built two risk stratification models, one that was trained with (that is, learned from) the data of people younger than 18 years old and one trained on patients 18 and older. This approach prevented the younger people from being crowded out by older people with more health care use. Rather than prioritize based on cost, both models were designed to predict inpatient psychiatric admissions as a proxy for impending behavioral health need. The results of the two age- and condition-sensitive models were used to match individuals with interventions tailored to address their age- and condition-sensitive needs.

As organizations capture more data—including clinical data in electronic medical records and care management systems, as well as survey data on topics such as activities of daily living and social determinants of health—this information can be used to prioritize patients, not just for care management but for the programs or interventions best suited to their unique characteristics and needs.

Include Clinicians Throughout The Design Process
Most risk stratification algorithms are licensed and installed with little feedback and even less design input from the clinical team they are intended to support. As a result, interventions may not adequately account for limitations in the clinical team’s capacity or workflows, and they may fail to achieve optimal outcomes. To maximize the potential for algorithms to advance positive results, models should be designed with a collaborative approach in which clinicians lead the discussion about intended use. In the state behavioral health intervention described above, the decisions to model by age and focus on inpatient psychiatric admissions were the result of a design process that included clinicians from the start.

Evaluate Performance With Your Own Population
Clinicians should not be asked to “trust” the results of models that were not evaluated within their own population. Importantly, a local evaluation means that the results of each model can be checked for inadvertent bias by analyzing the distributions of various subpopulations by age, sex, race, and disease.

Use Appropriate Measures
There is not a single “best statistic” for all stratification applications. Understanding which is the right tool for the job is critical for teams planning and evaluating their efforts. Unfortunately, clinical research has a tradition of measuring model performance with diagnostic accuracy measures that indicate how good a model is at predicting which people do not need help (negative predictive value). The commonly used area-under-receiver-operator characteristic (AU-ROC or c-stat), which relies on specificity, measures how well an algorithm predicts true negatives. Both risk stratification vendors and researchers benefit from this type of accounting, which favors correctly identifying the hundreds of thousands of people who are not the most in need versus their ability to identify the hundreds who are. However, these measures offer little insight to teams hoping to allocate limited resources to those most in need.

The metric that matters for effective care management is how good the algorithm is at prioritizing people who do need help (true positives), or the positive predictive value (PPV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_negative_predictive_values)) of the algorithm. Even more relevant is the PPV for the number of people the team can possibly reach within a given period of time. In other words, measuring the PPV of an algorithm applied to all 100,000 people in a population is less relevant than the PPV of the first 100 predictions per week if that’s the volume and frequency of outreach the care management program can achieve.

Once Models Are Deployed, Conduct Ongoing Monitoring Of Performance And Output
Most risk stratification models are static, yet they are deployed in evolving and complex environments. The introduction of new data sources, changes in reimbursement contracts and policies, and the redesign of care management programs are not uncommon. Without a system of monitoring and periodic assessment to determine whether the model is meeting the clinical teams’ needs, clinical end users may not notice that models are producing irrelevant or inaccurate results.

Measure What Happens Next
The best predictions are merely suggestions. To have impact, a care management program must lead to a series of cascading activities, from outreach to enrollment to intervention. Today, surprisingly few care management teams measure the activities or the outcomes of their programs. Those that do often rely on annual assessments and biased pre- versus post-evaluations.

Moving forward, organizations that use stratification algorithms should do so as part of a system of ongoing measurement and improvement. Clinical teams should participate in the design of what’s measured to be sure that metrics are useful for advancing program goals. While an institution’s leadership may believe it is important to measure admission rates on an annual basis, care management is more likely to benefit from monitoring key metrics on a monthly basis, such as how many people identified as “at risk” received outreach from care managers, the number and method of outreach attempts, and enrollment rates. Measures of improvement should be compared against a control group with similar characteristics. Such information can be used to make incremental improvements that can help reduce admission rates over time.

Obermeyer and team have done health care an important service. By diagnosing a major shortcoming of the current approach to prioritizing patients for care management, this research should help prompt organizations to think more carefully about the use of algorithms. In doing so, it is important to recognize racial bias as one of several unintended consequences—along with past-consumption bias, condition bias, and age bias.

We now have a unique opportunity to modernize care management. It is time to replace the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach with models that are customized to local populations, informed by clinician expertise, and designed to prioritize those most in need. Deployment of these models should not be viewed as a one-time endeavor but rather as an evolving process aligned with a system of continuous quality improvement.

Author’s Note
The author is the founder and CEO of Cyft, a company that focuses on exactly this issue. He is also an adviser to other companies (Datalogue, Firefly Health) and philanthropies (the Helmsley Charitable Trust Foundation) that are responsible for using data to get the right care to the right people at the right time.

Praxis

18th January 2020, 18:34

I just wanted to jump in with a personal anecdote.

I dont experience racism, at least not in America( I did in Japan), but my wife does. She is Indonesian.

I dont think that most people realize this is an issue because it is never pointed at them.

One could easily think it is not an issue because the water signs no longer say "Whites only".

I got a text from her telling me that she went out to lunch at a Korean BBQ place while she is in LA.

She is first in line to be served, but is served last by the waiter(Koreans).

This is in California. How do you imagine this goes in other parts of the country?

She told me one time "The way I get treated with I am with you is different than when I am alone"

This boils my blood.

I do not have much to add here sorry.

I would hope that other people on here who experience racism, big and small, please add your anecdotes to start to show the people on this forum what kinds of things they dont have to deal with.

p.s.

We went shoe shopping as a family this Christmas. Went to a shoe store we have been to tons of times. We walk in and I head to the mens area and start looking. Am approached at least two of three times by sales people. Find shoes. Buy leave the store to take niece and nephews to park while shopping continues.

In talking to my wife about her experience, she was not approached once by sales person. My mother had to go get someone to help her.

James Newell

21st January 2020, 02:18

One of the most racist countries I have ever been in was in S. Korea I think around 1971, the kids happily or was it anger, threw rocks at me as a was riding a bicycle and called me White monkey. I later found out the Koreans think they were evolved from bears and the rest of the world was evolved from monkeys. Luckily for me they didn't know how to throw rocks very well.

I actually observed a lot of racist asian barbs especially to White women. All over asia when I was stationed there, eg, Thailand, korea, Japan.

It appears S Africa has it much worse now especially since the commie gov has got into power. Of course one can justify it all away with retributions needed against the whites, for their many years in power.

https://concit.org/media-silence-on-the-deaths-and-torture-of-white-african-farmers/

Hym

21st January 2020, 06:36

Race ism. Race schism. There must be many anecdotal views written on this thread, so I will add a small amount of mine. However, on this date being a reminder of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birth, actually Jan. 15, I remember deeper truths.

I remember the highest likelihood of agency hit squads, one of which did the shooting itself. I remember the King family, knowing full well the truth, searching for the truth in court of an agency of the u.s. gov't's guilt in the assassination and not any guilt of james earl ray, after they had lengthly conversations with him.

I would ask any black man why he would work for an agency that has never been held culpable for the death of Martin, providing the weapons that were used in Malcolm's murder, for inserting provocateurs as operatives in any empowerment movement, all done primarily for opposition to the profiteering war in Vietnam, the one step over the line in the most personal of self-sacrifices against evil. In this all I see no disconnect from economic and racial equality.

I find it hard to listen to the many obfuscations of the truths this great man shared with us, even while understanding the mechanisms of manipulation within academia, the media and the profiteers. I remember the turn to truths, from those that live far beyond hate, that Malcolm shared when he realized the common values we all share. Medgar Evers and millions of those as worthy as any other that ever lived who were victimized by the hatred, the greed and the fear. At the same time I hold no white guilt for the sins of other souls, as I know the temporary time limit of this human skin and the illusion of any value it does and does not have. I'll be working in the fields while others waste time blaming.

I also remember the abject stupidity of racism within those with their culturally embedded predispositions to self-destruction, given life through those same hate and fear based habituations. They are just too dumb to not know the great value and soulful nourishment that diversity creates.

I also rail at the ignorance of those who simply do not allow all to be as human as each other, just as good, just as f***ed up, just as normal, just as pre-occupied, just as brilliant, just as prejudiced, just as self-destructive, as capable and as culpable as any.

And, unless you have stepped up and in for others who are not of the majority wherever you live, when these challenges have threatened your income, your financial security, your personal freedom and your physical health...you do not know what it takes to be here and be of any worth. Your discussions about equality hold no merit with me. For me it has often been a matter of the rights of opportunity given as the duty of anyone in any government. It has almost always been the direct reality of economic equality not being given and even searched for when it is not present.

Being a member of the film world I am aware of how challenging it is at times to just be me and try to get work. The reality is that until the b.s. of discrimination, in it's many guises, is at hand I'm just enjoying the work and the company I keep. You'd never know who I was beyond my work unless the toilet stopped working.

Being different is not a skill set we put on our resumes. If it wasn't for having a depth of respect from others for my work ethic and my skills I would have had no work at all.

I say this as it is very odd being a person of no color at all, so say the blind, bringing up the fact that not one hispanic has ever held the highest position of those in construction, as a major coordinator, in the state with the highest percentage of hispanics in the country.

I even suggested to a good friend that the next time I am hired on in this position, one I've held before, that after I hire him as a general foreman I'd switch positions with him, making him the first hispanic high end coordinator. The only problem with that is he refused the offer since he loves to work as much as I do and, as he noted, I'm the one with the gift and love of this communication and the intense juggling the job requires.

Struggling to get work in that same position I suggested to another film union friend that I state in my resume that I look for work on film projects that have a moral base, an inspiring storyline and an insight into the human condition. My friend said I might as well ask not to be hired and he reminded me that our work does not function on morality and that, especially in this 3rd world state, it has a long way to go until it treats it's workers well, without having to be litigated into some semblance of human decency, even as it has now turned anew to a focus on adhering to federal labor laws and ASA contract guidelines.

With new leadership in a key role, that is balls to the wall about enforcing equality and focussed on harassment prevention, at least it is on the map now. Despite the newness, the old white guard, that, thru blackballing as it's defense to being exposed on it's endless pay to play criminality, had deliberately forced many to move onto new careers, or move to another state. That crap has had a long lasting negative effect on those keys, leads, scenics, and foremen all now in upper hiring positions.

In this case and in this state equality cannot be legislated or ruled into being, especially where the union is not a hiring hall, thus making seniority, skill, compatibility and ethics only the personal choice of those doing the hiring. It is not merit based though the union always claims that to be it's moral charter on a national scale. Again, attacking racism seems to be central to gaining equality on many levels. But Hey....tilting at windmills and giving an energetic series of F**ks doesn't work when you're alone. It has never given me work.

Of course I would expect my skills to be the only determining criteria, just as it would be rare for a production to know that I demand equality along with safety, on time progress and pro-active dispute resolution and then use that as a determinate factor in choosing me. I still just want to work. I move on.

By the way, and central to the racism between whomever here, the racist views of the new mexican hispanics against Mexican immigrants is in stark contrast to the less overt racism of the Californian mexican-americans against Mexican immigrants living in that state. It seems to aggravate me much more than the hard working Mexican immigrants here. The Spanish "citizens" here, sometimes from centuries old lineage, are shocked when i bring it up to them, but they don't deny it. Idiots.

Not for me. I may have to move to another state, or another country, or create work in another field for my future. We'll see. In my life I really don't have time for the prejudiced. I live in the color and the challenge of the personalities I work with.

Listening to my son and his stays in south america I see a stark contrast in the lives of those who are discriminated against, yet live in "democracies". It is always those who, like Lula, raise the common economic lives of the poor who are attacked. It is no coincidence that those being uplifted, who most often only want the opportunity to work for a humane wage, and not to gain some welfare, are of color not shared by those in control. It may be that overt racism can be dealt with much easier than living in any place where lip service pretends to equally provide opportunity. It is never a difficult thing to see, even as the lives of many are complex.

Mark

22nd January 2020, 16:04

I do not have much to add here sorry.

I would hope that other people on here who experience racism, big and small, please add your anecdotes to start to show the people on this forum what kinds of things they dont have to deal with.

You have added MUCH value. Thank you so much.

These are the kind of anecdotes that make it real for folks. I also have had to go find folks to wait on me at stores, have received my food after a number of other folks of different persuasions have come into the restaurant and ordered, am passed over to be helped in different contexts. Because these kinds of experiences are so common, it makes folks subject to them hyper-sensitive and we watch carefully. It is a form of paranoia that isn't good for you, and I'm speaking from personal experience here. It is sometimes hard to see the best in folks when you have to experience these kinds of things as a common occurrence. And, sometimes, you make an accusation about a perceived action or lack thereof in these situations that the person accused does not even realize they've done or not done. And so, they take offense and you're off to the races.

It is so tiring. And stressful.

I think you made a good point about people of the majority population in the USA and Europe not really being familiar with these types of experiences because they are not subjected to them. All of the examples you mention are familiar to me, for instance and yes, it happens to all minority groups, perhaps in all countries where there are minority groups. I cannot speak to the reality of that because I cannot know it, but I do admit that it is a possibility.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

One of the most racist countries I have ever been in was in S. Korea I think around 1971, the kids happily or was it anger, threw rocks at me as a was riding a bicycle and called me White monkey.

How did that experience make you feel at the time? How old were you and is it a formative memory for you, if I may ask?

I actually observed a lot of racist asian barbs especially to White women. All over asia when I was stationed there, eg, Thailand, korea, Japan.

What do you mean when you say a lot and what do you mean when you say "barbs"?

It appears S Africa has it much worse now especially since the commie gov has got into power. Of course one can justify it all away with retributions needed against the whites, for their many years in power.

I agree, it is not possible to justify retribution as anything other than what it is. Revenge. How do you justify oppression in the first place? And is it your belief that the white farmers are being oppressed in South Africa?

James Newell

22nd January 2020, 20:24

I do not have much to add here sorry.

I would hope that other people on here who experience racism, big and small, please add your anecdotes to start to show the people on this forum what kinds of things they don't have to deal with.

I can totally agree with the above comment. While we all have probably experienced some kind of racist slur or incident of some kind in a lifetime. I don't see it as very important.
Martin Luther Kings statement of " Judge a person by his character and not by his skin color" is probably one of the best summations of living with your fellow man.

I might add to that, don't judge a person by his politics or religious beliefs either.

I think we have to be aware as Mankind as a group that there are some people or groups that love to create differences to sow discord. How many wars and death have been caused by mocked up "differences"? Divide and conquer is a time tested technique of conquering a group, nation and even a planet.

My prior post re S. Korea and Asia was probably to open up an Asian side to all this. Not to incite. The Asians back then were having new worlds opened up, and my comments were simply observations. It was an interesting feeling to be the only blond guy walking among the masses there, I kinda liked being a minority. The white women would get far more stares than me.

Mark

23rd January 2020, 16:07

What a pleasure to read your writing, Hym. Thank you for sharing!

I remember the highest likelihood of agency hit squads, one of which did the shooting itself. I remember the King family, knowing full well the truth, searching for the truth in court of an agency of the u.s. gov't's guilt in the assassination and not any guilt of james earl ray, after they had lengthly conversations with him.

This is so, MLK knew full well the power of the forces arrayed against not only him, but anyone who threatened the status quo. This video shows a man who knows he doesn't have long to live. It is one of his last, if not his last, public appearance before his assassination.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e49VEpWg61M

I would ask any black man why he would work for an agency that has never been held culpable for the death of Martin, providing the weapons that were used in Malcolm's murder, for inserting provocateurs as operatives in any empowerment movement, all done primarily for opposition to the profiteering war in Vietnam, the one step over the line in the most personal of self-sacrifices against evil. In this all I see no disconnect from economic and racial equality.

I don't speak for all black men who've worked for the military industrial complex or government, but as one who has done and is currently doing that, I believe I may be able to shed some light on your question. Blacks have fought for this nation since the American Revolution; recall Crispus Attucks, the first to die during the so-called Boston Tea Party. In every conflict. Recall the Buffalo Soldiers, who fought against native folks during the frontier years.

Past some originating generations of enslavement, the tie to Africa dissipated, as such things occur and people become creatures of their lived landscapes. Over many, many generations of trauma and pain, of life and love, of being tools of the control matrix while virtually - and physically - building this nation from the ground up, watering its soil with blood, sweat and tears, black Americans have come to feel a sense of ownership of this land. Not by dint of privilege but by dint of hard, soul-aching work, presence and sheer grit. Of surviving against all odds, of defeating attempts at genocide and by being so strong and resilient in the face of all efforts to deny, denigrate and destroy us physically, mentally and spiritually by an oppressor system and those who have propagated it.

We believe we ARE this nation. We are its promise in action. We are the proof of this system's full potentiality in effect, as in, the guarantee and promise of freedom to those who fight for it. Well, who has fought for it more than us? Not only against enemies foreign but also enemies of that very freedom the Constitution and Declaration enshrine, within.

You will never see black people leaving this nation en masse. And here, I'm speaking of those of us whose ancestors have been here for hundreds and thousands of years, as mine have. For one, we have no place to go, we are mixed, black, white and native. A new people, genetically engineered by slave masters and love. We are as much a part of this landscape as anyone who can be considered such and we are more a part of it than many who claim it as a mere vestige of their inherent expression of European-derived privilege.

We work against those elements of the system that seek to keep us disenfranchised, that seek to destroy us from the face of the earth and that work occurs within the system and without.

Martin saw no disconnect either. Which is why he sought to hold an interracial poverty march, right before his assassination. It has always been true that blacks and poor whites have had more in common than apart. President Lyndon B Johnson said it best: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

I find it hard to listen to the many obfuscations of the truths this great man shared with us, even while understanding the mechanisms of manipulation within academia, the media and the profiteers. I remember the turn to truths, from those that live far beyond hate, that Malcolm shared when he realized the common values we all share. Medgar Evers and millions of those as worthy as any other that ever lived who were victimized by the hatred, the greed and the fear. At the same time I hold no white guilt for the sins of other souls, as I know the temporary time limit of this human skin and the illusion of any value it does and does not have. I'll be working in the fields while others waste time blaming.

I appreciate your personal perspective greatly. The work engaged, is the Great Work, of alchemical transformation of a landscape and a people who are One, but who don't realize it yet because we are set against each other so skillfully by the masters of deceit and manipulation.

And, unless you have stepped up and in for others who are not of the majority wherever you live, when these challenges have threatened your income, your financial security, your personal freedom and your physical health...you do not know what it takes to be here and be of any worth. Your discussions about equality hold no merit with me. For me it has often been a matter of the rights of opportunity given as the duty of anyone in any government. It has almost always been the direct reality of economic equality not being given and even searched for when it is not present.

Yes.

Listening to my son and his stays in south america I see a stark contrast in the lives of those who are discriminated against, yet live in "democracies". It is always those who, like Lula, raise the common economic lives of the poor who are attacked. It is no coincidence that those being uplifted, who most often only want the opportunity to work for a humane wage, and not to gain some welfare, are of color not shared by those in control. It may be that overt racism can be dealt with much easier than living in any place where lip service pretends to equally provide opportunity. It is never a difficult thing to see, even as the lives of many are complex.

Such a beautiful share. Props and appreciation.

Hym

24th January 2020, 20:06

Thank You, Rahkyt.
I would rail against any black exodus from here. That'll never happen.

When I noted that agencies were likely responsible for the assassination of Dr.King I also meant the army squads assigned to the area at the time.

Here is an indelible experience I had when I was young.....

When I was 7 my Dad took me to a teamsters union strike in L.A. I don't recall him taking any other of my siblings to those picket lines. I remember the cold of the very early morning that day and welcoming the warmth as the day went on, but that happened very slowly as I wasn't used to staying so relatively still for so long. I recall how odd it was for all of the men there not working and watching his friends stopping the truckers to talk to them.

At one point in the morning a dark panel van pulled up. Police got out, big police and they quickly began harassing the strikers. My Dad told me that they were the Metro Squad. After they pushed the strikers around they singled out a Mexican-american man and put him in the van. There may have been more than one van and more than one police car there. I don't remember because I was so focused on the attack against the workers there.

As the van and the other cars were pulling away I asked my Dad what were the cops doing. He said that they were going to take this man, one of the loaders/swampers who worked with him to get his CDL, beat the crap out of him and then drop him off somewhere it would be hard for him to get back. I was shocked by this and asked him why. He said those cops were hired by the company they were striking against. He then said "He (my Dad's friend) is paying a price for us." The majority of the drivers and their loaders were black or hispanic at that time and most likely are the same majority to this day.

My son's birthday, August 28, is the memorial day that Dr. King made his "I Have A Dream" speech. That makes sense on many levels if you ever get to know him.

Mark

29th January 2020, 16:32

Hello, Hym, thank you again for sharing your experiences. I am appreciative of and encourage all who wish to do the same, these are stories of real people living real experiences. None of the issues we discuss in this thread are hypothetical or ideological, they have to do with what we go through and how we interpret, through our subjective lenses, the world around us. None of us has all the answers, but we all possess a small piece of it. And it is only by sharing those piecees that we can see the larger picture and understand the parameters of what is truly going on and why.

As the van and the other cars were pulling away I asked my Dad what were the cops doing. He said that they were going to take this man, one of the loaders/swampers who worked with him to get his CDL, beat the crap out of him and then drop him off somewhere it would be hard for him to get back. I was shocked by this and asked him why. He said those cops were hired by the company they were striking against. He then said "He (my Dad's friend) is paying a price for us." The majority of the drivers and their loaders were black or hispanic at that time and most likely are the same majority to this day.

This story is amazing and so pertinent. Your father's quote reminds me of something that I've spoken of before in this thread but that deserves revisiting, because it cannot be under-emphasized as it has to do with the very formulation of this nation and the current racial dichotomy that we are all trapped systemically within. What your father was speaking to directly and probably consciously is the very essence of the divide that was deliberately created by the British and then consolidated and continued by the American aristocrats that succeeded them in ruling this nation.

Bacon's Rebellion (https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/bacon_s_rebellion_1676-1677) occurred in 1676-77 and it was the first, and last, large-scale multi-racial uprising against a government in American history. People from across the class structure, to include indentured Irish and Africans, fought together against Indians, whom were the original target, and British forces that came in to bolster the government and suppress the rebellion. According to Wikipedia (which suffices for this general, descriptive purpose), this collective action by the general populace had the following effect:

The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (many enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class. The ruling class responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.

Racialized slavery and the obsolescence of indentured servitude had been coming for a while. Throughout the mid to late 1600s laws had been passed locally and at the state level making it more difficult for African descended folk to obtain freedom, from enshrining intergenerational enslavement to tying enslavement to the status of the mother, which was designed in order to absolve slave masters from the responsibility of all of the rapey behavior they were involved in as well as the responsibility to and care of the children produced by that rapine behavior, throughout that era of American history, which spanned hundreds of years.

It was also at this point that the ruling class began to offer the previously indentured Irish jobs on the slave patrol, as overseers and other now middle-class occupations, as kind of a barrier between the enslaved and those who, at that point, were beginning to be considered as a singular, white race. So this was the very beginning of what is now a global consideration, that those of European descent are one people, heretofore known as "white" people. Prior to this point, this was not a political designation. Europeans were and are prejudiced against each other, generally along the lines of core (Great Britain, Germany, France, etc.) versus periphery nations (Italy, Portugal, Greece, etc.). But in America, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, whiteness as a bulwark against blackness, was formally institutionalized.

As an examination of Bacon's Rebellion will reveal - taken alongside a further exploration of American history from the viewpoint of organized resistance against the depredations of capital - it has always been about the money.

Land was also granted to the Irish and other lower-class whites, especially as the westward expansion continued but in the east, this practice served to invest those lower class whites in the system and its propagation and further separate them from the blacks they had allied themselves with against governmental forces previously.

As yours and your father's experience attests, Hym, those same practices are in effect today. They have been institutionalized over time and continue to separate us, or, as occurred in your personal experience, help us to understand the overall plight of the lower and underclass by way of graphic and poignant example.

His statement to you, "He is paying a price for us" is an exact understanding of white supremacy and capitalism as practiced in America. The lower classes in general and the black and brown inhabitants of those strata, pay the price in pain and suffering, in living lives of the permanent underclass, which serve to strike fear into whites and select blacks and browns inhabiting the upper lower and middle classes. That fear is seminal, in that it says to all of us that the jobs we hold are at the sufferance and will of those who create the jobs and they can be taken away at any time. The beating that brown (or black) man took served further to show all of the workers, but white workers in particular, that their job status and economic stability is ephemeral and dependent upon their acquiescence to the demands of capitalism and the institution of racial hierarchy. As perception extends up the class structure, these realizations become more stark as, the higher you rise, the harder the fall. The message seems to be, death and destruction of all you hold dear, if you do not comply.

I would like to emphasize now that this generalization stands examination across the board and also across the span of American history. Any objective review of this nation's history and the codification of racialized slavery, the subsequent Black Codes following emancipation, Jim Crow institutionalization, Segregation and then partial de-segregation and integration, in residence as well as employment, will show this interpretation to have been and to be, even still, in some ways, the norm.

My son's birthday, August 28, is the memorial day that Dr. King made his "I Have A Dream" speech. That makes sense on many levels if you ever get to know him.

A wonderful, blessed synchronicity, which speaks to your family's purpose and destiny, perhaps, if you are a believer in such things. It is a pleasure holding these conversations with you. :)

Mark

31st January 2020, 17:35

It is good to have an understanding of the history, especially of the parts not generally told. The parts you don't learn in High School, the parts even colleges and universities generally don't get into very deeply.

The reason why it is so good is because the devil is in the details, where it is difficult to make generalizations or blanket statements with no justification in history or even logically, because the actual reality is there with you, before you, engaged and understood, made a part of your general corpus of knowledge.

This article documents that background of scientific racism in America, doesn't get into Darwin or Linnaeus or the other proponents that informed the rising Eugenicists of the late Victorian era and early 20th century, but it informs, generally and provides a structure for further knowledge to augment. The links provide other tales that inform the present as well.

A brief history of the enduring phony science that perpetuates white supremacy (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-brief-history-of-the-enduring-phony-science-that-perpetuates-white-supremacy/2019/04/29/20e6aef0-5aeb-11e9-a00e-050dc7b82693_story.html)

The mysterious and chronic sickness had been afflicting slaves for years, working its way into their minds and causing them to flee from their plantations.

Unknown in medical literature, its troubling symptoms were familiar to masters and overseers, especially in the South, where hundreds of enslaved people ran from captivity every year.

On March 12, 1851, the noted physician Samuel A. Cartwright reported to the Medical Association of Louisiana that he had identified the malady and, by combining two Greek terms, given it a name: Drapetomania.

Drapetes, a runaway, and mania, madness.

He also announced that it was completely curable.

Negroes, with their smaller brains and blood vessels, and their tendency toward indolence and barbarism, Cartwright told fellow doctors, had only to be kept benevolently in the state of submission, awe and reverence that God had ordained.

“The Negro is [then] spellbound, and cannot run away,” he said.

The Dawn of American Slavery: Jamestown 400 special report (https://www.washingtonpost.com/american-slavery/?utm_term=.c497181db44c&tid=lk_interstitial_manual_10)

Cartwright’s presentation a decade before the Civil War was part of the long, insidious practice of what historians call scientific racism — the spread of bogus theories of supposed black inferiority in an attempt to rationalize slavery and centuries of social and economic domination and plunder.

Here, enslaved people were beneath even the human desire for freedom. They had to be diseased.

This thinking would thrive in the 18th and especially the 19th centuries. It would mutate, vary in perversion and persevere for 400 years right up to the present day. Starting with theories of physical and intellectual inferiority that likened blacks to animals — monkeys and apes especially — or helpless children, it would evolve to infer black cultural and then social inferiority.

“What black inferiority meant has changed in every generation . . . but ultimately Americans have been making the same case,” said historian Ibram X. Kendi.

Such thought exists today with pernicious assumptions about the current nature of black life and black people, still featuring age-old racist references to blacks as animals. It persists despite the advent of modern DNA science, which has shown race to be fundamentally a social construct. Humans, as it turns out, share about 99.9 percent of their DNA with each other, and outward physical characteristics such as hair texture and skin color, about which racists have long obsessed, occupy just a tiny portion of the human genome.

Even so, many Americans, blind to the origins of racist notions, “think that there’s such things as black blood and black diseases and that black people are by nature predisposed to dancing and athletics,” Kendi said. “These are common ideas.”

Modern examples — sometimes overt, sometimes seemingly springing from the collective American subconscious — underscore the insidiousness of pseudoscientific ideas about race that were first promoted in earlier centuries.

Consider comedian Roseanne Barr’s use of an ape analogy (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2019/03/21/feature/inside-roseanne-barrs-explosive-tweet/?utm_term=.093d3c473e23&tid=lk_inline_manual_22) in a tweet about Valerie Jarrett, an African American adviser to President Barack Obama, which led to the cancellation of Barr’s ABC television show.

Now consider Cartwright’s claims in 1851 that, among other things, a Negro withstood the rays of the sun better because of an eye feature like one found in apes.

Cartwright also speciously observed that the black man’s neck was shorter than a white person’s, his “bile” was a deeper color, his blood blacker, his feet flatter, his skull different.

Anthony and Mary Johnson: the free black pioneers whose surprising story tells much about race in Virginia (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/anthony-and-mary-johnson-are-pioneers-on-the-eastern-shore-whose-surprising-story-tells-much-about-race-in-virginia-history/2019/04/29/aefaec8e-605d-11e9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html?utm_term=.1ce4899a0090&tid=lk_interstitial_manual_26)

Yet, in addition to his keen eyesight, he had other animal-like senses, smelling better and hearing better than the white man.

“Like children, [Negroes] require government in everything . . . or they will run into excesses,” Cartwright said. Slavery, he concluded unsurprisingly, was for the enslaved person’s own good.

The twisted vestiges of scientific racism continue to inspire white hatred of and violence toward blacks today.

“Anyone who thinks that White and black people look as different as we do on the outside, but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional,” mass murderer Dylann Roof wrote in the crude manifesto that he posted on the Internet in 2015. “Negroes have lower Iqs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior.”

On June 17, 2015, Roof went into an African American church in Charleston, S.C., and shot nine black worshipers to death. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

'More sensation than reflection'
Self-interested justifications for atrocities against and the oppression of African Americans go back to the 1400s and an early Portuguese defense of slave trading written by Gomes Eanes de Zurara, wrote Kendi, a professor at American University in Washington, in his book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (https://www.amazon.com/Stamped-Beginning-Definitive-History-National/dp/1568584636/ref=asc_df_1568584636/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312126490544&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5551167487329073236&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9007806&hvtargid=pla-319371347036&psc=1),” which won the 2016 National Book Award.

Zurara wrote that captured Africans had “lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings . . . [and] only knew how to live in bestial sloth.” Once enslaved, their souls could be saved and their lives improved, he said.

On this side of the Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson played an early and highly influential role in the establishment of pseudoscientific ideas about black racial inferiority.

On Feb. 27, 1787, more than a decade after he helped write the Declaration of Independence, future president Jefferson published his book “Notes on the State of Virginia,” an extensive study of subjects including his state’s geography, climate, religion and its enslaved black population.

The haunted houses’: Legacy of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion lingers, but reminders are disappearing (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/the-haunted-houses-legacy-of-nat-turners-slave-rebellion-lingers-but-reminders-are-disappearing/2019/04/29/d267d814-5d68-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html?utm_term=.f486274e74ee&tid=lk_interstitial_manual_42)

The book made clear that when the revered Founding Father said it was “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he was not including black people.

“In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection,” wrote Jefferson, whose livelihood depended on the existence of slavery. “In imagination they are dull [and] tasteless. . . . This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

“Deep rooted prejudices . . . real distinctions which nature has made . . . and many other circumstances will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race,” he wrote.

It was perhaps the most damaging and enduring instance of scientific racism in American history, Kendi said.

“This was one of the . . . best selling nonfiction books in early America,” he said. “And black and other anti-racist activists were arguing against Jefferson’s theory of black intellectual inferiority into the 1830s.”

'Pervading darkness'
In 1849, Samuel Cartwright was engaged by a Louisiana medical committee to investigate “the diseases and physical peculiarities of our negro population.”

He seemed well qualified. The 57-year-old native of Fairfax County, Va., had practiced in Natchez, Miss., for 25 years, and his patients included his friend Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy. The same year the report was issued, he was appointed professor of “diseases of the Negro” at what is now Tulane University.

He began his report for the Louisiana committee by reviewing “the anatomical and physiological differences between the negro and the white man.”

Skin color was obvious.

But “there are other differences more deep, durable and indelible,” he wrote. “The membranes, the muscles, the tendons . . . even the negro’s brain and nerves . . . are tinctured with a shade of pervading darkness.”

Then there was the true cause of the enslaved person’s “debasement of mind,” he wrote.

“It is . . . [the] defective hematosis, or atmosperization of the blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium . . . [that] has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves,” he claimed.

The remarkable survival story of Angela, the first enslaved African woman recorded in Virginia (https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/29/she-was-captured-enslaved-years-ago-now-angela-symbolizes-brutal-history/?utm_term=.5d76ba809b2b&tid=lk_interstitial_manual_60)

Although Cartwright’s ideas were actually part of a long racist tradition, by the time he rendered them they had a new urgency, said Khalil Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

The rise of the movement to abolish slavery “created a crisis of knowledge about . . . who people of African descent were in the hierarchy of man, and what precisely were they capable of,” he said.

Until then, he said, despite pronouncements like Jefferson’s, science wasn’t essential to justifying slavery. Now, under threat, the then-250-year-old institution was direly in need of a “scientific” rationale.

“There is a great convulsion before us,” Josiah C. Nott, a South Carolina physician, anthropologist and a future medical director in the Confederate army, told a Southern Rights Association meeting in 1851.

“It is time that we should arouse from our lethargy and prepare for the crises,” he said.

Nott offered his pseudoscientific rationale: “Look around you . . . at the Negro races,” Nott said. “Their physical type is peculiar; their grade of intellect is greatly inferior; they are utterly wanting in moral and physical energy.”

Embedded within his speech was a not-so-hidden motive: The institution of slavery, he said, “has grown up with us from our infancy, it has become part of our very being; our national prosperity and domestic happiness are inseparable from it.”

Evolutionary ladder
Around that time, in 1850, an enslaved man named Jack stood before a camera in Columbia, S.C. His face was deeply creased, perhaps from age, perhaps from long exposure to the weather.

He was described as a “driver” — of what was not specified. Livestock? Wagons? People?

Originally from Guinea, in West Africa, he was owned by one B.F. Taylor Esq., who had a plantation in Columbia, S.C.

That March, Jack, who looked about 40, and six other enslaved men and women, were brought to the studio to have their photographs taken. They were specimens, and for the most part they were pictured naked.

The images were made at the behest of Louis Agassiz, the famous Swiss American scientist and Harvard professor, who was studying what was called “polygenism.”

This was the latest “scientific” tool applied to the idea of supposed black inferiority: the now-discredited notion that man sprang from numerous sources and that “races” could therefore be categorized and ranked.

It would carry well into the 20th century.

The photographs were “designed to analyze the physical differences between European whites and African blacks, but at the same time . . . prove the superiority of the white race,” photography scholar Brian Wallis wrote in a 1995 essay on the pictures.

“In nineteenth-century anthropology, blacks were often situated along the evolutionary ladder midway between a classical ideal and the orangutan,” he wrote.

The Bible was used to justify slavery. The Africans made it their path to freedom (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-bible-was-used-to-justify-slavery-then-africans-made-it-their-path-to-freedom/2019/04/29/34699e8e-6512-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html?utm_term=.2a020fe7141a&tid=lk_interstitial_manual_78)

Such thinking went with the rise in the early 1900s of modern eugenics — the idea that a “race” could and should be purified by selective breeding and the elimination of flawed peoples.

In 1916, a New York lawyer and racial theorist named Madison Grant wrote a notorious book called “The Passing of the Great Race.”

Grant, whose father, a Union army doctor, had earned the Medal of Honor in the Civil War, believed in a rigid racial hierarchy, with “nordics” at the top and blacks and others at the bottom.

“Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within,” Grant wrote.

His book was translated into several languages.

One reader in Germany was especially admiring. He, too, mused about extermination, but of a different “race.” His name was Adolf Hitler, and he reportedly referred to his copy of the book as his Bible.

In 1936, African American sprinter Jesse Owens smashed the ideas of Hitler and Madison when he won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics.

But Owens’s own track coach belittled the success of black runners: “It was not long ago that his ability to sprint and jump was a life-and-death matter to him in the jungle.”

The old notion lived on, and so have many white social and economic advantages.

Even when “Americans have discarded old racist ideas, new racist ideas have constantly been produced for their renewed consumption,” Kendi wrote.

Some day, he hoped, the time will come “when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with black people is that they think there is something wrong with black people.”

‘The haunted houses’: Legacy of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion lingers, but reminders are disappearing (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/the-haunted-houses-legacy-of-nat-turners-slave-rebellion-lingers-but-reminders-are-disappearing/2019/04/29/d267d814-5d68-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html?utm_term=.b38775cd18ec&tid=lk_readmore_manual_91)

Freedom and slavery, the ‘central paradox of American history’ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/freedom-and-slavery-the-central-paradox-of-american-history/2019/04/30/16063754-2e3a-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html?utm_term=.d1cefaf38d25&tid=lk_readmore_manual_92)

Anthony and Mary Johnson were pioneers on the Eastern Shore whose surprising story tells much about race in Virginia history (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/anthony-and-mary-johnson-are-pioneers-on-the-eastern-shore-whose-surprising-story-tells-much-about-race-in-virginia-history/2019/04/29/aefaec8e-605d-11e9-bfad-36a7eb36cb60_story.html?utm_term=.58baaac25d69&tid=lk_readmore_manual_93)

Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.

Gracy

31st January 2020, 22:42

This guy really intrigues me, had to listen to his entire talk with Joe Rogan today. His name is Daryl Davis, and he is on a one man mission to end racism in America via education, the elimination of ignorance.

I recall briefly stumbling across his unique and fascinating story some time back, hearing about the 200 or so Klan members who wound up walking away from it due to growing relationships with him, and even seeing photos of these friendships, robes and all if you can believe it!

42406 42407

4240842409

When I saw he had done Rogan for 2 1/2 plus hours, I simply had to hear this man out.

Here is the talk, comes with my absolute highest recommendation, especially about the first hour and twenty minutes or so describing how he started down the road of befriending, and eventually inspiring many high level Klan members to consider taking their lives in a different direction.

Absolutely riveting. A great man imo!
oGTQ0Wj6yIg

Mark

5th February 2020, 15:02

Even though the beginnings of the modern science of genetics were in American slave studies, American eugenics movements of the late Victorian, Geography and Environmental Determinism and, a bit later, the Nazi concentration camps, its efficacy and current state of exploratory remorselessness has resulted in the application of the science to many questions that shed light on topics otherwise relegated merely to myth and whimsy. There are a number of questions regarding the issue of skin color that remain mysterious, it seems that the prevailing theory of cold climes being the cause for lightening skin coloration remains predominant, which makes sense environmentally, but does not necessarily account for all examples, for instance, the Inuit. This article does provide some context for the movement of peoples and the evolution of the European population.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42414&d=1580914153

How Europeans evolved white skin (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin)
By Ann Gibbons (https://www.sciencemag.org/author/ann-gibbons)

Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago.

The origins of Europeans have come into sharp focus in the past year as researchers have sequenced the genomes of ancient populations, rather than only a few individuals. By comparing key parts of the DNA across the genomes of 83 ancient individuals from archaeological sites throughout Europe, the international team of researchers reported earlier this year that Europeans today are a mix of the blending of at least three ancient populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe in separate migrations over the past 8000 years. The study revealed that a massive migration of Yamnaya herders from the steppes north of the Black Sea may have brought Indo-European languages to Europe (http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/02/mysterious-indo-european-homeland-may-have-been-steppes-ukraine-and-russia) about 4500 years ago.

Now, a new study from the same team drills down further into that remarkable data to search for genes that were under strong natural selection—including traits so favorable that they spread rapidly throughout Europe in the past 8000 years. By comparing the ancient European genomes with those of recent ones from the 1000 Genomes Project, population geneticist Iain Mathieson, a postdoc in the Harvard University lab of population geneticist David Reich, found five genes associated with changes in diet and skin pigmentation that underwent strong natural selection.

First, the scientists confirmed an earlier report that the hunter-gatherers in Europe could not digest the sugars in milk 8000 years ago, according to a poster. They also noted an interesting twist: The first farmers also couldn’t digest milk. The farmers who came from the Near East about 7800 years ago and the Yamnaya pastoralists who came from the steppes 4800 years ago lacked the version of the LCT gene that allows adults to digest sugars in milk. It wasn’t until about 4300 years ago that lactose tolerance swept through Europe.

When it comes to skin color, the team found a patchwork of evolution in different places, and three separate genes that produce light skin, telling a complex story for how European’s skin evolved to be much lighter during the past 8000 years. The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today.

But in the far north—where low light levels would favor pale skin—the team found a different picture in hunter-gatherers: Seven people from the 7700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. They also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair. Thus ancient hunter-gatherers of the far north were already pale and blue-eyed, but those of central and southern Europe had darker skin.

Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.

The team also tracked complex traits, such as height, which are the result of the interaction of many genes. They found that selection strongly favored several gene variants for tallness in northern and central Europeans, starting 8000 years ago, with a boost coming from the Yamnaya migration, starting 4800 years ago. The Yamnaya have the greatest genetic potential for being tall of any of the populations, which is consistent with measurements of their ancient skeletons. In contrast, selection favored shorter people in Italy and Spain starting 8000 years ago (http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/03/13/016477), according to the paper now posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. Spaniards, in particular, shrank in stature 6000 years ago, perhaps as a result of adapting to colder temperatures and a poor diet.

Surprisingly, the team found no immune genes under intense selection, which is counter to hypotheses that diseases would have increased after the development of agriculture.

The paper doesn’t specify why these genes might have been under such strong selection. But the likely explanation for the pigmentation genes is to maximize vitamin D synthesis (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6212/934.summary?sid=91e8ebfd-8581-4bd7-bac5-26dc16bf5a87), said paleoanthropologist Nina Jablonski of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, as she looked at the poster’s results at the meeting. People living in northern latitudes often don’t get enough UV to synthesize vitamin D in their skin so natural selection has favored two genetic solutions to that problem—evolving pale skin that absorbs UV more efficiently or favoring lactose tolerance to be able to digest the sugars and vitamin D naturally found in milk. “What we thought was a fairly simple picture of the emergence of depigmented skin in Europe is an exciting patchwork of selection as populations disperse into northern latitudes,” Jablonski says. “This data is fun because it shows how much recent evolution has taken place.”

Anthropological geneticist George Perry, also of Penn State, notes that the work reveals how an individual’s genetic potential is shaped by their diet and adaptation to their habitat. “We’re getting a much more detailed picture now of how selection works.”

Mark

5th February 2020, 15:11

This guy really intrigues me, had to listen to his entire talk with Joe Rogan today. His name is Daryl Davis, and he is on a one man mission to end racism in America via education, the elimination of ignorance.

oGTQ0Wj6yIg

I've also heard of this gentleman and his work, although I have never listened to or watched him discuss it. Thanks for sharing this resource, I will definitely check it out and I hope others do as well!

This is the deep work of our times and those who do it are to be commended. People are people, I've found and, one on one, it is always possible to make a way with most, to create common cause and to find places and spaces of agreement and connection.

I've done a bit of this work myself, although not in the direct and confrontational manner Daryl has. In being open and engaging, I have found that people open up to me and share their stories, why they have held prejudices against black folks and others. I've often found that it generally goes back to one incident that often happened during childhood where there was a bad experience with someone of color that then colored their perception of all people of color from that moment on. It is a typical human response and comes down to a safety and fear issue, which makes perfect sense. I've been blessed to have been able to break those stereotypes for a good number of people in my life integrating spaces in America and abroad, just by being who I am with my background and experience.

It is all about the human connection. Actually showing people that we are more alike than different, no matter our skin color.

Mark

5th February 2020, 16:27

These days it really is all about the science. To counter arguments based upon incorrect underlying assumptions, it is necessary to know the facts as they stand. There are a few in this article, with links to other resources.

How to fight racism using science (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/26/fight-racism-using-science-race-genetics-bigotry-african-americans-sport-linnaeus)
Misguided assumptions about race are going mainstream, but hard facts can help you combat entrenched attitudes

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42417&d=1580919376

It seems we can’t move for comments about race dominating our media landscape, be it about an actor formerly known as a princess, or by an actor previously unknown to anyone outside of his famous acting dynasty. These are fractious times, and such debates appear to be increasing in frequency. But there are some fights for which you can arm yourself in advance – and when the argument is about race, the weapon of choice is science.

Racism is a prejudice that has a longstanding relationship with science. The invention of race occurred in the age of empires and plunder, when men of the emerging discipline of science classified the people of the world, mostly from their armchairs. Carl Linnaeus is the father of biological taxonomy, having invented the system that we use today: genus and species – Homo sapiens. He was also a central figure in the emergence of scientific racism too, alongside Kant, Voltaire and a host of other European men.

Classifications were based primarily on skin colour, some on a handful of skull measurements, and they also came with some shoddy value judgments: Linnaeus had the people of Africa as lazy and “governed by caprice”; Native Americans were “zealous and stubborn”; East Asians were haughty, greedy, and “ruled by opinions”. Voltaire believed that black people were a different species. All of these taxonomies were inherently hierarchical, with white Europeans always on top.

In the 19th century, Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton and others tightened their scientific arguments for race though, as Darwin noted, no one could agree on how many races there actually were, the range being between one and 63. Galton was an amazing scientist, and a stunning racist. The most delicious irony about him is that the field he effectively established – human genetics – is the branch of science that has demonstrated unequivocally that race is not biologically meaningful. Modern genetics clearly shows that the way we colloquially define race does not align with the biology that underpins human variation. Instead, race is a cultural taxonomy – a social construct. This doesn’t mean it is invalid or unimportant, nor does it mean that race does not exist. Humans are social animals, and the way we perceive each other is of paramount importance. Race (https://www.theguardian.com/world/race) exists because we perceive it.

Racism seems to be making a comeback in public life: the prime minister has a well-stocked back catalogue of racist remarks, most notably describing Congolese people as “piccanninies” with “watermelon smiles”. Antisemitism is a defining issue for the 21st-century Labour party. Sport has always suffered from racist fans, and in 2018, bananas were thrown on to pitches at black footballers such as Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, as they were routinely 30 years ago. The England cricketer Jofra Archer was subjected to racist abuse in a Test match in New Zealand in November.

We all know someone who has casually racist opinions: the misattribution of elite athletic success to ancestry rather than training, that east Asian students are naturally better at maths; or that Jews are innately good with money. Racism may be back, so get tooled up, because science is no ally to racists. Here are some standard canards of prejudice, and why science says something different.

Skin in the game
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42418&d=1580919391

What we see with our eyes is the merest fraction of a person. But humans are a highly visual species, and skin colour is the primary factor in allocating race. This idea is modern though, only becoming the primary classifier during the so-called Age of Enlightenment. Modern genetics reveals a much more complicated – and fascinating – picture.

Lighter skin is, at least partially, an adaptation to less sunny skies, as a means of protecting us from folate deficiency. Homo sapiens originated as an African species, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we were ancestrally dark-skinned, nor that everyone was the same colour. Some of the differences we can see and measure between populations are local adaptations to evolutionary pressures such as food availability and disease. Similarly, genes for lighter pigmentation have been selected by an evolution away from the equator. But the palette of skin colour within the African continent is far greater than anywhere else, meaning that a simplistic model of selection based on exposure to the sun only explains a fraction of that diversity. There are 1.3 billion Africans, 42 million African Americans. Not only are these huge numbers, but the people in question are more diverse genetically than anyone else on Earth. And yet westerners refer to all of them as “black”. This is a scientifically meaningless classification, and one that is baked into western culture from five centuries of scientific racism. Stereotyping based on pigmentation is foolish, because racial differences are skin deep.

These lands are your lands
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42416&d=1580919365

“England for the English” warbled Morrissey in his song The National Front Disco (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1cTiqXWKII). Now that Mozza has given apparent support to For Britain (https://www.forbritain.uk/), a political party even Nigel Farage thinks is full of “Nazis and racists”, it’s no longer clear the lyrics were ironic. Although Morrissey denies he is a racist, the sentiment is an old racist refrain. In July last year, President Trump suggested that if four elected US congresswomen didn’t like it in the US, they should go back to where they came from (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/14/trump-squad-tlaib-omar-pressley-ocasio-cortez). Three of them were born in the United States and one is a Somali-born American citizen. Meanwhile, Trump’s paternal grandparents were German immigrants, his mother Scottish-born, his first wife Moravian, his third, Slovenian. It is never clear where the benchmark for indigeneity lies.

Indigeneity is a tricky concept. The British Isles have been invaded throughout their history: 1066 was the most recent hostile conquest, but before that, we were occupied by Vikings, who followed Angles, Saxons, Alans, and dozens of other tribes. The Romans ruled for a while, with conscripts not from Rome but from all over their empire, including Gaul, the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa.

About 4,500 years ago, Britain was populated primarily with farmers who had European ancestors. DNA taken from the bones of the long dead suggests they were probably olive-skinned, with dark hair and brown eyes.

The Beaker folk arrived in Britain about 4,400 years ago, and again according to ancient DNA, within a few centuries had replaced almost the entire population. We don’t know how or why, whether it was violence, disease, or something else.

Before them there were darker-skinned hunter-gatherers, who had been there a few thousand years. Then it all gets a bit foggy. The earliest evidence of British humans is in the crumbling coastline of Happisburgh in Norfolk, where size nine footprints of an unknown species of human were set in soft stone 900,000 years ago.

No country, people, political power or border is permanent. The only true indigenous Brits were not even our own species. So, when racists say “England for the English”, or when they talk about indigenous people, I do not know who they mean, or more specifically, when they mean. They probably don’t either.

Pure blood
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42415&d=1580919353

White supremacists are obsessed with DNA. I spend time lurking in some of the nastiest corners of the internet, partially so that you don’t have to, but also to track their conversations about ancestry. Racist online cesspits such as Stormfront and 4Chan and 8Kun are flooded with thousands of posts about racial purity and ancestry-testing products. Occasionally, these commercial kits reveal previously unknown ancestry from people that white supremacists loathe. White purity is the key idea within white supremacy, and reactions are often conspiracy-fuelled (“the companies are owned by Jews”), or just absurd: “When you look in the mirror, do you see a jew [sic]? If not, you’re good,” which somewhat undermines the point of the tests.

There are no purebred humans. Our family trees are matted webs, and all lines of our ancestry get tangled after a few generations. All Nazis have Jewish forebears, all racists have African ancestors. Non-racists often think that their ancestry is somehow pure too, and this can be bolstered by misinterpreting commercial genetic ancestry kits. But no matter how isolated or wholesome you think your family tree is, it is a node on a tangled bank, linked directly to everyone else on your continent after only a few centuries, and everyone in the world after a couple of millennia.

Genealogy and genetic genealogy are not perfectly aligned, and due to the way DNA is shuffled during the production of sperm and egg, much is cumulatively lost over the generations. What this means is that you carry DNA from only half of your ancestors 11 generations back. You are genetically unrelated to people from whom you are actually descended as recently as the middle of the 18th century. You are descended from multitudes, most of whom you know nothing about, and many of whom you have no meaningful genetic relationship with.

Black power
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42419&d=1580919841

The last white man to win the 100m final at the Olympics was Allan Wells in 1980, a year when the US boycotted the event. This was also the last time white men competed in the final, five in total. For many, this forms the basis of a long-standing assumption that black people – and more specifically African Americans, Jamaicans or Canadians – have a biological advantage for explosive energy sports.

Unfortunately, elite sportspeople are an abysmal sample on which to make generalisations about populations – they are already wonderfully freakish outliers. The sample size is hopeless, too: the total number of athletes that have competed in the 100m Olympic final since Wells took the gold is 58. Five of them were African, and not from the west African countries from where the enslaved were taken. By this metric, Africans are exactly as successful as white people in the 100m since 1980.

The argument that informs this misguided idea is that centuries of slavery have resulted in selection for explosive energy genes (about which we know very little). This is also a total nonstarter, for many reasons. Most significantly, we can look for the signals of evolutionary selection in African Americans since the beginning of transatlantic slavery, that is, genes that have proliferated in that population. A 2014 study (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259220337_Genome-wide_Scan_of_29141_African_Americans_Finds_No_Evidence_of_Directional_Selection_since_Admixture) of the DNA of 29,141 African Americans showed no signs of selection across the whole genome for any trait in the time since their ancestors were taken from their African homelands.

But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that genes were selected that related to power and strength. Why then do eastern Europeans dominate weightlifting, yet are absent from sprinting? Why do African Americans dominate in boxing, but not wrestling? Where are all the black sprint cyclists? Why is it that in the 50m freestyle in swimming in the whole history of the Olympics, the number of African American finalists is… one? None of these facts align with the slavery explanation for African American dominance in the 100m.

The transatlantic slave trade also imported millions of West African people to South America. The number of South Americans of any ancestry to have competed in the 100m finals? Zero.

The point is this: sprinters in the Olympics, or indeed any elite sportspeople, are not a dataset on which a statistician could draw any satisfactory conclusion. Yet it is precisely the data on which extremely popular racial stereotypes are based. Elite athletes deserve better praise than the belief that they have auspicious ancestry.

Mark

5th February 2020, 17:39

I've had some extra time today so forgive the extra articles, I didn't want to leave and continue with my RL adventures before stopping at the abode of race and intelligence, a topic I've seen mentioned as an aside quite some number of times, in this space over the years. It is difficult for me not to address it every time that I've seen it but I haven't, generally, as it is an in-depth and fraught discussion. I find this article to address it superbly with many, many links and examples to the actual science and the pseudo-scientific discussions and implications that often obscure the very real differences that can be found between and within diverse populations.

I find that just knowing how intricate the discussion is and recognizing the sheer impossibility of accurately coming to the conclusion many "race" scientists and supremacist apologists have just to make a splash, some money or noteriety, casts the debate in more of a social and cultural rather than scientific context which reveals the true intentions underlying the debate in the first place.

Stop Talking About Race and IQ (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/stop-talking-about-race-and-iq-take-it-from-someone-who-did.html)
Take it from someone who did.

By WILLIAM SALETAN (https://slate.com/author/william-saletan)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42420&d=1580923199

The race-and-IQ debate is back. The latest round started a few weeks ago when Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote a New York Times op-ed (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html) in defense of race as a biological fact. The piece resurfaced Sam Harris’ year-old Waking Up podcast interview with Charles Murray (https://samharris.org/podcasts/forbidden-knowledge/), co-author of The Bell Curve (https://books.google.com/books?id=s4CKqxi6yWIC&printsec=frontcover), and launched a Twitter debate between Harris and Vox’s Ezra Klein. Klein then responded to Harris and Reich in Vox (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve), Harris fired back (https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/), and Andrew Sullivan went after Klein (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/denying-genetics-isnt-shutting-down-racism-its-fueling-it.html). Two weeks ago, Klein and Harris released a two-hour podcast (https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17210248/sam-harris-ezra-klein-charles-murray-transcript-podcast) in which they fruitlessly continued their dispute (https://samharris.org/podcasts/123-identity-honesty/).

I’ve watched this debate for more than a decade. It’s the same wreck, over and over. A person with a taste for puncturing taboos learns about racial gaps in IQ scores and the idea that they might be genetic. He writes or speaks about it, credulously or unreflectively. Every part of his argument is attacked: the validity of IQ, the claim that it’s substantially heritable, and the idea that races can be biologically distinguished. The offender is denounced as racist when he thinks he’s just defending science against political correctness.

I know what it’s like to be this person because, 11 years ago, I was that person (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/features/2007/created_equal/liberalcreationism.html). I saw a comment from Nobel laureate James Watson about the black-white IQ gap, read some journal articles about it, and bought in (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/features/2007/created_equal/liberalcreationism.html). That was a mistake. Having made that mistake, I’m in no position to throw stones at Sullivan, Harris, or anyone else. But I am in a position to speak to these people as someone who understands where they’re coming from. I believe I can change their thinking, because I’ve changed mine, and I’m here to make that case to them. And I hope those of you who find this whole subject vile will bear with me as I do.

Here’s my advice: You can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about the genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they’re the same thing. Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2008/05/not_black_and_white.html). It overextends the science you’re defending, and it engulfs the whole debate in moral flames.

I’m not asking anyone to deny science. What I’m asking for is clarity. The genetics of race and the genetics of intelligence are two different fields of research. In his piece in the Times, Reich wrote about prostate cancer risk, a context in which there’s clear evidence of a genetic pattern related to ancestry. (Black men with African ancestry in a specific DNA region (https://www.nature.com/articles/ng2015) have a higher prostate cancer risk than do black men with European ancestry in that region.) Reich steered around intelligence where, despite racial and ethnic gaps in test scores, no such pattern has been established.

It’s also fine to discuss the genetics of IQ—there’s a serious line of scientific inquiry (https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech) around that subject—and whether intelligence, in any population, is an inherited social advantage. We tend to worry that talk of heritability will lead to eugenics. But it’s also worth noting that, to the extent that IQ, like wealth, is inherited and concentrated (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/) through assortative (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22774442) mating (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886913006399), it can stratify society and undermine cohesion. That’s what much of The Bell Curve was about.

The trouble starts when people who write or talk about the heritability of intelligence extend this idea to comparisons between racial and ethnic groups. Some people do this maliciously; others don’t. You can call the latter group naïve, credulous, or obtuse to prejudice. But they might be open to persuasion, and that’s my aim here. For them, the chain of thought might go something like this: Intelligence is partly genetic, and race is partly genetic. So maybe racial differences on intelligence tests can be explained, in part, by genetics.

There are two scientific problems with making this kind of inference. The first is that bringing race into the genetic conversation obscures the causal analysis. Genes might play no role in racial gaps on IQ tests. But suppose they did: To that extent, what would be the point of talking about race? Some white kids, some black kids, and some Asian kids would have certain genes that marginally favor intelligence. Others wouldn’t. It’s still the genes, not race, that would matter.

This is a rare point of consensus in the IQ debate. In his interview with Harris, Murray notes that in The Bell Curve, race was a crude proxy for genetics. Since the book’s publication in 1994, our ability to assess genetic differences has come a long way. Today, scientists are evaluating thousands of genes (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/06/184853.1) that correlate (https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2017121) with small increments in IQ (https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3869). “The blurriness of race is noise in the signal,” Murray tells Harris. “It’s going to obscure … genetic differences in IQ.”

“Race science,” the old idea that race is a biologically causal trait, may live on as an ideology of hate. But as an academic matter, it’s been discredited. We now know that genes flow between populations as they do between families, blurring racial categories and reshuffling human diversity. Genetic patterns can be found within groups, as in the case of prostate cancer. But even then, as Ian Holmes notes in the Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/reich-genetics-racism/558818/), the patterns correlate with ancestry or population, not race.

When you drag race into the IQ conversation, you bring heat, not light.

The second problem with extending genetic theories of IQ to race is that it confounds the science of heritability. Sullivan and Harris cite research that indicates IQ is, loosely speaking, 40 percent to 80 percent heritable. It can seem natural to extend these estimates to comparisons between racial groups. That’s what I did a decade ago. But it’s a mistake because these studies are done within, not between, populations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ). They measure, for example, the degree to which being someone’s twin or biological sibling, rather than simply growing up in the same household, correlates with similarity of IQ. They don’t account for many other differences that come into play when comparing whole populations. So if you bring race into the calculation, you’re stretching those studies beyond their explanatory power. And you’re introducing complicating factors: not just education, income, and family structure (http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/class/measuring-status.aspx), but neighborhood, net worth—and discrimination, which is the variable most likely to correlate directly with race.

Murray and others have answers to these objections. They argue that education programs have failed to close racial gaps, that studies haven’t proved that getting adopted has much lasting effect on kids’ IQ scores (https://medium.com/@houstoneuler/the-cherry-picked-science-in-voxs-charles-murray-article-bd534a9c4476), and that collective increases in IQ scores are based on factors other than “general” intelligence (http://quillette.com/2017/06/11/no-voice-vox-sense-nonsense-discussing-iq-race/). These are complex disputes full of nuances about replicating studies, interpreting test questions, and extrapolating from trend lines. But notice how far we’ve drifted from biology. The science here is oblique, abstract, and tenuous. Are you still comfortable speculating about genetics? Are you confident, for instance, that studies that compare black children to white children properly account for family assets and neighborhood, which differ sharply by race (https://www.nap.edu/read/9719/chapter/11#230) even within the same income bracket (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/674561)?

It’s one thing to theorize about race and genes to assist in disease prevention, diagnosis, or treatment, as Reich has done. But before you seize on his essay (https://www.creators.com/read/michael-barone/04/18/genetics-is-undercutting-the-case-for-racial-quotas) to explain racial gaps in employment (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/denying-genetics-isnt-shutting-down-racism-its-fueling-it.html), ask yourself: Given the dubiousness of linking racial genetics to IQ, what would my words accomplish? Would they contribute to prejudice? Would they be used to blame communities for their own poverty? Would I be provoking thought, or would I be offering whites an excuse not to think (https://www.creators.com/read/michael-barone/04/18/genetics-is-undercutting-the-case-for-racial-quotas) about the social and economic causes of inequality?

Murray, Sullivan, and Harris try to soften their speculations by stipulating, as I once did, that even if racial differences in IQ are genetic, you shouldn’t make assumptions about any individual. They’re correct that it’s both wrong and irrational to make such inferences from aggregate data. But it’s also easier to treat people as individuals when you don’t start with racial generalizations.

If you’re libertarian or conservative, you might think I’m calling for censorship. I’m not. I’m just asking for precision. Genes are the mechanism under discussion. So talking about the genetics of race and the genetics of IQ is more scientific, not less, than pulling race and IQ together.

Many progressives, on the other hand, regard the whole topic of IQ and genetics as sinister. That, too, is a mistake. There’s a lot of hard science (https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech) here. It can’t be wished away, and it can be put to good use. The challenge is to excavate that science from the muck of speculation about racial hierarchies.

What’s the path forward? It starts with letting go of race talk (http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-conversation-google-killed/article/2009400). No more podcasts hyping gratuitous racial comparisons as “forbidden knowledge (https://samharris.org/podcasts/forbidden-knowledge/).” No more essays speaking of grim ethnic truths (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/denying-genetics-isnt-shutting-down-racism-its-fueling-it.html) for which, supposedly, we must prepare (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/features/2007/created_equal/liberalcreationism.html). Don’t imagine that if you posit an association between race and some trait, you can add enough caveats (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/features/2007/created_equal/all_gods_children.html) to erase the impression that people can be judged by their color. The association, not the caveats, is what people will remember.

If you’re interested in race and IQ, you might bristle at these admonitions. Perhaps you think you’re just telling the truth about test scores, IQ heritability, and the biological reality of race. It’s not your fault, you might argue, that you’re smeared and misunderstood. Harris says all of these things in his debate with Klein. And I cringe as I hear them, because I know these lines. I’ve played this role. Harris warns Klein that even if we “make certain facts taboo” and refuse “to ever look at population differences, we will be continually ambushed by these data.” He concludes: “Scientific data can’t be racist.”

No, data aren’t racist. But using racial data to make genetic arguments isn’t scientific. The world isn’t better off if you run ahead of science, waving the flag of innate group differences. And if everyone is misunderstanding your attempts to simultaneously link and distinguish race and IQ, perhaps you should take the hint. The problem isn’t that people are too dumb to understand you. It’s that you’re not understanding the social consequences of your words. When you drag race into the IQ conversation, you bring heat, not light. Your arguments for scientific candor will be more sound and more persuasive in a race-neutral discussion.

The biology of intelligence is full of important questions. To what extent is it one faculty or many? How do we get it, grow it, maintain it, and use it? If it’s heritable, should we think of it less as merit and more as luck, like inheriting money? To what extent does a class structure based on intelligence duplicate or conceal a class structure based on family wealth? Is intelligence truly supplanting other kinds of inheritance as a competitive advantage? Is it unleashing social mobility? Or is it, through assortative mating, entrenching inequality? These are much better conversations than the one we’ve been stuck in. Let’s get on with them.

Mark

10th February 2020, 15:23

So, let's get down to it. Speaking of human differences, let's go back a bit further, to see if we can find the root of change, of differentiation and evolution within the human family. This article is a beginning to that search.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42447&d=1581347564

Neanderthal discovery sheds new light on human history (https://www.foxnews.com/science/neanderthal-discovery-sheds-new-light-on-human-history)

By James Rogers (https://www.foxnews.com/person/r/james-rogers)

Scientists at Princeton University have made a stunning Neanderthal ancestry discovery that sheds new light on human history (https://www.foxnews.com/category/science/archaeology/history).

Neanderthal DNA has typically been associated with modern humans outside of Africa. However, by developing a new method for finding Neanderthal DNA in the human genome, the Princeton researchers have, for the first time, searched for Neanderthal ancestry in African populations, as well as those outside the African continent.

A paper on the research has been published in the journal Cell (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30059-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867420300593%3Fshowall%3D true).

NEANDERTHAL BEACHCOMBERS WENT DIVING FOR SEASHELLS, SCIENTISTS DISCOVER (https://www.foxnews.com/science/neanderthal-beachcombers-went-diving-for-seashells)

“When the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, using DNA collected from ancient bones, it was accompanied by the discovery that modern humans in Asia, Europe and America inherited approximately 2 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals — proving humans and Neanderthals had interbred after humans left Africa,” the scientists explained, in a statement (https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/01/30/new-study-identifies-neanderthal-ancestry-african-populations-and-describes-its). “A comparable catalogue of Neanderthal ancestry in African populations, however, has remained an acknowledged blind spot for the field due to technical constraints and the assumption that Neanderthals and ancestral African populations were geographically isolated from each other.”

The new computational method for detecting Neanderthal ancestry, dubbed IBDmix, has already delivered results.

“This is the first time we can detect the actual signal of Neanderthal ancestry in Africans,” said co-first author Lu Chen, a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics (LSI), who is co-first author of the study. “And it surprisingly showed a higher level than we previously thought.”

GRISLY DISCOVERY: BONES REVEAL NEANDERTHAL CHILD WAS EATEN BY LARGE BIRD (https://www.foxnews.com/science/grisly-discovery-bones-reveal-neanderthal-child-was-eaten-by-large-bird)

Researchers found that Neanderthal ancestry in Africans was not due to an “independent interbreeding event” between Neanderthals and African populations. Instead, they came to the conclusion that migrations of ancient Europeans back into Africa introduced Neanderthal ancestry into populations in the African continent.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42448&d=1581347708

By comparing data from simulations of human history to data from real people, experts also found that some of the Neanderthal ancestry detected in Africans was the result of human DNA introduced into the Neanderthal genome. “This human-to-Neanderthal gene flow involved an early dispersing group of humans out of Africa, occurring at least 100,000 years ago — before the Out-of-Africa migration responsible for modern human colonization of Europe and Asia and before the interbreeding event that introduced Neanderthal DNA into modern humans,” the scientists said, in the statement.

The study, which was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, was led by Joshua Akey, a professor at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. The researchers acknowledge that they were able to analyze a limited number of African populations and hope that their findings will inspire further study.

CLIMATE CHANGE DROVE SOME NEANDERTHALS TO CANNIBALISM (https://www.foxnews.com/science/climate-change-drove-some-neanderthals-to-cannibalism)

Experts have gained fresh insight into Neanderthals in recent years. In 2018, for example, archaeologists in Poland identified (https://www.foxnews.com/science/grisly-discovery-bones-reveal-neanderthal-child-was-eaten-by-large-bird) the prehistoric bones of a Neanderthal child eaten by a large bird.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42449&d=1581347777

In another study released in 2018, scientists suggested that climate change played a larger part in Neanderthals’ extinction than previously thought.

SOME OF OLDEST NEANDERTHAL BONES HAVE BEEN DNA TESTED SHOWING MORE THAN 70 DIFFERENCES (https://www.foxnews.com/science/some-of-oldest-neanderthal-bones-have-been-dna-tested-showing-more-than-70-differences)

Last year, researchers in France reported that climate change drove some Neanderthals to cannibalism.

In another study, experts studied seashells fashioned into tools that were discovered in Italy in 1949 to reveal (https://www.foxnews.com/science/neanderthal-beachcombers-went-diving-for-seashells) how some Neanderthals had a much closer connection to the sea than was previously thought, according to a statement (https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/01/15/beach-combing-neanderthals) released by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The closest human species to homo sapiens, Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for around 350,000 years. Scientists in Poland report that Neanderthals in Europe mostly became extinct 35,000 years ago. However, there are a number of theories on the timing of Neanderthals’ extinction, with experts saying that it could have occurred 40,000 (https://www.foxnews.com/science/climate-change-killed-off-neanderthals-study-says), 27,000 (https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/neanderthal-behavior-59267999) or 24,00 (https://www.nature.com/news/2006/060911/full/news060911-8.html)0 years ago.

Mark

10th February 2020, 15:46

There are some fundamental differences in the human family that may come from the melding of differential populations, long ago. It wasn't just Neanderthals, it was also Denisovan and others. There are benefits that have come from that admixture, but also a realization that humanity is one family, and there has never been a pure race of any type, anywhere. We've been mixing blood and genes forever. That realization alone should release some people from any feelings of superiority or inferiority they may harbor.

ANCIENT SEX BETWEEN DIFFERENT HUMAN SPECIES INFLUENCES MODERN-DAY HEALTH (https://www.inverse.com/article/62293-neanderthal-densivoan-gene-inheritance-study)

It's just as well we Homo sapiens got some Neanderthal and Denisovan genes into our DNA.

When Homo sapiens left Africa and encountered the Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, the two ancient hominins did the obvious thing and had sex with one another, exchanging life-saving genetic adaptions (https://www.inverse.com/article/49573-human-neanderthal-sex-virus-protection). That genetic exchange allowed human-hybrid children to skip the thousands of years of natural selection Neanderthals experienced in Europe, and inherit virus-fighting and life-saving genes fast.

This genetic boon occurred some 100,000 (http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals/interbreeding) years ago, but Neanderthal genes — along with the genes from another species of ancient human, the Denisovans (https://www.inverse.com/article/42346-denisovan-neanderthal-ancient-humans-mating) — continue to influence our health today.

Now, scientists say this influence may be more expansive than they previously thought. In fact, ancient humans’ genetic exchange could be one of the major causes of adaptive evolution in humans, according to a new study (http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msz306%20).

Using new computational methods, scientists determine that the gene flow between archaic humans affects modern-day human metabolism, our response to different types of pathogens, and a scattering of neuronal traits. The findings were published on Tuesday in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Study authors Alexandre Gouy (https://www.cmpg.iee.unibe.ch/about_us/team/phd_students/m_sc_gouy_alexandre/index_eng.html%20) and Laurent Excoffier (https://www.cmpg.iee.unibe.ch/about_us/team/researchers/prof_dr_excoffier_laurent/index_eng.html) first analyzed “archaic introgression maps” for 35 Melanesian individuals. Introgression maps, Gouy tells Inverse, tell you which blocks in your genome are likely to be of archaic ancestry. They’re traced by comparing the genomes of ancient hominins — obtained from Neanderthal and Denisovan fossils — and modern humans using statistical tools.

Basically, you can “see a genome as a mosaic of blocks inherited from your ancestors,” he says. As ancient hominins interbred with modern humans, some of these blocks along the genome can be traced back to Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestors.

The researchers then looked at introgression maps across participants in the 1,000 Genomes Project (https://www.internationalgenome.org/). For the purposes of the study, the researchers focused on those of people from East Asia, Europe, and Papua New Guinea.

WHAT DID HUMANS INHERIT?

Their analysis of patterns of introgression, along with data sets of connected genes and subnetworks, yielded complex and fascinating findings.

It’s previously been shown that the Denisovan gene EPAS1 (https://www.inverse.com/article/30875-tibet-dna-genetics-denisovan-evolution) likely helps Tibetans live in high-altitude places, and that some Neanderthal variants are associated with behavioral traits, including mood disorders and an inclination towards cigarettes (https://www.inverse.com/article/37140-neanderthal-genes-human-looks-mood-dna).

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42450&d=1581349261

The new study found that, in European populations, Neanderthal genes are also linked to metabolism, iron- and oxygen-binding in red blood cells and muscles, as well as olfactory receptors. Among East Asians and Europeans, ancient introgression is associated with a GABA transporter and a neurotransmitter transporter, the study suggests. In Papuans, genes showing (https://www.eurekalert.org/login.php?frompage=%2Femb_releases%2F2020-01%2Fmbae-idd010720.php) “a significant excess of introgression” associated to autism susceptibility and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were found.

Especially intriguing was the finding the presence of introgressed mutations in Papua New Guineans that are potentially linked to resilience to malaria, Guoy says. These mutations are linked to Denisovan ancestry.

NOT ALL INHERITANCE IS THE SAME

Importantly, just because one has Densivoan or Neanderthal DNA in their genome that doesn’t mean that inheritance is going to show up in their genes in the same way. Each human population has a specific history, and ancient hominins interbred with modern humans at different times and in different places.

“That is why introgressed genes are sometimes specific to a population,” Gouy says. “Different people can carry the same amount of Neanderthal DNA, but it can be found in different places of their genome.”

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42451&d=1581349358

For example: The region of the genome that may be involved in resistance to malaria among Papua New Guineans (https://www.inverse.com/article/54792-ancient-human-denisovan-lineage-split) is inherited from Denisovans. These mutations are almost always found in Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians — which is why they aren’t present across the global population.

It’s also not as simple as saying because a person with Neanderthal DNA has ADHD, then Neanderthals had ADHD. While this study points out that Denisovan and Neanderthal-inherited genes are related to health and behavior, “it remains very difficult to quantify precisely the effect of those mutations,” Guoy says.

“What we can say so far is that some introgressed mutations have been associated to neurological processes,” he says. “We cannot know yet precisely how it will affect the health or behavior of an individual, based on genomic data only.”

A DIFFERENT WAY OF EXAMINING GENE INTERACTIONS

The study is based on two novel approaches, Guoy says. One allows researchers to find networks of genes showing an excess of introgression in particular populations, and the one to other tests whether specific mutations in certain genes tend to be found together in modern individuals. That clumping is known as when genes are “co-introgressed.”

These techniques allowed them to gain new insights by examining the data from a network-interaction perspective. Gouy says that they can see their approach as complementing more traditional methods that focus on single genes, this simply allows them to take a different perspective on the same data.

“I personally find it fascinating to see that interbreeding with other human lineages shaped human adaptations,” Gouy says. “As we were developing approaches to understanding modern human adaptations by looking at gene interactions, we realized that such interactions for Neanderthal and Denisova-inherited mutations had been overlooked.”

The results from genomic studies need to be interpreted with caution, Gouy says. Behavior results from a complex interaction of genes and the environment — and it’s difficult to assess the full impact genes have.

But it is obvious that the interaction between genes affects us in some way, and historically our archaic mutations have been overlooked. These played a role in human evolution and health, and more research is needed to know the full extent.

Abstract:
Anatomically modern humans carry many introgressed variants from other hominins in their genomes. Some of them affect their phenotype and can thus be negatively or positively selected. Several individual genes have been proposed to be the subject of adaptive introgression, but the possibility of polygenic adaptive introgression has not been extensively investigated yet. In this study, we analyze archaic introgression maps with refined functional enrichment methods to find signals of polygenic adaptation of introgressed variants. We first apply a method to detect sets of connected genes (subnetworks) within biological pathways that present higher-than-expected levels of archaic introgression. We then introduce and apply a new statistical test to distinguish between epistatic and independent selection in gene sets of present-day humans. We identify several known targets of adaptive introgression, and we show that they belong to larger networks of introgressed genes. After correction for genetic linkage, we find that signals of polygenic adaptation are mostly explained by independent and potentially sequential selection episodes. However, we also find some gene sets where introgressed variants present significant signals of epistatic selection. Our results confirm that archaic introgression has facilitated local adaption, especially in immunity related and metabolic functions and highlight its involvement in a coordinated response to pathogens out of Africa.

Mark

10th February 2020, 16:29

This is where it gets really interesting. I read some years ago an apocrophal tale about J.R.R. Tolkien. The story was, that he had been granted access to Oxford's oldest records, which, apparently, was not something often done. I recall the tale as stating that he spent years down in subterranean vaults/basement areas, researching. Considering the many Ages of humanity spanning the threshold of time, back in these days, the world did indeed look like a chapter out of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Different types of humans roaming the landscape, warring, loving, living.

Is the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and associated books really a true history of some lost pre-historic time period?

Has anybody else ever heard this story or read of it? If so, please leave a link, or expand upon the tale. :)

And we are their descendants, mixed up, mixed together to become something new. Still evolving, still mixing, still changing, still growing in multiple dimensional modalities. Somewhere within this history, there is a mystery.

Homo heidelbergensis: The Answer to a Mysterious Period in Human History? (https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/homo-heidelbergensis-the-answer-to-a-mysterious-period-in-human-history)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42452&d=1581351191
Cranium 5, a skull found at Sima de los Huesos and thought to be either a late Homo heidelbergensis or an early Neanderthal. (Credit: Rept0n1x/Wikimedia Commons)

There’s a murky chapter in human evolution, one that occurs right before our species entered the scene.

Over 1 million years ago our ancestors belonged to the primitive-looking species Homo erectus. Jump to 300,000 years ago and Earth is home to at least three lineages of big-brained humans: Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans. So what happened in the intervening 700,000 years?

There’s a wealth of research on H. erectus as well as modern humans and our cousins, Neanderthals (http://discovermagazine.com/2018/jul-aug/neanderthals) and Denisovan (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/08/19/the-denisovans-new-finds-are-illuminating-the-mysterious-ancient-humans/#.XXufpCVry0J)s. Much less is known about our Middle Pleistocene predecessors (https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-642-27800-6_55-5). Since the first specimen from the time span was reported in 1908 — a 610,000-year-old jawbone classified as Homo heidelbergensis — researchers have found Mid-Pleistocene fossils across Europe, Asia and Africa.

These little-understood hominins increased in brain size, spread to new lands and hunted challenging game with finely crafted weapons. One of these lineages led to modern humans. But the details of their lives and evolutionary relationships are still slim.

Now, thanks to ancient DNA analyses, our Mid-Pleistocene family tree is becoming clearer. But other questions remain. Above all: Were these ancestors modern enough that we would consider them human?

Between H. erectus and H. sapiens

Most anthropologists agree that if you traced your ancestry back about 1 million years, you’d find a population of Homo erectus (http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus). From the neck down, the creatures resembled present-day people: They had modern stature and body proportions, distinguished by relatively long legs and short arms. But no H. erectus would be mistaken for a H. sapiens. With hulking brows and flatter skulls, the species had brains about two-thirds our size: The average volume of 30 well-preserved (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248413001358) H. erectus skulls was 950 cm3, compared to 1350 cm3 for recent humans (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2018/09/21/neanderthal-brains-bigger-but-not-necessarily-better/#.XXp1PCVrz5B).

Fast-forward to 300,000 years ago and the H. erectus lineage gave rise to at least three varieties of humans: European-based Neanderthals, Denisovans in Asia and the ancestors of all living people, Homo sapiens in Africa.

The intervening span is what anthropologists call “the muddle in the middle (https://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110878837/9783110878837.875/9783110878837.875.xml)”. The time period is characterized by poorly understood fossils, book-ended by better-studied H. erectus and modern humans.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42453&d=1581351430

Between H. erectus and H. sapiens, intermediate species existed, variably named Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis or Homo antecessor, depending on a researcher’s views. Many anthropologists just call the whole bunch Middle Pleistocene hominins, after the geologic time period 130,000 to 780,000 years ago.

One spectacular site, Sima de los Huesos in Spain (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/09/10/sima-de-los-huesos-ancient-hominins-neanderthals/#.XXrdXyVrz5A), has yielded the most Mid-Pleistocene hominin remains. Excavations there since the 1980s have unearthed more than 7,000 fossils representing at least 28 individuals dated to 430,000 years ago.

But other, similar-looking Mid-Pleistocene hominins have been found across Europe, Asia and Africa. They appear somewhat primitive, thanks to robust faces and brows, but have skull volumes around 1230 cm2 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248413001358), intermediate between H. erectus and later human averages. These ancient humans had evolved from H. erectus, but they had not yet become Neanderthals, Denisovans or H. sapiens.

Our direct ancestors were among these bigger-brained hominins spread across the Old World. But anthropologists disagree about which specimens to include in this illustrious lineage, and what to call them.

Evolutionary Possibilities

One view is all big-brained Mid-Pleistocene hominins — from Africa, Europe and Asia — belong to a single species, usually called Homo heidelbergensis (here (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/comments/S0960-9822(13)01607-2), here (https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-642-27800-6_55-5)). The lineage descended from Homo erectus and led to later humans. In this scenario, Homo heidelbergensis was the shared ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Others contend that Mid-Pleistocene specimens show too much variation (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13219-015-0127-4) to be lumped into a single species. This implies the global pool of H. heidelbergensis-looking hominins had already formed distinct lineages. Proponents of this hypothesis often draw the division between African and Eurasian fossils. They use Homo heidelbergensis for Eurasian fossils leading to Neanderthals and Denisovans, and Homo rhodesiensis for Mid-Pleistocene African hominins likely on the lineage leading to modern humans. The shared ancestor gets pushed to earlier specimens, such as ~800,000-year-old remains from Spain sometimes called Homo antecessor.

But population territories were probably more complicated than simple continental borders. Groups expanded, contracted and migrated as environments changed. They overlapped and interbred. The result was that, even if there were multiple species of Mid-Pleistocene humans, they likely intermingled with each other, both geographically and sexually.

Tidying Up the Muddle

Recent paleogenomics work has imposed some order on the muddle. By comparing DNA differences between lineages, researchers have estimated the timing of the evolutionary splits between modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, which took place during the Mid-Pleistocene. Using this molecular clock dating (https://theconversation.com/dna-dating-how-molecular-clocks-are-refining-human-evolutions-timeline-65606) approach, a 2017 Science paper (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6363/655) reported that Homo sapiens diverged from the others around 520,000 to 630,000 years ago, and then the sister species Neanderthals and Denisovans split 390,000 to 440,000 years ago.

That timeline agrees with a 2016 genomic analysis (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17405/) of the ~430,000 year old Sima fossils — the oldest human ancient DNA yet recovered. The sequences suggest the individuals belonged to the Neanderthal lineage after it split from Denisovans. It’s safe to classify the Sima hominins (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/09/10/sima-de-los-huesos-ancient-hominins-neanderthals/#.XXuUjSVryvt) as Neanderthal ancestors.

But getting human DNA this old was a near miracle (http://discovermagazine.com/2017/janfeb/4-oldest-human-dna-revises-our-family-tree). The molecules survived because the cave keeps a cool 50 degrees Fahrenheit; they were recovered because researchers put in extraordinary effort. The scientists salvaged just 0.1 percent of the Sima genome from one bone and tooth.

Ancient DNA won’t be found in most Mid-Pleistocene fossils, especially those from hot, tropical climates, harsh on biomolecules. Still, the dates we do have — divergences between H. sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans — provide a strong foundation for making sense of the muddle in the middle.

Becoming Human

Other questions about our ancestors can’t be answered by DNA. Regardless of which population(s) directly led to H. sapiens, Mid-Pleistocene hominins across the globe increased in brain size, which seems to have enabled more advanced behaviors (https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-642-27800-6_55-5). Compared to earlier H. erectus, stone tools made by Mid-Pleistocene hominins were more sophisticated (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128000496002882?via%3Dihub) — thinner and more symmetrical. They also hunted larger, more challenging prey including herds of elephants, horses and rhino. Killing these animals requires planning, experience and cooperation.

Perhaps these ancestors were more human than not.

Hym

10th February 2020, 17:39

Saw a documentary on an over the air broadcast, Corp.For Public Broadcasting-not PBS. The narrator and the gist of the doc was the core of all interconnected, but by mainstream politics and media not connected, health and employment as the result of racism.

The doc showed overlapping maps showing racial concentrations, economic opportunities availability, educational expenditures, longevity, etc. and correlated the obvious racial exclusionary history of the areas of Chicago. Again, those who do not include everyone and then allocate to serve the present needs of all communities are blatantly racist.

The author also showed the needless expenditures of a community upon disaster preparedness and showing one drill, spending up $250,000, using abandoned tenements to stage the waste of monies, showing how F***ing ignorant those preparing and funding the drills really are. Yes, they don't get it. Those funds belong to the entire community, not just those who dwell in fear and prejudice.

Mark

12th February 2020, 15:20

Lighter eyes, a trait commonly associated with Europe, did not necessarily evolve there. The evidence suggests that darker hued populations originated this innovation for reasons unknown, perhaps as a random mutation, although the environmental conditions of Europe probably allowed for its success and wildfire-like selection and distribution throughout the population in successive generations.

Genetic analysis reveals blue eyes evolved before light skin (https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/genetic-analysis-reveals-blue-eyes-evolved-light-skin/)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42465&d=1581520444

Skeletal remains from a 7,000 year old Spaniard have been genetically sequenced and suggests that the evolutionary onset of light-colored eyes predates light skin. The results also gave clues to what his diet might have been like. The lead author on the paper was Iñigo Olalde of Barcelona’s Institut de Biologia Evolutiva and it was published in Nature (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12960.html).

The remains were discovered in northwestern Spain at the La Braña-Arintero site. The skeleton belonged to a man from the Mesolithic Period who has been dubbed La Braña 1. One of his teeth yielded enough DNA to complete a genetic analysis. The results gave important clue (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/snrc-bea012114.php)s about the evolution of appearance and diet in the region.

Though the height and approximate age at time of death were not released, the researchers were able to determine that La Braña 1 did not look quite how they expected. His dark hair and dark skin were not unusual, but he likely had light eyes which was very unusual for this time period. The exact shade of his eyes could not be determined, but it was clear to the researchers that they were not brown. This could very well mean that light eyes made their evolutionary debut before light skin.

Fresh baked bread, rice, and cheese are dietary staples in Spain today, though this was not always the case. According to the analysis, he only had a few copies of the genes responsible for breaking down starch. This indicates that the diet was limited in grains and starchy vegetables like potatoes. Though wheat and other grains were already domesticated by this point (http://www.nas.edu/evolution/EvolutioninAgriculture.html), they were not common in Europe at this juncture. Once agriculture became more commonplace, it is likely that those who had more copies of genes allowing them to digest starch had an advantage, as they were able to consume this easily obtained food.

La Braña 1’s genome also shows that he was lactose intolerant, meaning he did not consume dairy products. While lactose intolerance is seen as an anomaly in some regions, it is globally and historically the norm. Many people produce the enzyme lactase early in life when they depend on breast milk, but that function decreases over time. Many people are able to produce lactase throughout their entire lives and eat dairy without a problem, but this lactose persistence (http://genetics.thetech.org/original_news/news45) is actually much more rare (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mace-lab/gallery/lactase).

Another male skeleton, named La Braña 2, was also discovered by the team in 2006. Unfortunately, the DNA was not as well preserved in this second individual, which is making it difficult for the researchers to sequence. They are currently working to restore the genome and provide more information about what the earliest Europeans looked like during the Mesolithic Period.

Mark

12th February 2020, 15:56

Continuation upon the theme in the previous post today, genetics for blue eyes have been traced to a single ancestor approximately 8,000 years ago. The coalescence of ethnicity and what we now call racial groups, from previously existing brown and black melanated populations.

One Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes (https://www.livescience.com/9578-common-ancestor-blue-eyes.html)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42467&d=1581520923

By Jeanna Bryner - Live Science Editor-in-Chief (https://www.livescience.com/author/jeanna-bryner)

People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research.

A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic mutation (https://www.livescience.com/10486-genes-instruction-manuals-life.html) that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before then, there were no blue eyes.

"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.

The mutation affected the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin.

"A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said.

The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism.

"It's exactly what I sort of expected to see from what we know about selection around this area," said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to the study results regarding the OCA2 gene. Hawks was not involved in the current study.

Baby blues

Eiberg and his team examined DNA from mitochondria, the cells' energy-making structures, of blue-eyed individuals in countries including Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages.

They specifically looked at sequences of DNA on the OCA2 gene and the genetic mutation associated with turning down melanin production.

Over the course of several generations, segments of ancestral DNA get shuffled so that individuals have varying sequences. Some of these segments, however, that haven't been reshuffled are called haplotypes. If a group of individuals shares long haplotypes, that means the sequence arose relatively recently in our human ancestors. The DNA sequence didn't have enough time to get mixed up.

"What they were able to show is that the people who have blue eyes in Denmark, as far as Jordan, these people all have this same haplotype, they all have exactly the same gene changes that are all linked to this one mutation that makes eyes blue," Hawks said in a telephone interview.

Melanin switch

The mutation is what regulates the OCA2 switch for melanin production. And depending on the amount of melanin in the iris, a person can end up with eye color ranging from brown to green. Brown-eyed individuals have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production. But they found that blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.

"Out of 800 persons we have only found one person which didn't fit — but his eye color was blue with a single brown spot," Eiberg told LiveScience, referring to the finding that blue-eyed individuals all had the same sequence of DNA linked with melanin production.

"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," Eiberg said. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Eiberg and his colleagues detailed their study in the Jan. 3 online edition of the journal Human Genetics.

That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world.

"The question really is, 'Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?" Hawks said. "This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids."

Genes: The Instruction Manuals of Life (https://www.livescience.com/10486-genes-instruction-manuals-life.html)
10 Things You Didn't Know About You (https://www.livescience.com/11348-10.html)
Top 10 Missing Links (https://www.livescience.com/11326-top-10-missing-links.html)

Mark

12th February 2020, 16:04

The doc showed overlapping maps showing racial concentrations, economic opportunities availability, educational expenditures, longevity, etc. and correlated the obvious racial exclusionary history of the areas of Chicago. Again, those who do not include everyone and then allocate to serve the present needs of all communities are blatantly racist.

Fear and hate will not provide the human family with a viable path into the future. This is a time when we must work together to overcome some pretty hefty issues, from broken governments and ancient political conspiracies to elite excesses and the equitable distribution of planetary resources. The competitive "winning" attitudes and perspectives that drive our economics based upon endless and bottomless consumptive greed, have driven us, no matter the origin of these emotional and spiritual causative factors, to the brink of .. something. We have a choice. Wall ourselves off from the rest of humanity, or work together. Is it every man, woman and tribe for themselves? Will that way of thinking provide us with a viable path forward?

The author also showed the needless expenditures of a community upon disaster preparedness and showing one drill, spending up $250,000, using abandoned tenements to stage the waste of monies, showing how F***ing ignorant those preparing and funding the drills really are. Yes, they don't get it. Those funds belong to the entire community, not just those who dwell in fear and prejudice.

And this is the crux of the issue. Those who complain the most, hold the most wealth, want to separate themselves the most, exist by parasitical means feeding off of other sectors of the population. Be it through corporate welfare, government contracts or just plain ol' capitalist exploitation of labor, their wealth is derived from those they profess to hate. Their fear and prejudice, perhaps, in some part comes from that sub-conscious realization as well as the knowing that what goes around in some way, shape or form, does indeed come back round again, like an old friend, faithful to the end.

Ernie Nemeth

12th February 2020, 17:54

Mark

12th February 2020, 18:39

What do you think is the real possibility that perhaps the assumption that all humans evolved on earth is mistaken?

I am familiar with the stories of Aldebaran and all of the other tales of the New Age regarding extraterrestrial origin. I think there is a real possibility that colonies of humanoids from other star systems have inhabited earth and merged DNA with the indigenous hominids and also later homo sapien and that those genetic strains have become a part of us.

I would like to see genetic evidence of such. Of the existence of DNA strands that were not present in the human family prior to the influx of extraterrestrial DNA. If humanoids from other planetary systems, like the Anunnaki, came here and were able to genetically manipulate a form of hybrid to create the human family, the evidence of that should be available genetically.

The evidence might be in the realm of that "mysterious" time frame in evolutionary history, perhaps, between the Australopithecus and the Homo families, where the jump in cognition occurred about 2 million years ago. Or, it could have happened later, between the disparate Homo species and the differentiation to Homo sapien about 2-400,000 years ago, at which point the mental capacity seemed to expand dramatically.

Could it not also be that there are races from other worlds that have blue eyes and white skin?

Could it not also be that there are races from other worlds that have brown eyes and black skin? Or purple skin? Or green skin?

In an infinite creation, there are infinite possibilities, Ernie. White skin is not special.

I heard somewhere that the black skin races are the indigenous race, while the others are from other worlds.

And I have heard somewhere that the hair type and epidermis of "black skinned" populations are unique in the world, and that the hair of whites and Asians is more like the great apes than the "black skinned" "sub-Saharan" African population, which differentiates them from those sub-human entities and perhaps makes them closer relatives to those apes than the members of those "black skinned" races. The skin color of the great apes is also white. Your thoughts?

Do you think there is any truth to this?

In an infinite multiverse, there are infinite variations. I do not discount anything except the reality of race as a defining distinction of the human family.

Ernie Nemeth

13th February 2020, 00:36

Could it not also be that there are races from other worlds that have brown eyes and black skin? Or purple skin? Or green skin?

In an infinite creation, there are infinite possibilities, Ernie. White skin is not special.

And I have heard somewhere that the hair type and epidermis of "black skinned" populations are unique in the world, and that the hair of whites and Asians is more like the great apes than the "black skinned" "sub-Saharan" African population, which differentiates them from those sub-human entities and perhaps makes them closer relatives to those apes than the members of those "black skinned" races. The skin color of the great apes is also white. Your thoughts?

Okay.

My thoughts are that when I heard the idea that white skin is a mutation I started thinking of other ways such a trait could be explained without resorting to calling it a mutated version of the original. It seems to me that either conclusions should not be reached until we have more data or we have to consider the real possibility that there are other worlds and other humanoids indigenous to each.

Somehow melanin-deficiency seems ...uh... racist.

Oh now I get it. Sometimes I'm a bit slow. Not good at such word-play.

Turned the table on me. Nice one.

Point taken.

sorry

Agape

13th February 2020, 06:51

Rahkyt.

What do you think is the real possibility that perhaps the assumption that all humans evolved on earth is mistaken?

Could it not also be that there are races from other worlds that have blue eyes and white skin?

I heard somewhere that the black skin races are the indigenous race, while the others are from other worlds.

Do you think there is any truth to this?

Apologies to Mark/Rakhyt for interjection. Apologies to myself for discussing our starry origin as I’m aware of without being able to “prove it” in lab.

I’m not “new age” and our origin is not “new age”, it’s not only ancient - in your terms - it’s perhaps, older than this piece of Universe.

I can’t care less now about not being able to “prove it” since I’ve got lots of beatings, threats and my tools were taken away and I’m happy to have survived.

But back to our origin ...please 🙏 do not attack.
My Bodhgaya ET Event Report is out there, not threatening anyone. I’m not “CG”.
I do fear you humans a lot , for being who you prefer to be.

We all are translucent plasma bodies in origin. That’s “softer than unboiled egg”. There’s no “DNA” floating in our plasma bodies since DNA is coagulated fragments of information net condensed to this gravity and atmospheric pressure.

If you break an egg and what you call “white” is actually transparent and translucent.
It has no colour at all.

Your plasma body likewise, has no colour unless it increases its core activity and temperature. Presence of protective isotopes contributes for any sort of “eye colour” as a result.

Of course if you boil an egg, you may classify it as “white” and “yolk”.

If you burry it to Earth the way Chinese cuisine does it becomes famously “black egg”. If you boil your Easter eggs in black tea or onion peels it turns the whites almost “mahogany”.

How nice to have so many colours ?

Notice that unboiled eggs can’t survive here on their own, once cooked their life expectancy is short.
Black eggs can allegedly survive bit longer.

Perhaps ..

if all the broken fragmented information/mind/dna within us start working together can it return a piece of it self to the original yolk ?

Scientifically impossible from eggs perspective but there’s so much we do t know about life beyond DNA, yet.

Wish you all happy colors to your Sunrise

🧩🌈🌸🌟

Mark

13th February 2020, 14:55

My thoughts are that when I heard the idea that white skin is a mutation I started thinking of other ways such a trait could be explained without resorting to calling it a mutated version of the original. It seems to me that either conclusions should not be reached until we have more data or we have to consider the real possibility that there are other worlds and other humanoids indigenous to each.

The scientists are drawing conclusions, based upon the genetics, about when certain mutations came into existence. What conclusions about the point in our DNA timeline that these changes happened is up for debate?

There is another article that I read somewhere about how this particular change is just one indicator for skin color and there are others. I'll find that and post it next, it will validate your point.

I am not "against" extraterrestrial origin for anyone, how could I be? I'm a member of Project Avalon and a long-standing explorer of Creation and the potentialities of consciousness.

I think there is something "more" to this insistence, in the New Age, that whites are not from this planet, though.

Somehow melanin-deficiency seems ...uh... racist.

Oh now I get it. Sometimes I'm a bit slow. Not good at such word-play.

Turned the table on me. Nice one.

Point taken.

sorry

Absolutely no need to apologize. I don't take it personally as it is a pervasive phenomenon and it is not about you or I, individually. It is about assumptions and about an inordinate concentration upon a particular way of being that, by its nature, is exclusive and invalidates all other perspectives. So I do not see it as personal or exclusive to you, or any other individual either. it is systemic.

Mark

13th February 2020, 15:08

Ernie, a quote relevant to our conversation about light skin and, strangely enough, also my example from yesterday:

Researchers agree that our early australopithecine ancestors in Africa probably had light skin beneath hairy pelts. “If you shave a chimpanzee, its skin is light,” says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, the lead author of the new study. “If you have body hair, you don’t need dark skin to protect you from ultraviolet [UV] radiation.”

There is always "more" research to be done. And more information to synthesize and add to pre-existing knowledge. I would be very excited to hear that extraterrestrial strands of DNA, coming from exo-planets circling other stars, have been discovered in the human genome and, who knows, that may happen. I hope it will, because I also don't believe the human family is unique to Terra. We may have to get to those planets and sample the DNA of the life there before it happens, though, but when it does, I will celebrate the findings with you and Agape. Until then, for me, Occam's Razor applies. :)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42476&d=1581606205
Researchers have identified genes that help create diverse skin tones, such as those seen in the Agaw (left) and Surma (right) peoples of Africa.

New gene variants reveal the evolution of human skin color (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/new-gene-variants-reveal-evolution-human-skin-color)
By Ann Gibbons (https://www.sciencemag.org/author/ann-gibbons)

Most people associate Africans with dark skin. But different groups of people in Africa have almost every skin color on the planet, from deepest black in the Dinka of South Sudan to beige in the San of South Africa. Now, researchers have discovered a handful of new gene variants responsible for this palette of tones.

The study, published online this week in Science (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/11/science.aan8433), traces the evolution of these genes and how they traveled around the world. While the dark skin of some Pacific Islanders can be traced to Africa, gene variants from Eurasia also seem to have made their way back to Africa. And surprisingly, some of the mutations responsible for lighter skin in Europeans turn out to have an ancient African origin.

“This is really a landmark study of skin color diversity,” says geneticist Greg Barsh of the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama.

Researchers agree that our early australopithecine ancestors in Africa probably had light skin beneath hairy pelts. “If you shave a chimpanzee, its skin is light,” says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, the lead author of the new study. “If you have body hair, you don’t need dark skin to protect you from ultraviolet [UV] radiation.”

Until recently, researchers assumed that after human ancestors shed most body hair, sometime before 2 million years ago, they quickly evolved dark skin for protection from skin cancer and other harmful effects of UV radiation. Then, when humans migrated out of Africa and headed to the far north, they evolved lighter skin as an adaptation to limited sunlight. (Pale skin synthesizes more vitamin D when light is scarce. (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6212/934))

Previous research on skin-color genes fit that picture. For example, a “depigmentation gene” called SLC24A5 linked to pale skin swept through European populations in the past 6000 years. But Tishkoff ’s team found that the story of skin color evolution isn’t so black and white. Her team, including African researchers, used a light meter to measure skin reflectance in 2092 people in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Botswana. They found the darkest skin in the Nilo-Saharan pastoralist populations of eastern Africa, such as the Mursi and Surma, and the lightest skin in the San of southern Africa, as well as many shades in between, as in the Agaw people of Ethiopia.

At the same time, they collected blood samples for genetic studies. They sequenced more than 4 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)—places where a single letter of the genetic code varies across the genomes of 1570 of these Africans. They found four key areas of the genome where specific SNPs correlate with skin color.

The first surprise was that SLC24A5, which swept Europe, is also common in East Africa—found in as many as half the members of some Ethiopian groups. This variant arose 30,000 years ago and was probably brought to eastern Africa by people migrating from the Middle East, Tishkoff says. But though many East Africans have this gene, they don’t have white skin, probably because it is just one of several genes that shape their skin color.

The team also found variants of two neighboring genes, HERC2 and OCA2, which are associated with light skin, eyes, and hair in Europeans but arose in Africa; these variants are ancient and common in the light-skinned San people. The team proposes that the variants arose in Africa as early as 1 million years ago and spread later to Europeans and Asians. “Many of the gene variants that cause light skin in Europe have origins in Africa,” Tishkoff says.

The most dramatic discovery concerned a gene known as MFSD12. Two mutations that decrease expression of this gene were found in high frequencies in people with the darkest skin. These variants arose about a half-million years ago, suggesting that human ancestors before that time may have had moderately dark skin, rather than the deep black hue created today by these mutations.

These same two variants are found in Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and some Indians. These people may have inherited the variants from ancient migrants from Africa who followed a “southern route” out of East Africa, along the southern coast of India to Melanesia and Australia, Tishkoff says. That idea, however, counters three genetic studies that concluded last year that Australians, Melanesians, and Eurasians all descend from a single migration out of Africa. Alternatively, this great migration may have included people carrying variants for both light and dark skin, but the dark variants later were lost in Eurasians.

To understand how the MFSD12 mutations help make darker skin, the researchers reduced expression of the gene in cultured cells, mimicking the action of the variants in dark-skinned people. The cells produced more eumelanin, the pigment responsible for black and brown skin, hair, and eyes. The mutations may also change skin color by blocking yellow pigments: When the researchers knocked out MFSD12 in zebrafish and mice, red and yellow pigments were lost, and the mice’s light brown coats turned gray. “This new mechanism for producing intensely dark pigmentation is really the big story,” says Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College.

The study adds to established research undercutting old notions of race. You can’t use skin color to classify humans, any more than you can use other complex traits like height, Tishkoff says. “There is so much diversity in Africans that there is no such thing as an African race.”

Ernie Nemeth

13th February 2020, 15:28

I have also found an article that again suggests that humanoid DNA has diverse roots, and that we did not all walk out of Africa nor do we share one single female ancestor, as the science today would suggest...

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/12/805237120/ghost-dna-in-west-africans-complicates-story-of-human-origins

Although there is no suggestion that the DNA is other-worldly, the single-anscestor, out-of-Africa meme is slowly loosing steam.

It won't be long, if our masters allow it of course, that our off-world connections will be uncovered.

It begins:

About 50,000 years ago, ancient humans in what is now West Africa apparently procreated with another group of ancient humans that scientists didn't know existed.

There aren't any bones or ancient DNA to prove it, but researchers say the evidence is in the genes of modern West Africans. They analyzed genetic material from hundreds of people from Nigeria and Sierra Leone and found signals of what they call "ghost" DNA from an unknown ancestor.

Our own species — Homo sapiens — lived alongside other groups that split off from the same genetic family tree at different times. And there's plenty of evidence from other parts of the world that early humans had sex with other hominins, like Neanderthals.

That's why Neanderthal genes are present in humans today, in people of European and Asian descent. Homo sapiens also mated with another group, the Denisovans, and those genes are found in people from Oceania.

Mark

13th February 2020, 15:52

I have also found an article that again suggests that humanoid DNA has diverse roots, and that we did not all walk out of Africa nor do we share one single female ancestor, as the science today would suggest...

This article did not say that at all. This is what it said.

About 50,000 years ago, ancient humans in what is now West Africa apparently procreated with another group of ancient humans that scientists didn't know existed.

I've just posted, a few days ago, many articles above talking about Neanderthal and Denisovan. Have not gotten to the other, unknown genetic traces of other hominids, but that was part of the plan going forward. All humans are primarily Homo sapien, with strands of DNA that come from the other hominid and other groups that inhabited other parts of the planet. Please see: Posts 361 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100738-Racism&p=1335293&viewfull=1#post1335293), 362 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100738-Racism&p=1335297&viewfull=1#post1335297) and 364 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100738-Racism&p=1335616&viewfull=1#post1335616).

Although there is no suggestion that the DNA is other-worldly, the single-anscestor, out-of-Africa meme is slowly loosing steam.

It is not losing steam. What you are speaking about is, first, a straw man, but there are different forms of hominid that live in different parts of the world that interacted with and mated with Homo sapien, which we all are, primarily and dominantly, and who came out of Africa.

It won't be long, if our masters allow it of course, that our off-world connections will be uncovered.

From your mouth, to your Divinity's ears. :)

Mark

13th February 2020, 16:03

Apologies to Mark/Rakhyt for interjection. Apologies to myself for discussing our starry origin as I’m aware of without being able to “prove it” in lab.

No need to apologize. Thank you for interjecting, all voices and comments are welcome.

I’m not “new age” and our origin is not “new age”, it’s not only ancient - in your terms - it’s perhaps, older than this piece of Universe.

I will accept your self-definition as a valid expression of your sovereignty, to define yourself as you so desire. When you say "our", of whom do you speak?

We all are translucent plasma bodies in origin. That’s “softer than unboiled egg”. There’s no “DNA” floating in our plasma bodies since DNA is coagulated fragments of information net condensed to this gravity and atmospheric pressure.

Granted.

If you break an egg and what you call “white” is actually transparent and translucent.
It has no colour at all.

There is no racism, as we know it, beyond the body. Thank you for pointing it out.

Perhaps ..

if all the broken fragmented information/mind/dna within us start working together can it return a piece of it self to the original yolk ?

Scientifically impossible from eggs perspective but there’s so much we do t know about life beyond DNA, yet.

Wish you all happy colors to your Sunrise

And the same to you!

Ernie Nemeth

13th February 2020, 16:09

A species with two extra chromosomes cannot mate with a species with two less. That is science's most basic tenet. There are no other hominids with the same number of chromosomes as humans on earth. How did they procreate with these apes then?

And since our own chromosome #2 is obviously spliced, it has been manipulated by some sort of intelligence, other than the source of creation.

And since science refuses to acknowledge this particular obviousness, I refuse to believe anything else they have to say because I know their premise is faulty. Since the premise is the foundation for all the rest of their conclusions, I have to reject it all.

I also believe that their classification and toxicology methods are biased since they are trying to prove an assumption the entire field believe to be true - that all humans are from earth and that there is no life anywhere else in the entire universe.

Lloyd Pye comes to mindas supporting something similar.

How do you think this argument fits into the research ongoing?

Mark

13th February 2020, 16:27

A species with two extra chromosomes cannot mate with a species with two less. That is science's most basic tenet. There are no other hominids with the same number of chromosomes as humans on earth. How did they procreate with these apes then?

I'm not sure about your numbers, but I can say that apes are not the same as hominids. There is a discussion about gene splicing, which is how science currently explains the ability of different forms of humans to interact sexually and have children. This discussion about the topic (https://genetics.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/denisovan-chromosome-2) is very interesting.

And since science refuses to acknowledge this particular obviousness, I refuse to believe anything else they have to say because I know their premise is faulty. Since the premise is the foundation for all the rest of their conclusions, I have to reject it all.

Science does not "refuse to acknowledge this particular obviousness", but what you believe or not is your choice.

I also believe that their classification and toxicology methods are biased since they are trying to prove an assumption the entire field believe to be true - that all humans are from earth and that there is no life anywhere else in the entire universe.

I think rather than this being the case, evidence to the contrary has not been found nor are scientists looking, in particular, for such origins. Remember, it is only in recent months and years (https://dpo.tothestarsacademy.com/) that ufology has gone mainstream.

Mark

13th February 2020, 20:50

In support of a link shared by Ernie above and, also, the wide-ranging implications of the interaction of many types of humans across the span of time and space to create the human family that we now consider to be a single type of being, Homo sapiens sapiens (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens-sapiens). What the article is stating, is that prior to this point there has been evidence of unknown human hominims inside of Africa. We are used to talking about Neanderthal and Denisovan, but there are apparently others as well that were distinct enough to merit their own classification.

Early humans in Africa may have interbred with a mysterious, extinct species – new research (https://uk.news.yahoo.com/early-humans-africa-may-interbred-190122048.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACtallLBp2duY7Fr2Y65GKNRmSq-Ro85EVS0_PpJq0Lx3Mz4yMWS59nGVic2Pe8m--DQSYczRtBIW6OdmOPFc9JPJxqPty273UNqlVoYu0oKTbvqEhs_EtYNDTcFtjxcoIzjm3_h_57ikHU9R-F4lRX_WBayZDbu7znXkFknWz_4)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42480&d=1581625699

One of the more startling discoveries arising from genomic sequencing of ancient hominin DNA (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12886) is the realisation that all humans outside Africa have traces of DNA in their genomes that do not belong to our own species.

The approximately six billion people on Earth whose recent ancestry is not from Africa will have inherited between 1% and 2% of their genome from our closest but now extinct relatives: the Neanderthals (https://theconversation.com/neanderthals-cared-for-each-other-and-survived-into-old-age-new-research-93110). East Asians and Oceanians have also inherited a small amount of ancestry from the Denisovan (https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/denisovan/)s, another close relative of Homo Sapiens.

Now a new study, published in Science Advances (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/7/eaax5097), suggests that early humans living inside Africa may also have interbred with archaic hominims. These are extinct species that are related to Homo sapiens.

The interbreeding outside Africa happened after our Homo sapiens ancestors expanded out of Africa into new environments. It was there they had sex with Neaderthals (https://theconversation.com/jaw-bone-discovery-reveals-more-about-secret-sex-lives-of-neanderthals-and-early-humans-43656) and the related Denisovans (https://theconversation.com/how-breeding-with-an-ancient-human-species-gave-tibetans-their-head-for-heights-28818).

This led to new discoveries. Early genetic studies of people from across the globe had previously suggested that our current distribution (https://www.nature.com/articles/325031a0) was the result of a single expansion out of Africa around 100,000 years ago. But the identification of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry in modern Eurasians complicated things.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42481&d=1581625768

We still think that most – anywhere between about 92% and 98.5% – of the ancestry in people not living in Africa today does indeed derive from the out-of-Africa expansion. But we now know the remainder came from archaic species whose ancestors left Africa hundreds of thousands of years before that.

What was happening inside Africa?
Insights into interbreeding have been driven by the much greater availability of modern and ancient genomes from outside of Africa. That’s because the cold and dry environments of Eurasia are much better at preserving DNA that the wet heat of tropical Africa.

But our understanding of the relationship between ancient human ancestors within Africa, and their connection with archaic humans, is beginning to deepen. A 2017 study of ancient DNA from southern Africa (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.08.049) investigated 16 ancient genomes from people alive over the last 10,000 years. This showed that the history of African populations was complex. There wasn’t just a single group (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-1929-1) of humans around in Africa when they expanded out 100,000 years ago.

It’s a result that was supported earlier this year by a paper examining ancient DNA from four individuals (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-1929-1) from what is now Cameroon. Taken together, this research suggests there were geographically diverse groups in Africa well before the main expansion out of the continent. And many of these groups will have contributed to the ancestry of people alive in Africa today.

In addition, it now appears that there was potentially gene-flow into ancient African Homo sapiens populations from an archaic ancestor. One way in which this could happen is for people to expand out of Africa, have sex with Neanderthals, and then migrate back into Africa. Indeed, this has been demonstrated in one recent study (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.01.012).

The new paper provides evidence that there may also have been gene-flow into the ancestors of West Africans directly from a mysterious archaic hominin. The researchers compared Neanderthal and Densiovan DNA with that from four contemporary populations from West Africa. Using some elegant mathematics, they then built a statistical model to explain the relationships between the archaic hominins and modern Africans.

Mark

13th February 2020, 21:09

To understand where we are, we have to understand where we come from. In that vein, since we are Project Avalon and interested in the Human Experience, we have to take a bit of time to think broadly about topics that interest us and to use holistic methods to address the questions that divide us. Our curiosity about who we are goes down into the depths of our biology, our psychology and our spirituality and to get at our societal structures, perhaps, it is necessary to understand many different aspects of those areas.

So in that spirit, a part of our search here will be to examine what science is saying about a number of different topics that may have some bearing upon the question. I've already begun by looking at our ancient ancestors and predecessors, which will continue, but I will also begin to look into where science currently stands in regards to Panspermia (https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/in-search-of-panspermia/) and questions of "Alien Origin", as far as that might lead us. At the very least, it is a useful exercise to understand where exactly modern science is on these issues, if only to point out how far we have yet to go.

Of course, we are all in this together, so your input is necessary for this discussion to bear fruit and for a full record to be co-created by the members of this grand project. Thank you in advance for your contributions!

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42482&d=1581627436

Do We Share DNA with ET? (http://nautil.us/issue/80/aliens/do-we-share-dna-with-et)

If there’s life beyond Earth, the genetic code might be our common bond.
BY DANIEL OBERHAUS

The primary difficulty of interstellar communication is finding common ground between ourselves and other intelligent entities about which we can know nothing with absolute certainty. This common ground would be the basis for a universal language that could be understood by any intelligence, whether in the Milky Way, Andromeda, or beyond the cosmic horizon. To the best of our knowledge, the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe, which suggests that the facts of science may serve as a basis for mutual understanding between humans and an extraterrestrial intelligence.

One key set of scientific facts presents an intriguing question. If aliens were to visit Earth and learn about its inhabitants, would they be surprised that such a wide variety of species all share a common genetic code? Or would this be all too familiar? There is probable cause to assume that the structure of genetic material is the same throughout the universe and that, while this is liable to give rise to life forms not found on Earth, the variety of species is fundamentally limited by the constraints built into the genetic mechanism.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42483&d=1581627534

On Earth we have only sequenced the genomes of a small percentage of living organisms and have only recently completed the human genome. We have successfully cloned several animals, but technical and ethical roadblocks prevent scientists from doing the same with humans. If an extraterrestrial civilization isn’t burdened with ethical dilemmas about cloning, however, sending the genetic code for humans and other species may be the most effective way to teach them about our biology.

References to our genetic makeup have been a feature of interstellar messages from the very beginning. Although the first genes wouldn’t be sequenced for another three years, the 1974 Arecibo message, an interstellar radio message sent from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, included a rudimentary bitmap of DNA’s helical structure. Designed by Frank Drake, the founder of SETI, with input from Carl Sagan, the Arecibo message consisted of 1,679 binary digits arranged as a rectangular bitmap. The resulting image depicts the numbers one through 10 and the atomic numbers for the five elements that make up DNA, as well as the formulas for the sugars and bases in DNA nucleotides, a crude drawing of a human, a graphic representation of the solar system, and a picture of the Arecibo telescope.

Would aliens be surprised that life on Earth shared an underlying genetic code? Or would this be all too familiar?

In 1999, two interstellar radio transmissions known as Cosmic Calls included symbols for each of DNA’s four nucleotides. To date, however, only a single interstellar transmission has encoded any genetic information.

To commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Arecibo message, the artist Joe Davis (https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2009/11/18/%E2%80%9Crubisco-stars%E2%80%9D-and-the-riddle-of-life/) traveled to Puerto Rico to broadcast the genetic sequence for the large subunit of the ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase (RuBisCO) molecule. RuBisCO is the most abundant protein on Earth and plays a major role in converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into energy-rich molecules for plants. To encode this genetic information in a signal, Davis first considered representing each of the 1,434 nucleotides with a two-bit ID (C=00, T=01, A=10, G=11) to create a 2,868-bit sequence representing the RuBisCO molecule. The problem with this, of course, is that there isn’t enough information to use analysis techniques such as those described above by Elliott. Thus, any ETI that received this message would have no way to determine the coding schema used to create the message, which would essentially be an unintelligible mess of data.

For better or worse, it is unlikely that any extraterrestrials will ever receive, much less understand, Davis’s message. None of the stars selected by Davis have been confirmed to host planets, and two of the target stars aren’t likely able to support life even if they do. GJ 83.1 is a flare star, a type of dwarf known for periodic bursts of intense radiation and Teegarden’s star is a red dwarf, a type of star that is widely believed to be too cool to support life unless the planet was so close to the star that it would become tidally locked, meaning that half of the planet would be in perpetual night.

Even if there are intelligent inhabitants around any of the three “RuBisCO stars,” the odds that they would be able to interpret Davis’s message is quite low, given the lack of context or redundancy to correct for message corruption during transit. Davis was the first to admit that his interstellar message was meant more for his fellow passengers on spaceship Earth than extraterrestrials, but this stunt points the way to a promising future for METI (messaging extraterrestrial intelligence).

In the last few decades, biologists have sequenced the genomes for thousands of species, including humans. These are effectively the “blueprints” for the species, but we are only just beginning to learn how to read the code. A sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence may have developed genetic engineering to the point where genomes are the equivalent to an executable computer program, which would allow them to artificially recreate a human and other terrestrial species in their own labs. This assumes that extraterrestrials are made of the same genetic “stuff” as life on Earth, but this may not be as large of an assumption as it first seems.

In some ways, it would almost be more disturbing to make contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization populated by fleshy, mostly hairless hominids than a civilization of eight-eyed cephalopods, but this possibility is not entirely out of the question. As the astrobiologist Charles Cockell has argued, empirical evidence suggests that certain features of life are deterministically driven by physical laws. Extrapolating from this, it is reasonable to believe that “at all levels of its structural hierarchy, alien life is likely to look strangely similar to the life we know on Earth.”

Cockell’s argument is analogous to the case made by pioneering cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky that extraterrestrials are likely to think like us because they are subject to the same basic physical constraints. Minsky argued that we will be able to converse with an extraterrestrial intelligence because they will think like us. If all intelligent creatures are faced with the same fundamental problems (restraints on space, time, and materials) and the methods of intelligence are determined by the nature of the problem at hand, Minsky reasoned that extraterrestrial intelligences will arrive at solutions similar to our own, namely symbolic systems for representing these problems and processes for manipulating those systems that can also be described symbolically.

It would be naïve, of course, to suggest that evolution is totally determined by the laws of physics given the significant and obvious role that chance plays in the trajectory of evolution. For example, research suggests that the probability of an asteroid impact resulting in global cooling, mass extinction, and the subsequent appearance of mammals was “quite low” 66 million years ago. It was sheer cosmic bad luck that the asteroid impacted the relatively small portion of the Earth’s surface that was rich in hydrocarbons and sulfur that ultimately choked the Earth with stratospheric soot and sulfate aerosols. In this case, the site of the asteroid impact changed the history of life on Earth in a way that could never be predicted by deterministic evolutionary laws.

The point is that although the trajectory of evolution isn’t predictable in advance, the variety of species it produces is not boundless. This contradicts the intuitive interpretation of Darwinian evolution, which suggests that natural selection results in a “tendency of species to form varieties” in infinite number.

On the contrary, Cockell argues that “evolution is just a tremendous and exciting interplay of physical principles encoded in genetic material” and “the limited number of these principles ... means that the finale of this process is also restrained and universal.”

Consider, for example, the emergence of cellular life on Earth. Is the cellular form something that we might expect to emerge on an extraterrestrial planet, or would extraterrestrial organisms find a different mode of self-assembly?

Might an extraterrestrial intelligence have a genetic code built from six or more nucleotides? It’s unlikely.

In the 1980s, the biologist David Dreamer used carboxylic acids extracted from the famous Murchison meteorite to demonstrate that these simple molecules would spontaneously form cellular membranes when added to water. According to Cockell, this suggests that the ingredients for cellular life are “strewn throughout the Solar System in carbon-rich rocks,” which means “we might expect the molecules of cellularity to form in any primordial cloud, ready to deliver their cargo of protocell material to the surface of any planet with a waiting abundance of water.” Later experiments demonstrated that meteorites are far from the only source of molecular material that can form cellular membranes, suggesting that this mode of organization is likely common in the universe.

Similar physical laws also limit the possibilities of still more fundamental aspects of biology, such as the structure of DNA. One of the most remarkable features about DNA is that it is composed of only four nucleotides—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine—that can only combine in very limited ways: adenine pairs with thymine and cytosine pairs with guanine. Is the fact that there are only four nucleotides or that they combine into two base pairs an evolutionary accident? Might an extraterrestrial intelligence have a genetic code built from six or more nucleotides, and might these nucleotides be different from the four that comprise the DNA of life on Earth? This is a possibility, of course, but there are strong reasons to believe that it is unlikely.

Adding more nucleotides to the equation increases the amount of information available to the system and means that smaller molecules can contain the same amount of information as longer molecules in genetic pools with only four nucleotides. The trade-off, of course, is that the percentage of bases that a given nucleotide can link with halves with each base pair added to the system.

For example, in a two-nucleotide system, each base can pair with half of the bases. In a four-nucleotide system, each base can only link with a quarter of the bases, and so on. Thus, Cockell argues, “as you add more bases, it gets more difficult to find ones that are sufficiently dissimilar to make it easy for them to be distinguished when the molecule replicates,” which results in a higher rate of errors. Indeed, computer models of RNA, the molecular interface between DNA and basic proteins, suggest that four nucleotides result in the greatest fitness.

As for the types of base pairs, research using synthetic nucleotides to expand the number of base pairs in the genetic code has demonstrated that swapping these synthetic base pairs out of the normal code or adding them usually produces unstable results. However, organisms such as bacteria that have synthetic nucleotides added into an expanded genetic alphabet have been shown to be stable under stringent laboratory conditions. The results of ongoing experiments with the many possible base pairs suggest that the four base pairs we see in RNA and DNA are optimized to meet the conditions that allow for its replication, but also the preservation of its structure.

If the brain and its cognitive structures are in fact optimized for the embodied experience of the organism, this suggests that the thesis that extraterrestrials will think similarly to us is not so far-fetched after all.

Daniel Oberhaus is a staff writer at Wired, where he covers space exploration and the future of energy. He is the author of Extraterrestrial Languages (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/extraterrestrial-languages).

Mark

14th February 2020, 15:41

Not much depth to this article, but it came out back in 2013, when this research was starting to shift the narrative. I see this article as indicative of the realization on the part of geneticists and a growing segment of the general populace that the history of the planet and its people may be a lot longer and more intricately involved than has been previously admitted.

I think it is also a tacit admission that Tolkien's LOTR series and his research in the record storage facilities of Oxford may have uncovered real histories of ancient populations otherwise lost to common knowledge.

Middle Earth on planet Earth: Prehistoric human interbreeding created ‘Lord of the Rings world’ (https://metro.co.uk/2013/11/20/middle-earth-on-planet-earth-prehistoric-human-interbreeding-created-lord-of-the-rings-world-4194369/)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42486&d=1581693939

A prehistoric ‘Lord of the Rings-type world’ once existed on Earth with a number of different human species interbreeding and populating the globe at the same time, it has been claimed.

Extensive interbreeding between members of ancient human-like groups is thought to have produced a number of different sub-species living across Europe and Asia between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. Scientists say new genome sequences from two extinct human relatives – Neanderthals and Denisovans – suggest these archaic groups bred with anatomically-modern humans, and each other, more extensively than previously thought.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42487&d=1581693952

The findings, unveiled at a meetings at London’s Royal Society this week, suggest interbreeding could go some way to explaining the genetic diversity of today’s humans.

One geneticist compared the findings with the fictional world of Middle Earth in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which sees mythical hominid species – such as dwarves and elves – living side-by-side.

Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who attended the meeting but was not involved with the research, said afterwards: ‘What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a Lord of the Rings-type world — that there were many hominid populations.’

Humans who originate outside of Africa owe two per cent of their DNA to Neanderthals, while Oceania populations – such as Australian Aborigines and Papua New Guineans – got four per cent of their genome from Denisovans breeding with their ancestors.

Mark

14th February 2020, 15:50

Engaging the same theme as above, in 2008 the discovery of these fossils led to another evocation of LOTR and the idea of a multiplicity of human types coexisting in the same time-frame. Given such diverse origins, and in relation to our topic in this thread, there is some cultural evidence for stark differences between people, which could lead to very firm ideas and stereotypes over time and across space.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42489&d=1581695409

Were “Hobbits” Human? (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/were-hobbits-human-14768/)
Debate rages over an Indonesian fossil find

By Guy Gugliotta

In 2003, researchers excavating a limestone cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores made an extraordinary discovery: the 18,000-year-old bones of a woman whose skull was less than one-third the size of our own.

Modern humans were already living throughout the Old World during her time—yet she was physically very different from them. The researchers, led by paleoanthropologist Peter Brown and archaeologist Michael Morwood, both of Australia's University of New England, concluded that the woman represented a previously undiscovered species of archaic human that had survived for thousands of years after the Neanderthals had died out.

They named her Homo floresiensis and nicknamed her the "Hobbit," after the diminutive villagers from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. The team has since recovered bones from as many as nine such people, all about a yard tall, the most recent of whom lived about 12,000 years ago.

The Hobbits of Flores created an uproar among anthropologists, causing them to question assumptions about evolution and human origins that had held sway for more than half a century. Some agree that the "Hobbits" are a distinct species. But others, such as anthropologist Robert Martin of Chicago's Field Museum, say the bones belong to small Homo sapiens—perhaps people who suffered from microcephaly, a condition in which the brain fails to grow to normal size. Five years after the initial discovery, says Martin, "nobody's budging an inch."

Some critics say that it would have been impossible for a hominid with a brain the size of an orange to make the sophisticated tools found at Ling Bua Cave—let alone hunt with them—and that they must have been crafted by modern humans. But supporters of the separate species hypothesis modeled the shape and structure of the Hobbit brain and say it could have made the tools.

When Smithsonian anthropologist Matthew Tocheri and other researchers analyzed the Hobbitt wrist, they found a primitive, wedge-shaped trapezoid bone common to great apes and early hominids but not to Neanderthals and modern humans. That fits a theory that Hobbits are less closely related to Homo sapiens than to Homo erectus—the human ancestor that is thought to have died out 100,000 years ago. Morwood has found crude Homo erectus-type stone tools on Flores that may be 840,000 years old.

The skeptics retort that disease is a more likely explanation for the wrist bones. A study this year speculated that the Flores people could have suffered from hypothyroidism, a form of cretinism found relatively frequently in modern Indonesia that, the researchers say, could also produce deformed, primitive-appearing wrists.

Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program, who once doubted that the Hobbits were a separate species, says he's changed his mind: "Flores was this wing in the building of human evolution that we didn't know about. There is no reason that 800,000 years of experimentation could not evolve a small but advanced brain."

Mark

14th February 2020, 16:03

And then there is the NatGeo version.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42490&d=1581695659

New Fossils Hint 'Hobbit' Humans Are Older Than Thought (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/06/hobbits-humans-older-ancestors-island-fossils-archaeology/#close)
Teeth and bones reveal a likely ancestor of the famous tiny humans found in Indonesia.

BY ADAM HOFFMAN

FOR THE PAST decade, a fossil human relative about the size of a toddler has loomed large in the story of our evolutionary history. This mysterious creature—found on the Indonesian island of Flores—has sparked a heated debate about its origins, including questions over its classification as a unique species.

But now, a scattering of teeth and bone may at last unlock the mystery of the “hobbits,” also known as Homo floresiensis.

The 700,000-year-old human remains are the first found outside Liang Bua cave, the site on Flores that yielded the original hobbit fossils. The much older samples show intriguing similarities to H. floresiensis, including their small size, and so provide the best evidence yet of a potential hobbit ancestor.

“Since the hobbit was found, there have been two major hypotheses concerning its ancestry,” says Gerritt van den Bergh (http://cas.uow.edu.au/members/UOW094227.html), an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia and a contributor to the work.

According to one theory, H. floresiensis is a dwarfed form of Homo erectus, an ancient human relative that lived in East Asia and parts of Africa until about 143,000 years ago. But other researchers think the hobbits evolved from even earlier, smaller-bodied hominins such as Homo habilis or Australopithecus.

“These new findings suggest that Homo floresiensis is indeed a dwarfed form of Homo erectus from Java, a small group of which must have gotten marooned on Flores and evolved in isolation,” van den Bergh says.

The fossils also dispel any lingering theories that the hobbits were a form of diseased Homo sapiens, with smaller heads and statures due to developmental conditions such as Down syndrome or microcephaly (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/hobbit-1.html), the birth defect linked to the modern Zika outbreak (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160307-zika-virus-microcephaly-brazil-science/).

Second Site
Archaeologists found the first hobbit fossils while excavating Liang Bua cave in 2003. The ancient human relative stood about 3.5 feet (1.1 meters) tall and weighed around 75 pounds (35 kilograms)—and yet it was a full-grown adult.

Further work at Liang Bua cave revealed that the hobbits made stone tools and may have had similarly handy neighbors (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160113-stone-tool-sulawesi-hobbit-flores-archaeology/) on the island of Sulawesi. But without any additional remains, their evolutionary history has been shrouded in mystery.

The latest excavation site, called Mata Menge, is located in the So’a Basin of central Flores, approximately 46 miles (74 kilometers) southeast of Liang Bua.

Since 2010, the team has found thousands of stone tools as well as the fossils of small elephants, giant rats, komodo dragons, and crocodiles. When they expanded their excavation in 2014, the team at last unearthed hominin skeletal remains, including a jaw fragment, six teeth, and a small piece of cranial bone.

“Initially, we thought we were dealing with a juvenile mandible, because it was so tiny—even smaller than the Homo floresiensis mandibles,” says van den Bergh. “But after a CT scan, we were surprised to see that the root cavity was fully developed, indicating that it was an adult specimen.”

Shocking Age
While four of the teeth came from the same adult as the jaw fragment, a closer inspection revealed that the remaining two were “milk teeth,” each belonging to a separate infant. The team then used statistical techniques to compare the jaw and teeth bones with corresponding fossils in other species such as H. habilis, H. erectus, and the original H. floresiensis.

Their analysis, published today in Nature, indicates that the Mata Menge fossils most closely resemble H. erectus, though they are considerably smaller in size, and they have many common structural features with H. floresiensis.

“The fossils are very similar, but the Mata Menge fossils are slightly more primitive compared to H. floresiensis from Liang Bua,” writes Yousuke Kaifu, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, Japan, and lead author of the study.

To determine the age of the fossils, another research team took samples of the surrounding sediment layers and used a highly precise dating technique called argon-argon dating, which measures the decay of radioactive argon over time. They also isolated a tooth fragment and used a combination of dating methods based on the decay of uranium.

Their results, also published today in Nature (http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature17663), show that these fossils are about 700,000 years old—making them the oldest hominins to be found on the island.

“I kind of expected this, but was shocked when I first saw the fossils and realized the fact that such small people were around as early as 700,000 years ago, when large-bodied Homo erectus were around on the continental parts of Asia,” writes Kaifu.

Ancestral Bones
Although the archaeologists can’t yet be certain that the older hominin remains belong to the same species as H. floresiensis, the analysis suggests that the Mata Menge dwellers are the hobbits’ likely ancestors. This categorization is further supported by the stone tools from Mata Menge, which bear a striking resemblance to those found at the Liang Bua site.

The authors note that other stone tools have been found on Flores dating back as early as one million years ago, around the same time H. erectus was living on nearby Java.

Combining all the evidence, a chronology begins to unfold in which H. erectus settled on Flores and then shrank to the hobbit size seen at Mata Menge and Liang Bua.

“I think that they’ve provided very good evidence for why it has some characteristics that are suggestive of Homo floresiensis, and that Homo erectus was the likely ancestor coming from Southeast Asia,” says Rick Potts (http://humanorigins.si.edu/research/human-origins-program-team/rick-potts), director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History.

Some skeptics may contend that 300,000 years is an unreasonably small window for Homo erectus to reduce itself to hobbit size.

But while there’s no other indication of such rapid changes in our hominin ancestors, Potts says there are recorded case studies of other mammals that have become small quickly in response to limited resources or a lack of predation on an island—a process known as island dwarfing. For example, the red deer on the island of Jersey shrank to one-sixth of its original size over just 6,000 years.

As the team continues to excavate Mata Menge, they hope to find more skeletal remains that could provide a more robust description of these human relatives, as well as older fossils that might help connect the developmental dots and form a coherent time line for this strange branch on our evolutionary tree.

“I think of Flores as being its own little laboratory of human evolution that will ultimately allow us to understand how the body evolved in response to environmental stresses,” says Potts. “It may take years to develop, but I think it’s a tremendous opportunity.”

Ernie Nemeth

14th February 2020, 16:17

When I really look deep at any life form I always marvel at the genius of the intelligence that created it. But I have never attributed the life form types to a source creator. Since childhood I have fantasized about what sort of being could have come up with all these forms. And I have never considered these life forms to be accidental either. They were designed by a group of intelligent beings long, long ago.

The source creator created life, the one and only life, without form but fully functional. The forms were added later. Then this life was organized and toyed with; beings of great talent then explored all the various forms that could support it. And when they were done they recorded their inventions in a molecule that could hold the basic templates: DNA.

It is impossible for the DNA molecule to spontaneously happen by chance, not in a million billion times the age of the universe. It is so obviously engineered that its function, if we could understand it, would uncover secrets of the true workings of the universe, and perhaps even reveal the identity of what we would or will eventually call the progenitor race.

An Ancient Race whose art is the life forms of today.

Mark

14th February 2020, 16:59

An Ancient Race whose art is the life forms of today.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42491&d=1581699223

Real talk.

I don't find the nascent science of our times to be inimical to this idea at all. And I do see these differences, that are ancient in nature, as probably a part of our cultural evolutionary history as well, as disparate ideals of supremacy come from in-group and out-group dynamics, which lead to the formation of societal institutions and mores that support the cohesion of the group.

Ernie Nemeth

15th February 2020, 17:15

Mike

18th February 2020, 16:59

I'm cross posting this video from my Evergreen thread at the request of Bill, who along with myself is curious to get Mark's reaction to it (and anyone else's for that matter!).

It's about 2 and a half hour long, but well worth every second. The time goes by fast - it's fascinating.

For those that aren't familiar with the events that took place in 2017 on the Evergreen campus, it goes like this in a nutshell:

The day of absence, as it's called, is an Evergreen tradition where the black staff and faculty willingly stay off campus for a day (i think it's just a day?) to emphasize their contributions to the school.

The problem arose when it was required for whites to stay off campus. A professor, Bret Weinstein, took issue with the requirement of whites to stay off the campus vis a vis the free-will decision of blacks to stay away. The madness that follows has to be seen to be believed.

xq4Y87idawk

Mark

19th February 2020, 18:58

Hey. Thanks for sharing. I'm about an hour into it. Here is an interesting series of interchanges so far:

The professor says its a reaction to the real inequities that are experienced in the outside world. 48:00. Rogan calls it misdirected. The professor says the colleges can't defend themselves. Rogan says it is happening to colleges all over the country and its pretty unprecedented. "Ideological mobs" have been operationalized, stemming from Postmodernism which has led to what the professor called absurdities.

The professor then calls this phenomenon, "The Postmodern Bully" and states that it is so new, nobody knows what to do with it. Earlier discussion sees the professor explaining the social justice warriors as being 2 groups in 1. One, people who want equity. Two, people who want revenge.

The professor calls this, "The Era of Peak Bull****".

I understand his perspective because I am experiencing it now in a sense. I am engaged in criminal justice reform at the local level and the progressive activists in town are calling the conservatives intent upon keeping the system intact and retaining control more reliable than me as an outsider, coming in, seeking reform. It turns into upside down mirror world when ideology is in control.

I understand and am familiar with both sides of this equation.

There is an issue of wanting to empower these college kids, and then there is the other side of things where you want to prepare them for the world outside of the colleges, which is a world still based upon white supremacy. The colleges are incubating false realities, where these extreme perspectives are flourishing and, because of the Age of the Internet and phones, videos and all kinds of social media posts are revealing these things to the rest of the world in ways that have never been possible before. It is like watching the sausage being made in the kitchen as they work through their ideologies and discover that they are not workable out in the real world.

We are in an era that is brand new in this country. And people are trying to figure out how to move forward into the future seeking equitable opportunities for all people. And there will always be extremists in this situation. I remember being in college myself and being exposed to extremist views, like the 5% Nation (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5614846), the Nation of Islam (https://www.noi.org/), the Black Moors (http://msta1913.org/), Hebrew Israelites (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/nyregion/black-hebrew-israelites-jersey-city-suspects.html), Wa****aw nation (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1999/wa****aw-nation-comes-under-investigation) and more, all intent upon seeking separation from the "White Devil" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakub_(Nation_of_Islam)) and creating black nations or "homelands" in America.

I, of course, knew of the NOI and Marcus Garvey based upon my being raised by parents who were civil rights activists throughout their lives, but these other groups were new to me and I studied them then and actually incorporated some of those views into my Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel, Temple of the Sky (https://www.amazon.com/Temple-Sky-Terran-Babylon-Book-ebook/dp/B01H0UHZ4G) in which a world where Africa is off-limits to technology - made so by the Eloheem Anunnaki - and continent-spanning cities cover the rest of the planet, which is the final battleground for a galaxy spanning space opera that incorporates albino Illuminati princes, journeys to multiple dimensions, genetic engineering of white people, psychic powers and reincarnation.

Growing up the way I did, on military bases around the world, I experienced a diverse surroundings from the youngest ages, which was not the case for most Americans during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. So I knew the reality of living around white people, which was very difficult back then, for those of us who integrated white spaces. I don't know if I've ever shared that here but entire classes would taunt me with racial epithets, I was chased home from school, fights on paper routes and playgrounds, adults coming after me cursing me out for stepping on their lawns walking home from school, not being allowed in my friends homes, yards or pools, ad infinitum.

When my family lived off-base in Illinois and Oklahoma, those were the worst experiences of this type of racism. It was not at all like that on the bases in the DOD school system as racism was literally illegal and would result in loss of rank, money and potentially a career if engaged in directly. But there are many black kids who go to these colleges and this is their first experience of white people. Living with them, getting to know them as individuals, learning that people are truly people. When real knowledge trumps ideology, we see real growth. That is what ALL OF THIS will result in. For this nation as a whole.

What these students are doing stands in counterpoint to what they see out in the world around them with the Proud Boys, the Tiki Torch crew of White Nationalists, the known biases of corporate America and the workforce and the substantial number of states where melanated skin is a very rare sight indeed which many view as hostile to diversity. It is a necessary discussion and dissection of the pros and cons, of the extremes, as is the rest of the discussion on the opposite side of the political spectrum, that this nation needs to have and that the world is experiencing by proxy.

Ok, this was kind of rambling and I'm not sure if I have addressed what y'all were interested in discussing. Do I need to watch more or have I captured the gist of the entire video?

Mike

20th February 2020, 04:00

Mark i know you're a busy dude so i appreciate you taking the time to watch some of the video and respond so thoughtfully.

What troubled me wasn't that the students were in search of some form of equity, it was that they seemed to be seeking power masquerading as equity. In other words, they wanted to reverse the historical roles of blacks and whites, not create a sense of fairness. And a large group of those students were actually white!:)

Hey how can I get ahold of this book of yours?

Mark

20th February 2020, 16:41

What troubled me wasn't that the students were in search of some form of equity, it was that they seemed to be seeking power masquerading as equity. In other words, they wanted to reverse the historical roles of blacks and whites, not create a sense of fairness. And a large group of those students were actually white!:)

I did not look at the videos of the students so I was not aware of that. But I'm not surprised. I do have thoughts about it, though. First though, how did it trouble you and why, Mike?

The Millennials and Gen-Z have grown up and are maturing in an era where multiculturalism has formed their very base perceptions of the world. Television, videos, music beginning in the 80s but intensifying in the 90s and especially the 00s have presented them with a world that does not exist, one in which it seems like the entire nation is diverse, where black and brown folks exist equitably with white folks. The commercials, the movies, the music have shaped their view of the world, not to mention having a black president for 8 years in the form of one Barack Hussein Obama. Still speaking in crass generalizations, while "they" knew that racism existed, because their youths, the late 90s and the entire 00s, were well within the era of political correctness and movements like the Tea Party and white "nationalist" organizations were seen as the extreme fanatical edge of politics, they had no idea that racism was so pervasive in this nation.

And so, Drumpf and his election, the seemingly swelling ranks of organizations dedicated to white supremacy and nationalism, the intensifying movement proselytized by racist pamphlets and banners being placed on college campuses (https://www.statesman.com/news/20181005/inside-texas-states-year-of-hate-neo-nazi-propaganda-fight) - which the campus in my town, Texas State University, has been at the forefront of - has awakened them to the reality that older generations have never lost sight of. That we are not in any way "post-racial" and that what some call hate and others call protecting the white race from dilution and extinction, has given rise to a pervasive fear in many that the world as they knew it is gone forever. So they want to protect what's left by building walls and passing legislation to limit immigration that further "browns and blacks" the USA. For their children, creating, in effect, a neo-apartheid form of governance and minority rule in this country. Whites as "protected class".

But for the babies, these young college students, they feel betrayed. They have lived in a different world, a media bubble, that was popped quite abruptly.

They believe in a different kind of world than that we currently exist in, apparently. The depths of their perceptive betrayal and the extremities of their responses, are, perhaps, exemplified - by some few - in these videos.

Hey how can I get ahold of this book of yours?

I left a link to my amazon site up in the post above. :handshake:

Mark

20th February 2020, 17:36

If we intuitively understand the true dynamics at work, but that is at odds with the scientific interpretation, then how can complication and convolution add to our comprehension? Put another way, if we don't have the right fundamentals, the right foundation, how can we build a sound understanding of what is our true history or the way forward to a healthy future?

What do you suggest are the right fundamentals, the right foundation?

Science talks about DNA as if they understand it, but they do not. Even with the correlations between this gene and that expression, these are only surface features of something far more intricate and deep. DNA, as we understand it today merely codes for the hundred or so proteins. But a protein is not alive. So where does the life part get coded in?

Is your understanding greater than those who spend hours a day studying genetics? I'm afraid your comments seem like a further erosion of the expertise of those who seek higher understanding by delving deep into the known science and accumulated knowledge of humankind (https://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/). I agree, there are deeper understandings to be had. I also agree that there are suppressed sciences, ancient understandings of the nature of the material, psychological and spiritual aspects of the greater reality that some are aware of, but most are not. But a blanket rejection of science as we understand it sounds more like a celebration of a cult of ignorance or, worse yet, an arrogant, cultural rejection of our nascent understanding of the science of creation that does not support the advancement of Terran humankind as a species.

And, it is a discipline in continuous progress. Growth. Addition to the wellspring of knowledge that has been accumulated across the centuries.

I don't see where such a perspective is useful in any discussion as it is a blanket rejection of rationality based upon opinion, rather than observed knowledge.

Mike

20th February 2020, 17:56

well it troubled me because it was disingenuous. it troubled me when the students held the school president hostage. it troubled me when they physically threatened and shouted down the opposition. it troubled me when they stalked Weinstein allies and showed up at their homes. troubled me that they weren't interested in having an honest dialogue, just furthering what eventually became an authoritarian crusade. it troubled me that they were trying to resolve racism with more racism. it troubled me that they have no regard for freedom of speech. troubled me that 2 brilliant professors were unfairly labelled racist and forced to resign from the university. was troubled when the school president told campus police to stand down when innocent lives were in danger...

this video troubles me too: FH2WeWgcSMk

i was troubled by all of it basically:)

I'm sorry, i'm not trying to be glib! It's just that i have to be to work in half an hour, and i don't have the damn time atm to get into this like i would like. i'd love to unpack all this with a little more nuance, and will do so as soon as i get the chance.

Ernie Nemeth

20th February 2020, 18:09

Mike

21st February 2020, 00:39

Hi Mark, along with the video I posted in my last post here, these are really the boots on the ground type of videos that display the madness in all it's glory. I think each one is roughly 30 mins long. The first one is a slow warm up, but the second 2 are really something to see. It makes Bret's interview with Joe seem tame by comparison.

I'm just offering these here along with a strong suggestion to watch, but am also fully aware of how obnoxious it is for me to expect you to take time out of your busy day to do that.

I started writing a more detailed post in response to your post #390, but then realized that you might not have any idea what I'm talking about if you're not fully aware of the entire situation..

..so here it is. if it's something that interests you, have a look. if ya do, i think we can have a much broader, nuanced discussion on the entire event

A0W9QbkX8Cs[/YOUTUBE]

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Mark

21st February 2020, 15:10

In support of the movement in science to opening the paradigm wider in regards to the potentiality for alien life to be present on earth. A really extraordinary article.

A controversial study has a new spin on the otherworldliness of the octopus (https://qz.com/1281064/a-controversial-study-has-a-new-spin-on-the-otherworldliness-of-the-octopus/)
By Ephrat Livni (https://qz.com/author/livniqz/)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42545&d=1582297283

Octopuses are strange, smart creatures (https://qz.com/1077632/octlantis-is-a-just-discovered-underwater-city-engineered-by-octopuses/) that certainly seem alien—what with the tentacles, camouflage, and shape-shifting skills. Still, the idea that they actually came from outer space would seem to fall strictly into the realm of sci-fi; an update of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu (https://qz.com/1095491/humans-had-to-evolve-to-acknowledge-octopus-consciousness/), say.

But in these interesting times, real life reads like fiction. Recently, a group of 33 scientists worldwide—including molecular immunologist Edward Steele and astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe (https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/directory/professor-chandra-wickramasinghe/)—published a paper suggesting, in all seriousness, that octopuses may indeed be aliens.

The paper, published in the March issue of the the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798?via%3Dihub), is controversial, obviously, and the vast majority of scientists would disagree. But the paper is still worthy of discussion—for one, as a thought exercise, because outlandish ideas are often initially rejected. And in provoking us with seemingly bizarre theories, it forces us to acknowledge that there are aspects of life on Earth for which classic evolutionary theory as yet has no explanation.

The octopus, for example, is traditionally considered to come from the nautiloid, having evolved about 500 million years ago. But that relationship doesn’t explain how these odd cephalopods got all their awesome characteristics or why octopuses are so very different (https://qz.com/857377/the-aliens-in-arrival-look-like-octopuses-because-humans-think-cephalopods-are-both-scary-and-smart/), genetically speaking, from their alleged nautiloid ancestors. The paper states:

The genetic divergence (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/genetic-divergence) of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great … Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene.

The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral nautilus to the common cuttlefish to squid to the common octopus can’t be found in any pre-existing life form, the authors say.

So far, so good. But then the paper gets highly speculative. The researchers continue, “It is plausible then to suggest they [octopuses] seem to be borrowed from a far distant ‘future’ in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.”

To make matters even more strange, the paper posits that octopuses could have arrived on Earth in “an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs.” And these eggs might have “arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago.” The authors admit, though, that “such an extraterrestrial origin…of course, runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm.”

Indeed, few in the scientific community would agree that octopuses come from outer space. But the paper is not just about the provenance of cephalopods. Its proposal that octopuses could be extraterrestrials is just a small part of a much more extensive discussion of a theory called “panspermia,” which has its roots in the ideas of ancient Greece (https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/over-our-heads-a-brief-history-of-panspermia).

The word “panspermia” translates to “seeds everywhere.” The idea is that the seeds of life are everywhere in the universe (http://www.panspermia-theory.com/), including space, and life on Earth may originate from “seeds” of some kind in space. In this paper, the authors argue that the “seeds,” or alien life forms invading Earth, come in multiple forms, including “space-resistant and space-hardy” viruses and bacteria. It supports this argument by pointing to organic matter found in comets, as well as various medical studies on the inexplicably intelligent self-replicating abilities and super-strength of viruses. The paper reviews 60 years of experiments and observations from a range of scientific fields to support its unusual conclusions.

Virologist Karin Moelling (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300804) of the Max Planck Institute Molecular Genetics in Berlin isn’t convinced, although she says that the paper is worth contemplating because there’s still so much we don’t know about the origins of life on Earth. She writes in a commentary (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300804?via%3Dihub) (paywall) in the same publication, “So this article is useful, calling for attention, and it is worth thinking about, yet the main statement about viruses, microbes and even animals coming to us from space, cannot be taken seriously.”

Evolutionary scientist Keith Baverstock from the University of Eastern Finland, in his commentary on the paper (paywall), is equally wary. The proposed theories “would support an extra-terrestrial origin of life,” he writes. Still, they don’t necessarily lead to that conclusion; there are other plausible explanations for the evidence the paper offers.

The authors are well aware of the intellectual resistance to their ideas, writing:

We certainly do not want this paper to read, as one reviewer has put it, ‘somewhat like a last-ditch and exasperated attempt to convince the main stream of the scientiﬁc community that…life has been carried to this planet from elsewhere in the universe on comets/meteorites.’

The researchers acknowledge that some forms of life originated on Earth. But they still say that other, perhaps earlier, forms originated elsewhere, like outer space. In other words, they argue that the two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, and, taken together, they would help fill in some gaps in the current scientific understanding that the classic evolutionary theory cannot.

The paper is intended to be provocative. That said, it did withstand a year of intense peer-review before publication. As Steele told Cosmos (https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/viruses-et-and-the-octopus-from-space-the-return-of-panspermia), “It has thus passed some severe and tortuous tests already.”

If for no other reason, the ideas proposed in this rather radical paper are worthy of our attention because we always tend to agree with what we already believe (https://qz.com/1268034/scientists-show-how-opinions-trick-your-understanding-of-facts/). Yet the history of science is full of theories that were mocked and rejected out of hand, only to finally be accepted as truth. Or, in Steele’s words (https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/viruses-et-and-the-octopus-from-space-the-return-of-panspermia), “The situation is reminiscent to the problem Galileo had with the Catholic priests of his time—most refused to look through his telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter.”

Consider these scientists intellectual troublemakers (https://qz.com/1269977/a-berkeley-professor-explains-why-society-needs-more-troublemakers/). You don’t have to agree with their theories about octopuses from outer space to appreciate their contribution to the great conversation about the origins of life. Society and science need people to articulate unconventional ideas and shake up the status quo. They provoke us to rethink what we imagine we know.

Mark

21st February 2020, 15:32

As you state, I am not an expert. But the fundamentals are obvious, except to science because science has no way to approach these topics with objectivity - since they are not objective.

The right fundamentals.

Life is the reason for the universe.
Love is the feeling of unity.
Consciousness is universal.
The base reality is not substantial.
Life exists everywhere. By extension, intelligent life is common.

There are five.

I like these. Can agree with every one of them. Yes, this is the direction and understanding that every field of science needs to move toward, post haste. From my observation of multiple fields of endeavor, I believe it is happening very fast, right now.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether current research is valuable. All I know is that an effect of an effect is not a cause. That is all they are looking at because the truth is a sanctioned commodity in this as well as many other areas of science that comes too near the occult. It is designed to confuse and lead around and around, and away from the most profound paradigm-breaking discoveries we are not granted access to at any cost.

Agreed, but again, these truths are moving closer and closer to the mainstream as we engage here and now. The evidence of this, again, crosses fields. It seems that some of it is a deliberate form of tech release, of innovations and discoveries that we in the AltCom know have been around for decades and hundreds if not thousands of years, but which are being celebrated and highlighted in the mainstream press by sanctioned publications and practitioners.

At least show an interest in (I say to science in general), how, for instance, DNA responds to the morphogenic field that transports information to individuals far removed from each other. Or possibly relate spontaneous asymmetrical hereditary adjustments to some mechanism of DNA. Either and many more would open the door to true 'science' that could help all of us advance our knowledge. These 'marker' games are for patent applications and big pharma investment.

How quantum entanglement in DNA synchronizes double-strand breakage by type II restriction endonucleases (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4746125/)

Epigenetics: A Turning Point in Our Understanding of Heredity (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/epigenetics-a-turning-point-in-our-understanding-of-heredity/)

I do believe the two articles above in some ways address your points? As I pay very close attention to these areas, if you describe the second, in regards to "spontaneous asymmetrical hereditary adjustments" and whether or not you are refering to epigenetics, we can delve into it deeper. These are vital areas of study and, I believe, they are being addressed by current practitioners.

I do tend to throw the baby out with the bath water so show me where the baby is...

There is just so much going on, Ernie. So much it is hard to keep up with. It is like a renaissance of intense, scientific rigor. I have been watching and reading and sharing information at the forefront of the quantum exploration for years now and it is breaking into new scientific disciplines every day. The base idea of information being the foundation of Cosmos (https://mindmatters.ai/2020/01/could-information-be-at-long-last-the-missing-dark-matter/) correlates to the "All is Mind" alchemical formulation of consciousness as foundational to this physical reality. And there are many, many more.

All of which relate to how we relate to each other, to bring it back to our current discussion on ethnic and racial interrelation and interconnectedness. Understanding how we are interconnected at the scholastic level cannot be expected from all, who do not have the time or the wherewithall to engage this data in depth as some of us do, nor should it be expected. And so ignorance as the rule remains the state of oceanic humanity, until such a time as we can achieve methods of information dissemination that are truly available to a population with the capacity, provided by education, economic stability and culture, to co-create what King called "The Beloved Community". We have a long way to go.

And a lot of unwilling segments of humanity to convince to go with us.

Fear and loathing is much easier. It requires no opening of the mind, only a further closing.

Mark

21st February 2020, 16:18

I started writing a more detailed post in response to your post #390, but then realized that you might not have any idea what I'm talking about if you're not fully aware of the entire situation..

..so here it is. if it's something that interests you, have a look. if ya do, i think we can have a much broader, nuanced discussion on the entire event.

This morning my students are testing during 5th Period, 4 hours. I don't have a 5th Period class, so I'm now sitting in my classroom till lunchtime with no students. That said to say, I have had the time to watch these videos. What would you like to discuss about them?

Watching them has not changed my impressions. These are children of the multicultural media era, maturing into a world and within a protected culture provided by an educational institution staffed by liberals who have no idea what to do with the "monsters" they've created. And make no mistake: when I used the word "monsters" in this context, I mean it in the pure sense of its definition, "an imaginary creature that is typically large, ugly, and frightening."

These are babies. Early-20s and late teens. Many of them are, at least. Living within imagined realities addressing very real material conditions. The imagined reality is the college campus, a space deliberately designed to foster leaps of understanding by teaching the humanities, disciplines to include the Arts and the Sciences. They've just left mama and daddy's houses, the streets, segregated and integrated secondary systems and have found ideologies and adults that provide a structure for their lived, othered experiences of being black or otherwise melanated, white and othered as LGBTQIA, and, apparently, have also been trained in tactics designed to disrupt and forward controversial - to mainstreamed audiences - positions seeking fundamental societal change.

That is what college is for, to some folks. Exploration of possibility.

Nobody was hurt, that I can see. People yelling, screaming and crying, while others attempt to engage reasonably, is a sight often seen on college campuses and protest sites around the world.

This statue, on Texas State University's campus, the Fighting Stallions, is our Free Speech area. This is where you see such things here and it gets really, really rowdy. We get preachers and fundamentalists with large placards and pictures of fetuses, we get white supremacists, LGBTQIA, you name it.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42554&d=1582320535
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42553&d=1582320528

Their disruption of the campus and their monitoring tactics were admittedly extreme and effective, as far as getting their message out and engaging a wider audience. I'm of the impression that this is the aspect that you are concerned with, perhaps?

I'm sure some watching this all happen are seeing evocations of Saul Alinsky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky) and the communist threat to disrupt American Democracy and Freedom, although, it seems to me, these days our community, the AltCom, as well as the American political Right and the Drumpfers have more engagement with Russia than diversity advocates on a college campus. It is also strange that we hear the word socialism mentioned a lot more than communism these days, as well.

Funny how that shift has occurred. Socialism was Europe, but now Europe is demonized among certain populations in the US and Russia is less so.

Mark

21st February 2020, 18:33

Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT), where genes not directly received from our ancestors find their way into the code. Another indication of extraterrestrial origin being a possibility and where and how to find indications of such in the genetic code. Although, I think it is safe to say, that extraterrestrial genetic manipulation of hominids could only have occurred between species that already shared genetics.

Human genome includes 'foreign' genes not from our ancestors (https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/human-genome-includes-foreign-genes-not-from-our-ancestors)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42546&d=1582303204

Many animals, including humans, acquired essential ‘foreign’ genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times, according to research published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study challenges the conventional view that animal evolution relies solely on genes passed down through ancestral lines and suggests that, at least in some lineages, the process is still ongoing.

The transfer of genes between organisms living in the same environment is known as horizontal gene transfer. It is well known in single-celled organisms and thought to be an important process that explains how quickly bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics, for example.

Horizontal gene transfer is also thought to play an important role in the evolution of some animals, including nematode worms, which have acquired genes from microorganisms and plants, and some beetles that gained bacterial genes to produce enzymes for digesting coffee berries. However, the idea that horizontal gene transfer occurs in more complex animals, such as humans has been widely debated and contested.

Lead author Alastair Crisp from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge said: “This is the first study to show how widely horizontal gene transfer occurs in animals, including humans, giving rise to tens or hundreds of active 'foreign' genes. Surprisingly, far from being a rare occurrence, it appears that this has contributed to the evolution of many, perhaps all, animals and that the process is ongoing. We may need to re-evaluate how we think about evolution.”

The researchers studied the genomes of 12 species of fruit fly, four species of nematode worm, and ten species of primate, including humans. They calculated how well each of their genes aligns to similar genes in other species to estimate how likely they were to be foreign in origin. By comparing with other groups of species, they were able to estimate how long ago the genes were likely to have been acquired.

In humans, they confirmed 17 previously-reported genes acquired from horizontal gene transfer, and identified 128 additional foreign genes in the human genome that have not previously been reported. A number of genes, including the ABO gene, which determines an individual’s blood group, were also confirmed as having been acquired by vertebrates through horizontal gene transfer. The majority of the genes were related to enzymes involved in metabolism.

In humans, some of the genes were involved in lipid metabolism, including the breakdown of fatty acids and the formation of glycolipids. Others were involved in immune responses, including the inflammatory response, immune cell signalling, and antimicrobial responses, while further gene categories include amino-acid metabolism, protein modification and antioxidant activities.

The team identified the likely class of organisms from which the transferred genes came. Bacteria and protists, another class of microorganisms, were the most common donors in all species studied. They also identified horizontal gene transfer from viruses, which was responsible for up to 50 more foreign genes in primates.

Some genes were identified as having originated from fungi. This explains why some previous studies, which only focused on bacteria as the source of horizontal gene transfer, originally rejected the idea that these genes were ‘foreign’ in origin.

The majority of horizontal gene transfer in primates was found to be ancient, occurring sometime between the common ancestor of Chordata and the common ancestor of the primates.

The authors say that their analysis probably underestimates the true extent of horizontal gene transfer in animals and that direct transfer between complex multicellular organisms is also plausible, and already known in some host-parasite relationships.

The study also has potential impacts on genome sequencing more generally. Genome projects frequently remove bacterial sequences from results on the assumption that they are contamination.

“It’s important to screen for contamination when we’re doing genome sequencing, but our study shows that we shouldn’t ignore the potential for bacterial sequences being a genuine part of an animal’s genome originating from horizontal gene transfer,” adds Dr Chiara Boschetti from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

Mark

21st February 2020, 21:44

What if these "ghost lineages" don't just exist in the far distant past? As the techniques for finding traces of them improve, it is quite possible that we will see more recent examples of populations that have snuck into Terran genetic lines, perhaps physically indistinguishable from some populations, but containing unmistakable genetic anomalies that point to an origin just a bit more distant from Sol than Terra.

Neanderthals may have interbred with a much older human lineage (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/neanderthals-may-have-interbred-with-a-much-older-human-lineage/)
The result is likely to be disputed, as it relies on a novel technique.

JOHN TIMMER (https://arstechnica.com/author/john-timmer/)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42555&d=1582320980

Shortly before the publication of the first Neanderthal genome, a number of researchers had seen hints that there might be something strange lurking in the statistics of the human genome. The publication of the genome erased any doubts about these hints and provided a clear identity for the strangeness: a few percent of the bases in European and Asian populations came from our now-extinct relatives.

But what if we didn't have the certainty provided by the Neanderthal genome? That's the situation we find ourselves in now, as several studies have recently identified "ghost lineages"—hints of branches in the human family tree for which we have no DNA sequence but find their imprint on the genomes of populations alive today. The existence of these ghost lineages (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/ancient-african-skeletons-hint-at-a-ghost-lineage-of-humans/) is based on statistical arguments, so it's very dependent upon statistical methods and underlying assumptions, which are prone to being the subject of disagreement within the community that studies human evolution.

Now, researchers at the University of Utah are arguing that they have evidence of a very old ghost lineage contributing to Neanderthals and Denisovans (and so, indirectly, possibly to us). This is a claim that others in the field will undoubtedly contest, in part because the evidence comes from an analysis that would also revise the dates of many key events in human evolution. But it's interesting to look at in light of how scientists deal with a question that may never be answered by definitive data.

Looking for ghosts
Ghost lineages have made their presence known in two ways. In the first, sequences of DNA from different populations can reveal shared ancestry groups. Native Americans, for example, have sequences that descended from an ancestral population that contributed DNA to modern East Asians, as well as another population that contributed to modern Siberians. In West Africans, we've found a significant contribution from a population that doesn't seem to have contributed to any other existing population (along with contributions from groups that do have current descendants).

While that population's contribution is well within the range of normal human variation, we still don't know anything about who they were or where they interacted with the ancestors of West Africans. They're a historical ghost at the moment, though further studies could always provide more details.

But there are hints of additional ghost lineages in our past. In these cases, the contribution comes from something outside the normal range of human variability. Take the Neanderthal DNA, for example. European and Asian populations all share common ancestors that seem to have left Africa about 50,000 years ago and thus have a relatively small range of variations in their DNA. Neanderthals, by contrast, split off from the lineage that produced modern humans hundreds of thousands of years ago and have been largely separated since. They had plenty of time to build up their own variations that are distinct to their lineage and not found in modern human populations.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42556&d=1582320991

Thus, the DNA Neanderthals contributed to Eurasian populations included variants that fall well outside the range of the variation we see in other parts of the genome. And while we know about Neanderthals, it's possible you can get a similar contribution from a group we don't know about.

The problem is that this sort of branching is impossible to identify at the single-base level. There's no way to distinguish a variant that has arisen recently due to mutation from one that was brought in from a more distantly related lineage. In the diagram below, we take some known branches of the recent human family tree and add a potential ghost lineage. We can imagine an example where, at a specific location in the genome, modern humans and Neanderthals have an A, while Denisovans have a G.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42557&d=1582320998

One explanation for this is that modern humans got their A from Neanderthals, which we know interbred with us. But that interbreeding has mostly contributed to non-African populations, so this is unlikely. Another option is that a mutation occurred on the Denisovan lineage. But a third option is that the G came into the Denisovan population thanks to a completely separate human lineage that interbred with them. At the individual base level, these two options are impossible to tell apart.

Testing all the things
To discriminate among all the possible models of our evolutionary past, we have to consider both the information we know—that Neanderthal DNA is rare in African populations, for example—as well as statistical arguments. DNA variants tend to be inherited together, so if there is a contribution from a ghost lineage, it would likely involve some unusual variants clustering near each other in the genome. With enough solid knowledge and a careful statistical analysis of enough genomes, it should be possible to figure out which models are more likely and which can be ruled out.

That's more or less what this new research did. It starts with two Neanderthal genomes, one Denisovan genome, and one genome each from modern English, French, and Yoruban populations. It then builds different models of potential evolutionary histories—a branch here, a bit of interbreeding there—and determines how well each model is supported by the statistics. Given enough models to test, there should be a pattern where a collection of similar trees is favored. And that model better be consistent with the things we already know.

The rough outline of the tree that comes out of this analysis does a reasonably good job of matching up with things that have been seen in other analyses. The relatively recent gene flow from Neanderthals into modern humans is there, as is an earlier one from the ancestors of modern humans into early Neanderthals. There's also an indication of gene flow from a ghost population into the Denisovan lineage, which has been seen in other studies. This ghost lineage would have had to occupy some part of Eurasia as a contemporary of the Neanderthals and Denisovans, something that's certainly possible, given that the two groups we know about managed to get there.

Trees upon trees
Things start to get a bit strange, however, in the earlier parts of the favored tree. The same ghost lineage would have also contributed DNA to the common ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans, suggesting it was a distinct lineage already by the time of their split from the part of the tree that includes modern humans. There's no indication, however, of it contributing to the modern human lineage (except perhaps indirectly via its contribution to Neanderthals). That would suggest that the ghost lineage was outside of Africa by the time the modern human lineage started and only encountered the Neanderthal/Denisovan ancestors once they migrated into Eurasia.

That's possible, but the only lineages that we know were present outside of Africa at the time were variants of Homo erectus, a much earlier lineage.

What are we missing?
Which brings us to the dates of the different splits. The authors use what they acknowledge is a low estimate of the mutation rate/generation to figure out when the lineage splits occur. The estimate produces early splits for all the lineages compared to estimates from other sources. But even accounting for that, the lineage splits are older than most other estimates in the literature.

And that has a rather dramatic impact on the origin of the ghost lineage. Even using a mutation rate that produces a relatively recent split, the ghost lineage would have been a distinct branch of the human family tree roughly two million years ago. That's right about the same time as Homo erectus shows up in the fossil record. So this tree would have an extremely early branch of H. erectus moving out into Asia and being isolated from the rest of the human lineage until the ancestors of Neanderthals showed up roughly a million years later.

There's no shortage of reasons to be skeptical about that theory, including the rapid isolation of the lineage from the lineages that remained in Africa and the fact that fertility was still possible after such a long time spent in reproductive isolation. That, plus the fact that the dates disagree with so much else in the literature pretty much guarantees that the paper will be controversial.

But the paper was never going to be the final word, since the analysis it describes doesn't even try to include a number of additional events in human evolution that we know to be significant. We know that Denisovans contributed DNA to a number of Asian and Pacific lineages, but there are no sequences included from modern humans in those lineages. We also know another ghost lineage from around the time of the branch leading to modern humans contributed DNA—including an entire Y chromosome—to a small group of West African populations. Those aren't represented here, either.

It's not hard to understand why. More sequences and more branches would mean increased computation time for each tree evaluated, and adding additional potential branches means that far more trees have to be evaluated in total. But including these sorts of well-defined cases of interbreeding have the potential to provide a strong validation of any results produced by this analysis.

Fortunately, the data is all out there, and someone will undoubtedly find the computer time to make sure it gets done eventually. But this is a case where it's unlikely to be the sort of certainty provided by obtaining a genome from the ghost lineage, given the age of these events. And it may be that the remaining signals in populations we can get genomes from aren't strong enough to eliminate ambiguity.

It will be interesting to watch how researchers in the field deal with all these remaining uncertainties.

Mike

22nd February 2020, 02:53

hey Mark, I think it's at the end of the 3rd video when Weinstein makes the comment that this isn't about free speech, racism, or college campuses. it's actually about the breakdown of logic in our civilization. I agree wholeheartedly, and that's why I see it as being fundamentally important. The Evergreen debacle represents a microcosm of this logical breakdown taken to the near extreme.

The common name given to this breakdown of logic is postmodernism...which you referred to earlier, and which, for those that don't know, is often characterized by a kind of militant, distorted version of equity (equality of outcome), a suspicion and denial of reason and logic, a suspicion and denial of science, an emphasis on group identity, and this idea that reality is not objective..among other things.

By the way, I mostly agree with everything you've written about the Evergreen thing, but I must admit that I was surprised that you don't appear to be giving any of the responsibility to the students for what went down. I understand free speech zones and rowdy debate - and the propaganda they've been exposed to, and the way they've been misled - but do the students kidnap and hold faculty hostage at your school? Do they barricade them in libraries and threaten them with violence? Do they stalk their ideological adversaries and show up at their homes? Maybe I'm out of the loop dude but that stuff seems pretty severe to me!:)

Post modernism, from what I can tell, attempts to create a type of authoritarianism masquerading as utopia. It's structure is as follows..as I understand it (all within the context of the Evergreen events):

- the death of logic and reason: I'm not sure where to even begin. It's just endless. The council seems to be trying to end racism with more racism. The hiring procedure is preposterous. It required an equity justification for every single position on campus. In a meeting, food was provided for people of color only. Seats were provided for people of color only. Whites are basically required to apologize for their very existence at every turn. It was clearly more of a power play than anything else, in my view.

- authoritarianism: the council offers a dense plan for what they're calling equity, and while they "invite conversation" about it, they threaten anyone who might question it. And even though they did not reveal it initially, they basically demanded that everyone ask for permission to be apart of it all. One counsel member describes their implementation plan thusly: political organizing, violence, and prayer. When Bret is accused of racism at one particular meeting, he is told - as he begins to defend himself - that this isn't the place to do that. When he asks where he can defend himself, he is told that he will not get that opportunity.

- the death of science: even though Evergreen was likely the most progressive, liberal college in the country at the time, the students appear to be quite enraged about racism on campus...even though no credible reports of racism ever surfaced. The council declared that to even ask people of color about incidents of racism was a form of racism..which is kind of a sinister Orwellian maneuver. Science needs hypothesis, testability and falsifiability, as Heather says, so it would appear to be one of the first things to go. At one point Bret offers to give a seminar on racism - where it came from and why it exists - to put all the scientific underpinnings in place, but he is treated as if he's going to give a lecture on eugenics or something. Lots of other stuff I can't remember now..but anyway, it's all discordant with the scientific understanding of the world as an objective reality

- emphasis on group identity: I was saying this in another thread, but it appears as though the lgbqti...community is beginning to crumble under the weight of it's own rainbow metaphor. New oppressed groups are being manufactured daily, and the 'community' is beginning to eat itself as it competes for the victimhood trophy. In one of the videos a student or council member (sorry can't recall) goes on a rant about "gay whites taking over the movement". One of their seminars had to do with "how Asians are contributing to white supremacy". There's also this issue of transgender women in female sports(see my thread on that if interested), and the resentment biological women are feeling in response to it. It feels like a deck of cards to me at the moment, in some ways, because there are too many people seeking power, not authentic equity.

- the seeking of power masquerading as equity(also, see: authoritarianism): well, that's sprinkled thru all these bullet points. and I'm getting tired lol. at one point whites are sent fetching stuff for the black students. at another they reprimand the university president for using his hands in a way that suggests "micro-aggressions". When he complies with their demands to stop they all laugh and ridicule him. It was all preposterously disingenuous. The council and the activist students weren't actively trying to eradicate racism, they were trying to reverse the historical roles of blacks and whites, and thus achieve a position of power.

So anyway, like I said in the beginning, these events appear to represent the breakdown of logic and reason in our civilization, and therefore are quite important as a case study type of thing. I've put all this here in the racism thread, but it might actually more appropriately belong in a comprehensive thread on post modernism

Mark

24th February 2020, 14:34

Mark

24th February 2020, 14:58

I'm interested in hearing perspectives as to why this is not real, or why it should not be discussed. Despite the best efforts of many individual, group and national actors, it seems that the world continues to become a smaller place where ethnonationalism is increasingly at odds with growing diversity as the descendants of colonization inhabit the colonizing nations alongside the descendants of colonizers. There is a certain symmetry to it, obviously, but is is accompanied by indignant backlash, from generations educated in systems that did not disclose the full costs of their national wealth and so live under illusory systems of belief in their own innocence, goodness and lack of culpability in the nature of the world.

There are many indicators that this is breaking down for many people who actually realize and own up to their own participation in systems of oppression. Recognizing that it is not their fault, it is just a relic of the system they were indoctrinated in from the youngest ages. Breaking down that system with those who do not want to see it, or even admit the system's existence, is really difficult in the best of times. And even more difficult than that in a place like Avalon, where everyone already believes they are outside of the system and inured to its effects.

A SOCIOLOGIST EXAMINES THE “WHITE FRAGILITY” THAT PREVENTS WHITE AMERICANS FROM CONFRONTING RACISM (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism)

By Katy Waldman (https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/katy-waldman)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42583&d=1582555838

In more than twenty years of running diversity-training and cultural-competency workshops for American companies, the academic and educator Robin DiAngelo has noticed that white people are sensationally, histrionically bad at discussing racism. Like waves on sand, their reactions form predictable patterns: they will insist that they “were taught to treat everyone the same,” that they are “color-blind,” that they “don’t care if you are pink, purple, or polka-dotted.” They will point to friends and family members of color, a history of civil-rights activism, or a more “salient” issue, such as class or gender. They will shout and bluster. They will cry. In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged—and particularly when they feel implicated in white supremacy. Why, she wondered, did her feedback prompt such resistance, as if the mention of racism were more offensive than the fact or practice of it?

In a new book, “White Fragility (https://aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com/x/c/QvM-vjLdI545cUNBCEFWvE0AAAFwd6snswEAAAFKAbxxiPk/https://www.amazon.com/White-Fragility-People-About-Racism/dp/0807047414?creativeASIN=0807047414&linkCode=w50&tag=thneyo0f-20&imprToken=bZpJGR5FVOKxsX-DdqOp0A&slotNum=0),” DiAngelo attempts to explicate the phenomenon of white people’s paper-thin skin. She argues that our largely segregated society is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort, so that they fall to pieces at the first application of stress—such as, for instance, when someone suggests that “flesh-toned” may not be an appropriate name for a beige crayon. Unused to unpleasantness (more than unused to it—racial hierarchies tell white people that they are entitled to peace and deference), they lack the “racial stamina” to engage in difficult conversations. This leads them to respond to “racial triggers”—the show “Dear White People,” the term “wypipo”—with “emotions such as anger, fear and guilt,” DiAngelo writes, “and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation.”

DiAngelo, who is white, emphasizes that the stances that make up white fragility are not merely irrational. (Or even comical, though some of her anecdotes—participants in a voluntary anti-racism workshop dissolving with umbrage at any talk of racism—simmer with perverse humor. “I have found that the only way to give feedback without triggering white fragility is not to give it at all,” she remarks wryly.) These splutterings “work,” DiAngelo explains, “to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy.” She finds that the social costs for a black person in awakening the sleeping dragon of white fragility often prove so high that many black people don’t risk pointing out discrimination when they see it. And the expectation of “white solidarity”—white people will forbear from correcting each other’s racial missteps, to preserve the peace—makes genuine allyship elusive. White fragility holds racism in place.

DiAngelo addresses her book mostly to white people, and she reserves her harshest criticism for white liberals like herself (and like me), whom she sees as refusing to acknowledge their own participation in racist systems. “I believe,” she writes, “that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.” Not only do these people fail to see their complicity, but they take a self-serving approach to ongoing anti-racism efforts: “To the degree that white progressives think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.” Even the racial beliefs and responses that feel authentic or well-intentioned have likely been programmed by white supremacy, to perpetuate white supremacy. Whites profit off of an American political and economic system that showers advantages on racial “winners” and oppresses racial “losers.” Yet, DiAngelo writes, white people cling to the notion of racial innocence, a form of weaponized denial that positions black people as the “havers” of race and the guardians of racial knowledge. Whiteness, on the other hand, scans as invisible, default, a form of racelessness. “Color blindness,” the argument that race shouldn’t matter, prevents us from grappling with how it does.

Much of “White Fragility” is dedicated to pulling back the veil on these so-called pillars of whiteness: assumptions that prop up racist beliefs without our realizing it. Such ideologies include individualism, or the distinctly white-American dream that one writes one’s own destiny, and objectivity, the confidence that one can free oneself entirely from bias. As a sociologist trained in mapping group patterns, DiAngelo can’t help but regard both precepts as naïve (at best) and arrogant (at worst). To be perceived as an individual, to not be associated with anything negative because of your skin color, she notes, is a privilege largely afforded to white people; although most school shooters, domestic terrorists, and rapists in the United States are white, it is rare to see a white man on the street reduced to a stereotype. Likewise, people of color often endure having their views attributed to their racial identities; the luxury of impartiality is denied them. (In outlining these discrepancies, DiAngelo draws heavily on the words of black writers and scholars—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, Ijeoma Oluo, Cheryl Harris—although, perhaps surprisingly, she incorporates few present-day interviews with people of color.)

In DiAngelo’s almost epidemiological vision of white racism, our minds and bodies play host to a pathogen that seeks to replicate itself, sickening us in the process. Like a mutating virus, racism shape-shifts in order to stay alive; when its explicit expression becomes taboo, it hides in coded language. Nor does prejudice disappear when people decide that they will no longer tolerate it. It just looks for ways to avoid detection. “The most effective adaptation of racism over time,” DiAngelo claims, “is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.” This “good/bad binary,” positing a world of evil racists and compassionate non-racists, is itself a racist construct, eliding systemic injustice and imbuing racism with such shattering moral meaning that white people, especially progressives, cannot bear to face their collusion in it. (Pause on that, white reader. You may have subconsciously developed your strong negative feelings about racism in order to escape having to help dismantle it.) As an ethical thinker, DiAngelo belongs to the utilitarian school, which places less importance on attitudes than on the ways in which attitudes cause harm. Unpacking the fantasy of black men as dangerous and violent, she does not simply fact-check it; she shows the myth’s usefulness to white people—to obscure the historical brutality against African-Americans, and to justify continued abuse.

DiAngelo sometimes adopts a soothing, conciliatory tone toward white readers, as if she were appeasing a child on the verge of a tantrum. “If your definition of a racist is someone who holds conscious dislike of people because of race, then I agree that it is offensive for me to suggest that you are racist when I don’t know you,” she writes. “I also agree that if this is your definition of racism, and you are against racism, then you are not racist. Now breathe. I am not using this definition of racism, and I am not saying that you are immoral. If you can remain open as I lay out my argument, it should soon begin to make sense.” One has the grim hunch that such an approach has been honed over years of placating red-faced white people, workshop participants leaping at any excuse to discount their instructor. DiAngelo, for all the outrageousness she documents, never comes across as anything other than preternaturally calm, patient, and lucid, issuing prescriptions for a better world as if from beneath a blanket of Ativan. Her almost motorized equipoise clarifies the book’s stakes: she cannot afford to lose us, who are so easily lost.

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Self-righteousness becomes a seductive complement to “White Fragility,” as gin is to a mystery novel. (“I would never,” I thought, when DiAngelo described the conversation in which her friend dismissed a predominantly black neighborhood as “bad,” unsafe.) Yet the point of the book is that each white person believes herself the exception, one of very few souls magically exempt from a lifetime of racist conditioning. DiAngelo sets aside a whole chapter for the self-indulgent tears of white women, so distraught at the country’s legacy of racist terrorism that they force people of color to drink from the firehose of their feelings about it.

The book is more diagnostic than solutions-oriented, and the guidelines it offers toward the end—listen, don’t center yourself, get educated, think about your responses and what role they play—won’t shock any nervous systems. The value in “White Fragility” lies in its methodical, irrefutable exposure of racism in thought and action, and its call for humility and vigilance. Combatting one’s inner voices of racial prejudice, sneaky and, at times, irresistibly persuasive, is a life’s work. For all the paranoid American theories of being “red-pilled,” of awakening into a many-tentacled liberal/feminist/Jewish conspiracy, the most corrosive force, the ectoplasm infusing itself invisibly through media and culture and politics, is white supremacy.

That’s from a white progressive perspective, of course. The conspiracy of racism is hardly invisible to people of color, many of whom, I suspect, could have written this book in their sleep.

Mike

24th February 2020, 16:58

Hey there.

Postmodernism: a late-20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies as well as a problematical relationship with any notion of “art.”.

All of the things you are discussing above, in regards to post-modernism, are a very skewed and unrealistic understanding of a movement that has changed the world. In all actuality, all of the work we do here is postmodern. You can't deny others the same. Just because you don't agree with or understanding their way of breaking down the metanarrative.

postmodernism is infinitely more complicated than that Mark.

it's those mounting meta narratives that are acting as one enormous denial of the largest and most relevant narrative - objective reality. and we're only beginning to see the consequences.

some things are malleable, sure, but all the meta narratives that postmodernism has manufactured have taken that reasonable idea and blown it up into something preposterously unreasonable. i mean, if those videos aren't evidence of that, i don't know what is

Mark

24th February 2020, 17:29

postmodernism is infinitely more complicated than that Mark.

Granted. All things are more complicated than all explanations. All things are also simpler. Paradox is rife multiverse-wide, but we work within our current parameters and speak and share according to our understandings. Your understanding is skewed toward a perspective that leaves out othered perspectives. And that makes your interpretations one-sided and inimical to compromise or an allowance for other perceptive realities to exist that may be just as valid as your own.

it's those mounting meta narratives that are acting as one enormous denial of the largest and most relevant narrative - objective reality. and we're only beginning to see the consequences.

Of what objective reality do you speak.

some things are malleable, sure, but all the meta narratives that postmodernism has manufactured have taken that reasonable idea and blown it up into something preposterously unreasonable. i mean, if those videos aren't evidence of that, i don't know what is

Again. A university is a protected space, meant for projecting into possibilities. They have always served as such. This is how human societies evolve.

Orph

24th February 2020, 17:42

We all live in an imperfect world filled with crap we have no control over. We can only do our best to do what we feel in our hearts is right. But ultimately, we are all still part of the problem. ALL of us, by virtue of us just being alive on this planet, are part of this imperfection.

Animals suffer so we can eat meat. I can't be a vegan. The best I can do is try to eat as little meat and dairy products as I possible. But I've come to terms with the fact that I'm living in an imperfect world. I do the best I can do, and I move on.

WE ALL contribute to the pollution of this planet. No exceptions. So we do the best we can to limit our own personal pollution, knowing we live in an imperfect world, and we move on.

The government here in the USA is corrupt. I stopped voting a long time ago because the system is corrupt and voting won't change that. Regardless of whether you vote or not, you do what you feel is right, knowing we live in an imperfect world, and we move on.

When it comes to racism, I know I'm not perfect. But the world isn't perfect. I do the best I can and I move on. As far as discussing racism, what's the point? As a white male, I'm automatically a racist homophobic misogynist and the world would be better off if I just go jump off a tall bridge. I will always be wrong when it come to discussing racism, so why discuss it? The article states that I'm not allowed to say "I do the best that I can". Nope, that's not good enough. I must beat myself over the head and apologize for being white. Oh, now I see I have a new label, ... fragile white boy.

Look, if I live next door to you Mark/Rahkyt, and we see each other outside and I say "Hi neighbor. Beautiful day", and you say "Screw you white boy", you know what? I'm going to continue on with my day. I'm not going to try and discuss things. I'm going to know that you have the freedom to be however you want to be. Oh well. I'm going to move on. I'll continue to try and be a nice person, to try and do what's right. I know I won't always succeed. Occasionally I'll slip up. But if you aren't willing to see past the occasional slip-ups, then, ........... what's the point. Again, I'm not going to beat myself up for being white nor am I going to apologize for the imperfect world we all live in.

I know, if you were my neighbor, you wouldn't says those things to me. But, as my neighbor, if you can tell me something specific about me personally, I'm all ears. Such as ...... "Hey neighbor, do you realize your car is parked partly on my property"? ..... or ...... "Hey neighbor, all those druggie friends of yours are trashing my front yard". That's something I can personally work on to better myself. If you can tell me something about myself personally that I'm doing or saying that can be construed as racist, then yes, I'll listen.

But these generalizations that cover everybody, ..... well I'm tired of hearing that. If I lump all blacks into the category of being dumb and lazy, .... well, obviously that's wrong and will result in big problems. But if I have to get into a so called "discussion" that will only have one outcome, meaning, I'm white so I'm a racist homophobic misogynist fragile white boy and I've got to either beat myself with a cat-o-nine-tails or I have to go jump off a bridge, ...well, you know what? .............. It's a beautiful day, and I've got other things to do.

Mike

24th February 2020, 18:07

the objective reality i'm talking about is the one that acknowledges science and biology and mathematics and physics. the one that emphasizes facts as opposed to delusionally inspired subjective "narratives".

human societies actually devolve by making universities safe spaces. a university isn't a home, it's not a sanctuary...or at least it shouldn't be. it's often a place to be confronted by horrible ideas. history is horrifying, so is physics and biology and great literature. if a university makes you safe it's no longer a university. and worse yet, it's not preparing you for objective reality..which doesn't allow for a time out the moment your feelings get hurt

those kids at evergreen wanted all the power and all the victimhood at once. thats pathological, and doesn't represent growth in any sense of the word. theyre north american, for starters, which puts them at the top 1%. and theyre at what was a reputable, strong university which puts them at the top 1% of that. i'm not buying their "oppression" for half a second.

Mark

24th February 2020, 18:38

When it comes to racism, I know I'm not perfect. But the world isn't perfect. I do the best I can and I move on. As far as discussing racism, what's the point? As a white male, I'm automatically a racist homophobic misogynist and the world would be better off if I just go jump off a tall bridge. I will always be wrong when it come to discussing racism, so why discuss it? The article states that I'm not allowed to say "I do the best that I can". Nope, that's not good enough. I must beat myself over the head and apologize for being white. Oh, now I see I have a new label, ... fragile white boy.

Ok. This personalizes it, when it is not personal. Your personality complex is not you and it is amenable to change. This is the "fragile" part, where you and others who think similarly don't even want to look at the potentiality that it is possible to change a/your way of seeing the world, because the idea of racism pulls up so much baggage. Perhaps you don't see a different way as a "better" way and, in the end, there is no better at all, there just is.

There is no discussion to be had in relation to your points as they are absolute, when the human personality construct is not absolute. Infinitely malleable.

But we do choose, who we are. And who we are does correspond with who others are, who resonate and live in certain systems that become the primary expression of their chosen personality matrix.

You are not "automatically" anything. There are many "white boys" who exist within a personal sphere of healthy interactions and thought processes regarding privilege and power, as well as the interconnectivity of the human family.

We can all change our labels. If we want.

Look, if I live next door to you Mark/Rahkyt, and we see each other outside and I say "Hi neighbor. Beautiful day", and you say "Screw you white boy", you know what? I'm going to continue on with my day. I'm not going to try and discuss things. I'm going to know that you have the freedom to be however you want to be. Oh well. I'm going to move on. I'll continue to try and be a nice person, to try and do what's right. I know I won't always succeed. Occasionally I'll slip up. But if you aren't willing to see past the occasional slip-ups, then, ........... what's the point. Again, I'm not going to beat myself up for being white nor am I going to apologize for the imperfect world we all live in.

Your way of perceiving this issue is very clear by your word choice and syntax. It is not really conducive to real conversation or growth, it is a rant which is fine, but I do understand where you're coming from. You possibly don't believe that there is anything about your perception of race that needs to change. Since change begins with each of us and you don't perceive humans as being able to be any different than they are since the world is imperfect, your way of interacting with the world will remain the same and that imperfect world may indeed contain experiences where a black neighbor of yours tells you to screw off. It doesn't have to be that way for you, though.

But these generalizations that cover everybody, ..... well I'm tired of hearing that. If I lump all blacks into the category of being dumb and lazy, .... well, obviously that's wrong and will result in big problems. But if I have to get into a so called "discussion" that will only have one outcome, meaning, I'm white so I'm a racist homophobic misogynist fragile white boy and I've got to either beat myself with a cat-o-nine-tails or I have to go jump off a bridge, ...well, you know what? .............. It's a beautiful day, and I've got other things to do.

Do you have these kinds of conversations often? Do you hear and see these words written or spoken, often? What, exactly, are you tired of?

You are projecting a lot of meaning in this conversation that was not there and you are not alone in doing so. It is a combative attitude that refuses to hear or countenance the reality of its own obtuse nature, which is, really, human nature.

I'm really glad you contributed today, Orph. Thanks for sharing your perspective. It is invaluable.

Mark

24th February 2020, 18:56

the objective reality i'm talking about is the one that acknowledges science and biology and mathematics and physics. the one that emphasizes facts as opposed to delusionally inspired subjective "narratives".

Ah. That reality. Well, haven't you been paying attention to the most recent advances in quantum physics? Reality is imminently subjective. (https://www.livescience.com/objective-reality-not-exist-quantum-physicists.html) The truth can be different.

As a scion of Project Avalon, you also are engaged in the conversation I'm having with Ernie in this thread about the nature of science, including biology, mathematics and physics, it is a discourse we are all involved in about the nature of reality. The double slit experiment and the observer effect (https://www.lowellsun.com/2020/01/28/be-observant-it-could-change-everything/) speak to the subjectivity of our perceptions which is given its "objective" state by the appearance of coherence at the atomic and molecular level. But that doesn't mean that quantum effects don't occur in the realm of individual and group perception and the formulation of culture. Our "delusionally" subjective narratives are just as real to us as those sciences you mention and that should be abundantly clear to anyone who seeks to study the world of culture and society as well as the effects of these ways of seeing reality that certainly have a very real effect upon our biosphere.

human societies actually devolve by making universities safe spaces. a university isn't a home, it's not a sanctuary...or at least it shouldn't be. it's often a place to be confronted by horrible ideas. history is horrifying, so is physics and biology and great literature. if a university makes you safe it's no longer a university. and worse yet, it's not preparing you for objective reality..which doesn't allow for a time out the moment your feelings get hurt

Don't discount feelings. Every change of meaning in the world that has ever occurred started out as a feeling.

Just because that feeling threatens your idea of stability and safety in the world does not invalidate it. It just proves the subjectivity of your ideas, as well as the fact that "horrible" is a relative term, depending upon your individuated nature and group, cultural norms.

These students aren't physically safe. The use of that word is only in reference to the exploration of ideas. They're not physically safe on a university campus or anywhere in this nation and many places around the world. And they know it, hence the emotivity they display. Your approval or validation is not required nor sought. If you cannot step into their shoes and attempt to see it from their perspective then your position is oppositional to them without understanding them, which is also a valid way to live, as millions are doing so every day in the USA and in other nations around the world as well.

And that is just the way it is, proving the necessity of change in these pivotal and momentous times.

those kids at evergreen wanted all the power and all the victimhood at once. thats pathological, and doesn't represent growth in any sense of the word. theyre north american, for starters, which puts them at the top 1%. and theyre at what was a reputable, strong university which puts them at the top 1% of that. i'm not buying their "oppression" for half a second.

There is no contradiction in that reality, of there being, in one personal vessel or one group, the coexistence of power and victimhood simultaneously. Opposites, poles, often agree. As an example, the only thing that divides the far Left and the far Right is race.

On every other conspiracy, they agree.

Go figure.

And as far as what you buy? These kids wouldn't put a dime down for your opinion because they would be able to hear by your tone and see by the expression on your face that you have absolutely no idea where they're coming from. Nor do you want to. Which is why this is all necessary.

Mac

24th February 2020, 19:07

Hasn't this always happened nothing new is it. Kids being kids, they're given too much attention and nothing to get bent out of shape about. As much as I like Mr Weinstein he does seem to court this and I always see a twinkle in his eye as well as contempt, rightly so I suppose. Tragic that racism is still a thing and still pushes buttons for some Both black and white have their racists so all we can do is try not be one and raise children to see the nonsense that it is. As far as education goes if you want a good one educate yourself through life as you go along. Every good teacher wants their pupils to think for themselves, and good teachers also learn from the pupils as they teach them . The standard of education today and some of the Teachers is a worry. I'm not a practicing Catholic but had a pretty decent RC education, and it shocked me when I saw the contrast to my children's education, very basic and sterile.

Mark

24th February 2020, 19:15

Hasn't this always happened nothing new is it.

Absolutely. This is the way it must always be, within cultures that experience the dynamic shift of populations. It's just our turn.

Kids being kids, they're given too much attention and nothing to get bent out of shape about. As much as I like Mr Weinstein he does seem to court this and I always see a twinkle in his eye as well as contempt, rightly so I suppose. Tragic that racism is still a thing and still pushes buttons for some Both black and white have their racists so all we can do is try not be one and raise children to see the nonsense that it is. As far as education goes if you want a good one educate yourself through life as you go along. Every good teacher wants their pupils to think for themselves, and good teachers also learn from the pupils as they teach them . The standard of education today and some of the Teachers is a worry. I'm not a practicing Catholic but had a pretty decent RC education, and it shocked me when I saw the contrast to my children's education, very basic and sterile.

All very true and pertinent points, thank you so much for sharing them! As an educator myself, I can attest to your observation, and that is what I teach my children. How to learn. How to think for themselves. How to go beyond the narratives of their friends, family and cultures and see the higher and more multiversal realities, a lens through which our mundane perspectives can truly be seen to be what they are, ephemeral exhalations of excess, exceedingly egoic, yet also, seemingly necessary for our repetitive human experience of worldly phenomenon.

My students often tell me of their other teachers, the ones who just teach from the book and to the test. Their disdain for them mirrors that we expressed as students as well, for teachers of a similar ilk. I think a lot of what we are discussing today has gotten in the way of real educations, as many educators are too scared to really talk to their students about the world for fear of losing their jobs.

Mac

24th February 2020, 19:22

I've read many of your posts Mark and would bet you find the right balance as an educator. 8)

Mike

24th February 2020, 19:36

Mark

24th February 2020, 20:05

Reality is imminently subjective if you're just inventing stuff and calling it reality. But fair enough . What you're neglecting to mention is the very small number of realities that actually have any utility whatsoever in the real world. And if you want to parse up the phrase "real world" into a bunch of flaky philosophies that have zero objective reality, keep teaching your students that, grab a beer, and sit back and watch the world crumble.

Just inventing stuff, huh? LOL Right. From your perspective.

You have absolutely no idea what I teach my students, Mike. Nor, in essence, what I believe. Your lack of desire to see through someone else's eyes seems to make it difficult for you to countenance viewpoints that are different from your own but that is fine. Those of us who have lived a lifetime from an othered perspective can see your way of thinking, have been immersed in it from the time we were toddlers, and understand folks who think like you very well. We will do what is necessary to make sure our children and your children are able to work together to save this world because we believe that we must do it as a human family, and together. That is the only way it can happen. And it will because it is our destiny to do so and inherit the stars.

The world is crumbling because the people in the world have decided that it is time for it to crumble.

The world as it has been, at least. The world that will result, with all of our conflicts and cultures and ancient political conspiracies and biospheric dangers, will be exactly what our descendants make it. And they will see our inadequacies of this time and rise above them to do so because they must.

And more power to them.

Yes, your delusional realities are just as real to *you* as the sciences are to everyone else. That's quite mad, but wouldn't be so dangerous if it wasn't being forced on everyone else in an authoritarian manner. It's not about equity at all with the postmodernists, it's about power. If taking over a campus and holding faculty hostage isn't a sufficient enough example for you, i don't know what is.

Campuses are never really taken over by students. They are allowed to occupy space. We can talk about tenuous grasps upon reality, if you really choose to. :)

I do know where those kids are coming from, and it frightens me that it doesn't frighten you in the least. There were other kids there that weren't black btw. Lots of them. And I do care quite a bit because the sanity of our civilization is hanging in the balance.

You don't understand the pain you saw expressed there. If you did, you wouldn't talk the way you do. And the color of the kids, really doesn't matter. Because they have the capacity to love one another, truly, and stand together.

And that is what will save this world.

Mac

24th February 2020, 21:14

Mike, Pick an era..the sanity of our civilisation is always in the balance, that's life. The approach you take is part of the problem whether you be righty or lefty or centre. I'm not having a dig and agree with some of your concerns. (Don't be a sjw though ) that's a light hearted poke. :beer: As for the sciences being some sort of infallible God wait see what tomorrow brings everything can be turned on its head in a moments inspiration..see history. cheers

Mike

24th February 2020, 21:22

Ok, look man, I want to walk away from this being cool with you. I have pretty strong opinions on all this stuff, but it was wrong of me to be insulting. I apologize for that. I know you feel just as strongly on your end and so I'll try my best to consider that moving forward

I worry because, sheesh, just yesterday I saw this professor at University of Toronto saying there are no biological differences between men and women. He wasnt arguing the gender case...he was literally saying there are no biological differences between men and women. And from what I've been seeing since, having dug into it a little, is that he's not the only one! Other profs are saying it too. It's common in gender studies. I understand what you're saying about subjective realities, in fairness. But what does quantum physics have to do with that? Ya know?

The evergreen thing felt so witch hunty to me, and so disturbing . I imagine you think you're on the right side of things and that those are your people. And maybe they are. But I fear that one day one of those kids will tell you you're too black, or not black enough, or too smart, or too tall, or too priveledged because of your position as a teacher, or whatever. And then whatever name that is invented for your priveledge and status will be followed by "frailty", and *you'll* be viewed as the oppressor.

Is that something you've ever considered? im no denier of racism, I'm quite grounded and aware of whats going on around me. But what im seeing now (im back in school these days, going for my degree 20 years too late) on campus is a distorted version of victimhood run absolutely amok.

Mac

24th February 2020, 21:36

My post could be seen as a bit sarky tbf, with hindsight. Didn't mean to put you on the back foot. It's a hot topic so will generate heat. I'm out too, as all I can see is all wanting the same thing, just bloody politics and confusion stopping us seeing this.

Mike

24th February 2020, 22:46

AutumnW

24th February 2020, 23:53

Mark

25th February 2020, 15:07

Ok, look man, I want to walk away from this being cool with you.

I know that you've got good intentions, Mike so it's all good in the hood. This is a difficult topic, as you know. I'm glad you came in to talk about it, this is what has to happen and this is the only time in this nation's history that it has been able to happen.

I mean, that is really my bottom line. And, not really just this nation, but the world!

We use the USA as an example, but that is only because it is here that the front line of racial reconciliation is occuring, there are many nations in the world that require the same kind of discussions, so I hope that by us addressing them here in the context of the AltCom, we will be able to create a record that others planet-wide will be able to access, because I believe that it is here, in the AltCom, that many of the solutions we require as a planetary species are first discussed, as well as the dissemination of knowledge regarding the true state of affairs, for those who come to awareness to sift to in order to find whatever they consider to be the truth. I am continuously thankful to Bill for starting this thread in order to add a record of this discussion, as wide and as far-ranging as we can make it, with as many diverse thoughts and opinions as possible in order to make it representative of as many people as possible.

I'm trying to keep it even myself, so as not to "scare" anyone off from making comments. Easier said than done.

I have pretty strong opinions on all this stuff, but it was wrong of me to be insulting. I apologize for that. I know you feel just as strongly on your end and so I'll try my best to consider that moving forward

We both want what is best for all of the people of the world, I think. It's not about me personally. I can take insults. I'm apparently a damn politician now, so I better have a thick skin. I may get passionate but I'll never be disrespectful.

I worry because, sheesh, just yesterday I saw this professor at University of Toronto saying there are no biological differences between men and women. He wasnt arguing the gender case...he was literally saying there are no biological differences between men and women. And from what I've been seeing since, having dug into it a little, is that he's not the only one! Other profs are saying it too. It's common in gender studies. I understand what you're saying about subjective realities, in fairness. But what does quantum physics have to do with that? Ya know?

I have not seen that or heard that myself. I'd be interested in seeing how he justifies it but it does not sound like a position I could support. There are a lot of issues with Trans folk and integrating into traditional societies, and that is difficult enough. To deny a biological truth though, seems beyond the pale.

The evergreen thing felt so witch hunty to me, and so disturbing . I imagine you think you're on the right side of things and that those are your people. And maybe they are. But I fear that one day one of those kids will tell you you're too black, or not black enough, or too smart, or too tall, or too priveledged because of your position as a teacher, or whatever. And then whatever name that is invented for your priveledge and status will be followed by "frailty", and *you'll* be viewed as the oppressor.

Mike. It's not that I'm totally on their side. I can see where you are coming from as I also believe some of the commentary was an extreme reaction.

But we are experiencing a time of extremity on all sides of every equation. It seems polarity is the rule of the day and that makes sense, so none of it surprises me. Perhaps that is what you are seeing as agreement.

I see their side of it just as I see the Proud Boys side of things, just as I see the KKK's side of things, just as I see the Aryan nation's side of things.

But I'm on the side of Justice. The greatest expression of such for the largest amount of people and that equation requires me to seek justice in each position and multiversal justice, in this case, lies on the side of those historically oppressed in this nation and in others. It is difficult that it has to happen in generations inhabited by people who didn't create the system and only inherited it, but, on the other side of things, there was a dark inheritance as well. And the balance must be sought.

Is that something you've ever considered? im no denier of racism, I'm quite grounded and aware of whats going on around me. But what im seeing now (im back in school these days, going for my degree 20 years too late) on campus is a distorted version of victimhood run absolutely amok.

What we are witnessing in the White House is privilege run amok. Balance.

Mark

25th February 2020, 15:11

Mark

25th February 2020, 15:21

Mark, It would be helpful if you would use specific examples of oppression. As a Canadian, for example, I find it astonishing that so many blacks are warehoused in prisons and that there is a profit incentive to keep them there. Many large corporations use the prison system for cents on the dollar labor. Then, they abscond those tiny wages by charging inmates room and board. Very few people know about this. It is a glaring and horrible practice. Strangely, I have not seen it taken up as a cause by academia, the same academia that provides a loudspeaker to those who focus on 'micro-aggressions.'

The prison-industrial complex is a direct inheritance from slavery. From the era of the Black Codes following slavery, those lower class whites, Irish, some English, French and other marginalized groups who manned the slave patrols and other posts of the control system herded black men particularly into jails and prisons, for indigence. There were no jobs, and blacks had been freed, so they were put back to work doing what they were doing before, working the plantations and continuing to help build this nation from the ground up. The Black Codes were supplanted by the Jim Crow system of social control in the 1900s, which continued the same procedures as well as they were able in the south and the jails became warehouses for black men to continue to labor for free, continuing to build this nation and maintain its roads and increase its wealth.

There are many examples and articles about it as this is no secret. I have cousins here in Texas who work in the prisons out in the hinterlands between the big cities, because there are no other jobs of worth available with benefits and substantial pay. They'd rather be doing anything else, I'd imagine and, over the years that I've known them working there, I've seen their personalities change and I believe it has contributed to the death of a couple of my cousins who passed before their time, because of the stress of it.

Imho, macro-aggressions should be cleared up for the benefit of all, before micro-aggressions get so much play.

Why can't we do both at the same time? Why can't addressing all of the issues simultaneously be a way of working through this? It is not as if we are on a time schedule. Nor is it as if we have some higher, guiding force aligning these issues for remediation according to a linear scheduling process. People hurt, daily. Microaggressions literally drive people crazy. It is hard to know that if you do not experience it. It contributes to shortened lifespans for those affected by it. Blacks are dying from racism (https://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/07/19/weekend-read-racism-killing-black-americans).

I have thought for years that the funding for gender studies programmes, for example, comes from front foundations that present as progressive but are actually right wing groups who have been trying to fracture the left. The real fragility here is a collective unwillingness to establish the genesis of these programs.

You may have a very real point there. The new movement, American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS), that seeks to separate the interests of continental Africans from black Americans - by separating us out for consideration of Reparations - seems to have some component of Right Wing interest and collusion (https://www.mediamatters.org/4chan/what-know-about-ados-group-targeting-black-progressives). So it is a definite thing.

Hym

25th February 2020, 15:45

Mark/Rahkyt. It is the best of real education you share here. I am appreciative of it all.

And, maybe more to the point, it is the contributions of all who have participated here by inquiring, sharing and challenging that give the subject it's worth. It'd be, as it always is, much more insightful when more share their viewpoints and experiences. Kudos for asking others to contribute.

The insights, the depth of looking into all aspects of the subject and all of it's impact in so many areas of our lives is, but should not be, unique. It runs to the core of those things that claim to be just.

Put it in books, in curriculum and into communications wherever people gather and claim to be fair, open and equal in the application of civil rights and employment opportunities.

In this life I have noticed that I arrive personally at the end of many injustices, at the times of reckoning, judgement and settlements that prove the worth of being... hue-mun.

Now I see that those things open up new paths to run, as the walk of humanity, for me, is way too slow. (Ray muhn ih bidi jog juhmaaoo...Singee such uhkuhpuht kuntuhlaa... My mind...opening to the true sight..discipline your focus in this way..)

When the color of being from the heart overcomes the mind, the mun, the man, the mundane, it expands beyond the field of normal sight and reaches even the soul-bound blind.

It takes but a few to make the paths open, but they must be thoroughly introspective, enough to clear the debris, as the insights of one opens the hearts of many.
Thank YOU!

Mike

25th February 2020, 17:52

Hi Mark, that Toronto University professor's name is Nicolas Matte. I know which video he makes the claim in but I don't have the timestamp atm. Too pressed for time to find it atm, but will definitely do that and post here a little later.

As far as Trump goes, I think the more radical elements of the left (sorry Dennis!:)) are just as responsible for his popularity as anything. I think they actually created the phenomena that they so abhor thru their excessive moralizing and sermonizing and thru their postmodern stunts. The radical right is the equation balancing itself, as they say in the Matrix movies. That's how I see it anyway. Let me guess, you disagree?:)

You're right, we both want what's best for the world. I've never doubted your good intentions either. I know you're a good man. It's obvious. It's just that our diagnosis of the issues and our ways of remedying them differ

And btw, I'm not a political animal at all. I didn't vote for Trump, for what it's worth, and I don't want to get into the business of defending him. But his rise to power is not quite as simple as a bunch of ignorant red necks voting him in. Much more nuanced than that in my view.

Mac, I have to respectfully push back a little on what you said in an earlier post. Mark knows how I feel about this but I'll repeat it for you here: the Evergreen events weren't just a bunch of kids being creatively rebellious at university. It wasn't "kids being kids". It was kids being mobs and kidnappers and hostage takers. Did you watch all 3 videos I posted in this thread? If you have, and you still think it's just kids being kids then there is such a wide gulf in our thinking that I won't address it further. But I'm curious if you've actually watched all 3 videos.

p.s. to be clear, I don't think Dennis is a "radical leftist". i just know he loathes those terms being thrown around

Bill Ryan

25th February 2020, 18:00

the Evergreen events weren't just a bunch of kids being creatively rebellious at university. It wasn't "kids being kids". It was kids being mobs and kidnappers and hostage takers.And (I'd suggest) ego-driven, self-important, and aggressively self-righteous. That's often quite dangerous fuel to add to these kinds of flames.

Mac

25th February 2020, 18:29

Mac, I have to respectfully push back a little on what you said in an earlier post. Mark knows how I feel about this but I'll repeat it for you here: the Evergreen events weren't just a bunch of kids being creatively rebellious at university. It wasn't "kids being kids". It was kids being mobs and kidnappers and hostage takers. Did you watch all 3 videos I posted in this thread? If you have, and you still think it's just kids being kids then there is such a wide gulf in our thinking that I won't address it further. But I'm curious if you've actually watched all 3 videos. " "

No I didn't, you're right apologies, life is too short. I do know the specifics though and think it's frankly ridiculous all of it. They'll be gone soon it'll blow over and blowing it out of proportion just gives them air. What I would be interested to see is what are they doing to nip this in the bud in the future. What it does need is cool headed people to analyse why it happened and and to implement measured solutions. This happened when I was at School, student strikes and teachers heckled. Lasted a week was national and fizzled out, I can't even remember what it was about (80's). A combination of parents and peer pressure stopped it after the grievances were aired. USA mmv, hopefully not. Imo a lot of the Teachers need to cop on fast and this race nonsense just needs to be eradicated because for most half way sane people it's twaddle.

Edit: I'm curious though what would you have us do Mike it's obvious most agree it's nuts. What can we do about it that's not going to inflame it. Cheers

Mark

25th February 2020, 18:55

It is the best of real education you share here. I am appreciative of it all.

Thank you for the gift of presence and attention. I have the time in my life to engage this way and I'm grateful for the space to do it and also for the participation of everyone who is helping to drive this topic forward. It is one of the most emotionally charged issues of our time and getting past the hype and histrionics to really address what lies beneath is one of the most important goals we as a species can assay considering the larger issues we have to deal with together moving forward. It is a global issue. Your words are greatly appreciated.

Hi Mark, that Toronto University professor's name is Nicolas Matte. I know which video he makes the claim in but I don't have the timestamp atm.

I'll check it out on google, thanks, I'm sure there is plenty of furor over a stance like that.

As far as Trump goes, I think the more radical elements of the left (sorry Dennis!:)) are just as responsible for his popularity as anything. I think they actually created the phenomena that they so abhor thru their excessive moralizing and sermonizing and thru their postmodern stunts. The radical right is the equation balancing itself, as they say in the Matrix movies. That's how I see it anyway. Let me guess, you disagree?:)

I would turn those around. The "radical Right" is more in line with the official history of America. The radical Left has always been a response to the original oppression of genocide and slavery. As I said in my last post, there has never been a time in American history where a Left has existed to this extent. Or, as Chris Rock put it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_L7qoP17-w

Sometimes comedy can approach some truths that are difficult to speak about seriously. Supremacy in any form is not a healthy way to look at the world and our place in it as members of a human family.

You're right, we both want what's best for the world. I've never doubted your good intentions either. I know you're a good man. It's obvious. It's just that our diagnosis of the issues and our ways of remedying them differ

And btw, I'm not a political animal at all. I didn't vote for Trump, for what it's worth, and I don't want to get into the business of defending him. But his rise to power is not quite as simple as a bunch of ignorant red necks voting him in. Much more nuanced than that in my view.

What is your way of remedying some of these issues that might be different from mine? I am curious, as that is the topic of the thread and talking about solutions should be a part of all of this.

And in regards to Drumpf, I am inclined to agree, to the extent that he is an expression of a desire by a plenary that transcends political party, seeking to build a neo-apartheid sanctuary out of the potential Democracy most Americans would like to see realized.

the Evergreen events weren't just a bunch of kids being creatively rebellious at university. It wasn't "kids being kids". It was kids being mobs and kidnappers and hostage takers.And (I'd suggest) ego-driven, self-important, and aggressively self-righteous. That's often quite dangerous fuel to add to these kinds of flames.

That is true, as far as it goes.

It is also behavior that has been, historically and accurately, assigned to the other political side of this equation, most particularly in relation to the categorization of "the other side", the Left, as an ethnic rather than ethnic + sexual minority. The addition of the white kids, makes them generally unassailable by police violence, as they are potentially the children of privilege (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-gay-privilege-exists-all-year-it-particularly-hurtful-during-ncna1024961).

Consider who their "enemy" is. Who they are fighting against and the message they are seeking to get across. They see themselves as assailing a system that has historically considered their lives automatically forfeit as people like that have historically been considered to be property of that system and, therefore, imminently expendable. If the police can be considered to be "Kidnappers and hostage takers" and economic violence alongside sheer, terroristic subjugation are their tools, then in most logical extrapolations of these responses, more extreme violence could have been forthcoming in that scenario but, so far, has not been.

The LGBTQIA white kids are standing with their black and brown friends and lovers and they act as a shield. Some of them are radicals, in the tradition of John Brown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)), it seems, and "extreme" measures are apparently not off the table.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g&disable_polymer=true

Are these children the ones to put them out? Are they responsible for taking the higher road, and expressing a way of being that has never existed before now?

Mac

25th February 2020, 20:35

Mark I've seen white on white racism and its consequences. The devastation of being born with baggage that has nothing to do with the individual born. I've seen it cause people to bomb and kill and maim. I've seen it kill spirit so much they end up addicted to drink drugs and become disowned and despised by even their own kind. I've seen it make it people live psychotic lifestyles as" hard cases" just trying to validate themselves.
I don't know what it feels like to be a black Man, but what I do know racism is always going to be around in some form, until we evolve a bit more 8) What in your opinion is the best way to teach kids how to see past it, look down on it for what it is. Everyone can be capable of racism/tribalism whether they know it or not when push comes to shove, again see history. Your jails are full of the results of a demographic who believed the lies, not all obviously but the cultures sometimes within disaffected groups can be a bit unhealthy. How can we get it into the children's heads not to own it or be affected by it,because it's never healthy if they do. Same goes for the non racist white folk who get labelled guilty. How can we get it in their heads yes it's history but it's not you,forgive, learn from it, don't repeat it and move onward and upwards. Sorry Mike for slight deviation.

Edit: I also understand that a black Man in some jurisdictions would get jail probably quicker than the white boy from a different part of town. Although I am only guessing at that, haven't looked at the stats,but fairly confident. I still think just teaching them to remove the baggage, if they can is the way to go imho. To be fair the majority do don't they. We manage fairly well here in the UK for all our faults. Brexit got a bit weird but normal service resumed-ish. The times are a bit bleh but been far worse so we ought to be hopeful...maybe. We've moved on a bit, again see history. Still a way to go but doable. 8) (fingers crossed)

Mike

25th February 2020, 23:39

Mark you know what the real irony of this entire dialogue is? We couldn't have even had this conversation on the Evergreen campus.:) We'd be shouted down immediately by self-righteous sloganeering and hideous shrieks of hysterical emotion. Or kidnapped and taken hostage, who knows? (Well, you might not be shouted down, but I would have been)

Their assumption of moral superiority is arrogant beyond belief. They are so sure of themselves that they won't even allow any dialogue that might suggest otherwise. That's the type of authoritarian ideology that creates dictators, fascist regimes, and wars.

The black kids on campus have justified reasons to feel upset about the world. But it's no excuse to kidnap and take hostages. The trans kids have some legitimate gripes too, but it doesn't give them the excuse to throw biology in the trash...and worse yet, demand that everyone else do the same. And none of them are the arbiters of truth and justice, and therefore have no right whatsoever to abolish the freedom of speech and expression for everyone else. Without realizing it, they're fighting against the very equity they purport to be espousing.

My remedies to the current situation won't resonate with you at all because I don't view western civilization as being an inherently evil, patriarchal society run by white supremacists. But it mostly involves facing what's in front of us (reality) with courage and strength(not inventing subjective narratives to avoid it), cultivating virtue, and embracing personal responsibility instead of blaming everyone and everything for one's issues (hey I warned you that it wouldn't resonate with you! lol)

The victim mentality creates helpless people, it doesn't embolden them. Enabling this type of behavior creates weak, authoritarian brats. Tyrants in training, basically.

The Chris Rock clip is great. He's a legend, love the dude. I don't mind the jibes at whites at all. But his true genius is that he also isn't afraid to admit when black people have gone crazy too

Mac

26th February 2020, 00:11

I must add because, well because I'm not a fan of telling anyone how to feel, not that I'm suggesting that's what anybody's doing heh (oh dear).
What I will say is, the only reason I explored this here with Mark is, he obviously has very little baggage, because it is a hot potato in US I get that.
My experience here in the UK is not the same. I still maintain removing the baggage is the way forward.

Dennis Leahy

26th February 2020, 02:21

Back when this thread started, I was one of the mods in the backroom discussing the issue, which had been precipitated by what I and (I don't remember who else) saw as racism creeping, well, more like stampeding into this forum. Trump had made blatantly racist statements about Mexicans and Arabs in his rise to political power, and I could see that there were a number of Trump supporters in the forum that had unmasked their own racism. Bill immediately saw this as a cultural issue, misidentified as racism. I disagreed strongly. There certainly is, or can be, a "culture clash" component to forced immigration (forced by the imperial American Empire, via war, notably), and perhaps the immigration and especially forced immigration (refugees from imperialism) issue is better identified by the much softer sounding "culture-ism" moniker, but I felt/feel that this misses the point of the underlying racism. In some cases, say Iranians, for example, the hue of skin tone is really not the issue (many Iranians could blend in - skin tone wise - with the crowd at a KKK rally), so I also realize that the simple, easy accusation of "racism!" isn't entirely semantically accurate.

So, I decided early on to just stay out of this thread, to not be the "turd in the punchbowl" seemingly arguing semantics, and allow Bill to expound on his thesis.

Thanks again — but you're totally not getting it.

Let me spell it out. :)

I wrote:

I'm saying that the Ecuadorians who'd prefer I wasn't in their country are NOT racist.

I'm also trying to get intelligent people, reading this, to THINK.

What this means — and I'm sure of it — is that most of the people in the US or Canada who don't want non-integrated people from other cultures there are not racist.

French, German, Swedish or British people who don't want Middle Eastern immigrants there aren't racist, either.

Of course it's not about race. It's about the preservation of culture. This is my entire point.

The anti-Mexican and anti-Arab (expressed as "anti-Muslim") rhetoric that Trump used/uses is more honestly defined as racism as a blanket term that includes also religious-ism, and that's what I saw flooding into the forum. Mark/Rahkit has done a great job of scientifically dispelling the notion that there are separate races - we're all Homo sapiens sapiens - but what I was seeing is what is typically known as "racism" in the US. I also think that overt and covert racism in the US, where I have spent 65 years, is quite a bit different than the racism in England where Bill spent his early childhood (though Bill did also live in South Africa, where racism was/is overt.)

So, make "racism", "culture-ism", and "religious-ism", and maybe other components of prejudice into 3 separate topics, or maybe just use "racism" as the umbrella? Or call it prejudice? I grew up and have spent my whole life in a deeply racist country, one with not only a history that includes slavery, but one in which the supreme legal document of the land, the US Constitution, literally codified racism (after having the balls to use the line, "All men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence.)

I don't see much value in attempting to pursue the topic by dissecting the semantics. Perhaps 100 million aboriginal tribal people (that we still insanely refer to as "Indians") were wiped off the face of the Earth by white-skinned Europeans/proto-"Americans"...and the NFL football team in the US capital - in the year 2020 - is called the "Redskins." That's pretty powerful racism.

Something on the order of 12 million Africans were kidnapped and rendered into slavery, about 10 million survived the slaver's conditions and the voyage, and maybe 1/2 a million ended up in the US, where slavery was legal until 1863. That's pretty powerful racism. Underpaid, slave-wage Chinese workers built the early US railroads. Japanese US citizens were thrown into prison camps in WW II. Yes, I realize that other ethnic groups, like the Irish and the Italian "white" people also suffered some slavery, wage-slavery, and codified prejudice, but again, it was at the hands of a group of white-skinned European descent people that self-declared themselves as superior, and became wealthy by exploiting all their declared inferiors, and gained governance power. White superiority was thus inculcated into US society, where it warped and morphed into multiple forms of off-the-books prejudice and called systemic racism and/or institutional racism, as well as the overt and covert racism expressed by individuals.

This isn't opinion - it's history, the real history of the USA.

I know that all Trump followers/supporters/cheerleaders are not racist, but those that are not racist do rationalize/excuse/ignore Trump's racism. It's not the only reason to abhor Trump as a person and as a president (oh dear god, don't compare Clinton to Trump as an excuse to support him - we're smarter than to fall for that binary claptrap) but I saw, in 2016-17, overt racism infecting Project Avalon, and wanted to stop it. In my mind, Project Avalon was never a place where lowbrows had a pulpit to spew racism/prejudice with a "first amendment" unfettered privilege, it was a place for people who were thinking outside the mainstream babble, people who saw deeper than their programming, and people breaking free from the programming - such as being ok with "acceptable" racism, ignoring systemic racism in the US, or excusing the US president's racism due to some perceived good thing that trumps Trump's racism

So, I guess I have breached this thread now. This is my opening volley.

Mike

26th February 2020, 02:56

Mac

26th February 2020, 02:58

Cool Dennis, right we are where we are, how do you teach kids to navigate it. What advice do we give them firstly for their own sake and to slowly eradicate it from a future society. I'm not disagreeing with you, just I can't talk about stuff without throwing out solutions for now and maybe the future, as naive as that might seem. The day we all wake one Morning and say oh we get it, is not going to happen anytime soon. Bxxger isn't it 8)

I'm not political btw it bores me stupid. Last person I voted for over here was Corbyn. Not because of his politics because he was an honest decent Man, not owned, but he blew it on Brexit. The lies and slander dumped on him was so blatant but, lapped up.

Dennis Leahy

26th February 2020, 04:57

welcome to the thread Denno, you're off to a crackling start.

i don't have an issue with a single thing you've written.

my issue is this: what happened at Evergreen, and what's happening in college campuses across the country, and what is spilling over into corporate culture as well (Google and the whole James Damore debacle) is a postmodern plague that isn't seeking authentic equity - it's seeking power....not power with but power over. It's seeking a reversal of the historic roles between oppressors and victims. Someone could make a pretty good karmic argument for that maybe - and I would have a hard time disputing it! - but what postmodernism attempts to do is make an intellectual argument for it, which to me is a disingenuous attempt at what is really a power-play masquerading as something else, all enforced by a hyper inflated sense of PC victimhood by people who aren't really victims at all, but instead future tyrants in the making

p.s. i really wish you'd watch the 3 videos i've included on this thread on the evergreen events. i watched your 3 hour marathon, so you owe me you bastard:bigsmile:

Mike, I did sample the videos. I won't bother to watch them in their entirety. (Sorry, give me a different assignment as payback for watching a brilliant, eye-opening video that you told me should be required viewing.) What do you want me to say about the Evergreen student idiots? Did you think I'd defend them? Or are you just looking for someone with clear skin (I'm only called "white" - I'm much more transparent-skinned showing blood in muscles-pink hahahaha) to say that people of color can be/act racist?

I went back to college and finally got a degree (from the 6th college/university I had attended) when I was 40, but the last university I attended was primarily night school, and primarily adults, so I didn't get the teenage and early 20s drama that your current college experience is evidently assaulting you with. But, what did you expect, signing up for a Gender Studies major, with a minor in Flat Earth Geography? :bigsmile: It may seem like these knuckleheads with more angst than substance are the future of humanity, but really, the Evergreen debacle and whatever you're experiencing on your college campus now is really not a microcosm of reality. I don't think "postmodernism" is a good handle for what you're seeing and disgusted by. And this most certainly isn't the core tenets of "the left" (though in this example you have provided, there might be some who are also anti-war and anti-"Establishment" - meaning anti-American-Corporate-Fascist-Imperialist-Empire.) I'd stick to specifics, rather than labeling this a "postmodern plague", or your reaction to it seems more like a "Reefer Madness"-esque, pearl-clutching, hand-wringing response.

I do see your Evergreen students (prior to their assault/siege) as victims - both in terms of what society has done to actually make them victims, but more importantly, victims of programming/brainwashing. Identifying primarily as a victim, repeatedly ripping open your own wounds, doesn't seem to be a wise trajectory toward either self-healing or societal healing. On the other hand, pretending that the culture and cultural programming isn't sick, ignoring the agenda of the psychopathic monsters that control the world, and just being a smiling android that shows up to work on time isn't doing anything to help society develop.

Are you familiar with Picasso's Guernica? Do you accept that form of expression of outrage at atrocity? Probably, yes. So, there are lots of ways to try to attack and disassemble and heal our society that has accepted false history and deliberate programming - including notions such as that racism ended in 1863 in the US. I'm sure you don't want outrage and speaking out about racism - especially systemic and institutionalized racism - to end, or for individuals to pretend that they are not really victims of racism if they are (and in the US, if your skin tone is dark and you are not rich, or a world-class athlete or performer, you are almost undoubtedly a victim of racism.) I'm sure you're looking for a more sane, more intelligent approach.

I've been the victim of some crimes in my life, and if I stop and think about them, I get really pissed off. Imagine living an entire life of even minor and fleeting racism, consistently and constantly brought to your awareness. Actually, like childbirth (to a man) I don't think there is any way to convey the feelings of racial discrimination and prejudice over a lifetime unless you've lived it. It's really hard to "get over it" when you know it's still going to be ongoing tomorrow, and the day after...

Mike

26th February 2020, 05:20

Dennis Leahy

26th February 2020, 05:53

what i was hoping you'd notice is that the evergreen debacle is a perfect case study for what's happening on a much larger scale. also hoping you'd notice that it wasn't just a race thing, but far far more than that. it's also a trans thing, and a gender thing between men and women...but mostly it's a war against common sense, punctuated by the tendency for emotionally motivated people to mob up and attack people who are making sense..and silence them. oh, all in the name of "equity" of course.

i was hoping you'd notice how hypocritical it is. it really does need to be seen in its entirety to be appreciated.

and i was being silly when i called your video a marathon. it was excellent, and i do wish not only high school and college kids would watch it, but the entire world. if it were up to me it would be required watching for all the citizens of the earth. i'm glad you put me onto it. thanks again:handshake:
I stayed away from the trans and gay issues I saw in my glimpses into the videos, for this thread, because I hate to see threads get diluted. This one is already about culture-ism and racism, and I figured that's enough. Plus, I did comment and gave my (quickly encapsulated) views on transgenderism in your thread about the Argentinian soccer player.

Yes, being oppressed and attempting to create change by being the oppressor is hypocritical (in the case of kidnap/detaining and threatening, it's beyond hypocrisy and into criminal behavior) - and ineffective to the issues as well as counter-productive in getting someone fired that wasn't the progenitor or even cheerleader of the issues that pissed the students off.

That video that you committed the time and energy to watch is a marathon. I think I must be slipping in my ability to tease effectively and make sure the teased knows I'm teasing. :boink:

Mike

26th February 2020, 06:14

the evergreen vids are also a marathon, in fairness!:bigsmile: but i think a worthwhile one.

my tease mechanism is all corrupted too. ive been too damn serious lately. i think i need to start drinking again:beer:

Mac

26th February 2020, 11:51

You've got to laugh at times just to keep yourself sane heh. I have to bit my lip because there's loads could be said but can't, so much for free speech. Some know the truth but have to talk round it all the time, strange times. The Bad guys think they're the good guys and can't figure out why most decent people are repulsed by the way they do business. But hey it's a game ffs, may they one day look in the mirror and see who they are and what they have done and are doing. Getting smashed won't work Mike it's still there when you're sober learnt that decades ago. I'm going to enjoy my family and life, pitying the poor tortured souls that can't just be. Nothing more to add from me on this topic, think we're all more or less on the same page, I'm going to stick to the lunatic threads in future, life really is too short.:bigsmile:

Bill Ryan

26th February 2020, 15:29

Praxis

26th February 2020, 16:33

I know that all Trump followers/supporters/cheerleaders are not racist, but those that are not racist do rationalize/excuse/ignore Trump's racism. It's not the only reason to abhor Trump as a person and as a president (oh dear god, don't compare Clinton to Trump as an excuse to support him - we're smarter than to fall for that binary claptrap) but I saw, in 2016-17, overt racism infecting Project Avalon, and wanted to stop it. In my mind, Project Avalon was never a place where lowbrows had a pulpit to spew racism/prejudice with a "first amendment" unfettered privilege, it was a place for people who were thinking outside the mainstream babble, people who saw deeper than their programming, and people breaking free from the programming - such as being ok with "acceptable" racism, ignoring systemic racism in the US, or excusing the US president's racism due to some perceived good thing that trumps Trump's racism

So, I guess I have breached this thread now. This is my opening volley.

This is important to reiterate

Some are seeking power over other using social justice as their flag and they are bad but then again Donald trump is wrapping himself in the flag while holding a cross. Which is more of a problem?

One is student movement or organizations trying to raise awareness(whether their cause is good or bad) the other is the executive branch of the federal government and largest military apparatus in the world.

He removes people from EBT(which you guess it hits non whites the hardest) and then is cheered by the Evangelicals for giving them the opportunity to work.

I mean didnt jesus say "Blessed are the poor for they are granted the right to work"? I am pretty sure he said something like that.

At the very same time he puts children, which are not white children FYI, in cages because they came with their family, and a horrible no good culture that cant mix with the pure native culture, fleeing from political chaos in their homeland

Again, I have to admit there is scripture for this:

Mark 5:1 "On the other side of the sea, they arrived in the region of the Gerasenes. 2As soon as Jesus got out of the boat, He was met by a man with an unclean spirit"

John 15:"If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned."

Shame on us for not following through and actually burning these people.

But here we are talking about Evergreen college and post modernism . . .

Mark

26th February 2020, 18:00

I don't know what it feels like to be a black Man, but what I do know racism is always going to be around in some form, until we evolve a bit more 8) What in your opinion is the best way to teach kids how to see past it, look down on it for what it is. Everyone can be capable of racism/tribalism whether they know it or not when push comes to shove, again see history. Your jails are full of the results of a demographic who believed the lies, not all obviously but the cultures sometimes within disaffected groups can be a bit unhealthy. How can we get it into the children's heads not to own it or be affected by it,because it's never healthy if they do. Same goes for the non racist white folk who get labelled guilty. How can we get it in their heads yes it's history but it's not you,forgive, learn from it, don't repeat it and move onward and upwards.

Real education. Which is what we all here claim to be all about. And this covers so many areas that we are interested in, not just in regards to this issue but all of them. Real science education, real history education, real physical education. The world needs to move on, beyond these issues and it can be done, if people know the real stories about the past, the real foundations of science, the real nature of the body, mind and spirit connection.

It is not in the interest of any vested power to foster a world where people truly know what is going on. But it is in the interest of the human family to create educational means by which children grow up understanding the nature of their societies and how they got that way. When it becomes possible for people to know better, they do better. Until they know better, they do what they know, which often is worse, not better. Even babies are altruistic (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/10/21122624/altruism-babies-infant-generosity-cooperation), so there is a core nature of goodness that exists for many people, I won't even say most or all because that is certainly not so. Difference begins when we are taught (https://sites.psu.edu/aspsy/2017/03/25/racism-is-learned-at-an-early-age/) it.

Our teaching has to be better.

I also understand that a black Man in some jurisdictions would get jail probably quicker than the white boy from a different part of town. Although I am only guessing at that, haven't looked at the stats,but fairly confident. I still think just teaching them to remove the baggage, if they can is the way to go imho. To be fair the majority do don't they. We manage fairly well here in the UK for all our faults. Brexit got a bit weird but normal service resumed-ish. The times are a bit bleh but been far worse so we ought to be hopeful...maybe. We've moved on a bit, again see history. Still a way to go but doable. 8) (fingers crossed)

If the cops' baggage was removed, their fear of black men removed, then things would be different, yes. But that is a societal issue. We are programmed from a very early age in this culture to fear dark-skinned people. It affects all of us, even dark-skinned people, who are subjected to it every day. Who recognize it because they've been subject to the exact same programming as everybody else.

I hear from black Brits that things may not be all that great there either (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/02/revealed-the-stark-evidence-of-everyday-racial-bias-in-britain). These nations are going to grow more diverse, that is inevitable. We just have to teach each other who we are and institutionalize that to the extent that mass ignorance and miseducation as it is done here in the USA and elsewhere cannot take root and flourish for centuries to come.

Dennis Leahy

26th February 2020, 18:03

Bill immediately saw this as a cultural issue, misidentified as racism. I disagreed strongly. A very brief note!

I genuinely and highly respect every contributor to this discussion. :handshake:
I'm staying out if it (largely! :) ), too.
I do remain pretty firm in my view. Without taking anything away from the very many thoughtful, fascinating and detailed posts from others, I do strongly believe that most (but not all) 'racism' is a defensive-aggressive response to the deeply ingrained need and desire to preserve one's identified culture.

That's why I think some Ecuadorians feel uneasy about my being here. Nothing to do with skin color, or 'race'. But because they don't want their culture to be eroded or diluted by non-contributing, opportunistic immigrants like myself — and they fear that happening. I completely understand their concerns, and as I've posted elsewhere, I think the ethical grounds for me being resident here are really pretty thin.

But, where is this mono-cultural Shangri La nation? The USA brags about being poly-cultural, most of Europe was already multi-cultural before a recent large influx of war refugees were forced from their own nation by USA missiles and bombs. (If a large number of ex-pat German citizens were forced all at once to emigrate to Germany, don't you think that would have caused high tensions in Germany? I agree that the tensions of foreign refugees was partly cultural, but logic tells me it had more to do with moving in too many human bodies, too fast to be absorbed gracefully.)

Australia is poly-cultural. Canada is poly-cultural, and even has a province where French is the primary language. The story of humankind is one of migration, and the mixing or at least tolerance of cultures. Places like "Chinatown" in the US are cultural islands within the poly-culture, and fully accepted by the rest of society. You want a great bagel in New York? Anyone knowledgeable will direct you to a Jewish bakery or deli. The best Vietnamese food in southern California is going to be in a Vietnamese-dominant area. Other than a few tribal peoples (like where the idiotic "Christian" missionary caught a bunch of arrows, relatively recently), or nearly inaccessible mountainous places, there is no mono-culture to protect.

Your example is powerful, but your conclusion that your Ecuadorian neighbors don't want you there due to culture is likely your own projection. What do you think would happen if you wrote out a short paragraph and used google translate to put it in Spanish, and said:
"Hola, mi nombre es Bill Ryan y vivo cerca de ti. Disculpe mi pobre español, pero quería decirle que si alguna vez tiene problemas, estaré encantado de ayudarlo en todo lo que pueda. Quiero ser un buen vecino." *

And, maybe take them a jar of your favorite marmalade. :bigsmile:

What do you think would actually happen?

Genociding 100 million indigenous (but yes, even they migrated there a few thousand years earlier) tribal peoples and codifying it into the US Constitution and laws is racism - regardless that the "Indians" had a different culture than the European interlopers who wanted to (and did) steal their land. The "Uncle Tom" African slaves that mimicked/acquiesced into the plantation owner's culture (and religion!) were still SLAVES. I do think you bring an interesting element into a discussion of racism by examining culture clashes, but the real clash is over property and resources, not culture.

*("Hi, my name is Bill Ryan and I live near you. Excuse my poor Spanish, but I wanted to tell you that if you ever have problems, I will be happy to help you in any way I can. I want to be a good neighbor.")

Mac

26th February 2020, 18:05

Even babies are altruistic " Amen to that. Nothing to say further think w're on the same page. 8)

Mark

26th February 2020, 18:53

Mark

26th February 2020, 19:04

"...but I saw, in 2016-17, overt racism infecting Project Avalon, and wanted to stop it. In my mind, Project Avalon was never a place where lowbrows had a pulpit to spew racism/prejudice with a "first amendment" unfettered privilege, it was a place for people who were thinking outside the mainstream babble, people who saw deeper than their programming, and people breaking free from the programming - such as being ok with "acceptable" racism, ignoring systemic racism in the US, or excusing the US president's racism due to some perceived good thing that trumps Trump's racism..."

It started here earlier. It was August 4th, 2014. Henrik Palmgren and Red Ice radio. He hosted (https://redice.tv/red-ice-radio/white-genocide-and-the-archontic-infection) John Lash and we discussed it here a small bit. Froze my soul and I knew the AltCom was changed forever.

Mac

26th February 2020, 21:10

Mike

27th February 2020, 05:58

My remedies to the current situation won't resonate with you at all because I don't view western civilization as being an inherently evil, patriarchal society run by white supremacists. But it mostly involves facing what's in front of us (reality) with courage and strength(not inventing subjective narratives to avoid it), cultivating virtue, and embracing personal responsibility instead of blaming everyone and everything for one's issues (hey I warned you that it wouldn't resonate with you! lol)

I understand exactly where you are coming from. Thank you for sharing your perspective in the thread.

respectfully, i don't think you do. i think you still imagine that you're the good guy and i'm the bad guy. am i wrong?:)

do i believe in systemic, or institutional racism? i do! but i don't think it's responsible for every single little disparity we see out there. it's all vastly layered and complex.

the racism that's most prevalent currently is a form of generational racism, or echoing attitudes that get passed down thru families. we all get a dose of that - white, black, chinese, indian, etc

the only way to remedy it is thru education (fact based education) and personal responsibility. you can't legislate thoughts and attitudes. and you damn well can't genuinely change anyone's racism thru so called 'sensitivity training'. all that does is cause more bitterness and resentment. people that refuse to do it will be labeled racist, and the people who do it will only be doing it for fear of being labeled racist. it's a bad game all the way around.

i'm just as horrified about our racial history as you and Dennis are! all i'm saying here is that it's wrong to ascribe all disparities to some form of discrimination, and it is wrong to try to correct those disparities thru reverse discrimination.

those kids at evergreen get to sleep in till noon and have warm meals whenever they want at the school cafeteria. they have heat and air conditioned rooms. they're getting drunk and dancing and partying and f#cking and having a grand old time. they probably drive better cars than i do. one of those kids referred to himself as a "slave". that's an unforgivable insult to all real slaves, the ones we had here in america and the ones all around the world throughout history. and the ones that still exist today.

their required reading should begin with the book 'the gulag archipelago', by alexander solzenitsyn. first he was on the russian front in world war 2, and then he wound up in the dreaded gulags for 10 years, doing the most brutal forms of forced labor imaginable.

those kids think they have problems? no. that guy had f#ckin problems.

they don't know what real problems are. and it's not even really their fault. they're too young to know what real problems are. they'll know what a real problem is the moment they enter the work force. they'll know what a real problem is the moment the rent is due and they can't pay it, or when they are too broke to buy groceries. or when they get a terminal illness.

the postmodernists have a point - and you made it earlier - and that is that the world is open to a near infinite number of interpretations. fair enough! i will grant you that. it's very hard to rank order those in terms of quality. i'll grant you that too. but then they cross the line by saying therefore there are no qualitative distinctions between modes of interpretation. that's where they go too far. there is a finite set of viable interpretations. and i say that because that is self evident, and you can't have a dialogue with someone if they won't acknowledge what is self evident...

...like this character here. this is that video i told you about where the professor claims there's no biological differences between the sexes. he mentions it almost immediately:
jcDKCmC9gWU

Mark

27th February 2020, 14:36

respectfully, i don't think you do. i think you still imagine that you're the good guy and i'm the bad guy. am i wrong?:)

Not at all. Good and bad are relative positions. It is how the world works. I do understand where you are coming from. Your good. Blessings to you and yours.

Mark

27th February 2020, 14:42

That's a whole other ball of mess Mark, and people like him are never helpful. Like most religions they have their issues,plus the unhealthy tribalism of some the non religious among them. Understandable fear but best left for them to sort themselves. The treatment the Palestinians receive is shocking and taking the above route stops the legitimate criticism. Anyway best thought I'd add that before I removed myself, as most people who supported Corbyn were deemed ant semites/enablers. It's beneath contempt heh.

I hear you.

I was a supporter, a fan of Red Ice radio, listened to them regularly, and John Lash and his work with Gaia-Sophia before that day. After that day I could no longer countenance his work nor visit that site as it felt heavy and Archon-laden, which was something that was very, very prevalent throughout the AltCom during that time. I can remember the feel of the energies here at PA, at another site I built (http://eye-rise.com/forum) and worked at also, we were going through it, there were psychic attacks and the shift of intention began to push me away until I had to go, for a couple of years, until the energies shifted again. I'd check the site every few months or so for news, but it took this thread to bring me back, as I've mentioned before.

Mark thought this was an interesting chat. I haven't many thoughts on the matter as still digesting it and halfway through. Initial reaction, he's a bit short sighted.
Won't have time to comment further as busy but thought worth sharing here.
R.Brand is a good interviewer imo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvAhquRJf_A

Thank you for sharing, I'll check it out. And thank you for adding your thoughts to this record, it is timely and much needed. Anytime you want to contribute further, feel free. Blessings.

Dennis Leahy

27th February 2020, 14:42

Praxis

27th February 2020, 14:57

Mark

27th February 2020, 15:09

In order to render a bit of this recent discussion a bit less obtuse, here are some considerations from someone who worked for the National Review - hence the subtle-yet-present ideological slant - that shed a light on some of these issues we've been discussing, particularly the impact of the Postmodern revolution on college campuses and in the Liberal Arts tradition. This is related to our world in general but also to our topic in particular in how Critical Race Theory (I'll post on that next) intersects and furthers the Postmodern impetus driving societies toward a deeper understanding of what makes them tick.

The Predicament of Contemporary Academia (https://merionwest.com/2020/02/03/the-predicament-of-contemporary-academia/)

Introduction

In 1987, when the Reverend Jesse Jackson led hundreds of student protestors at Stanford University, chanting “Western civilization has got to go,” it was a perplexing spectacle for many outside observers. Why would students at Stanford—presumably an exemplary testament to the moral, philosophical and cultural accomplishments of the West—be so ardently opposed to our civilization’s very existence? In the context of the 1987 protests, Stanford’s requirement that all its students take certain classes in the study of the Western tradition (a common, eminently reasonable expectation at liberal arts universities throughout the West) was the source of student outrage. However, the larger antipathy towards the idea of Western civilization itself, which animated the Stanford protests, is a sentiment that now pervades contemporary academia, extending even to include reports last week of Yale discontinuing an introductory art history class over concerns about artists taught being (https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/01/24/art-history-department-to-scrap-survey-course/), “overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male.”

In the modern liberal arts, the Western tradition is increasingly regarded as a symbol of oppression and suffering, and its major achievements are all thought to be emblematic of this inherently oppressive character. When the Stanford protestors petitioned their university to abolish any mandated engagement with the intellectual inheritance of the West, this was the underlying objection: the conviction that Western civilization, particularly for historically marginalized groups, is irredeemably marred by a history of racism, sexism, and any number of other mortal sins. In the context of the modern liberal arts, the consequences of this tectonic shift are difficult to overstate.

The Rise of Critical Theory

The West is experiencing a crisis of confidence; this is more apparent in our current moment than it was in 1987, though events like the Stanford protests were a foreboding warning to anyone who was paying close attention. One of the most significant causes of this pervasive cynicism is the transformation of the modern university, pursuant to a radical shift in the dominant conception of the purpose of a liberal arts education. In contrast to the classical understanding of a university education as an initiation into the intellectual inheritance of Western civilization, a new conception of the liberal arts began to emerge in tandem with the popularization of the “oppressive” understanding of the West; the liberal arts, argued the proponents of this new understanding, must be transformed into a tool for liberation from the Western inheritance. The result was various iterations of “critical theory,” from the neo-Marxism of Antonio Gramsci to the postmodernism of Michel Foucault, and it sought to replace the ancient Platonic formulation of education as a search for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Simultaneously, a Socratic love of wisdom (the traditional guiding principle of liberal education) was superseded by a critical skepticism, which saw its preeminent task as deconstructing and attacking the philosophical convictions of the past, rather than engaging with them as potential sources of wisdom.
The new conception of liberal arts learning understands its fundamental goal to be, in the words of Robert P. George, “liberation from traditional social constraints and norms of morality—the beliefs, principles, and structures by which earlier generations had been taught to govern their conduct,” resulting from a belief, “that the traditional norms and structures are irrational – vestiges of superstition and phobia that impede the free development of personalities by restricting people’s capacities to act on their desires.” The liberal arts was no longer to be an engagement with one’s intellectual heritage but, rather, a training in its rejection. Simultaneously, a Socratic love of wisdom (the traditional guiding principle of liberal education) was superseded by a critical skepticism, which saw its preeminent task as deconstructing and attacking the philosophical convictions of the past, rather than engaging with them as potential sources of wisdom.

Newly emergent ideas of “critical theory,” which regard inherited traditions, habits, and forms of knowledge as objects of suspicion rather than as genuine achievements are the ascendant causes of this radical shift in the liberal arts. In particular, the postmodern theories of fashionable philosophers like Foucault transformed the way that academics viewed the world around them: every aspect of our social conditions, in Foucauldian thought, is the cumulative result of concealed systems of power and domination. Consequently, in contemporary intellectual life, the critical impulse that began in the ancient Socratic search for wisdom and truth has assumed its own rigidly ideological character; in short, the initial emphasis on resisting dogma—sapere aude!—has become a dogma in and of itself. In the pursuit of liberation from the antiquated assumptions of the past, the liberal arts has taken on a new set of assumptions and convictions, increasingly viewing every aspect of the history and thought produced by Western civilization as deserving perpetual critique.

The Rationalist Challenge

In searching for an explanation of the predicament that contemporary academia finds itself in, we should direct our attention to two major intellectual trends that have emerged and taken hold in the liberal arts since the advent of the Enlightenment. The first of these influential factors is rationalism—specifically, the modern Enlightenment iteration of the rationalist impulse, which possesses a near-limitless optimism about the capability of human reason to remake the world in its image, viewing every imperfection in the human condition as a mathematical problem to be solved and eventually overcome by a particular method or formula. This rationalist mode of examination is skeptical of everything but its own skepticism, which it ironically accepts without question; subsequently, for the rationalist, the quest for wisdom is no longer a contemplative endeavor to locate the eternal and transcendent but, rather, the perpetual accumulation of data and methodologies in an attempt to apply the precepts of rationalist inquiry to every question of human existence. In the words of the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the rationalist thinker, “has no sense of the cumulation of experience, only of the readiness of experience when it has been converted into a formula: the past is significant to him only as an encumbrance.” In attempting to understand the critical condition of the modern university, one immediately finds a culprit in the spread of this reductionist mode of inquiry.

The impulse to place all of one’s inheritance under the microscope of dispassionate scientific inquiry makes liberal learning a cold and joyless affair. It also foments a distinctly critical attitude towards the object of one’s study—specifically, in the context of the humanities, this disposition has resulted in a deep suspicion towards many of the political and philosophical achievements that characterize Western civilization. For this suspicion, too, rationalism is at least partially to blame; in the mind of the rationalist, Oakeshott writes, “nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations), familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny.”2 The Enlightenment rationalist project, which strives to study politics and philosophy in the same way that one might study mathematics has resulted in a strong dislike for inherited habits and traditions of ideas. In contrast to the classical liberal arts practice of engaging in conversation with these philosophical traditions, rationalism is irritably impatient of them. Consequently, as the rationalist disposition became predominant in intellectual life, the liberal arts became similarly displeased with its intellectual inheritance. In this way, the modern scholar’s rejection of his own civilization is a testament to rationalism’s influence on institutions of higher education in the post-Enlightenment West.

Downwards to Nihilism

Despite its undeniable influence on contemporary intellectual thought, rationalism is not the sole culprit in the predicament of the modern university. Although modern rationalism presents significant challenges to the integrity of the academy, many of the achievements of Western academia were made possible by the Enlightenment project’s emphasis on free inquiry and the use of individual reason. In many ways, the more insidious foe of the traditional liberal arts ideal is nihilism, a radical philosophical innovation borne out of the rationalist tradition but simultaneously at odds with it. Rationalism, though reducing intellectual inquiry to the pursuit of methodological perfection, still affirms the possibility of universal truth and a natural right accessible to human reason. Nihilism, on the other hand, possesses no such confidence.

“God is dead,” Nietzsche tells us, and with him dies the possibility of anything beyond the temporality of our mortal state of being.
The nihilist sees himself as daring to take philosophy to the place that the rationalist could not stomach, transforming the rationalist’s focus on the materially quantifiable into a radical disavowal of the possibility of anything existing at all beyond our material realm. The infamous introduction of this epoch of nihilistic disillusionment was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation that “Gott ist tot,” a prophetic warning of the Enlightenment project’s destruction of the possibility of religious belief.3 Whereas rationalism had cast doubt on the idea of a religious faith inaccessible to pure reason or formulaic measurement, nihilism took this skepticism and applied it to the possibility of any transcendent or universal truth of the cosmic order; “God is dead,” Nietzsche tells us, and with him dies the possibility of anything beyond the temporality of our mortal state of being.

As a voice crying out in the wilderness, Nietzsche completed the descent from Enlightenment rationalism into the nihilism of what has often been called, “the historical point of view.” Specifically, Nietzsche radicalized the rationalist emphasis on historical situatedness and proclaimed all aspects of the human experience relative to the context of historical time and place, devoid of intrinsic meaning or eternal significance. In the words of Leo Strauss, this “historical insight” claims that “all ideals are the outcome of human creative acts, of free human projects that form that horizon within which specific cultures were possible; they do not order themselves into a system; and there is no possibility of a genuine synthesis of them. Yet all known ideals claimed to have an objective support: in nature or in god or in reason. The historical insight [therefore] destroys that claim and therewith all known ideals.”4

Though antithetical to the utopian optimism of Enlightenment rationalism, nihilism is in some ways the final stage of a trend in post-Enlightenment thought within which rationalism was a way-station; particularly in the context of political philosophy, rationalism is at least partially to blame for its own demise. The rationalist reduction of political and moral questions to a series of technical problems removed the contemplation of the transcendent from political thought; with the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, a focus on the here-and-now—the material realm accessible to human reason—became the preeminent concern of intellectual life. This shift in emphasis was concomitant with the emergence of a heightened historical awareness; that is, the success of rationalism was the simultaneous downfall of a concern for anything that might rise above the historical context of the current conditions of material existence. Increasingly, the study of politics, philosophy, and history was conducted with an emphasis on the historical context of a particular moment, rather than the contemplation of eternity. This was an inevitable development: The eternal is of little use to the rationalist, who instead prefers that which conforms to formula and logical discernment. Tragically, however, rationalism’s assumptions regarding the significance of this historical context were to eventually spell its own demise.

As the Enlightenment rationalist had proclaimed the historicist insight to be the precursor to the perfection of human nature, seeing nature as infinitely malleable to the political and social conditions of the time, Nietzsche turned this insight on its head: The terrible truth of historicism, he argued, was its destruction of any objective notion of “perfection” itself, along with an overturning of the ancient belief in good and evil, right and wrong, and eternal truth. The rationalist project was done in by the very insights it had produced.

The Death of Metaphysics

With the rise of Nietzschean nihilism (wherein the idea of truth itself was postulated to be merely relative to historical context), the idea of metaphysics itself was also destroyed; if everything is merely relative to the context of our historical situation, then nothing can exist beyond or above the material realm. Contemporary life has been corrupted by the nihilistic destruction of the metaphysical, which lurks beneath much of our modern intellectual inquiry—often unacknowledged but nonetheless exercising enormous influence over the state of political and philosophical thought. Herein lies the core challenge of our time: We moderns possess a distinct, pervasive mistrust of any lingering attachments to the eternal. In the Sisyphean quest to subjugate nature to the tribunal of individual reason, we have instead found ourselves lost in the barren wilderness of a cosmos that appears altogether more incomprehensible to us than it once did; the human race has been forsaken by its own ambition.

Under this new nihilistic regime of disbelief in the very possibility of belief, liberal education is no longer a quest for wisdom or truth but a prolonged apprenticeship in the trade of metaphysical despair, rejecting the very idea that any transcendent wisdom or universal truth exists at all. Rationalism (though still predominant in the liberal arts) is no longer fortified by its previous confidence in the truth of what it claims to pursue; as Strauss writes, “modern western man no longer knows what he wants—he no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, [or] what is right and wrong.”5 The scientific skepticism of the rationalist remains omnipresent in the university, but its bold proclamations of being one data set away from Utopia are less pronounced than they once were.

Nihilism destroyed the possibility of completing the utopian Enlightenment project, but the present-day scholar has found no satisfactory replacement to the rationalist mode of inquiry. Quixotically, rationalism continues to predominate the university experience despite a newfound uncertainty in its own claims. Instead, rationalism in the post-modern world becomes a sort of distraction—a manic search for existential meaning in the endless pursuit of formulaic solutions to the material problems of the moment, haunted by the ever-present spectre of nihilistic dread. The desperate state of the liberal arts is a testament to this condition.

Modernity and the Liberal Arts

The predicament of contemporary academia, then, might be understood as the odd marriage of rationalist optimism and nihilistic despair. In the experience of today’s liberal arts education, one notices a distinct loss of faith in the metaphysical assumptions of the Enlightenment paired with a recommitment to its material ambitions. Man naturally seeks meaning beyond his mortal temporality; constantly in search of reprieve from the inescapable nature of time-bound existence, the human condition is thus oriented towards the transcendent. The death of God has left contemporary man with little hope of meaning beyond the material experience of the moment. Therefore, despite a newfound lack of confidence in the rationalist project to remake the world, the modern intellectual has no choice but to recommit himself to this dream, hoping to find some kernel of meaning therein but simultaneously despairing of the possibility of ever doing so.

This is, perhaps, an explanation for a resurgence of emphasis on political activism in the university in recent years. Activism, once understood as having little place in any reputable institution of liberal learning, has become ubiquitous on university campuses throughout the West. Man’s search for meaning, no longer satisfied in religious belief or the philosophic quest for wisdom, has been relocated to the pursuit of a political program. As a result, liberal arts education has been dragged down into the world that it previously resisted, subjugating honest intellectual inquiry to cheap ideological attachments and the profanities of political activity. In this new formulation, the academic no longer merely attempts to understand the world he inhabits, instead actively seeking to change it. This particular phenomenon is a testament to the continued influence of rationalism in the liberal arts: Political activism in the university is the result of the rationalist’s displeasure with the state of existing social arrangements, and it exhibits rationalism’s utopian confidence in the ability of the well-trained mind to discard the asymmetrical imperfections of a given provinciality in favor of uniformly imposed revisions. However, due to the failures of the utopian projects in the twentieth century, the bright-eyed activist with the infallible political program is less certain of himself than he once was; he continues to see the world as a series of mathematical problems, but now doubts his own authority in prescribing valid solutions.

…the flower children of the 1960’s have been replaced by the youthful anger of a generation that already feels betrayed by the world it inhabits.
Following upon the heels of this new doubt, a cloud of apocalyptic sentiment has overtaken the liberal arts experience. Hopelessness, paired with a bitter anger at a world that refuses to conform to utopian aspiration, pervades the academy. Activism is angrier and more petulant than it once was; the flower children of the 1960’s have been replaced by the youthful anger of a generation that already feels betrayed by the world it inhabits. Greta Thunberg thunders that her generation “will never forgive” their elders for the sins of inaction on climate change, Black Lives Matter protestors chant “what do we want? Dead cops!”, and presidential candidates tell newly arrived refugees that America is a nation infected to its core by white supremacy; everywhere, one encounters a hysterical anger at the state of existence.

The classroom, too, is not immune to this: The project of “deconstructing” Western civilization, revealing the hidden organs of political power concealed beneath every aspect of the Western tradition, still dominates the social sciences—but the revolutionary aspirations of the rationalist no longer have a future utopia to look towards. Rather, the university has found itself in a state of endless revolution, perpetually attacking the world it inhabits without a semblance of an idea of the world it desires. The old rationalist desire to tear down existing social arrangements in order to start anew has been abridged, and the post-modern program only seeks to deconstruct and dismantle, with little hope for the subsequent reconstruction of a perfected future.

What is colloquially referred to as “safe space culture” is undoubtedly a reaction to this new despair engulfing the university; having torn down all objects of social affection, rejected any notions of gratitude as mere parochialisms, and deconstructed the mystic chords of memory that bind a civilization together, the post-modern intellectual finds himself adrift. He has little confidence in the scientific “reason” that his Enlightenment predecessors championed as the tool with which men would become gods, and yet he continues to regard the cosmic order with the skeptical eye of the Baconian method. Having encountered the terrible truth of nihilism (yet still hopelessly engaged in the endless revolution of the rationalist), the contemporary scholar turns to comfort as a last resort. As the doctor administers morphine to the chronically ill patient on the verge of death, the child-proofing of the university is an attempt to make the futility of the post-nihilist state of intellectual inquiry more bearable.

Trigger warnings, safe spaces, the rise in emphasis on “holistic” pedagogies and increased concern for mental health, demands for the censorship of sentiments that make students feel “unsafe” and the intolerance of any cause for offense or discomfort: all are the result of an unspoken disillusionment that now pervades the liberal arts. This coddling of the university has been written about at length, but critics of such trends often blame the emotional immaturity of younger generations or particular radical ideologies for these developments. While such indictments might contain some truth, they are surface-level indicators of a significantly deeper issue: an attempt to contend with the nihilistic predicament.

Conclusion

Liberation, that vaguely defined but perpetually overemployed neologism, continues to be the dominant goal in contemporary understandings of liberal arts education. No longer attached to a specific political program, modern liberative efforts instead pursue the rejection of all social mores, traditions and habits, viewing the abolition of all constraints on individual behavior as a necessary precursor to true freedom. The contemporary academic, suspicious of any political program that claims to possess the final truth of human association, now rejects truth itself as an unbearable imposition on his desire, “to live each day as if it were his first.”6 The critical impulse that predominates today’s liberal arts experience is a result of this development: Liberation, once understood as the rationalist project of remaking the world in pursuit of perfection, now doubts its own ambitions. A dislike for the existing state of the world remains, but any claims regarding utopian truth are now seen as similarly suspicious; instead, liberation is now concomitant with destruction—a rejection of all that is.

In the context of liberal arts education, however, liberation was not always understood as the radical rejection of one’s heritage. Instead, Robert George writes:

“According to the classical liberal arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms – it is, rather, liberation from slavery to self…Our critical engagement with great thinkers enriches our understanding and enables us to grasp, or grasp more fully, great truths – truths that, when we appropriate them and integrate them into our lives, liberate us from what is merely vulgar, coarse, or base. These are soul-shaping, humanizing truths – truths whose appreciation and secure possession elevate reason above passion or appetite, enabling us to direct our desires and our wills to what is truly good, truly beautiful, truly worthy of human beings as possessors of profound and inherent dignity.”7

Liberation, in this understanding, is the result of engagement with the legacy of our intellectual tradition rather than a rejection of it. This understanding must be pursued once again in the liberal arts. This is no easy task, for the dominance of historicism and nihilism in our current moment cannot be entirely escaped; it must instead be reconciled with. Men cannot be forced to believe once again in God, nor can the ancient conception of knowledge as timeless and universal be entirely recovered. A recuperation from this predicament instead requires a more humble proposition: A restored gratitude and respect for our inheritance as participants in the Western tradition. To anyone who cares to notice, the limitations of the historical point of view are revealed when one encounters the wisdom of the greatest thinkers in this tradition, in the revelation that Plato’s The Republic or Hobbes’ Leviathan still have something valuable to tell us about our current situation. Entering into a conversation with the wisdom of past epochs, we realize that the human condition is not wholly confined to the circumstances of its historical context—transcendence is possible, if only we regain the inclination to search for it once again.

Nate Hochman is a student at Colorado College and a former editorial intern at National Review.

Mark

27th February 2020, 15:16

A concise description of how Critical Race Theory developed. These intellectual stances, as described in this and the last post, are the critical parameters for the perspectives that have been proselytized by those folks have been calling Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) in recent years. It has become a perjorative, when, in fact, it is a necessary evolution of a system of thought that spans centuries. Intellectual stasis is anathema to human beingness, from these clashes in the Academy further insights develop that increase the cohesion and coherence of society.

That is the goal, at least. We will see what results from these forays into the intellectual wilds.

What is Critical Race Theory? (https://spacrs.wordpress.com/what-is-critical-race-theory/)

The Theory.

Critical Race Theory was developed out of legal scholarship. It provides a critical analysis of race and racism from a legal point of view. Since its inception within legal scholarship CRT has spread to many disciplines. CRT has basic tenets that guide its framework. These tenets are interdisciplinary and can be approached from different branches of learning.

CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colorblind, however, CRT challenges this legal “truth” by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege. CRT also recognizes that liberalism and meritocracy are often stories heard from those with wealth, power, and privilege. These stories paint a false picture of meritocracy; everyone who works hard can attain wealth, power, and privilege while ignoring the systemic inequalities that institutional racism provides.

Intersectionality within CRT points to the multidimensionality of oppressions and recognizes that race alone cannot account for disempowerment. “Intersectionality means the examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their combination plays out in various settings.” This is an important tenet in pointing out that CRT is critical of the many oppressions facing people of color and does not allow for a one–dimensional approach of the complexities of our world.

Narratives or counterstories, as mentioned before, contribute to the centrality of the experiences of people of color. These stories challenge the story of white supremacy and continue to give a voice to those that have been silenced by white supremacy. Counterstories take their cue from larger cultural traditions of oral histories, cuentos, family histories and parables. This is very important in preserving the history of marginalized groups whose experiences have never been legitimized within the master narrative. It challenges the notion of liberalism and meritocracy as colorblind or “value-neutral” within society while exposing racism as a main thread in the fabric of the American foundation.

Another component to CRT is the commitment to Social justice and active role scholars take in working toward “eliminating racial oppression as a broad goal of ending all forms of oppression”. This is the eventual goal of CRT and the work that most CRT scholars pursue as academics and activists.

The Movement.

The Critical Race Theory movement can be seen as a group of interdisciplinary scholars and activists interested in studying and changing the relationship between race, racism and power. This is crucial to understand in order to fully realize the goals of CRS in SPA. CRT is an amalgamation of concepts that have been derived from the Civil Rights and ethnic studies discourses. In the 1970s, a number of lawyers, activists, and scholars saw the work of the Civil Rights as being stalled and in many instances negated. They also saw the liberal and positivist views of laws as being colorblind and ignorant of the racism that is pervasive in the law.

The works of Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman have been attributed to the start of CRT. Bell and Freeman were frustrated with the slow pace of racial reform in the United Sates. They argued that the traditional approaches of combating racism were producing smaller gains than in previous years. Thus, Critical Race Theory is an outgrowth of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), which was a leftist movement that challenged traditional legal scholarship. These CRT scholars continued forward and were joined by Richard Delgado. In 1989, they held their first conference in Madison, Wisconsin. This was the beginning of the CRT as movement.

CRT has more recently had some spin-offs from the original movement. Latina/o Critical Theory (LatCrit), feisty queer-crit interest group, and Asian American Legal Scholarship are examples of the sub-disciplines within CRT. These sub-disciplines address specific issues that affect each unique community. For LatCrit and Asian American scholars they examine language and immigration policies, whereas, a small emerging group of Indian scholars examine indigenous people’s sovereignty and claims to land. This displays the diversity even within the CRT disciplines that hold CRT to maintain its multidisciplinary approach.

Mike

27th February 2020, 16:21

Ouch, Mike. Those Evergreen kids really got under your skin. You have strong opinions, but you're presenting them as facts.

Think of the absurdity of a white guy declaring what the most prevalent form of racism is currently, and multiply that by a thousand when declaring it to someone non-white. Kinda like a guy lecturing women on menstrual periods.

The gender issue is a dilutant to this thread, which is already (at its inception) blended with or compared with culture-clash.

It's not just the evergreen kids themselves, it's that they represent a microcosm of a much bigger problem. What happened there is what's happening on campuses all across the country, and it's finding it's way into corporate culture too. That's why it's so important. But if you haven't watched the videos then I wouldn't expect you to feel the same urgency I do. It's not just the students behavior that was so abhorrent, it was the faculty and staff as well. Small witch hunt cultures become big ones, and then it becomes authoritarianism. That's what's happening in our country today. Good people were unfairly accused of racism and bigotry at evergreen, and they lost their jobs as a result. i don't think that's a trend either of us wants to see continue

Re gender issues: fair enough, I'll let them go. My bad. Just trying to demonstrate that in some conditions, alleged racism is really just postmodernism masquerading as racism...just like other "equity" seeking phenomena. The connections are vital to have a comprehensive view of the picture. Respectfully, I don't think you really understand what postmodernism is, and it's causing you to kind of miss my points entirely.

I don't pretend to know exactly what we should do about racism, but the evergreen events and others like it, and the stuff that happened with James Damore at Google, make it pretty damn clear what we shouldn't do.

We shouldn't force "equity" on other people when it is really just a power game resulting in reverse discrimination. That's the answer that evergreen students and faculty suggested, and the answer Google was suggesting with the Damore debacle. Mark doesn't seem to have any issue with it at all either, so it appears it's his answer for it too. The whole thing is an insidious idea that will only make a bad problem worse.

And its ok to have opinions on what racism is. Thats partially the point of the thread. Mark's been sharing his on this thread all over the place. If you imagine its noble of you to continue to offer up yours with delicate subservience, by all means continue.

If you think the equity doctrine is the answer to all this mess, fair enough, ..we can make intellectual peace with each other right now, and not address it any further. Happy to do that.

Strat

27th February 2020, 16:35

You have strong opinions, but you're presenting them as facts.

You do the same thing though don't you? You are one of our resident masters of expressing opinion, I'd like to see you pick apart his post. I'm not saying this as a jab, I'm genuinely interested. He was basically dismissed and that's not fair.

Maybe off topic but I don't see the value in speaking my mind on the matter anymore. It seems as though you are shoved into 1 side or the other. I go out 1-2x per week and I never have issues with other cultures or they with me. So how does it benefit me talking these issues over? It causes more harm than good. I think it's better to just hang out with my friends, be a good person and let the issue slowly wither away and die.

Mark

27th February 2020, 16:48

We shouldn't force "equity" on other people when it is really just a power game resulting in reverse discrimination. That's the answer that evergreen students and faculty suggested, and the answer Google was suggesting with the Damore debacle. Mark doesn't seem to have any issue with it at all either, so it appears it's his answer for it too.

And its ok to have opinions on what racism is. Thats partially the point of the thread. Mark's been sharing his on this thread all over the place.

All you've offered, thus far, is opinion, Mike. It is appreciated as it is one that many share and we need all representative voices present and accounted for, so thank you for that. I've been sharing a bit more than opinion on this thread. I appreciate your presence but will not rise to your continuous offering of passive aggressive asides and poisonous bait. :)

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Maybe off topic but I don't see the value in speaking my mind on the matter anymore. It seems as though you are shoved into 1 side or the other. I go out 1-2x per week and I never have issues with other cultures or they with me. So how does it benefit me talking these issues over? It causes more harm than good. I think it's better to just hang out with my friends, be a good person and let the issue slowly wither away and die.

Love it. Real talk. Another valuable opinion, although I obviously disagree that it causes more harm than good. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, regardless.

Mike

27th February 2020, 17:05

Mark I've offered everyone the perfect case study to demonstrate what's actually happening in the country at the moment. That's what I've offered.

As I suspected, you think I'm the bad guy here, and you imagine yourself the calm purveyor of wisdom and truth. Sorry, I'm calling bullsh!t on that.

Much of what you're offering is also opinion, masquerading as fact. And I don't mind your opinions at all. Totally cool. Fair game. But your passive aggression lies in your assumption that you are morally and factually correct at every turn, and we just all need to cuddle up to the campfire and learn. Sorry dude, im not playing that game. You need to learn too. We all do.

I'm not here to stop you, or make your life difficult. I actually appreciate the back n forth, even though you've ignored some really important things I've said, like the fact that we couldn't have this dialogue on evergreen. Anyone that watches those videos knows that this is obvious. Not opinion.

I want to stress this again because it's important. I know you're a good dude. If we met over beers and chatted, I think we'd walk away friends. I think Dennis is a man of total integrity. I really do. But I resent the moral sermonizing and the assumption of moral high ground. It's not productive man.

Mark

27th February 2020, 17:31

I want to stress this again because it's important. I know you're a good dude. If we met over beers and chatted, I think we'd walk away friends. I think Dennis is a man of total integrity. I really do. But I resent the moral sermonizing and the assumption of moral high ground. It's not productive man.

Projection is the bane of higher thought and movement in many areas of human endeavor. You've sermonized since you entered this thread and you brought your resentment with you, I did not cause it nor have I done anything to increase it, as its quotient was already sky-high. Perhaps you should check yourself and also the foundations of your understanding.

Mike

27th February 2020, 17:40

Mark

27th February 2020, 18:32

It is good to have a cultural understanding of what we are talking about and its origins in the West. This concise rending of the historicity of racism gets the point across and gives us a shared point to jump off from in further discussions.

The Historical Origins and Development of Racism (https://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-01.htm)

by George M. Fredrickson

Racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable. An ideological basis for explicit racism came to a unique fruition in the West during the modern period. No clear and unequivocal evidence of racism has been found in other cultures or in Europe before the Middle Ages. The identification of the Jews with the devil and witchcraft in the popular mind of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was perhaps the first sign of a racist view of the world. Official sanction for such attitudes came in sixteenth century Spain when Jews who had converted to Christianity and their descendents became the victims of a pattern of discrimination and exclusion.

The period of the Renaissance and Reformation was also the time when Europeans were coming into increasing contact with people of darker pigmentation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas and were making judgments about them. The official rationale for enslaving Africans was that they were heathens, but slave traders and slave owners sometimes interpreted a passage in the book of Genesis as their justification. Ham, they maintained, committed a sin against his father Noah that condemned his supposedly black descendants to be "servants unto servants." When Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude was thus changed from religious status to something approaching race. Beginning in the late seventeenth century laws were also passed in English North America forbidding marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring of informal liaisons. Without clearly saying so, such laws implied that blacks were unalterably alien and inferior.

During the Enlightenment, a secular or scientific theory of race moved the subject away from the Bible, with its insistence on the essential unity of the human race. Eighteenth century ethnologists began to think of human beings as part of the natural world and subdivided them into three to five races, usually considered as varieties of a single human species. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, an increasing number of writers, especially those committed to the defense of slavery, maintained that the races constituted separate species.

The Nineteenth century was an age of emancipation, nationalism, and imperialism--all of which contributed to the growth and intensification of ideological racism in Europe and the United States. Although the emancipation of blacks from slavery and Jews from the ghettoes received most of its support from religious or secular believers in an essential human equality, the consequence of these reforms was to intensify rather than diminish racism. Race relations became less paternalistic and more competitive. The insecurities of a burgeoning industrial capitalism created a need for scapegoats. The Darwinian emphasis on "the struggle for existence" and concern for "the survival of the fittest" was conducive to the development of a new and more credible scientific racism in an era that increasingly viewed race relations as an arena for conflict rather than as a stable hierarchy.

The growth of nationalism, especially romantic cultural nationalism, encouraged the growth of a culture-coded variant of racist thought, especially in Germany. Beginning in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the coiners of the term "antisemitism" made explicit what some cultural nationalists had previously implied--that to be Jewish in Germany was not simply to adhere to a set of religious beliefs or cultural practices but meant belonging to a race that was the antithesis of the race to which true Germans belonged.

The climax of Western imperialism in the late nineteenth century "scramble for Africa" and parts of Asia and the Pacific represented an assertion of the competitive ethnic nationalism that existed among European nations (and which, as a result of the Spanish-American War came to include the United States). It also constituted a claim, allegedly based on science, that Europeans had the right to rule over Africans and Asians.

The climax of the history of racism came in the twentieth century in the rise and fall of what might be called overtly racist regimes. In the American South, the passage of racial segregation laws and restrictions on black voting rights reduced African Americans to lower caste status. Extreme racist propaganda, which represented black males as ravening beasts lusting after white women, served to rationalize the practice of lynching. A key feature of the racist regime maintained by state law in the South was a fear of sexual contamination through rape or intermarriage, which led to efforts to prevent the conjugal union of whites with those with any known or discernable African ancestry.

Racist ideology was eventually of course carried to its extreme in Nazi Germany. It took Hitler and his cohorts to attempt the extermination of an entire ethnic group on the basis of a racist ideology. Hitler, it has been said, gave racism a bad name. The moral revulsion of people throughout the world against what the Nazis did, reinforced by scientific studies undermining racist genetics (or eugenics), served to discredit the scientific racism that had been respectable and influential in the United States and Europe before the Second World War.

Explicit racism also came under devastating attack from the new nations resulting from the decolonization of Africa and Asia and their representatives in the United Nations. The Civil Rights movement in the United States, which succeeded in outlawing legalized racial segregation and discrimination in the 1960s drew crucial support from the growing sense that national interests were threatened when blacks in the United States were mistreated and abused. In the competition with the Soviet Union for "the hearts and minds" of independent Africans and Asians, Jim Crow and the ideology that sustained it became a national embarrassment with possible strategic consequences.

The one racist regime that survived the Second World War and the Cold War was the South African in 1948. The laws passed banning all marriage and sexual relations between different "population groups" and requiring separate residential areas for people of mixed race ("Coloreds"), as well as for Africans, signified the same obsession with "race purity" that characterized the other racist regimes. However the climate of world opinion in the wake of the Holocaust induced apologists for apartheid to avoid, for the most part, straightforward biological racism and rest their case for "separate development" mainly on cultural rather than physical differences.

The defeat of Nazi Germany, the desegregation of the American South in the 1960s, and the establishment of majority rule in South Africa suggest that regimes based on biological racism or its cultural essentialist equivalent are a thing of the past. But racism does not require the full and explicit support of the state and the law. Nor does it require an ideology centered on the concept of biological inequality. Discrimination by institutions and individuals against those perceived as racially different can long persist and even flourish under the illusion of non-racism, as historians of Brazil have recently discovered. The use of allegedly deep-seated cultural differences as a justification for hostility and discrimination against newcomers from the Third World in several European countries has led to allegations of a new "cultural racism." Recent examples of a functionally racist cultural determinism are not in fact unprecedented. They rather represent a reversion to the way that the differences between groups could be made to seem indelible and unbridgeable before the articulation of a scientific or naturalistic conception of race in the eighteenth century.

George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor Emeritus of United States History at Stanford University.

Mark

27th February 2020, 18:49

Indian Schools and the clash of nations. Reservations and cultural assimilation. I did not know this history before today, an interesting and currently relevant revelation. Relatively good intentions were present here, the idea of bringing people into the Christian fold. Then, institutionalization and the invariably accompanying abuse, the depradations of dark human nature. Will time and continuing attention and this trial and error process result in positive ends, if there is no end at all?

The Ugly, Fascinating History Of The Word 'Racism' (https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815/the-ugly-fascinating-history-of-the-word-racism)

GENE DEMBY (https://www.npr.org/people/182264497/gene-demby)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=42616&d=1582828595

The Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902. Pratt was railing against the evils of racial segregation.

Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow. Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.

Although Pratt might have been the first person to inveigh against racism and its deleterious effects by name, he is much better-remembered for a very different coinage (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865): Kill the Indian...save the man.

"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," Pratt said. "In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."

We're still living with the after-effects of what Pratt thought and did. His story serves as a useful parable for why discussions of racism remain so deeply contentious even now.

But let's back up a bit.

Beginning in the 1880s, a group of well-heeled white men would travel to upstate New York each year to attend the Lake Mohonk Conference Of The Friend Of the Indian. Their primary focus was a solution to "the Indian problem," the need for the government to deal with the Native American groups living in lands that had been forcibly seized from them. The Plains Wars had decimated the Native American population, but they were coming to an end. There was a general feeling among these men and other U.S. leaders that the remaining Native Americans would be wiped out within a generation or two, destroyed by disease and starvation.

The Lake Mohonk attendees wanted to stop that from happening, and they pressed lawmakers to change the government's policies toward Indians. Pratt, in particular, was a staunch advocate of folding Native Americans into white life — assimilation through education.

Top: A group of Chiricahua Apache students on their first day at Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pa. Bottom: The same students four months later.
John N. Choate/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
He persuaded Congress to let him test out his ideas, and they gave him an abandoned military post in Carlisle, Pa., to set up a boarding school for Native children. He was also able to convince many Native Americans, including some tribal leaders, to send their children far away from home, and leave them in his charge. (They had reasons to be skeptical of Pratt, given the dubious history of white promises to Indians.)

"These [chiefs] were smart men," said Grace Chaillier, a professor of Native American studies at Northern Michigan University. "They saw the handwriting on the wall. They knew their children were going to need to be educated in the ways of the dominant culture or they weren't going to survive."

For many Natives, Chaillier said, this wrenching decision came down to a grim arithmetic: the boarding school would provide their children with food and shelter, which were hard to come by on the reservations. "The reservations were becoming very, very sad places to be," she said. "These were places of daunting poverty. People were starving."

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School would become a model for dozens of other unaffiliated boarding schools for Indian children. But Pratt's plans had lasting, disastrous ramifications.

He pushed for the total erasure of Native cultures among his students. "No bilingualism was accommodated at these boarding schools," said Christina Snyder, a historian at Indiana University. The students' native tongues were strictly forbidden — a rule that was enforced through beating. Since they were rounded up from different tribes, the only way they could communicate with each other at the schools was in English.

"In Indian civilization I am a Baptist," Pratt once told a convention of Baptist ministers, "because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked."

"The most significant consequence of this policy is the loss of languages," Snyder says. "All native languages are [now] endangered and some of them are extinct."

Pratt also saw to it that his charges were Christianized. Carlisle students had to attend church each Sunday, although he allowed each student to choose the denomination to which she would belong.

When students would return home to the reservations — which Pratt objected to, because he felt it would slow down their assimilation — there was a huge cultural gap between them and their families. They dressed differently. They had a new religion. And they spoke a different language.

"These kids coming from the boarding schools were literally unable to speak with their parents and grandparents," Chaillier said. "In many cases, they were ashamed of them, because their grandparents and parents were living a life that nobody should aspire to live."

But Pratt's idea to assimilate Native Americans gained traction, and the government began to make attendance at Indian boarding schools compulsory. Families who didn't comply were punished by the government. "For a period in the 1890s, federal Indian agents could withhold rations [from families] to kind of forcibly starve someone out," Snyder says.

Tsianina Lomawaima, who heads of the American Indian Studies program at the University of Arizona, told our colleague Charla Bear (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865) that the government's schooling policy had more cynical aims.

"They very specifically targeted Native nations that were the most recently hostile," Lomawaima says. "There was a very conscious effort to recruit the children of leaders, and this was also explicit, essentially to hold those children hostage. The idea was it would be much easier to keep those communities pacified with their children held in a school somewhere far away."

Unhappy, homesick students regularly ran away from the schools, and authorities were sent out to apprehend deserters, who were sometimes given asylum by Native communities who protested the mandatory school laws.

But since there was little oversight of the boarding schools, the students were often subjected to horrific mistreatment. Many were regularly beaten. Chaillier said that some of the schools were rife with sexual abuse. Tuberculosis or trachoma, a preventable disease causes blindness, were rampant. All of the boarding schools, she said, had their own cemeteries.

Chaillier said that Pratt wasn't always aware of these conditions. But these were the consequences of the popularity of his philosophies.

Chaillier, who is Lakota, told me a story that her mother often shared with her about her Indian school experience. One day, according to her mother's story, a young student snuck out from his room at night, fell into a hole being dug for a well on the school grounds, broke his neck and died. His body was put on display and the students were assembled, forced to view their schoolmate's corpse as a reminder of what happened to students who were disobedient.

But Chaillier's mother insisted that she didn't attend one of the bad Indian boarding schools. And she wanted Chaillier to attend one, as well. "If you were Indian, you went to Indian school," she said, describing her mother's feelings. Her mother felt that the Indian schools were a net good, even as they were calamitous for Indian cultures.

It's that ambivalence that makes Pratt's legacy so hard to neatly characterize.

"Richard Henry Pratt was an incredibly complex individual in many ways," Chaillier said. "Some of the worst outcomes that have happened in society have started out with someone thinking they were doing something good."

"For his time, Pratt was definitely a progressive," Snyder said. Indeed, he thought his ideas were the only thing keeping Native peoples from being entirely wiped out by disease and starvation. "That's one of the dirty little secrets of American progressivism — that [progress] was still shaped around ideas of whiteness."

Snyder said that Pratt replaced the popular idea that some *groups *were natively inferior to others with the idea that some *cultures *that were the problem, and needed to be corrected or destroyed. In other words, he swapped biological determinism for cultural imperialism.

Given the sheer scale of the physical and cultural violence he helped set in motion, was Pratt himself a practitioner of the very ill he decried at the Lake Mohonk convention? Was he a racist?

Over a century after he was first recorded using the word, we still ask that question — is she or isn't she racist? — in situations where no clear answer would ever present itself. We argue about the composition of the accused's soul and the fundamental goodness or badness therein. But those are things we can't possibly know. And as we litigate that question, other more meaningful questions become obscured.

Racism remains a force of enormous consequence in American life, yet no one can be accused of perpetrating it without a kicking up a grand fight. No one ever says, "Yeah, I was a little bit racist. I'm sorry." That's in part because racists, in our cultural conversations, have become inhuman (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_minute/2008/03/playing_the_racist_card.2.html). They're fairy-tale villains, and thus can't be real.

There's no nuance to these public fights, as a veteran crisis manager told my colleague (http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fblogs%2Fcodeswitch%2F2013%2F06%2F29%2F196794776%2FHOW-TO-PROVE-YOURE-NOT-RACIST&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFgcwGBv8xwa0JEEUbG0XXXW9MDdw), Hansi Lo Wang. Someone is either a racist and therefore an inhuman monster, or they're an actual, complex human being, and therefore, by definition, incapable of being a racist.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, who often writes about race, is one of several writers and thinkers who has drawn attention to this paradox (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_minute/2008/03/playing_the_racist_card.single.html):

The idea that America has lots of racism but few actual racists is not a new one. Philip Dray titled his seminal history of lynching At the Hands of Persons Unknown because most "investigations" of lynchings in the South turned up no actual lynchers. Both David Duke and George Wallace insisted that they weren't racists. That's because in the popular vocabulary, the racist is not so much an actual person but a monster, an outcast thug who leads the lynch mob and keeps *Mein Kampf *in his back pocket.

We can ask whether Richard Henry Pratt was himself racist even as he decried racism. But that question distracts from the concrete and lingering realities of his legacy. It's far more valuable to wrestle with these two ideas at once: Pratt probably improved the material lives of many individual Native American children who lived in poverty and were at risk of starving. He also aggressively campaigned to destroy their cultures and subjected them to a panoply of miseries and privations.

Last Monday, a woman named Emily Johnson Dickerson died. She was the last person in the world who spoke only the Chickasaw language (http://nativenewsonline.net/currents/last-monolingual-language-chickasaw-speaker-dies-93/). That's a reality interlaced with the difficult legacy of Richard Henry Pratt.

In the century since Pratt used the word racism, the term has become an abstraction. But always buried somewhere underneath it are actions with real consequences. Sometimes those outcomes are intended. Sometimes they're not. But it's the outcomes, not the intentions, that matter most in the end.

Mark

27th February 2020, 19:10

The author does not come to a very optimistic conclusion, but the attempt must be made. The text of the article is only 5 pages long so it is not that dense, but it is quite illuminating for anyone interested in examining the:

Psychological and Physiological Origins of Racism and Other Social Discrimination

In his book "White Over Black," the historian Winthrop Jordan, has documented much of the early developmental course and some of the dynamics of American racism. He laboriously gathered and creatively organized his data so that they show, graphically and in considerable detail, that European whites, upon encountering blacks, imputed to the blacks all the group-threatening characteristics which the whites were attempting to renounce and repress in themselves. By the psychological mechanism of projection they purged and purified their image of themselves as thev
dumped their undesirable characteristics upon their image of blacks, and thereby created a pro-white, anti-black paranoia. Role relationships, philosophies, economies, politics, education, and all other aspects of culture and social structure were then altered to support and to conform to these false beliefs which aggrandized whites and denigrated blacks.

Shakespeare beautifully reflected these 17th century social dynamics in the play "Othello" when he depicted the crafty white Iago systematically undermining and destroying"the dignity, the man-hood, the confidence, the initiative, the self-esteem, the capacity for love and trust, and eventually the life of the black Othello.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2608684/pdf/jnma00503-0057.pdf

Mike

27th February 2020, 19:50

My remedies to the current situation won't resonate with you at all because I don't view western civilization as being an inherently evil, patriarchal society run by white supremacists. But it mostly involves facing what's in front of us (reality) with courage and strength(not inventing subjective narratives to avoid it), cultivating virtue, and embracing personal responsibility instead of blaming everyone and everything for one's issues (hey I warned you that it wouldn't resonate with you! lol)

I understand exactly where you are coming from. Thank you for sharing your perspective in the thread.

respectfully, i don't think you do. i think you still imagine that you're the good guy and i'm the bad guy. am i wrong?:)

First, Mark is a good guy and I hope we all know(not imagine) this is true.

Second, I supremely dislike what you are doing here with this statement. Like pick up artist level debate tactic. Dont you see yourself as the good guy?

Are you the bad guy? No. Why would you think that anyone here thinks that? Are some of your points not what others think? Clearly yes we all do not agree on everything. We have a difference of opinions on some things and that is why we are here discussing. This doesnt mean that you are the bad guy in any sense.

This feels like projection mike. Why try to pivot to the victim stance?

Reverse Racism is a white nationalist dog whistle.

It doesnt exist. There is racism.

When a black person says "**** crackers, not allowed here" That isnt reverse racism. It is racism full stop. If a Mexican calls me snow white, it is racist full stop.

Reverse racism is a perspective that only ethnonationalist have because think of how it shifts the perspective. It makes them now the victim.

All racism is wrong no matter who it is directed at and where it came from. Humans are humans.

Hi Praxis, have you watched the evergreen videos i posted here?

Are you familiar with the James Damore debacle at google?

Victimhood is what I'm speaking out against. If you're not familiar with how notions of "equity" can go way too far, then you'll have no idea what I'm trying to say here. Those 2 events are perfect case studies, and I highly suggest you take a look.

Earlier Mark accused me of being passive aggressive. I'm not being passive aggressive at all. I'm just being aggressive! I've integrated that aggression from my shadow in a healthy way (reread that thread and all the other brilliant ones ive started lately, too many to count). Anyone who hasnt integrated theirs will view mine as being intrusive. But it's really just an excuse to assume moral high ground while avoiding the integration of their own shadow. It's cowardice masquerading as morality. Thats often what "taking the high ground" really is. It's not noble at all; it's a faux moral stance designed to remain willfully blind to one's shadow, all while justifying a failure to be honest with oneself.

I don't feel like I've really talked to Mark at all so far. I'd love to talk to him, but I feel like I'm mostly speaking to an ideological persona. I don't feel ive really learned anything about him yet; I feel like I'm discussing and debating a spread sheet filled with universally cliched ideological talking points. My aggression has been an attempt to break thru that.

Gemma13

28th February 2020, 04:50

I'm a lurker on this thread benefiting greatly from contributors so wanted to say thanks; especially to Mike and Mark.

Melinda

28th February 2020, 04:53

Hmmm... (I clench my pale fists - then release, letting out a sigh...)

I really appreciate so many posts on this thread. But recently, in relation to Mark/Rahkyt and Mike in particular – you are both (in my humble opinion) such bright, intelligent souls. Both making such valuable contributions. For entirely selfish reasons I almost wish distance was no object, as I'd love to make us all big pots of tea and sit by a warm, juicy fire so I could listen to you both expound for hours. And, as I'm a bit of a talker, sometimes especially when people inspire me, join in with my own contributions – as I seek to explore my own biases, compassion, and the sources of my viewpoints. In short, I'm really glad you're both here. Tea for everyone.

Racism. What a monumental subject. With such a vile, painful and damaging history. I've tried several times to write a post for this thread, each draft coming in at half a dozen or so pages. I'll try a shorter version that will no doubt be inadequate by my own standards, before I even worry about others'.

When I was a tiny child, my mother turned to me one day and reminded me that a friend of hers and my father's was coming over to visit. I remembered him and described him as “Chocolate coloured” and my mum, a sensitive soul, told me it was probably best not to describe him that way. My budding psyche was confused. Since while I didn't find chocolates delicious - I was a strange bod who didn't like candy - I did appreciate their dark, silky beauty. Things are different now. I've just gobbled two Ferrero Rocher, chocolates containing both brown and light bits. Although the lighter (whiter) parts are nuts. So, perhaps not the best metaphor for integration, on a thread about race. (Ahem.)

My scruffy-hermit attempts at interracial humour aside...

Institutional racism obviously exists. I could write pages on that alone. Equally, racism can and does exist in the minds or attitudes of people of all races. But that in itself cannot be a distraction from addressing institutional biases where they exist. In addition, people of the same race do not always agree on every accusation of racism levelled at people of another race.

Sometimes, when I look around at the world, at the problems facing people of all colours and races, the ways in which various people (of all races and nationalities) are attempting to handle it can seem like we are still just fighting for scraps from 'the master's table.'

It's one of the reasons I've spent so much time on Avalon writing about and exploring the 'Free Energy' topic. The notion that to completely remodel our world we need to start at the root, addressing the energy that fuels it, both spiritually and materially. The premise that we need systems of clean, abundant and environmentally-responsible energy for a radically new economic infrastructure, and a philosophy that seeks to provide true equality of opportunity for all, with an aim towards a shared peace and profoundly loving experience of life. It won't be easy getting there, and that's if we don't annihilate ourselves first with bombs, frequencies or a weaponised virus. Etc.

So many issues in society, including racism and counter-productive competition, have aspects of their foundation or their support-structures rooted in economic inequality. It's hard to resolve that when we're operating from a system that is, inherently, environmentally destructive. It inevitably colours our ability to grow, and to really come from a place of deepest integrity. I don't plan to elaborate further on that in this space. It would risk being a tangent on a thread that is needed space to address the roots and existence of racial ideas, experiences and constructs.

I will note however, that when it comes to growing such a system, a new system with a clean energy foundation, certain cultures can and need to learn from the viewpoints, and spiritual essence or experience, of what have been (historically) 'outsiders', or oppressed and/or sidelined minorities in their midst. From black communities, to Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Australian aboriginals, the list goes on. For that to happen those groups need their voices to be heard. And deeply listened to. You also have people in Asia and Africa who are keen to learn from and adapt the cultural fruits and ideas from what have been countries with predominantly white cultural leaders. People, everywhere, want to learn from each other. And many are denied access, whether the censorship is overt (e.g. China) or less obvious (e.g. North America.)

Questions remain over the best way to facilitate that access. But freedom of speech is and will remain crucial to it. Which is why I sympathise and agree with Mike's point that using accusations of racism (or transphobia) to shut people down, without giving them a proper opportunity to defend themselves, is a dangerous thing. If people want their ideas and/or voices to be taken seriously, respected, they have to apply that principal to all.

Many years ago I used to write letters, based on appeals by Amnesty International. I later came to question aspects of their organisation, but that's irrelevant to this particular story. Amnesty would email people cases so we could write letters to appeal to politicians, law enforcement etc, to reconsider the situations of an individual or group whose rights were being ignored or oppressed. Individuals who were abused or unjustly incarcerated. The first letter that gave me cause to doubt, cause to deeply consider whether I wanted to write on the person's behalf, was one of capital punishment. The murder the man had committed was so vile, that even though I did not support the death penalty, I wondered what right I had to ask for his sentence to be commuted, when I had not experienced the pain, the loss, of his victims or the victims' loved ones. What shifted me back to a place of principal was reading how the murder victims' closest relatives had themselves decided they did not want to punish the perpetrator in that way. Perhaps they had decided that murder was not the path to forgiveness that would ultimately set them free from part of their pain.

An eye for an eye will leave the world blind. If you are against murder, why support another form of it in the death sentence? Equally, we either believe in freedom of speech for those whose opinions we disagree with, or we don't believe in it at all. We cannot create a truly new and respectful system if it is built on hypocrisy. Built on the killing of a fundamental right. I agree with Mike that some of the questionable attitudes towards this are reaching into other areas of our lives, from corporate practices to internet censorship. The effects may linger, in policy or law, long after the furore of individual cases dies down in the media.

There are no doubt many and layered reasons why the civil rights movement in the U.S., or Mandela's road to ending and healing apartheid in South Africa, or Gandhi's path to freeing India from colonial oppression, did not result in utopias in the decades that followed. But it pays to ask, what were the deepest obstacles? Why hasn't the civil rights movement in the U.S. achieved more than it has? What is absent? It would be easy to say unlimited funds, or laser weaponry and super-advanced psychic power in the hands of civil rights crusaders. But to go deeper... If it was strength in the black people, or the white people, everyone involved - where do we find that missing strength?

Some answers are going to be different for people of different races or backgrounds. It's obvious that different groups are going to have very different experiences, histories, emotional and physical DNA memories, and sets of ancestors flowing in their veins. Some answers, conversely, are going to be simple, and the same for all. Some answers are going to require us all working together, to identify hidden enemies or forces of control – whether they are within us or safe in ivory towers or other dimensions.

On conflict, I read a quote attributed to Malcolm X which I agree with :

“Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/a-declaration-of-independence/

There is a danger that in appealing to minorities or oppressed peoples to be peaceful in protest, it will be seen as attempt to further pacify, to silence, to refuse to acknowledge the vast pain inflicted by silk-tongued or savage oppressors. That it will undermine the passion required to drive change. It is a legitimate danger. There are necessary fights that would never have been won had there been no warriors, only kind words.

But I'm also reminded of something Alice Walker wrote in a letter to Bill Clinton, while he was President, which I first read decades ago. About harmlessness. Alice Walker strikes me as more than just an interesting and powerful writer, with a rich mind and a deep heart. Writing to Clinton, talking with David Icke, loving her own people and 'the other' through life. She is an explorer. I can't really do her soul or contribution justice in a paragraph. But anyway... From her words to Clinton :

“The world, I believe, is easier to change than we think. And harder. Because the change begins with each one of us saying to ourselves, and meaning it: I will not harm anyone or anything in this moment. Until, like recovering alcoholics, we can look back on an hour, a day, a week, a year, of comparative harmlessness.”

I doubt this is an entirely accurate reproduction of her letter, but I found a copy at this link, and recall enough parts that I think it's worth reading despite what may be inaccuracies or typos :

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/118.html

It's hard to embody such 'harmlessness' when the wolves are at the door. Wolves, ever circling, in the flesh or in your head. Very hard indeed. But as Alice Walker described, even though I am mindful that the context in which she wrote is very specific and could take pages to explore and unpack in itself, perhaps some things are easier, at times simpler, than we think.

It concerns me that some of what's going on currently has its roots in power-plays rather than progress. There are murky politics. There is the risk of powerful, wealthy (in some cases white-skinned) social engineers using this very issue, racism, for their own ends to manipulate groups in certain directions via institutions and the media. I've read and heard non-white people making the same claim – that the ploy is dangerous. How it pits people against each other and uses / abuses their skin colour, gender, nationality or cultural inheritance to divide, to more easily conquer them. Perhaps it is elitists enslaving people in a new (yet not so new) way. Hard to navigate that trap in the midst of very real grievances. I imagine some minorities are aware of it, but using it to fund their objectives. Playing the system. They are in a difficult position.

When I consider all of the above, and try to reduce it to a simple principal, I believe the foundation on which a new system is built will influence deeply the quality of what it births. Will determine how new it really is. And none of this feels easy when the game is rigged.

You've been posting some great stuff Mark/Rahkyt. Thank you. The writing by Nate Hochman that you copied over in Post #450 made some really valuable points, and was an interesting read. And Mike, you've been posting some really valuable and necessary stuff too. You both seem (in this scribbler's humble opinion) basically awesome.

Deepest respect and love to all

Mike

28th February 2020, 05:25

That was beautiful Melinda:flower: Thanks. You really have a wonderful soothing energy.

I didn't expect to get so involved in the thread, but it's an important topic that deserves a few points of view.

And now that I've expressed mine, and my little chapter is written, I don't have anything else to add. Mark and Denno, no hard feelings.

Praxis

28th February 2020, 15:03

Victimhood is what I'm speaking out against. If you're not familiar with how notions of "equity" can go way too far, then you'll have no idea what I'm trying to say here. Those 2 events are perfect case studies, and I highly suggest you take a look.

Earlier Mark accused me of being passive aggressive. I'm not being passive aggressive at all. I'm just being aggressive! I've integrated that aggression from my shadow in a healthy way (reread that thread and all the other brilliant ones ive started lately, too many to count). Anyone who hasnt integrated theirs will view mine as being intrusive. But it's really just an excuse to assume moral high ground while avoiding the integration of their own shadow. It's cowardice masquerading as morality. Thats often what "taking the high ground" really is. It's not noble at all; it's a faux moral stance designed to remain willfully blind to one's shadow, all while justifying a failure to be honest with oneself.

I don't feel like I've really talked to Mark at all so far. I'd love to talk to him, but I feel like I'm mostly speaking to an ideological persona. I don't feel ive really learned anything about him yet; I feel like I'm discussing and debating a spread sheet filled with universally cliched ideological talking points. My aggression has been an attempt to break thru that.

Maybe Mark's approach has been an attempt to break through your aggression.

We are literally holding children in cages because they are the wrong color and culture and you are screaming about Evergreen college. I have ZERO time for you anymore.

AutumnW

29th February 2020, 01:23

Ernie Nemeth

29th February 2020, 18:39

I'd like to revisit a topic I've been exposed to recently, at least I think I have been exposed to from my point of view.

I am trying to break into a new but very much related area of electrical work - robotic control and industrial automated systems.

I am running into a strange situation. My knowledge is not a commodity as much as a liability in this setting. That is one thing.

The other is I was wondering where all the minorities we are bringing to the country are working. Well, I found them, they are in these industries I want to break into. Except the rules have changed in these places of employment. The focus is on obedience and following rules, and of course making them. The labor gains we have enjoyed in past decades are being eroded in these places and those who know better are not wanted or tolerated.

Collaboration, for example, beyond quickly discussing who will do what, is frowned upon, as is any form of socialization. The overview is the first casualty as the workers are only concerned with their own job security. That overview is as important, especially to service workers, as is job-specific knowledge. The logical flow-chart of the plant's operation and organization is withheld from those that need it the most. Questions and study in that regard are not welcome because the activities of the service workers has been identified and listed. There is no room or need for innovation or individualized effort.

So here it comes.

When I look around I see this is not true of all in these industries. In fact, the minorities are encouraged to excel, to mingle, to collaborate and have each others' back. It is only the long-term Canadians receiving this treatment. I would say white but it is not only whites but blacks being targeted by this tactic. Our rights and privileges are being removed and there is not a thing we can do about it. I was told to get my hands out of my pockets while discussing technical issues, like some 18 yr old kid with an attitude, by a young minority overseer who was trained in the old British influenced rigid style of everything by the book and no room for novelty school.

Am I seeing reverse-racism or am I seeing my own prejudice? A little of both perhaps?

Sure could use some helpful perspective on this one.

Praxis

1st March 2020, 14:38

Academia is creating a parallel reality right out of Gulliver's Travels, where countries go to war over which end of an egg should be cracked. It's become completely loonie.

It isn't Mike who is ignoring children in cages, nor Jordan Peterson. It's the students and those who cater to them who have created an ideological wall around themselves using the mortar of narcissism, naïveté and entitlement. The wall is so impenetrable and tall they can't see beyond it to the actual deep suffering going on.

What has made the deepest impression on me in the last year is being part of a vast writer's group, many of whom are well educated black women. In all the essays that have been written by this group, I don't think I've read one about Ferguson, Missouri riots and their causes. Nor have I read anything about the prison system. What they write a LOT about is all of the "micro-aggressions" they have to put up with when dating white men.

In Canada, a good 10% of the text in the leading newspaper is devoted to hair splitting gender non- issues but curiously, precious little text about the ongoing horror of people freezing to death in the winter on the streets. Amd that frosts me,mid you'll forgive a bad pun!

And Praxis, just a suggestion -- before you write someone off, send them a pm and try to get to know them, behind the scenes. Most importantly, watch their linked videos.

I would recommend you go back and read what we said to each other. After reading, do you feel Mike addressed any of my comments? I do not.

So we really arent discussing here but rather he is spouting Jordan Peterson Talking points and feeling very full of ego.

Again. We are holding children in cages and he is talking about a tiny college nobody cares about or goes to. If I went to evergreen maybe I could comment or care. Since evergreen doesnt affect me but the immigration policy of the US does, I actually care about immigration policy and not what is happening on a small college campus.

Gemma13

1st March 2020, 15:25

Ah, if only it was limited to a small group in our global sea. Sadly it is a global hot potato that has invented extremist ideologies that are quite literally shutting down free speech along with insidiuosly creating massive division amongst good people by branding them with false accusations of being guilty of heinous acts against humanity.

I am so strapped for time so cannot provide a comprehensive list of independent media outlets, research papers, authors, etc who are tackling this problem - but Mark and Mike have provided good ground. Here's one though to demonstrate that Mike's discussion on Evergreen is being used as a good summary, with visual proof to boot.

Disclaimer: This article is from a political magazine whose leaning/bias will not appeal to some but the article captures the essence of the Evergreen discussion in my opinion. There is so much more out there though.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/02/24/yes-i-am-a-race-denier/

EXTRACT:

(...)

And yet for all their different styles and success rates, these two groups share something incredibly important in common: they are obsessed with race. Genuinely, sometimes even hysterically obsessed with it. Indeed, my battering by both sides last week gave me a stark and enlightening realsation: both of these camps think of me, and presumably everyone else, as little more than a racial category. In my case, as a ‘white man’. The speed and firmness with which both sides reduced me to a white man was striking. The racists, including in a weird YouTube video one of them made about me, informed me that I am a white man who is insufficiently proud of my white heritage or of my genetic superiority to blacks. The wokeists denounced me as a white man who, by dint of my cultural heritage, can have no understanding of the racial complexities of modern Britain. (Even worse, I am a ‘mediocre white man’, in the words of the people at Novara Media. Perhaps I need to make a greater effort to strive for Aryan non-mediocrity.)

To both groups, I am a disappointing white man. I am a disappointment to my race. The racist abusers of science who propagate the foul idea of white genetic superiority see me as a self-hating white man who refuses to acknowledge my genetic supremacy to people of colour. The wokeist promoters of identitarian difference see me as a self-denying white man who refuses to acknowledge my inherited privileges, the way in which history has bestowed on me the category of ‘privileged’ while bestowing on black people the category of ‘victim’.

Neither side allows reality to leak in. That I am less intelligent than many black people makes not a blind bit of difference to the racist right who think I should wallow in my ‘superiority’. That I come from an Irish working-class background and am a first-generation Briton makes no difference to the wokeist left who think I should self-flagellate for my ‘privilege’. All truth and nuance is erased by both the science and the culture of racial myopia; by both the scientific racists of the new right and the cultural racialists of the woke left.

(...)

That we live in a new era of racial thinking, in which so much of educational, political and public life is organised around these new-sounding and dangerous racial ideas, is clear from the fact that it has become incredibly difficult to question and push back against woke racialisation. Indeed, there is now open ridicule of anyone who says: ‘I prefer the Martin Luther King approach of judging people by their character rather than skin colour.’ Woke activists mercilessly mock people who say this. In the US, some campuses describe such a worldview as a ‘racial microaggression’. So to argue against racial thinking is racist. This is mad, Orwellian nonsense.

We cannot let them demean and destroy the MLK belief that character is more important than colour, because this belief is the very essence of a progressive, humanist politics. Both the alt-right and the woke left want you to think racially. Refuse. Rebel. Do the right thing: view all people as individuals with agency, autonomy, aspirations and character, regardless of their skin colour, their ethnicity or their heritage. Fight for the King approach to humanity over the deeply destructive racialism of the flagging racist right and the ascendant woke left.

Mark

2nd March 2020, 15:58

I'm a lurker on this thread benefiting greatly from contributors so wanted to say thanks; especially to Mike and Mark.

Thank you Gemma. Thank you also, for reaching out and letting us know you've been reading. That always feels nice, as for issues like this, it is often hard to get folks to comment because it is so close to home in so many ways. So you are appreciated for being present and accounted for! :)

Racism. What a monumental subject. With such a vile, painful and damaging history. I've tried several times to write a post for this thread, each draft coming in at half a dozen or so pages. I'll try a shorter version that will no doubt be inadequate by my own standards, before I even worry about others'.

Thank you for sharing this post and I hope, in the future, you will feel freer to share others as well. All perspectives and realities are valid, here, and it is as safe a space as I and the moderators can make it for feeling open. If you are thinking or feeling something, others are too. And they will read your words and say, 'Yes! Someone said it, thank you!' Even though they may think that instead of giving a thanks, or commenting. Every word counts. So thank you, again, for these.

When I was a tiny child, my mother turned to me one day and reminded me that a friend of hers and my father's was coming over to visit. I remembered him and described him as “Chocolate coloured” and my mum, a sensitive soul, told me it was probably best not to describe him that way. My budding psyche was confused. Since while I didn't find chocolates delicious - I was a strange bod who didn't like candy - I did appreciate their dark, silky beauty. Things are different now. I've just gobbled two Ferrero Rocher, chocolates containing both brown and light bits. Although the lighter (whiter) parts are nuts. So, perhaps not the best metaphor for integration, on a thread about race. (Ahem.)

What an elegant story-telling style you have. Very visual and an early experience that obviously had a marked influence upon your later thoughts about these issues.

Institutional racism obviously exists. I could write pages on that alone. Equally, racism can and does exist in the minds or attitudes of people of all races. But that in itself cannot be a distraction from addressing institutional biases where they exist. In addition, people of the same race do not always agree on every accusation of racism levelled at people of another race.

Sometimes, when I look around at the world, at the problems facing people of all colours and races, the ways in which various people (of all races and nationalities) are attempting to handle it can seem like we are still just fighting for scraps from 'the master's table.'

Absolutely. Which underlies all of my efforts to get people to see past their partisan bias, which is present even here, to understand that we all have to work together and get beyond the created differences that were designed to keep us from working together in the first place. I've explored how those differences were created in the mid-1600s here in the USA and how they've been exported to Western nations across the world to institutionalize this hierarchy based upon a completely irrational form of judgment, skin-color.

Those masters remain content every time we concentrate on minor events and lose sight of the larger and more important goal.

It's one of the reasons I've spent so much time on Avalon writing about and exploring the 'Free Energy' topic. The notion that to completely remodel our world we need to start at the root, addressing the energy that fuels it, both spiritually and materially. The premise that we need systems of clean, abundant and environmentally-responsible energy for a radically new economic infrastructure, and a philosophy that seeks to provide true equality of opportunity for all, with an aim towards a shared peace and profoundly loving experience of life. It won't be easy getting there, and that's if we don't annihilate ourselves first with bombs, frequencies or a weaponised virus. Etc.

I will look for your work. I don't get out and about much lately but I will make a point of it as the topic of 'free energy' is one that will help to free people from the systemic oppression that has dogged oceanic humanity for so long.

So many issues in society, including racism and counter-productive competition, have aspects of their foundation or their support-structures rooted in economic inequality. It's hard to resolve that when we're operating from a system that is, inherently, environmentally destructive. It inevitably colours our ability to grow, and to really come from a place of deepest integrity. I don't plan to elaborate further on that in this space. It would risk being a tangent on a thread that is needed space to address the roots and existence of racial ideas, experiences and constructs.

I will note however, that when it comes to growing such a system, a new system with a clean energy foundation, certain cultures can and need to learn from the viewpoints, and spiritual essence or experience, of what have been (historically) 'outsiders', or oppressed and/or sidelined minorities in their midst. From black communities, to Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Australian aboriginals, the list goes on. For that to happen those groups need their voices to be heard. And deeply listened to. You also have people in Asia and Africa who are keen to learn from and adapt the cultural fruits and ideas from what have been countries with predominantly white cultural leaders. People, everywhere, want to learn from each other. And many are denied access, whether the censorship is overt (e.g. China) or less obvious (e.g. North America.)

Well said. I am glad to highlight it again.

Questions remain over the best way to facilitate that access. But freedom of speech is and will remain crucial to it. Which is why I sympathise and agree with Mike's point that using accusations of racism (or transphobia) to shut people down, without giving them a proper opportunity to defend themselves, is a dangerous thing. If people want their ideas and/or voices to be taken seriously, respected, they have to apply that principal to all.

Agreed. Those accusations of racism, depending upon who makes them, and what they are talking about specifically, can be valid or invalid, depending upon the context and, again, the specific instance.

There is racism. And people say racist things.

And, sometimes, it needs to be called out.

But, if that instance is one of ignorance or misunderstanding, then of course it should be explained.

An eye for an eye will leave the world blind. If you are against murder, why support another form of it in the death sentence? Equally, we either believe in freedom of speech for those whose opinions we disagree with, or we don't believe in it at all. We cannot create a truly new and respectful system if it is built on hypocrisy. Built on the killing of a fundamental right. I agree with Mike that some of the questionable attitudes towards this are reaching into other areas of our lives, from corporate practices to internet censorship. The effects may linger, in policy or law, long after the furore of individual cases dies down in the media.

That is so. But this thread is not the place to go in-depth in exploration of those separate issues even though they are deeply intertwined, mentioned as asides and in support of the discussion about racism, the LGBTQIA movement is certainly going to come up as it should. This could become a thread on all of the linked exposures the masses have to the excesses of privilege and oppression, and validly so. The identity politics movement is now vast, and includes people on what used to be called the Right (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/24/left-embraces-identity-politics-right-practices-it-much-more-effectively/).

This phenomenon, which is not new, as European Americans in this context were the first to employ identity politics, is something we can talk about and stay true to the intent of the thread.

There are no doubt many and layered reasons why the civil rights movement in the U.S., or Mandela's road to ending and healing apartheid in South Africa, or Gandhi's path to freeing India from colonial oppression, did not result in utopias in the decades that followed. But it pays to ask, what were the deepest obstacles? Why hasn't the civil rights movement in the U.S. achieved more than it has? What is absent? It would be easy to say unlimited funds, or laser weaponry and super-advanced psychic power in the hands of civil rights crusaders. But to go deeper... If it was strength in the black people, or the white people, everyone involved - where do we find that missing strength?

We find it in that space of desperation that exists when people realize they have nothing further to lose. Too many, on all sides, are currently too comfortable to make these changes because they are afraid it will take something from them and theirs. It is my opinion that we all have more to lose before we are desparate enough, as a human collective, to truly and effectively make the change necessary to shift society to that higher modality of beingness.

And it will take more collective trauma to get there.

It concerns me that some of what's going on currently has its roots in power-plays rather than progress. There are murky politics. There is the risk of powerful, wealthy (in some cases white-skinned) social engineers using this very issue, racism, for their own ends to manipulate groups in certain directions via institutions and the media. I've read and heard non-white people making the same claim – that the ploy is dangerous. How it pits people against each other and uses / abuses their skin colour, gender, nationality or cultural inheritance to divide, to more easily conquer them. Perhaps it is elitists enslaving people in a new (yet not so new) way. Hard to navigate that trap in the midst of very real grievances. I imagine some minorities are aware of it, but using it to fund their objectives. Playing the system. They are in a difficult position.

Yes. All "power players" do it, from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to Donald Trump Jr. and Steve Bannon. It's not a new way, it is what has been called the wages of whiteness (https://nonsite.org/editorial/du-bois-and-the-wages-of-whiteness), which, by their very existence, call into existence their opposition, both using the same tactics for different populations, in effect, mirroring each other creating a potentially equal, although seemingly oppositional, karmic effect.

When I consider all of the above, and try to reduce it to a simple principal, I believe the foundation on which a new system is built will influence deeply the quality of what it births. Will determine how new it really is. And none of this feels easy when the game is rigged.

You've been posting some great stuff Mark/Rahkyt. Thank you. The writing by Nate Hochman that you copied over in Post #450 made some really valuable points, and was an interesting read.

The game is rigged. And when we play the games of the "riggers", by falling for the ideological traps and conundrums they set, we are falling headlong right into the parameters of conflict that their Machiavellian designs have placed in this reality version to distract us. Thank you for the gift of presence and sharing these valuable words. Blessings.

Mark

2nd March 2020, 17:31

Hello, Autumn. It is nice to see your words here.

Academia is creating a parallel reality right out of Gulliver's Travels, where countries go to war over which end of an egg should be cracked. It's become completely loonie.

I'm not sure what real world example of nations going to war you are referencing here. I understand your deeper point but would submit to you that the system as it is, is already loonie. In every aspect. So in mediating that, it is not surprising when some go to the oppositional extreme. So these things should be expected, but they are not indicative of where most people, of all persuasions, fall on the spectrum.

It's the students and those who cater to them who have created an ideological wall around themselves using the mortar of narcissism, naïveté and entitlement. The wall is so impenetrable and tall they can't see beyond it to the actual deep suffering going on.

I do not agree with your assessment but understand you are far from alone in making it. What you are witnessing in those videos is deep, abiding pain, caused by actual suffering. Those kids came from somewhere. You can tell by the emotion in their voice that even though they are irrational-sounding, their protestations and extremes are based upon real world experience. I have already addressed this in-depth in discussion with Mike but I wanted to reiterate it momentarily just to highlight the reality of what living in sub-human conditions of humane treatment can push people to do. These kids crossed some boundaries with their kidnapping and stalking, yes. There is no excuse for it.

In Canada, a good 10% of the text in the leading newspaper is devoted to hair splitting gender non- issues but curiously, precious little text about the ongoing horror of people freezing to death in the winter on the streets. Amd that frosts me,mid you'll forgive a bad pun!

You are forgiven. J/k :)

And yes, a lot of this critical theoretical discussion does get down into the details of micro-aggressions, on the part of racial issues, I'm not all that familar with "gender non-issues" as you phrase it. That amount of detail pisses some folks off and irritates others, because they do not understand and have not experienced the emotional turmoil that often accompanies these experiences. And that can't be changed, it is just what is. This nation has to go through this process, as ugly as it is, to live up to its ideals. And as interconnected parts of a global system, our gross quantum entanglement ensures that all of these lessons are internalized, if not learned, by the entire human family at some depth of understanding.

I am running into a strange situation. My knowledge is not a commodity as much as a liability in this setting. That is one thing.

The other is I was wondering where all the minorities we are bringing to the country are working. Well, I found them, they are in these industries I want to break into. Except the rules have changed in these places of employment. The focus is on obedience and following rules, and of course making them. The labor gains we have enjoyed in past decades are being eroded in these places and those who know better are not wanted or tolerated.

Collaboration, for example, beyond quickly discussing who will do what, is frowned upon, as is any form of socialization. The overview is the first casualty as the workers are only concerned with their own job security. That overview is as important, especially to service workers, as is job-specific knowledge. The logical flow-chart of the plant's operation and organization is withheld from those that need it the most. Questions and study in that regard are not welcome because the activities of the service workers has been identified and listed. There is no room or need for innovation or individualized effort.

That sounds very echthroi-ish. Why do you think these kinds of draconian parameters have been placed upon these workers?

When I look around I see this is not true of all in these industries. In fact, the minorities are encouraged to excel, to mingle, to collaborate and have each others' back. It is only the long-term Canadians receiving this treatment. I would say white but it is not only whites but blacks being targeted by this tactic. Our rights and privileges are being removed and there is not a thing we can do about it. I was told to get my hands out of my pockets while discussing technical issues, like some 18 yr old kid with an attitude, by a young minority overseer who was trained in the old British influenced rigid style of everything by the book and no room for novelty school.

Am I seeing reverse-racism or am I seeing my own prejudice? A little of both perhaps?

Sure could use some helpful perspective on this one.

It sounds like a misguided attempt on the part of the company to integrate the foreign folks into the company culture and, into greater Canadian society. From my vantage, it looks like that space has been redesigned to this end, not merely as a work space for employees but some type of training ground for a radical form of societal integration. It also sounds like the new residents are being elevated above Canadian citizens in a very overt and precise manner, as if your concerns and needs are not as important or even the company's concern. You found the job, in a "hidden" sector, but the job was not designed for you and other citizens and so you are more of a nuisance than even a concern.

As I do not have access to another perspective, best heard from one of the newcomers to provide an alternate viewpoint, I cannot say if it is a little of both, one or the other. But it does sound as if there are definite issues of concern.

Mark

2nd March 2020, 17:37

Disclaimer: This article is from a political magazine whose leaning/bias will not appeal to some but the article captures the essence of the Evergreen discussion in my opinion. There is so much more out there though.

Thank you, Gemma13.

And yet for all their different styles and success rates, these two groups share something incredibly important in common: they are obsessed with race. Genuinely, sometimes even hysterically obsessed with it.

That was an interesting point and perspective. Thank you. I only, really, have one question for you. Where did this hysterical obsession with race begin and how?

Agape

2nd March 2020, 18:24

From my inner perspective, there are but two kinds of people- those who know and those who know not. Knowing from within that the person with too big/too small nose are another uniquely endowed being with long history, qualities and experiences we can’t match and vice versa.
There are two kinds of people really, those who crossed the sea of doubts and illusions about it and those who did not.
All speak the same but some keep their doubts and illusions like hidden treasures. They can be nice on outside but they’ll still make decisions based on their preferred social models.

Often I just want to shout at someone “don’t be racist” because I’ve seen too much already and how bad it can get.
Truth comes from within : we should not automatically give in or give up on each other for being different.

In real times I feel, there are still few people who know against the millions of doubters.

If I look into Tibetan culture for example, it was kind of closed minded and xenophobic from inside for thousands years. Explained as “protective mechanism” of its spiritual and social survival like any other fragile community faced rather brutal ends to it and exile situation: pushing everyone out of their safe shell and claustrophobic dogma about foreigners and the world out there.
The same has happened to millions of cultures in the past,
including Japanese and Chinese cultures and people of recent times.

Even then, many of those who escaped and survived still carry an inner sting of pride in “being different” for being ethnically different makes them feel better than “everyone else”.

I am asking myself recently if that sting in humans is some kind of residual brain chemical that we don’t need that acts like poison, a toxin, translates as dangerous sarcasm and dirty humor where we give love and wisdom otherwise.

I’d love to discover why is this happening *really* as all the *issue* makes no sense otherwise and there has to be a clue to human negativity other than “being different”, not looking good enough to somebody, not being the right “mating model” and so forth.

There’s so much brain power behind every little face, so why being bastards to each other, commenting on whether ya look more like Milky Way or Mars Bar.
Some people should stay contained in kindergartens forever and discuss their appearances, forever.

With smiles

🙏🌟🕊❤️

Mark

2nd March 2020, 19:17

So, we're back to the topic of topics (http://www.soul-guidance.com/houseofthesun/predators.html) once again.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who graduated from Texas State University - then Southwest Texas State - here in San Marcos, TX, said:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

Which is the perfect expression of wetikonomics and white supremacy/nationalism, as expressed in the following article and this entire thread. A slight aside, all cultures/societies change, so attempting to preserve a culture/society "intact" is fruitless, it has never happened and never will as cultures adapt and adopt over time, always have and always will. There are no "good old days" to go back to, either. Because we can never go back.

I suppose we never really leave this topic as it infects all avenues of human expression and interaction. I want to be very specific, in this instance. We have spent many words and many instances and many threads in discussing this topic in the Project Avalon Forum. Wildly at times, measured and considerate in others. We have been "infected" in our discussions and seen instances of mass psychic sickness here, at times, so it is always a difficult topic to talk about directly. Some other things that "happen" include long posts not posting, requiring new writing or copy/pasting, technical issues that can be influenced also by astrological retrograde, extreme computer glitching. So be as aware and as conscious as possible.

In that vein:

“One of the tragic characteristics of the wetiko psychosis is that it spreads partly by resistance to it. That is, those who try to fight wetiko sometimes, in order to survive, adopt wetiko values. Thus, when they win, they lose.”

This is a direct quote from the article below. And it is true, as we've recently discussed in this thread to distraction. Which is the point. Distraction by endless differentiation, subjective consideration and nomination of levels and levels of distinct formulations of victimization.

I'd like to concentrate our discussion here and moving forward upon how wetiko relates to racism and how the current form of its infective capacity has infiltrated Western Civilization and each one of us here talking about it in Project Avalon as well as every soul reading these words out there in cyberspace.

Hopefully, by remaining specific and using personal and collective examples from across the globe, we can share some pertinent knowledge that can help each of us to figure out how to underwhelm the virus's capacity to subvert our good intentions and fall back, once more, into the traps it sets on all sides. It is necessary to be self-critical and policing when discussing this topic, because
We are all host carriers of wetiko now.

Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition (https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-transition/)

By Alnoor Ladha (https://www.kosmosjournal.org/contributor/alnoor-ladha/), Martin Kirk (https://www.kosmosjournal.org/contributor/martin-kirk/)

It’s delicate confronting these priests of the golden bull
They preach from the pulpit of the bottom line
Their minds rustle with million dollar bills
You say Silver burns a hole in your pocket
And Gold burns a hole in your soul
Well, uranium burns a hole in forever
It just gets out of control.
– Buffy Sainte-Marie, “The Priests of the Golden Bull”

What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected? What if we then told you that this ‘mind virus’ can be described as a form of cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism. Not necessarily in the literal flesh-eating sense but rather the idea of consuming others – human and non-human – as a means of securing personal wealth and supremacy.

You may dismiss this line of thinking as New Age woo-woo or, worse, a leftist conspiracy theory. But this approach of viewing the transmission of ideas as a key determinant of the emergent reality is increasingly validated by various branches of science, including evolutionary theory, quantum physics, cognitive linguistics, and epigenetics.

The history of this infection is long, strange, and dark. But it leads to hope.

Viruses of the Mind

The New World fell not to a sword but to a meme.
– Daniel Quinn

One of the most well-accepted scientific theories that helps explain the power of idea-spreading is memetics.

Memes are to culture what genes are to biology: the base unit of evolution. The term was originally coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins writes, “I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged . . . It is still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.” He goes on, “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”

One of the high priests of rationalism, the scientific method, and atheism, is also the father of the meme of ‘memes.’ However, like all memes or ideas, there can be no ownership in a traditional sense, only the entanglement that quantum physics reminds us characterizes our intra-actions.

Of course, similar notions of how ideas move between us have been around in Western traditions for centuries. Plato was the first to fully articulate this through his Theory of Forms, which argues that non-physical forms – i.e. ideas – represent the perfect reality from which material reality is derived.

Modern articulations of the Theory of Forms can be seen in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the Noosphere (the sphere of human thought) and Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious, where structures of the unconscious are shared among beings of the same species. For Jung, the idea of the marauding cannibal would first be an archetype that manifests in the material world through the actions of those who channel or embody it.

For those who prefer their science more empirical, the growing field of epigenetics provides some intellectual concrete. Epigenetics studies changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than any physical alteration of the gene itself. In other words, how traits vary from generation to generation is not solely a question of material biology but is partly determined by environmental and contextual factors that affected our ancestors and then are triggered within our genetic sequence through activation events in our life.

The Wetiko Virus

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and the winding streams with tangled growth as “wild.” Only to the White man was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land infested by “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it “wild” for us.
– Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle

Many spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Sufism (the mystical branch of Islam), Taoism, Gnosticism, as well as many Indigenous cultures, have long understood the mind-based nature of creation. These worldviews have at their core a recognition of the power of thought-forms to determine the course of physical events.

Various First Nation traditions of North America have specific and long established lore relating to cannibalism and a term for the thought-form that causes it: wetiko. We believe understanding this idea offers a powerful way of understanding the deepest roots of our current global polycrisis.

Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan). It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live.

Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder. It allows – indeed commands – the infected entity to consume far more than it needs in a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement. Author Paul Levy, in an attempt to find language accessible for Western audiences, describes it as ‘malignant egophrenia’ – the ego unchained from reason and limits, acting with the malevolent logic of the cancer cell. We will use the term wetiko as it is the original term, and reminds us of the wisdom of Indigenous cultures, for those who have the ears to hear.

Wetiko can describe both the infection and the body infected; a person can be infected by wetiko or, in cases where the infection is very advanced, they can personify the disease: ‘a wetiko.’ This holds true for cultures and systems; all can be described as being wetiko if they routinely manifest these traits.

In his now classic book Columbus and Other Cannibals, Native American scholar and historian Jack D. Forbes describes how there was a commonly-held belief among many Indigenous communities that the European colonialists were so chronically and uniformly infected with wetiko that it must be a defining characteristic of the culture from which they came. Examining the history of these cultures, Forbes laments, “Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease.”7

We would presumably all agree that the behavior of the European colonialists in North America can be described as cannibalistic. Their drive for conquest and material accumulation was a violent act of consumption. The engine of the invading culture sucked in the lives and resources of millions of humans and other animals, and turned them into wealth and power for themselves. The figures are still disputed, but it is safe to place the numbers of humans killed in the ‘founding of the New World’ at tens of millions. It was certainly one of the most brutal genocides in history. And the impact on more-than-human life was equally vast. These heinous acts were enacted with a moral certainty rationalizing the destruction in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization.’

This framing belies the extent of the wetiko infection in the invader culture. So blinded were they by self-referential ambition that they could not see other life as being as important as their own. They could not see past ideological blinders to the intrinsic value of life or the interdependent nature of all things, despite this being the dominant perspective of the Indigenous populations they encountered. Their ability to see and know in ways different from their own was, it seems, amputated.

This is not an anti-European rant. This is the description of a disease whose vector was determined by deep patterns of history, including those that empowered Europeans in their drive for ‘global exploration’ as certain technologies emerged.

The wetiko meme has almost certainly existed in individuals since the dawn of humanity. It is, after all, a sickness that lives through and is born from the human psyche. But the origin of wetiko cultures is more identifiable.

Memes can spread at the speed of thought, but it requires generations to change the core characteristics of a culture. What we can say is that the fingerprints of wetiko-like beliefs can be traced at least as far back as the Neolithic revolution, when humans in the Fertile Crescent first learned to dominate their environment by what author Daniel Quinn calls “totalitarian agriculture” — i.e., settled agricultural practices that produce more food than is strictly needed for the population, and that see the destruction of any living entity that gets in the way of that (over-)production — be it other humans, ‘pests’ or the natural environment — as not only legitimate but moral.

This early form of wetiko-logic received an amplifying power of indescribable magnitude with the arrival of Christianity. “Let us make mankind . . . rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,” said an authority no less than God in Genesis 1:26. After 8,000 years of totalitarian agriculture spreading slowly across the region, it is perhaps not surprising that the logic finds voice in the holy texts that emerged there. It was driven across Europe at the point of Roman swords in the two hundred years after Christ’s death. It is no coincidence that, in order for Christianity to become dominant, the existing pagan belief-system, with its understanding of humanity’s place within rather than above nature, had to be all but annihilated.8

The point is that the epidemiology of wetiko has left clear indicators of its lineage. And although it cannot be pathologized along geographic or racial lines, the cultural strain we know today certainly has many of its deepest roots in Europe. It was, after all, European projects – from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution, to colonialism, imperialism, and slavery – that developed the technology that opened up the channels that facilitated the spread of wetiko culture all around the world. In this way, we are all heirs and inheritors of wetiko.

We are all host carriers of wetiko now.

Wetiko Capitalism: Removing the Veils of Context

I don’t know who discovered water, but I can tell you it wasn’t a fish.
– Attributed to Marshall McCluhan

When Western anthropologists first started to study wetiko, they believed it to be only a disease of the individual and a literal form of flesh-eating cannibalism.9 On both counts, as discussed, their understanding was, if not wrong, certainly limited. They did, however, accurately isolate two traits that are relevant for thinking about culture: (1) the initial act, even when driven by necessity, creates a residual, unnatural desire for more cannibalism; and (2) the host carrier, which they called the victim, ended up with an “icy heart” — i.e., their ability for empathy and compassion was amputated.

The reader can probably sense from these two traits the wetiko nature of modern capitalism. Its insatiable hunger for finite resources; its disregard for the pain of groups and cultures it consumes; its belief in consumption as savior; its overriding obsession with its own material growth; and its viral spread across the surface of the planet. It is wholly accurate to describe neoliberal capitalism as the primary cannibalizing force of life on this planet. It is not the only truth — capitalism has also facilitated an explosion of human life and ingenuity — but when taken as a whole, capitalism is certainly eating through the life-force of this planet in service of its own growth.

Of course, capitalism is a human conception and so we can also say that we are phenomenal hosts of the wetiko mind virus. To understand what makes us such, it is useful to consider a couple of the traits that guide the evolution of human cultures.

We have decades of evidence from social science describing just what highly contextual beings we are. Almost all aspects of our behavior, including our moral judgments and limits, are significantly shaped in response to the cultural signifiers that surround us. The Good Samaritan studies, for example, show that even when people are primed with the idea of altruism, they will walk by others in need when they are in a rush or some other contextual variable changes.10 And the infamous Stanley Milgram experiments show how a large majority of people are capable of shocking another human to a point they know can cause death simply because an authority figure in a white lab coat insists they do so.

We really are products of our environment, and so it should be taken as inevitable that those who live in a wetiko culture will manifest, to one degree or other, wetiko beliefs and behaviors.

Looking through the broader contextual lens, we must also account for the self-perpetuating nature of complex systems. Any living network that becomes sufficiently complex will become self-organizing, and from that point on will demonstrate an instinct to survive. In practical terms, this means that it will distribute its resources to support behavior that best mimics its own logic and ensures its survival.

In other words, any system that is sufficiently infected by wetiko logic will reward cannibalistic behavior. Or, in Jack Forbes’ evocative language, “Those who squirm upwards are, or become, wetiko, and they only perpetuate the system of corruption or oppression. Thus the communist leaders in the Soviet Union under Stalin were at least as vicious, deceitful and exploitative as their czarist predecessors. They obtained ‘power’ without changing their wetiko culture.”

This ensures that the essential logic of cultures spreads down through generations as well as across them. And it explains why power-elites self-organize resources to maintain a high degree of continuity in distributions of power, when those distributions efficiently serve their survival and growth. When this continuity is interrupted or broken, revolutions occur and the system is put under threat.

However, as the above quote suggests, the disruption must happen at the right level. Merely trading one wetiko for another at the top of an otherwise unchanged wetiko infrastructure (as in the case of Stalin replacing the czars or, more contemporarily, Trump replacing Obama) is largely pointless. At best, it might result in the softening of the cruelest edges of a wetiko machine. At worse, it does nothing except distract us from seeing the true infection.

The question, then, for anyone interested in excising the wetiko infection from a culture is, where does it live within the host body? In one respect, because it is a psychic phenomenon that lives in potentiality in all of us, it is non-local. But this, though ultimately important to understand, is not the whole truth. It is also true that there is a conceptual place where the most powerful wetiko logic is held, and that, at least in theory, makes it vulnerable.

In the same way that a colony of bees will instinctively house its queen in the deepest chambers of the hive, so a complex adaptive system buries its most important operating logic furthest from the forces that can challenge them. This means two things: first, it means embedding the logic in the deep rules that govern the whole. Not just this national economy or that, this government or that, but the mother system — the global operating system. And second, it means making these rules feel as intractable and inevitable as possible.

So what is this deep logic of the global operating system?

It comes in two parts. First, there is the ultimate purpose, which we might call the Prime Directive, which is simply to increase capital, as the term capitalism would imply.

We often dress this up in a narrative that says capital generation is not the end but the means, the engine of progress. This makes the idea of dethroning it feel dangerous and even contrary to common sense. But the truth is, we have created a system that artificially treats money as sacred. At this point in capitalism’s history, life is controlled by capital, more than it controls the forces of capital. If you need further proof, look no further than how we define and measure progress: GDP. More on that below.

Then, there is the logic for how we, the living components of this system, should behave, which we would summarize with the following epithet:

Selfishness is rational and rationality is everything; therefore selfishness is everything.

This dictates that if we all prioritize ourselves and maximize our own material wealth, an invisible hand (ah, what a seductive meme!) will create an equilibrium state and life everywhere will be made better. We are pitted against each other in a form of distributed fascism where we cocoon ourselves in the immediate problems of our own circumstances and consume what we can. We then couch this behavior in the benign language of family matters, national interests, job creation, GDP growth, and other upstanding endeavors.

Put these two parts of the puzzle together and it’s easy to see why the banker who generates excess capital receives vast rewards and is labelled productive and successful, almost regardless of the damage s/he causes. Those who are less successful at producing excess capital, meanwhile, are rewarded far less, regardless of the life-affirming good they may be doing. Nurses, mothers, teachers, journalists, activists, scientists — all receive far less reward because they are less efficient at obeying the Prime Directive and may even be countermanding the operating principle of self-interest. And as for those who are actually poor — well, they are effortlessly labelled not just as practical but also moral failures.

This capital expansion infection is so far advanced precisely because the system requires exponential capital growth. The World Bank tells us that we have to grow the global economy by at least 3 percent per year to avoid recession.15 Let’s think about what this means. Global GDP in 2014 (the last full year of data) was roughly USD $78 trillion.16 We grew that pie by 2.4% in 2015, which resulted in the commodification and subsequent consumption of roughly another $2 trillion in human labor and natural resources. That’s roughly the size of the entire global economy in 1970. It took us from the dawn of civilization to 1970 to reach $2 trillion in global GDP, and now we need that just in the differential so the entire house of cards doesn’t crumble. In order to achieve this rate of growth year-on-year, we are destroying our planet, ensuring mass species extinction, and displacing millions of our brothers and sisters (who we commonly refer to as “poor people”) from around the world.

So when people tell us that the market knows best, or technology will save us, or philanthrocapitalism will redistribute opportunities (pace Bill Gates), we have to understand that all of these seemingly common sense truisms are embedded in a broader operating system, a wetikonomy. And the more they are presented as unchangeable, the more often we’re told, “there is no alternative,” the more we should question. There is actually a beautiful irony in the fact that, when we know what we’re up against, such statements are our signposts for where to look to create change.

It is not that we are against markets, technology, or philanthropy — they can all be wonderful, in the right context — but we are against how they are being used as alibis to excuse the insanity of the wetiko paradigm that they are inseparable from. We are reminded of Jack Forbes’ heavy words; “It is not logical to allow the wetikos to carry out their evil acts and then to accept their assessment of the nature of human life. For after all, the wetiko possess a bias created by their own evil lives, by their own amoral or immoral behavior. And too, if I am correct, they were, and are, also insane.”

Seeing Wetiko: Antidote Logic

[I]Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate — just like genes replicate, and infect, and move into the organism of society. And, believing as I do, that society operates on a kind of biological economy, then I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution. But unless the memes are released to play the game, there is no progress.
– Terrence McKenna, Memes, Drugs and Community

You might just be a black Bill Gates in the making.
– Beyoncé, Formation

A key lesson of meme theory is that when we are conscious of the memetic viruses we are less likely to adhere to them blindly. Conscious awareness is like sunlight through the cracks of a window.

Thus, one of the starting points for healing is the simple act of seeing wetiko in ourselves, in others, and in our cultural infrastructure. And once we see, we can name, which is critical because words and language are a central battleground. To quote McKenna again: “The world is not made of quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, or the thoughts of God. The world is made of language. Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has invested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.”

His last line is critical for exploring our own agency in the replication of wetiko. We are all entangled in the unfolding of reality that is happening both to and through us. In place of traditional certainties and linear cause-and-effect logic, we can recast ourselves “as spontaneously responsive, moving, embodied living beings — within a reality of continuously intermingling, flowing lines or strands of unfolding, agential activity, in which nothing (no thing) exists in separation from anything else, a reality within which we are immersed both as participant agencies and to which we also owe significant aspects of our own natures.”

If wetiko exists, it is because it exists within us. It is also entangled with the broader superstructure, relationships, and choice architecture that we are confronted with within a neoliberal system on the brink of collapse.

Forbes reminds us that we cannot fight wetiko in any traditional sense: “One of the tragic characteristics of the wetiko psychosis is that it spreads partly by resistance to it. That is, those who try to fight wetiko sometimes, in order to survive, adopt wetiko values. Thus, when they win, they lose.” As such, reform-based initiatives, from the sharing economy to micro-lending, have succumbed to the co-optation and retaliation of wetiko capitalism.

However, once we are in the mode of seeing wetiko, we can hack the cultural systems that perpetuate its logic. It is not difficult to figure out where to start. Following the money usually leads us to the core pillars of wetiko machinery. Those of us that are within these structures, from the corporate media to philanthropy to banking to the UN, have access to the heart of the wetiko monster. It is up to you what you will do with that privilege.

For those of us on the outside, we can organize our lives in radically new ways to undermine wetiko structures. For example, the simple act of gifting undermines the neoliberal logic of commodification and extraction. Using alternative currencies undermines the debt–based money system. De-schooling and alternative education models can help decolonize and de-wetikoize the mind. Helping to create alternative communities outside the capitalist system supports the infrastructure for transition. And direct activism such as debt resistance can weaken the wetiko virus, if done with the right intention and state of consciousness.

By contracting new relationships with others, with Nature, and with ourselves, we can build a new complex of entanglements and thought-forms that are fused with post-wetiko, post-capitalist values.

We have to simultaneously go within ourselves and the deep recesses of our own psyches while changing the structure of the system around us. Holding a structural perspective and an unapologetic critique of modern capitalism — i.e. holding a constellational worldview that sees all oppression as connected — serves our ability to see and live the alternatives.

Plato believed that ideas are the “eyes of the soul.” Now that the veils obscuring wetiko are starting to be lifted, let us give birth to, and become, living antigens, embracing the polyculture of ideas that are challenging the monoculture of wetiko capitalism. Let us be pollinators of new memetic hives built on altruism, empathy, inter-connectedness, reverence, communality, and solidarity, defying the subject-object dualities of Cartesian/Newtonian/Enlightenment logic. Let us reclaim our birthright as sovereign entities, free of deluded beliefs in market systems, invisible hands, righteous greed, chosen ones, branded paraphernalia, techno-utopianism and even the self-salvation of the New Age. Let us dance with thought-forms through a deeper understanding of ethics, knowing, and being,23 and the intimate awareness that our individual minds and bodies are a part of the collective battleground for the soul of humanity, and indeed, life on this planet. And let us re-embrace the ancient futures of our Indigenous ancestors that represent the only continuous line of living in symbiosis with Mother Nature. The dissolution of wetiko will be as much about remembering as it will be about creation.

Endnotes and references on origin page.

Mark

2nd March 2020, 19:49

I am asking myself recently if that sting in humans is some kind of residual brain chemical that we don’t need that acts like poison, a toxin, translates as dangerous sarcasm and dirty humor where we give love and wisdom otherwise.

I posted a pdf in post 460 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100738-Racism&p=1338152&viewfull=1#post1338152), that discussed some of the physiological precursors that lead to this form of differentiation between people and, as one factor in that global inequity equation, our very way of thinking has a lot to do with it in ways I'd previously not considered. Just the sub-conscious "act" of differentiating between the front and back of our bodies, the top and bottom, create dichotomies of difference that we then project from our bodies and minds into our considerations of other individuals and sub-groups in our tribe, to considerations of real others, those who exist outside of our known boundaries. All of the polarities that we take for granted then accrue, black/white, good/bad, up/down, etc. It is a very personal process that starts at a very young age and that is, perhaps, epigenetic in nature at this point with some aspects being taught, culturally, as far as the choice of objects to elevate versus those to denigrate.

Very interesting considerations and pertinent to many aspects of our individuated and group cultural creation.

I’d love to discover why is this happening *really* as all the *issue* makes no sense otherwise and there has to be a clue to human negativity other than “being different”, not looking good enough to somebody, not being the right “mating model” and so forth.

The post above, 474 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100738-Racism&p=1338788&viewfull=1#post1338788), takes it to a level of consideration and discussion that may provide some illumination as far as it not "making sense", as well as clarifying the lesser considerations of "mating model" and so forth. It is, at least, a factor in many of our designations insofar as we are each "infected" with culturally appropriated norms of relating and of beauty that are diffused throughout a society and that everyone is familiar with, even if it is not discussed openly or directly. As these issues of race and ethnicity have not been equitably accounted for, across time and space.

There’s so much brain power behind every little face, so why being bastards to each other, commenting on whether ya look more like Milky Way or Mars Bar.

Some people should stay contained in kindergartens forever and discuss their appearances, forever.

I agree without qualification. LOL

I wish I could stay on higher ideals and spiritualized discussion. I would love to participate more in those aspects of Project Avalon but my time and attention are very concentrated these days and I feel it is important that this topic be aired out in the Alternative Community (AltCom). I've been grounded heavily by recent events in my life so my multidimensional perspective has, of necessity, been drawn back into these considerations, which I spent the first 40 years of my life considering and gaining a very extensive education on through personal experience and also academia. I am familiar with all sides of the issue and seek only to air them and find the "higher way" through it, as balance is desperately needed in these times.

Maybe at some point this conversation and thread will wind down, my material concerns will draw back and I'll be able to go back up to the "mountaintop" and meditate to my soul's content and never have to talk about them ever again.

I'd like that. :)

Be blessed.

Gemma13

3rd March 2020, 06:14

Mark I enjoyed reading the lengthy piece on Wetiko as I strongly agree with the concept and believe it is key to your question to me of race obsession origin. It actually forms part of my response that I will get back to you on. Along with Memes being the other fit, and part of our evolutionary solution. Pleasant synchronicity for me reading your contributions today. Thank you.

I should get time over the next week to put it together and post.

Mark

9th March 2020, 15:10

Sharing an article by a gentleman named "Johnny Reb", which goes a long way in describing the practical aspect of the Wetiko phenomenon and how racism is a part of it, to the extent that it is exploitative of human and other natural capital resources, resulting in the monetization of souls and collective units of consciousness, animals and plants, on a mass scale. Our economic system obviously reflects this. The societal institutionalization of racism and classism also reflect this. This historical treaties uses numerous good examples of individuals and groups/classes to illustrate the nature of Wetiko as it occurs and the cultural and class expression that can be determined clearly just by observation of history as well as current events.

We've determined in this discussion thus far that institutionalized behavior modification directs people in their adoption of cultural mores, people do what people do, as they are taught, which has been, in turn, a structure built upon inherent physical and psychological mechanisms that support dichotimization and polarity thinking. The inclusion of Weticonomics into this structure shows us how individuals who exemplify this phenomena consciously support and further these mind control methodologies to appeal to people's baser instincts and propensity to "follow the herd" and "not stick out" by standing up for themselves and others.

It becomes more difficult to appeal to higher forms of justice when it turns you against your family, friends and neighbors and even your own fear and trauma programming as well as your base survival instincts.

Christopher Columbus the Wétiko (https://www.skeptic.ca/Wetiko.htm)

To the Cree, and most Native North Americans, greed was a serious psychological malfunction. The Cree called it Wétiko.

Native American philosopher Jack Forbes explains that the overriding characteristic of a wétiko, a Cree word literally meaning “cannibal,” is “that he consumes other human beings for profit, that is, he is a cannibal” ... (from Columbus and other Cannibals, a book, in addition to American Holocaust by David Stannard, A Little Matter of Genocide by Ward Churchill and Native American History by Judith Nies, that ought to be required reading by every high school student)

By Johnny Reb

Ultimately, humility is the basis for democracy, just as arrogance is the basis for authoritarianism - Jack D Forbes

This culture is based on exploitation, domination, theft and murder…and the perceived right of the powerful to take whatever resources they want… it’s a culture that is killing the planet - Derrick Jensen

Kill every buffalo you can, for every buffalo dead is an Indian gone -Colonel R. I. Dodge, Fort McPherson, 1867

Are we “civilized”?

Mohandas Ghandi was once asked what he thought of Western Civilization. His response was “It would be a good idea.” As the latest manifestation of out-of-control exploitive capitalism has been discharged onto the world and even more rapidly ravages and wreaks havoc on the planet and which has now led to the demolition of the global economy, who can argue with that?

Ghandi’s terse response prompts us to ask “what exactly is civilization anyway?” It certainly has precious little to do with “civility” as any interchange with our dysfunctional culture of narcissism and greed quickly demonstrates. Dictionary definitions I have not found particularly helpful because they’re generally mired in self-serving ethnocentric bias. The OED is not particularly helpful, defining it as “a developed or advanced state of human society,” prompting one to ask what is meant by “developed” or “advanced.”

Religions, ideologies, doctrinaire world views and the need for certainty are invariably the refuge of the fearful, those who fear change, ambiguity and the loss of their privileged position within society. That’s why the modern monolithic nation state is founded on the written word, perhaps an offshoot of the ingrained notion of an unchanging Biblical literalism. It has become the bludgeon that provides for contraction of meaning and a singular mythology, loyalty, patriotism and devotion, the framing of discourse, entitlement and the affirmation of power for those who already have it.

This conception of a nation state was antithetical to the Native North American anarchistic world view. Castenada, a Franciscan priest who accompanied Coronado’s expedition, described the Hopis of New Mexico as living in “complete equality, neither exercising authority nor demanding obedience.” Castenada’s remark was a not uncommon observation by white Christian invaders of socialistic libertarian Native North American societies. Native peoples in North America believed that humans are merely a constituent of the natural world, not a chosen species instructed to master and exploit it with impunity. They had no conception of private property, believing that the world and its bounty was granted to all by their “Creator” and that no group or individual had the right to own any part of it. To the North American Indians, land had a very different meaning – culturally, economically and spiritually. “Sell a country!” Tecumseh shouted at a meeting of the representatives of the Northwest Territory in 1810. “Why not sell the air, the clouds, the rivers and the great sea as well as the entire earth?” Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?”

The Indians in California who had spent decades resisting or evading the Spanish missionaries and conquistadors were finally reduced to near total extermination by the American gold miners who overran their hunting grounds, villages and burial sites, murdered and scalped for bounties, kidnapped Indian women to serve as prostitutes and Indian children as slaves. Historian Alan Josephy called the treatment of California Indians “as close to genocide as any tribal people had faced, or would face, on the North American continent.”By the 1880’s 30 million buffalo had been killed merely for their hides and less than one thousand remained. In the Texas legislature General Sheridan, sounding like Heinrich Himmler, declared “for the sake of everlasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated”, since it would do more to settle the “Indian problem” than anything else by starving them out. Also by that time, the Eastern Indians in the United States had been moved to substandard land on reservations on land that was deemed valueless to the Christian White Man at the time. The reservations were no better than glorified concentration camps and Indians died in the thousands from the inability to sustain themselves, corruption of Indian agents, neglect and disease. Segregated within reservations, they were excluded from the American economy and political system. They could not vote, had no elected representatives, had no voice in the political process and were forced into a complex web of treaties that had no legal status for them. Of the more than 400 treaties signed with the US government, many of which they did not understand, not a single one was honored. When the greedy capitalists discovered gold, oil and other valuable minerals on their originally considered useless land, they were ruthlessly exploited once again. It continues to this day.

*Contrary to Hollywood mythology, scalping was introduced and originally practiced by white Christian Europeans. In California it was declared “open season” on any Native American who resisted the intrusion of the greedy gold miners.

Following the arrival of the brutal barbarian Columbus, they Native Americans were subjected to five centuries of racism, slavery, genocide and theft of their homelands. It’s ironic that Native Americans were referred to as “savages” by their European Christian invaders despite the fact they had a far superior conception of community, egalitarianism, family, justice and fair play than the greedy “enlightened” Christian white men who lied, pillaged, and murdered their way to total dominance, enslavement and subjugation of indigenous peoples throughout the world. Joseph Brant the great Mohawk Six Nations leader repeatedly argued for these lofty principles when he so eloquently and ironically said, “In the government you call civilized, the happiness of the people is constantly sacrificed to the splendor of empires. Hence your codes of criminal and civil laws have their origin; hence your dungeons and prisons. I will not enlarge on an idea so singular in civilized life. Among us we have no prisons.” (John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country, p. 28)

Unlike Christian Europeans and their Biblical fixations of certainty, Native peoples in North America had no written laws or doctrinaire religious codes, only an ongoing dialogue in which all verbal agreements were never calcified or immutable, but open-ended, often ambiguous and subject to change. As long as you continued the dialogue, violence as a solution to human conflict could be averted. Native Americans did not believe in inflicting the Old Testament idea of punishment, especially on their children, and cared for those who could not look after themselves. Their sense of the common good would not permit anyone in the tribe to wander homeless in the uncaring wilderness of a failed civilization. In our so-called “advanced” society of the 21st Century the majority of food bank users have jobs, forty to 60% of homeless shelter residents have jobs and over an eight month period in 2007, homeless shelters in metropolitan Vancouver had to turn a way 40,000 homeless people for lack of beds. Is this the best we can do? In my view it’s a flagrant failure of what any civilized society ought to be.

Unlike the depraved Christian notion of “original sin” in the Garden of Eden, First Nations people have never been compelled to suffer eternal torment and a daunting sense of guilt by being expelled from their land and natural environment by a vengeful ego driven Deity. They were never separated from their land by an oppressive mythology so it was neither perceived as a lost paradise nor an enemy.

Someone once asked Rick Santorum, a Christian fundamentalist and one of the most powerful people in the US Senate during the George W Bush administration why he consistently implements policies that are unsustainable and harmful to the natural environment. He replied that the natural world is inconsequential to God’s divine plan, explaining that the impending rapture and return of Jesus would solve all of mankind’s problems, including the devastation to the environment. “Nowhere in the Bible does it say that America will be here one hundred years from now.” It’s disturbing to realize that former president George W Bush* and 178 members of the United States Senate are also Christian fundamentalists who think like Santorum or are at the very least allied with the Christian right. These are the unthinking simpletons that Chris Hedges refers to in his book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

*Bush stated publically that his reasons for invading Afghanistan and Iraq were that “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.” Another disturbing fact: in a 1996 national poll it was revealed that more than 40% of Americans believe the world in its present form will end in the battle of Armageddon in Israel between Jesus and the anti-Christ. Presumably the opening bout will be between the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

The real savages

History is the polemics of the powerful – William F Buckley

History is very selective, written by the holders of power who select those events in the narrative that legitimize the status with them perched at the pinnacle of the socio-economic order. Albeit very slowly, this has been recently changing with the publication of books such as Howard Zinn’s ground breaking A Peoples History of the United States and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. For centuries the traditional historical narratives have comprised the mythology of our culture – creating myths that are constantly in a state of flux. The idea for a chronology of Native American history grew out of the paradigm shift that resulted from the 500 year centenary celebration of Columbus's arrival in the western hemisphere in 1492. Like many people expecting a lively celebration of Columbus's heroism, courage, and mythic vision, the imagination of some was captured instead by the "view from the shore" that was later chronicled not only by the books by Loewen and Zinn, but David Stannard’s American Holocaust and Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide. The point of view presented by indigenous peoples was one of great native cultural and societal contributions and great European savagery and injustice. Their perspective changed the narrative of time and challenged the conventional Hollywood myths of Native Americans.

The “discovery” of America is a distortion of language, a misnomer. It was at the very least an invasion, not a discovery, and the pattern of exploitation and murder was established right from the beginning. Once he arrived in the West Indies, Columbus immediately began herding the native Arawaks – “the best people under the sun, with neither ill-will nor treachery” – to take back to Spain to sell in the slave market. Those remaining were worked to death in the gold mines with a brutality so excessive that a priest who accompanied Columbus called it “fierce and unnatural cruelty.” Spanish violence and cruelty was incomprehensible to the natives: "[The Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babies from their mothers' breast by their feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks. . . They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords ... [They hanged Indians] by thirteen's, in honor and reverence for our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with fire, they burned the Indians alive. ... I saw all the above things . . . All these did my own eyes witness," wrote Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, the Spanish priest who came to the New World for land and ended by writing the famous Historia de las Indias, a history of the land Columbus mistakenly called India.

In graphical contradiction to centuries of national Columbus holidays and mainstream history texts, indigenous peoples throughout the hemisphere launched demonstrations to publicize the historical reality of the Arawak Indians and Columbus's genocidal search for gold. At the time Columbus landed on the island he called Hispaniola in 1492 there were an estimated 30 million people in Mexico and the Caribbean Islands (Columbus's brother counted over one million male inhabitants in what we now call the Dominican Republic in the census he conducted to determine how many adult males should be bringing in gold for tribute) and another estimated 50 million in the U.S., Canada, and South America, many of whom lived in highly complex cultures with sophisticated knowledge of astronomy, agriculture, metalworking, weaving, geography and measurement of time.*

*Population figures have been greatly revised over the past 20 years. Although all sites were not simultaneously occupied, population estimates at the time of Columbus range from 7 to 45 million people in South America; 7 to 30 million people in Mexico and the Caribbean islands; and one to 18 million people in the U.S. and Canada. Some revised estimates go as high as 110 million people in the entire western hemisphere. The variations are based on the interpretation of the numbers of settlements; the duration of settlements, the areas of land cultivated multiplied by the numbers of people they might have supported. I have used the more conservative of the revised estimates. About the only fact everyone agrees on is that there were far more people living in the Americas than was formerly believed or that our history books have told us.

Following the lead of his marauding Spanish Christian predecessor Christopher Columbus, the conquistador Hernando Cortés, shortly before razing Tenochtitlan (the present location of Mexico City) to the ground and slaughtering or enslaving most of its inhabitants, remarked that it was the most beautiful city he had ever seen. This contaminated conception of civilization has been commonly argued by so-called enlightened Christian Europeans throughout the world for the past five centuries. Captain John Chester wrote that the native Indians are to “gain the knowledge of our faith,” while, consistent with Biblical holy writ, Europeans would harvest “such riches the country hath.” It was similarly and universally argued by pious slave owners in the Nineteenth Century as philosopher George Fitzhugh stated that “slavery educates, refines and moralizes the masses by bringing them into continual intercourse with masters of superior minds, information and morality.” It’s just as commonly expressed today in the free market dogmas of unfettered capitalism with the relentless Western images of MacDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Jesus to the rest of the world, justifying dispossession of the poor in the Third World, forcing them into wage slavery and permanent penurious feudalism. With the recent calamitous meltdown of the global economy, the rest of the world appears to be destined to the same fate.

For example, how can one possibly make the case that the people of Africa have benefited from colonialism and their “economic interaction” with Western Europeans and Americans when an estimated 100 million died from the slave trade, while even many more were and continue to be impoverished and dispossessed? The same can be said for Aboriginal, Native Indians in America, the people of pre-colonial India and other hapless victims of the greedy ravages of capitalism throughout recent history. And nothing much has really changed since the Spanish conquistadors, as the recent invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States imperialist empire clearly reveals. Our solution to those native people that didn’t like what was being done to them was simple: death.

Putting it within an historical context, Lewis Mumford described the primary features of a “civilization”, constant in varying proportions throughout history, as “the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes.” The anthropologist/philosopher Stanley Diamond put it more succinctly, when he proclaimed that “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”

Were Columbus and his fellow Christian European cohorts and successors for the next five hundred years simply greedy sociopathic sub-humans who would tolerate mass exploitation, racism, theft, brutality, sadism and genocide? Native American historian Jack D Forbes in his book Columbus and other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism states that the overriding characteristic of a wétiko, a Cree word literally meaning “cannibal,” is “that he ‘consumes’ other human beings for profit, that is, he is a cannibal”. By cannibalism Forbes does not necessarily mean eating the flesh of another human, but defines the concept in an extended metaphor as a form of spiritual dysfunction and psychopathic behavior, even insanity, in which in all its multifarious ways greedy predatory men have exploited and murdered and destroyed the cultures (most often indigenous peoples) of other humans deemed “savages” via war, colonialism and imperialism. In his own words Forbes informs us that “wétiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which refers to a cannibal or, more specifically, an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible acts…the consuming the life of another for private purpose or profit.” He tells us that for the wétiko, “Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. . . . These characteristics all push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in. . . . This is the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions.” Forbes would extend this perverse behavior to those who would transform a pristine old growth forest into slabs and two-by-fours or dam a salmon filled river and flood a beautiful valley for hydro-electric power.

The truth is evidently plain and simple: Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, all the monarchs and patriarchs, the pope, and all those pious Christian Europeans who participated in the invasion and colonization and subsequent pillage, theft and slaughter of native peoples not just in the Americas, but throughout the world, suffered from the wétiko mind virus.

In his fascinating novel Three Day Road, the Native Canadian author and Literature Professor Joseph Boyden explains wétiko through one of his characters in the novel. He reveals it as a terrifying 'windigofication' of the main character's brother, Elijah. Xavier and Elijah enroll in World War I as Native Canadian Cree snipers when Elijah starts to revel in acts of barbarity (ironically, caused by his attempts to conform to white stereotypes about "Indian savages"), to the extent that Xavier deems it necessary to kill him in the novel's climactic ending.

Jack D Forbes tells us that throughout history wétikos have been primarily conservative elites, members of the educated and so-called civilized classes such as popes, monarchs, land barons and other rulers of totalitarian and hierarchical social orders. They are also the same powerful elites who have provided us with their own distorted propagandized version of history, as history as always been told by those who wield power and control, and like credulous children, we have believed it. Power, like property, the land, water (and not inconceivably, eventually the air we breathe) has become privatized and concentrated. They are the same people who today might listen to Mozart while reading Aristotle’s Ethics in the comfort of their grandiose mansions as they contemplate the bombing of primarily non-Christian brown people in Third World countries, especially those with huge oil reserves. Today they are by and large highly educated, the graduates of ivy-league universities, theological seminaries and military schools and other elite Western universities. They claim to have refinement, enlightenment and wisdom despite the fact they have provided us with arguably the most power hungry, exploitive and brutal era in human history where there is little chance for the survival of any charitable non-aggressive person other than as a lackey or wage slave.

Cultural theorist Tzvetan Todorov, in his study of Columbus, tells us that “the sixteenth century perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history…in 1500 the world population is approximately 400 million, of whom 80 million inhabited the Americas. “ Of the estimated 8 million that inhabited the islands in the Caribbean such as Haiti (where Columbus first landed) and Cuba, by the middle of the sixteenth century, out of these 8 million, none remained. After this genocidal miscalculation by Columbus his successors were forced to import millions of slaves from Africa, of whom very few survived either the voyage or subsequent enslavement. This orgy of racism, slavery and genocide by Western Christian Europeans continued unabated for another 450 years.

In Columbus and other Cannibals, Jack Forbes writes:

It is quite clear that in modern times we have witnessed the widespread brutalization of human beings. The history of Europe in the last 1,500 years and the history of European imperialism in Africa, Asia and the Americas reveal atrocities of almost unimaginable proportions. The brutality of the "religious" wars in Europe, the unrelenting exploitation of Original Americans, the sacrifice of tens of millions of Africans and First Americans in order to obtain slaves or peons, the genocidal policies of the English toward the Irish, of Europeans generally towards Native People, of the Nazis toward Jews, Slavs and Gypsies, represent only a few examples of large-scale cruelty, aggression and exploitation almost beyond belief.

Various terms, such as "wild," "savage" and "barbarian" have been used frequently to refer to violent, crude, brutal, cruel, destructive and aggressive behavior. Ironically, such terms have often been used by European writers to refer to non-white, non-Christian and non-European peoples whose customs were different and were therefore (because of that element of difference) called "wild" or "savage." The irony stems from the fact that few, if any, societies on the face of the earth have ever been as avaricious, cruel, violent and aggressive as have certain European Christian populations. Luther Standing Bear, a Native American thinker, summarized the more correct state of affairs in the following revealing passage:

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and the winding streams with tangled growth as "wild." Only to the White man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land infested by "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing; from his approach, then it was that for us the "wild west" began. (Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, xxvii) pp. 22-23

Wétiko continued unabated throughout the 20th century and into the 21st , the United States having taken over the role from the decadence and brutality of the former British Empire and other Western European nations, who have been the primary torch bearers of elitist exploitation, imperialism and genocidal attacks on indigenous peoples throughout the past five centuries. Forbes again:

Thus, the slaver who forces blacks or Indians to lose their lives in the slave trade or who drains away their lives in a slave system is a cannibal. He may "eat" other people immediately (as in the deaths of tens of millions of blacks in the process of enslavement or shipment) or he may "eat" their flesh gradually over a period of years.

Thus, the wealthy capitalist exploiter "eats" the flesh of oppressed workers and ravages his natural environment, the wealthy matron "eats" the lives of her servants, the imperialist "eats" the flesh of the conquered, and so on. Nazism, for example, may be described as a German form of cannibalism designed to consume Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other Slavs in order to fatten Germans. Anglo-American imperialism is a form of cannibalism designed to "eat" Indians and also to consume the Native people's land and resources (a process which continues in Central America and elsewhere today). Forbes summarizes:

It should be understood that wetikos do not eat other humans only in a symbolic sense. The deaths of tens of millions of Jews, Slavs, etc., at the hands of the Nazis, the deaths of tens of millions of blacks in slavery days, the deaths of up to 30 million or more Indians in the 1500s, the terribly short life spans of Mexican Indian farm workers in the US, and of Native Americans generally today, the high death rates in the early industrial centers among factory workers, and so on, all clearly attest to the fact that the wealthy and exploitative literally consume the lives of those that they exploit.

That, I would affirm, is truly and literally cannibalism and it is cannibalism accompanied by no spiritually meaningful ceremony or ritual. It is simply raw consumption for profit, carried out often in an ugly and brutal manner. There is no respect for a peon whose life is being eaten. No ceremony. No mystical communication - only self-serving consumption.

Who is Jack D Forbes?

Professor Jack D Forbes, former chair of Native American Studies and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, was born in Long Beach but has lived in Berkeley and Davis since 1967. He attended the University of Southern California, earning A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, the latter in history with a minor in North American ethnology. Forbes worked his way through college, serving on the fire crew of the Lassen National Forest and driving trucks for Meadow Gold Dairies. In 1960 he joined the faculty at California State University, Northridge. There he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and then in 1964 moved north to the University of Nevada, Reno.

In 1967 he assumed the post of Research Program Director at the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development in Berkeley. He then became a professor at U.C. Davis in 1969. In 1981-82 he was named a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick, England, and in 1983-84 he was honored with the Tinbergen Chair at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. In 1986-87 he served as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford University, England.

Of Powhatan, Delaware and non-Indian background, Professor Forbes became very active in Native American affairs very early, organizing the Native American Movement in 1961. In 1960 he formed the American Indian College Committee with Navajo artist Carl Gorman and others to create proposals for an Indian university. At Cal State Northridge he developed a proposal for an American Indian Studies program in 1960, ten years ahead of its time. In 1967 he was a co-founder of the California Indian Education Association and in 1971 of D-Q University, the Indian college near Davis. From 1968 through 1969 Forbes was a co-organizer of United Native Americans in the Bay Area and served as editor of Warpath. During the same period and later he served as editor of the Powhatan newspapers Tsen-Akamak and Attam-Akamik.

Forbes' published writings include twelve books, over twenty short books and monographs, ninety-five scholarly articles, over one hundred popular articles, numerous short stories, and poems. His first book, Apache, Navaho and Spaniard, remains in print after thirty-two years. Columbus and Other Cannibals is the current culmination of Forbes' thinking about the ultimate social causes of white Christian aggression and exploitation and about Native American philosophical beliefs and cultural norms. His earliest version of the book was sketched out in 1976 and published in a preliminary version in 1978.

Although focusing upon tragic issues of violence, exploitation, terrorism, slavery, genocide and violence, Forbes does not offer only a negative view of human evolution. He goes beyond a condemnation of aggression to undertake an analysis of how colonialism, imperialism and doctrinaire socio-economic systems of hierarchy systematically alter and brutalize individuals. Most importantly, he offers cultural options based upon traditional Native American philosophy and antidotes to the disease of cannibalism. Here’s Forbes:

Modern capitalism has been a major source of negative appraisals of human life, but dogmatic communism, Calvinistic and Lutheran Protestantism, Roman Catholicism and many other European or Euro-Mediterranean systems of thought have also viewed humans in a negative way, to one degree or another. Another powerful source of such thinking is (or has been) authoritarian political agencies and hierarchical social systems (ranging from Fascism and Nazism to the ancient cult of empire to the militaristic-right wing police officer syndrome).

And, of course, if one only looks at European history or the history of Europeans in Africa, Asia and the Americas one might indeed ' become persuaded that the Machiavellians and wetikos are correct in their judgments, European history is replete with almost continuous examples of human depravity - epoch after epoch of imperialistic wars, frequent examples of the systematic murdering of followers of different religions or members of different ethnic groups, almost continuous campaigns to liquidate or forcibly assimilate this or that nationality, rigid systems of class exploitation, the brutal subjection of peasants, slaves and workers and, finally, literally thousands of examples of lying, deceit, poisoning, duplicity, torture and sadism, ranging from the murders by Byzantine monarchs to the atrocities of the Catholic inquisition to the Italian Renaissance assassinators to the ruthless Bismarks to the individually depraved Marquis de Sade types.

Many people have labeled Hitler a madman. But what they fail to see is that Hitler's behavior was not really different from that of numerous Popes who authorized crusades against heretics, or of Ferdinand of Spain, who tortured and murdered thousands of ex-Jews and caused the murder of millions of Americans, or of Charlemagne, who systematically slaughtered the Saxons, or of many English kings who caused the death and exploitation of thousands of Irishmen, Scots, Americans and others. What makes Mussolini different from Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great? Only that he was not so successful and that he is closer to us in time.

Winston Churchill, the supposed antithesis of Hitler, was really a product of the same kind of thinking. Churchill was an avowed imperialist, a man very unwilling to end British rule over India, the African colonies and so on. True, Churchill did not kill as many people as Hitler, but then again, he was defending an already established empire, not trying to carve out a new one. The latter process is apt to be much more openly violent and repulsive to those who view such things from a distance.

It is very sad, but the "heroes" of European historiography, the heroes of the history textbooks, are usually imperialists, butchers, founders of authoritarian regimes, exploiters of the poor, liars, cheats and torturers. What that means is that the wetiko disease has so corrupted European thinking (at least of the ruling groups) that wetiko behavior and wetiko goals are regarded as the very fabric of European evolution. Thus, those who resist wetiko values and imperialism and exploitation specifically, such as the Leveler rebels in England, St. Francis of Assisi, Swiss mountaineers, or Scottish clansmen, are regarded as "quirks," "freaks," or rude democrats ("peasants") who could never exploit enough people to build a St. Peter's Cathedral or a Versailles palace.' (p. 37-38)

Forbes has modified the Ten Commandments , a revision by what he calls the “Ecumenical Council of Right-Wing Christianity convened by the Archbishop of Anti-Communism and attended by distinguished theologians following orthodox religious orders: the Society of Bible-Belt Racists, the Order of Secret Police, the Brothers of Military Glory, the Captains of Anti-Union Industry, the Society of Extortionists, Pornographers and Hit-men, the Sons of Apartheid, the High Priests of the CIA, the Improved Order of Successful Medical Doctors, the Mystic Order of International Bankers, and sundry other respected, powerful, and wealthy bodies":

1. Thou shalt make a profit.

2. Thou shalt disown thy parents when they become old and send them away to perish alone; but thou shalt put on an expensive funeral for them for appearances sake.

3. Thou shalt deceive with false looks and flattering words, for appearances are everything.

4. Thou shalt gather to thyself alone as many material things as thou can obtain.

5. Thou shalt save and hoard, sharing not with others unless for thy own self-interest.

6. Thou shalt adulterate the foods which people eat, and deprive them of healthy sustenance.

7. Thou shalt take whatever thou can from the forest, from the earth, from the air, or from the defenseless and weak.

8. Thou shalt kill whenever it profits thee, and thou shalt exalt killing and violence since all progress results therefrom.

9. Thou shalt be arrogant, aggressive, and bold since such qualities insure success.

10. Thou shalt not worry about thy sins for the Almighty has arranged a means whereby thou can be forgiven, even at thy death bed. (p. 84)

If the indigenous victims of the wetiko imperialists and capitalists resisted, they were simply exterminated, as Forbes tells us:

Revenge can, of course, become a curse among the victims of imperialism because the fulfillment of that desire can lead to incessant warfare, great cruelty on all sides, and eventual annihilation for the weaker party.

In the 1760s many natives sought to resist British expansion in the Pennsylvania and Western Virginia area. Their resistance led General Jeffrey Amherst, British commander, to write to Colonel Henry Bouquet in 1763, "Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians?" Bouquet answered that he would try to start an epidemic and mentioned a wish to hunt "the vermin" with dogs. Amherst replied, "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets [in which smallpox patients have slept], as well as by every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race. I should be very glad if your scheme of hunting them down by dogs could take effect."

Sadly, this type of viciousness, recognizing no "rules" of warfare, is still commonplace in the Americas, especially where people of American race are involved. Thus in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the local right-wing elites supported by the United States have committed in recent decades atrocities against Indians and part-Indians of a type which remind us of Columbus, Nuno de Guzman, Pizarro, and other notorious brutes of 400 years ago. Tens of thousands of Americans have been tortured, bombed, burned alive, raped, disemboweled, decapitated, and forced into exile in order to preserve the privileges and wealth of multi-national corporations, small white minorities and their corrupted mixed-blood cohorts.

White scholars and popular writers often speak of "human sacrifice" as if it were a practice confined to the Aztecs, Carthaginians, Pacific Islanders, or other non-European peoples. Since 1978, however, perhaps a quarter of a million Indian lives have been sacrificed in Central America for the sake of the social status and profits of wealthy people and corporations. A grotesque "anti-communist" ritual has been created in order to provide the ideological-ceremonial trappings for this secular ceremony of human sacrifice. We must no longer allow Eurocentric scholars to define "human sacrifice" in such a manner as to lead us to believe that a priest in a weird costume must cut the heart out of a victim in order for the act of sacrifice to become human sacrifice. Quite the contrary, the greatest and most extensive acts of human sacrifice have been, or are being, carried out by secular forces acting within the framework of ideologies that justify the necessity of sacrificing human lives for some larger goal, be it the attempted Nazi conquest of the Soviet Union, the anti-communist crusade, the earlier Roman Catholic crusade to convert the Americas, or the capitalist's demand for cheap raw materials and compliant economic fiefdoms. Perhaps most victims are now being sacrificed at the feet of the god "Profit."

As Barbara Cavalier of the California, Manufacturers' Association is quoted as saying in 1986, "We believe you should not inject social standards in investment practices." Thus the desire for profit in the financial centers of Europe, North America, Japan, Latin America, Africa, and everywhere, takes precedence over "social standards" and sets in motion the most far-reaching crimes imaginable. Cheap rubber, bananas, coffee, uranium, whatever resource it is, demands first a blood sacrifice, a cannibal feast. (pp. 103-04)

Subsequent US policies in the Philippines after 1898 and in Central America and Caribbean America often continued procedures developed against Native Americans. But especially in the latter two regions the US leadership learned that it was cheaper to use local white or non-white elites and their armies to control the local (often indigenous) population rather than to send in the marines or to assume direct colonial administration. This was known as "Dollar Diplomacy" or, as in the British Empire, "indirect rule." In this system brutal treatment of the Maya and other Native peoples occurred from Mexico and Guatemala to Panama, but the US was able to pretend that its hands were clean. Of course, direct interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Haiti, Chile and elsewhere exposed the lie in such claims.

These policies have continued into our own era, since the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations chose to directly support client regimes in the latter's oppression of their own peoples or in direct US efforts to prevent any national independence governments (in other words, "socialists") from coming to power as in Nicaragua. The 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s saw the open use of terrorism against indigenous Americans from Guatemala to Nicaragua by US supported, trained, and supplied forces. Still today, forensic anthropologists are excavating the remains of hundreds of Mayas massacred in Guatemala and buried in secret mass graves. One excavation has uncovered remains of 350 villagers, including 100 children, massacred by the US supported military in December 1982. (p. 127)

* To be continued in the next post.

Mark

9th March 2020, 15:11

Christopher Columbus the Wétiko (https://www.skeptic.ca/Wetiko.htm)
Cont'd from previous post due to size limitations

Jack D Forbes on Organized Crime by the State

Until recently it has ordinarily been the state (that is, governments) that have been engaged in organized crime, either directly or by sanctioning (or licensing) their subjects to engage in criminal acts. Some states (such as perhaps certain "pirate" kingdoms) were expressly organized for the purpose of stealing, looting, extorting, enslaving, and so on. But many larger states have also engaged in extensive activities of a similar nature, activities of such economic-significance as to suggest that "armed robbery" was, in effect, the state's major activity (overseas, at least).

The British, Portuguese, Spanish, Belgian and Dutch empires, for example, were at various times extensively engaged in the crime of seizing persons and selling or using them as slaves. This captive trade cannot be viewed as ethically being in any way different from Mafia kidnapping, murder, or extortion except in the sense that it was infinitely more bloodthirsty, profitable, and vicious.

The leaders of the Sicilian Mafia must appear as mild-mannered, almost decent persons when compared with the Liverpool, London, Boston, Lisbon, and Cadiz dealers in human flesh and butchers of entire nations.

Thus true organized crime commences with the state or with state-approved aggression. In the 1880s the United States adopted the "Dawes Act" and thereby enabled appropriately placed white citizens to systematically steal land and oil from Native Americans who were supposedly under the guardianship of the United States. This organized thievery, accompanied by threats and murders, was never corrected and never halted, until virtually all parcels of value had been secured by white people, as in much of Oklahoma.

Similar examples of state-initiated or approved organized crime include the US wars with Mexico designed to steal California and New Mexico, the US seizure of the Filipino Republic, and the City Los Angeles’s acquisition of water of Eastern California (Owens Valley and Mono Lake Basin) in order to make land speculators rich by subdividing the San Fernando Valley.

State-sanctioned organized crime also includes passing laws which give highly unfair advantages to the wealthy as opposed to the poor, as in making corporations persons in the eyes of the law and making the owners of a corporation not liable for debts, losses, and so on, or in allowing income tax deductions for fictitious losses (for example, accelerated depreciation on apartment houses or oil depletion allowances).

It is clear then that we live in a world where many states, especially the larger imperial powers, have been or are now formidable forces in the realm of crime. Significantly, state-initiated organized crime must surely set a pattern of behavior which will be imitated at various levels by private persons. Historically the state itself, and especially the European-style expansionist state, is one of the major corrupters of human morals (although it is itself a creature of the wetikos who have seized control of its power apparatus).

Many states also tolerate a great variety of organized crime which, although not directly sanctioned, is in some manner profitable to the ruling classes. Thus many large corporations (such as the Standard Oil Company before 1910 or the Southern Pacific -Central Pacific Railroad) have often operated in a criminal way. That is, the purpose of such bandit corporations has been to secure the greatest possible profit (or resources for producing profit) even if illegal or unethical activities had to be used. The state usually winked at such large-scale thievery because it was convenient to do so (the railroad will be useful to the state so what does it matter if a few people get rich siphoning off government grants or bankrupting farmers?); or because the state's leaders (congressmen, for example) are sharing directly in the loot.

The State of Nevada tolerates gambling casinos which are alleged as being largely controlled by Mafia or corporate syndicates because it is profitable to Nevada-based land speculators, contractors, businessmen in general, and public officials to have such businesses in what would otherwise be a very poor and sparsely populated region. (pp. 152-54)

The tragic thing about all this is that most ordinary citizens will ultimately suffer in such societies, regardless of the temporary benefits received by them. Thus black slavery and Indian removal in the US south did not ultimately benefit the working-class white population. Instead it led to the creation of an oligarchic ruling class which has, even to this day, often depressed wages and living conditions for both poor whites and poor blacks.

Similarly, the wealth created by the British Empire means very little today to the average Briton who must put up with a stagnant or declining standard of living made worse by the overpopulation of the British Isles. This overpopulation, and the depletion of many original natural resources, has been, in part, the result of early industrialization controlled by "robber barons" and overseas imperialism controlled by the same class of people.

The United States, too, will witness the same decline in the not-too-distant future. An aggressive foreign policy will keep oil, aluminum, uranium, and other essential raw materials coming in for a few years more, but corporate control of the economy and inequality will ensure that the profits primarily reach the ruling class. In the meantime, the artificial standard of living created by overseas investments, raw materials, and the exploitation of low-wage labor in Indonesia, Vietnam, Central America, China, Mexico, South Africa, and so on will gradually be eroded from within.

Imperialism creates the illusion of wealth as far as the masses are concerned. It usually serves to hide the fact that the ruling classes are gobbling up the natural resources of the home territory in an improvident manner and are otherwise utilizing the national wealth largely for their own purposes. Eventually the general public is called upon to pay for all of this, frequently after the military machine can no longer maintain external aggression.

A good example of how this works on a small scale occurred after World War II when a front corporation reportedly controlled by General Motors, Standard Oil, and a tire manufacturer bought up many of the electric railway transportation systems in the United States. This corporation allowed streetcar service to deteriorate, then it tore up tracks and sold themselves their own buses, rubber tires, and diesel fuel. The new bus lines contributed greatly to air pollution and traffic problems, and when patronage declined the all-bus systems were sold to the public. So "socialism" was used to unload unprofitable businesses onto the public while a continuing purchase of buses, tires, and diesel fuel was guaranteed. No significant prosecutions have taken place for what seems to have been an organized conspiracy to destroy rail mass transit systems. Now, of course, taxpayers are being asked to build new rail lines at tremendous cost.

This illustrates on a small scale what happens to entire economies under imperialism. The wealthy classes accumulate wealth, leaving the masses to suffer the consequences of the loss of basic resources, overpopulation, air pollution, environmental contamination, and, more significantly, a society and culture distorted in the value area by decades or even centuries of state-approved violence and aggression.

In the United States today it is the masses, and especially the poor and working class, who did the fighting and are paying for the Vietnam War and other military adventures and waste. The Vietnam War wasted many tens of billions of dollars (creating an inflation which eroded the earnings of the poor), incredible quantities of petroleum, and other basic resources which precipitated shortages in the US, an adverse balance of payments, and so on. But the rich did not suffer from the Vietnam aftermath because they had the means to raise their incomes to keep ahead of inflation, and being the owners of multinational corpora-i ions, they could obtain resources from many quarters.

Organized crime, in its many forms, is the most important manner in which the wetiko disease finds concrete expression. It is true that individual wetikos, operating on their own, may cause great misery at times, but it is much more common for the most brutal aggression to take place as a part of an organized, systematic assault. In the Americas, for example, the terrible Portuguese attacks upon Native people in Brazil, the actions of Spanish conquistadores, the expansionist pushes of Anglo-Saxon of pioneers, and the operations of all manner of exploiters from fur traders to rum sellers to slave hunters took place within imperialist systems whose overall objectives revolved around the central purpose of seizing native lands, resources, and lives for the profit of the system.

Even today an Original American's life is worth very little in the Americas, because the organized criminal syndicates posing as governments in many areas still regard the exploitation of the Indians and their resources as a legitimate activity. Ache Indians could not be sold as slaves in Paraguay without the existence of a pro-Nazi government controlled literally by gangsters. Indians could not have been murdered in South Dakota in the 1970s, with no thorough investigations and prosecutions, unless the terrorizing of Indians was indeed a continuing state-approved objective. Mayas could not have been murdered and terrorized systematically in Guatemala during the 1970s to 1990s without the approval of the Guatemalan state (the military) and of the United States, (since the US pays the bills and provides training for the terrorist officer corps).

In the United States many white people and government agencies are still actively seeking possession of Native land and resources. If this were part of a general campaign to break up large landholdings, create small farms, and open up resources for development, we could at least see it as a non-racial, non-imperialist issue. But when low-income, land-poor Indian people are the sole target and large landholding corporations (such as the Southern Pacific Railroad) and government agencies (in other words, the Bureau of Land Management) experience, little pressure we can be sure that the Native American is still officially and socially perceived as a legitimate victim.

The federal government of the US is very aggressive in seeking to condemn Indian land for dams and is extremely reluctant to return even admittedly-stolen land. On the other hand, that same government gave the Southern Pacific and Central Pacific railroads fantastic quantities of Indian land which was to be sold to pay railroad construction costs. Much of the land is still owned by the Southern Pacific or its successor corporations (11 percent of California). Some of this land was apparently obtained by fraud (for example, claiming that the Sierra Nevada’s extended to Utah in order to get a larger land grant) but the federal government has never taken any land back from the S.P. Railroad on legal grounds.

The former S. P. Railroad, for some reason, was not perceived by European-Americans as being a fitting target for their animosity but Wisconsin and Washington State Indians (with virtually no land base left, in most cases) are. So are the Sioux, the Yavapai, the Pit River Indians, and so on. One is tempted to repeat the words of Black Hawk, in reference to the white people who had invaded northwestern Illinois in the 182Os-1830s: "I had not discovered one good trait in the character of the Americans that had come to the country! They made fair promises but never fulfilled them!"

Another facet of organized systems of aggression is that the governments, syndicates, corporations, or groups controlling or profiting from such behavior also control the greater part of the organs of public opinion modification. Historically the state, the Christian churches, powerful newspapers, and so on, have conspired frequently to use patriotism, sectarian fervor, news, and propaganda to not only justify aggression, genocide, slavery, and torture but also to make the masses willing (or even anxious) participants. More significantly, as indicated earlier, the entire national culture becomes pervaded by myths, values, and habits of action and thought conducive to the perpetuation of a wetiko society. (pp. 156-159)

"Finding a Good Path," Forbes' final chapter, rests upon the notion that the real test of a spiritual path is not to see how many monuments result, or how many converts are obtained, or how many prayers are repeated over and over again by imitative voices, but rather the test is: How do people who follow that path behave? How do they behave towards other humans? How do they behave towards the earth? How do they behave towards other living creatures?

Mashika

11th March 2020, 05:17

I begin a book of mine with the line: "The Mexican's were everywhere, like air."

A woman I had been seeing not too long ago declared it racist. I asked why she thought so. But she wouldn't elaborate. She just let out a big sigh, as if to say "if you can't figure it out on your own it's no use telling you."

That was maybe 6 months ago. And I still don't quite understand her opinion. The book is about some experiences I had in my late 20's, and during that particular time I'd arrived in California from upstate NY. It was a culture shock. The Mexicans really were everywhere. Like air.

I bring it up because one person's harmless observation is often another's racist comment. It's such a slippery slope. A difficult topic to discuss, for all sorts of reasons.

One very simple reason are the basic labels we use to describe races. When I see someone write or utter the word "blacks" , it sounds crass and dismissive. And yet, that is usually the term I use myself! Same with "whites", but to a lesser degree. And of course, the absurdist in me also sees the humor. So called black people are really varying shades of brown, and white people are varying shades of.....what? Peach? I'm not even sure!

But even those comments will offend people! And they are just simple, true observations.

Why and how people get "offended" and "outraged" might be a thread unto itself.

I certainly don't think people should be going around using the word ni**er. Non blacks especially. And yet, it sounds awfully silly hearing grown adults referring to this as "the 'N' word" when discussing racial matters. In fact, in a way it even gives the word *more* power. Again, a slippery slope.

I recall many years ago, in upstate NY, the Native American vendors were getting some tax break on cigarettes. Something like that. And my initial thought was "well, good for them." If they sold 10 billion cigarettes the aggregate benefit wouldn't even match a fraction of the horrors they and their ancestors had suffered,...and yet, the local community went berserk with "outrage". I couldn't believe it! And here we have another issue that no one can seem to agree on, which is this: what, if any reparations should be made for past transgressions between one race of people and another?

Anyone wanna tackle that one?:)

Honestly when I witness things like that cigarette fiasco, it disgusts me. It makes me embarrassed to be human. And thats small beer compared to the real horrors we've perpetrated upon one another.

It could be said that I was bullied by some black guys my freshman year of high school. I weighed 135lbs then. And I was a huge pussy. But I was still kind of a wise ass and I got myself into trouble with my mouth occasionally. And luckily i was protected from beatings several times by this big tough guy named Travis. A black guy LOL. Thought I'd just drop that little tidbit in here. Food for thought...

As someone who has lived lots of years among Mexicans and hope to one day become one, i can tell more or less she may have read that as in

"The beaners were everywhere, like air"

Mostly out of how a lot of Mexicans feel they are seen from the US citizens point of view

Reminds me of this song, i think it tells it very well, that feeling. I don't agree much with it by the way but i do get that lots of Mexicans do, because of things that happened between the US and Mexico in the past, and still happen today some places and times?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62538RaYtk

Sometimes, even though is not my problem, i do feel offended if someone says something that i can tell was meant to hurt or insult, like "beaner", so maybe she was just being triggered by it. It's very easy to misinterpret sentences like that

For me, i get a lot of dumb stuff my way every other week, such like:

- Are you Japaneeese? How tall are youuuuu?
+ Around 5.11 or so, why?
- You are tall, Asians are supposed be short lolol, are you suuuuuure you are japaneeeese?
+ I'm half Russian, my mom is from Russia
- Oohhh, no wondaaa, but you are too flat lolol, aren’t Russian’s girls supposed to be very hot?
+ (mtf)…

Also the usual, "say something in japanese!" or why don't you dress like japanese girls! And so on..

But all that stuff mostly stereotype and not racism i guess. And it doesn't really matter much really for someone like me. For people who have had to deal with generations of racism and some deep stuff like what you said about black people or mexicans and how they feel, well that's a completely different story

Short story:

My little sis is a complete blonde bimbo LOL, when she was on middle school in California, she was bullied a lot and had into lots of fights because she could not speak English properly and was Russian, even though she looked completely American on the outside

When she got into a Mexican school a year later, she was bullied because she was an American bimbo (gringa) and was having a hard time speaking Spanish as anyone else was able to (kids did not care if she was speaking Russian or English, she was a gringa) ... LMAO!

Mike

11th March 2020, 08:51

Mashika

16th March 2020, 01:45

Hi Mashika:)

Reading that older post of mine was interesting. Every so often I'll get some beer and read a bunch of my old posts and make a night out of it. I highly recommend everyone do this. It's very revealing. Sometimes I'll think, wow, that was quite good!, and other times I can barely recognize the person that wrote the thing. It's a great indicator of where you once were, where you are now, and where youre going.

What annoyed me most about my girlfriend at that time was not that she labelled that comment racist, but that she was kind of disingenuous and hypocritical in general. She was a Seattle hipster type, a recreational virtue signaler who would have marched in the streets for Mexicans and blacks just to be seen doing it but would have never dated any of them, for example. And here she was, passing judgement on what I felt was a pretty harmless statement. She wasn't on very firm ground, morally, imo, so I resented her judgement..even if it might have had some truth to it.

But I take your point and fully understand it! Having viewed it again with fresh eyes, I can indeed see what you mean there and how the line could have been viewed as offensive.

Ugh, I'm sorry you have to endure all those ignorant judgements and the rest of that racial nonsense. I'm curious: do you find racism to be stronger in Mexico than the US? Or vice versa?

I think Mexico is way more racist in several ways, mostly against their own people, everyone wants to say "proud of being Mexican" but also treats native Mexicans like garbage or simply ignore them and push them away if possible

Not to say people are hateful, i love the culture and it's in several ways very similar to Russian culture, but it has that aspect of it that you can see two friends having a great time and then they get angry for whatever reason and then insults like "indio mugroso" (dirty indian) or similar come up, which is like a very derogative term to mean "Native Mexican" or "Mexican indigenous", even though pretty much everyone is partial indigenous in Mexico. So even the nicest people somehow have the racism and hate towards indigenous people

For someone like me, i don't get that much hate or attitude, but if i'm confused with an American citizen then i may get lots of it as well, for example this one time we went into a bar and had a small issue with some other girls there, and the owner though we were American and started calling us about it, saying we were there thinking we were special and all kinds of hateful stuff just for being Americans (they have lots of insults specifically made for Americans, most of them very racist) then when we explained we were Russians his attitude changed entirely, he apologized and tried to make us stay and make amends. It just didn't work out after that, i mean he already showed his true colors, how can he come back from that and continue as if nothing happened :)

That kind of stuff happens very easily, but as usual only some people are like that, i just think it's brought up way more easy than in the US, and that they treat each other nicely most of the time but suddenly insult each other with "indio" as if being indigenous was something very bad is very weird, and no Mexican will take being called "indio" lightly, it's a big offense somehow, even if they are proud of being Mexicans :)

Then, there are some weird people who live in Mexico but hate being Mexicans LOL, that's just crazy, they wish they would have been born somewhere else. Back in 2018 at the world cup, i was with some friends from Mexico and they also invited some other people along, there were a few of them who when asked where they came from they said "America" but did not want people to know they were Mexicans and attempted to hide their accent! I don't even know what to say about that

Thanks for sharing your story. I'll share a short one too:

My grandfather on my mom's side played a cowboy called "Canyon Jack" on a local tv show when he was a younger man. On his way home one day after work, during one particularly brutal snow storm, he got lost and pulled over into this nondescript little pub to make a phone call. So he walks into this place with his full Canyon Jack outfit on - cowboy hat, boots, spurs, frilly jacket, etc - shakes all the snow off of himself and approaches the bar for a drink. Suddenly the place goes quiet, in the same unsettling way a very noisy jungle goes quiet in the middle of the night..when even the insects shut up for a while. Anyway, he looks up, and the place is packed with native American indians..all staring at him in the same uncomfortable way. So without a word he put his hat back on, turned around, and walked right back out into the storm having never made his phonecall:bigsmile:

LMAO! Totally pictured the scene in my mind :bigsmile:

Intellectually I think the idea of any kind of reparations is a terrible idea. I can give you a million good reasons why. But emotionally I have a hard time resisting it, in some instances. The cigarette tax thing is one such instance.

I find this a difficult thing, but seems like it's true that current generations are not to blame for what happened in the past, none of the people involved are even alive anymore?

Hard to say but i think feeling guilt about the past is not correct, maybe there should be other ways to handle this, like integration between different races instead of just giving stuff away and then moving forward without seeing each other away?

I don't think i can see or feel the problem from the right point of view so maybe i'm saying something very dumb but i think giving free stuff to the people or group who were harmed is not really doing "reparations" and more like 'here's some cash and let's forget it happened' while real reparations would be to make things go back to how they used to be, or partially merge both cultures and groups so they are not segregated? Like you said you see no American indians anywhere, so what good is to give them free stuff or money if they still remain hidden away? The damage remains constant over the ages, no matter how much money or other stuff they are given so that kind of reparation is actually just some money so they go away and don't be a bother or problem for some time, not a real attempt to fix things up?

Mike

16th March 2020, 03:29

In my mid 20's I found myself selling sporting apparel at fairs and trade shows and stuff like that. At one event in L.A. I met this lovely Mexican woman and we began what was to be sort of a romantic connection.

Her Dad was a full Mexican, but her mother was white. And she caught all kinds of sh!t for it growing up in Mexico. In her early adulthood she found out she was adopted, and wasn't white at all..which was kind of a cruel and darkly humorous irony.

Anyway, I often spent time with her and her very large group of friends, all Mexicans. Initially I could sense they distrusted me, so I made a point of buying everyone beer on the first couple nights we all hung out. This actually made a couple of them trust me even less, because they thought I had some agenda I s'pose. Eventually I became friendly with most of them, except for a couple. Most would speak English when I was around out of courtesy, but a few wouldn't. Then they'd kind of snicker and apologize disingenuously before speaking Spanish yet again..deviously encouraging the others to do same. I knew enough Spanish to understand what they were up to. I kind of expected it, so it didn't trouble me too much.

At these events I was often the minority, even when I wasn't hanging around with the Mexican group. Being in California was a real eye opener. It's sort of like Mexico 2.0. As a white guy, unless I was inland, I wasn't even the second most represented group around - that would be the Asians.

Despite our adversarial historical relationship, it felt like the whites and the blacks had a kind of unspoken solidarity..all based on the fact that we were very outnumbered LOL. Maybe I imagined it, but that's the way it felt to me. We'd nod at each other as we passed by, and the implication was, 'I got ya bro, no worries:)

I have olive skin and tan very easily, and was often mistaken for a Mexican myself. People approached me speaking Spanish all the time. It was always a little awkward explaining that I didn't really speak the language. The Mexicans would squint and inspect me closely, and then sort of nod and walk off after - I imagine - seeing my green eyes..which always gave me away as being a gringo.

I almost got killed when a friend of mine unknowingly drove into the territory of a Mexican gang. We were chased, and finally caught at a red light (which, for the life of me, I still don't know why my friend didn't blow thru). The guy rolled his window down and gestured for me to do the same. So i did, all along thinking I was a goner, but the gangster didn't shoot. Instead he explained to me that he had given me a gang sign a few blocks back, and wanted to know why I hadn't responded. I had seen his car but didn't recall seeing any sign. I explained to him that I was from NY and was just driving thru, and he kindly explained to me what I should do next time a gang sign was flashed my way; he gave me a gesture signifying neutrality..but I can't recall what it was. Then he drove away, and said 'welcome to Californiaaaa' as his voice trailed off into the distance. Close call.

In Santa Barbara I was jumped by a group of young Mexican guys..late teens, early 20's maybe (this happened twice actually). It was racially motivated. I was with a black friend at the time, and we fought them off and walked away mostly unscathed. They shouted a bunch of racial sh!t at both of us as we all separated. No big deal really, but it was unsettling, and the threat of it happening again was always in the back of my mind. I began looking over my shoulder quite a bit.

Later on, I kind of fell for another Mexican woman. We had a nice thing going but she was feeling the pressure from her friends who clearly didn't approve of her dating a white dude. That ended, sadly.

When I moved inland, things were much different. The majority of people were white, but they were fiercely white LOL. There was something vaguely (and not so vaguely) Aryan Nation about these dudes. They all dressed the same, as if they had been rolled off a conveyor belt - black volcom hat and black volcom shirt, dickies shorts, three quarter length socks on feet securely tucked into a pair of vans...and a whole lot of tattoos. And they almost all seemed blond haired, strangely enough. They looked like the Hitler youth!:) To be fair, I met a lot of good people inland..but there was a strong undertone of racism the whole time. It didn't even need to be outwardly spoken..it was palpable.

Once I was taking a light jog in an area called Canyon Lake, where I lived at the time. I was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey, and this is right around the time they had switched coaches from Bill Cowher, a white guy, to Mike Tomlin, a black guy. Some guy shouted something to me as a jogged by. I couldn't hear him so I took out my earbuds and said "Sorry, missed that." And the guy said, "It's a shame ya know?" "A shame about what?," I asked. "That new n!gger coach they have now.." He said it so casually, as if we were talking about the weather. It shocked me speechless.

There's so much to say about my 3 years in California, but I'd be writing about it all day if I tried to encapsulate the entire thing. It was quite surreal, not only because I was often the minority wherever I went, but because I didn't even relate too well to the people of my own race there. I was often more comfortable around the Mexican and Asian and Filipino and black folks I met than I was the inland whites. It was a great learning experience overall, wouldn't have traded it for anything.

Strat

5th April 2020, 14:56

Fantastic debate!
WQxM_EK5aiM

Bill Ryan

30th May 2020, 11:12

TargeT

31st May 2020, 23:52

I'd be just as interested to see his view's on the "push back" and the obvious co-op that seems to be occurring.

I don't know if that situation was racially motivated or not, it certainly was horrible.... the current riots seem to be "race divided" in very small areas from what I've observed (though there are quite a few that seem to re-emphasis the racial divide).

ALSO, that was NOT MURDER; the use of "MURDER" is meant to cause an emotional response and is a part of why MSM is dead (It definitely was manslaughter at least).

do NOT allow linguistic drift, it is along the lines of the tower of babel, but worse.

AutumnW

1st June 2020, 00:41

I agree Target. It took over 8 minutes in broad daylight while people recorded it on video. So it is closer to a modern day lynching when you think about it.

Billy Vasiliadis

1st June 2020, 01:05

My feeling is it was in part racially motivated but also a reflection of the mentality of a police force which is trained to see people as targets. Would George Floyd be alive if he were a white man? Would the police have been as aggressive as they were? I don't know but it is a possibility for sure.

TargeT

1st June 2020, 03:05

My feeling is it was ... a reflection of the mentality of a police force which is trained to see people as targets.

I would SLIGHTLY agree with this statement, but more so think/assume (not that it's an excuse) that they mostly interact with people that are doing things deemed unacceptable by society or the legal system (usually both) which causes a temperament and bias that is not cohesive to "protect and serve" when you think of the original intention of that group of words.

Would George Floyd be alive if he were a white man? Would the police have been as aggressive as they were? I don't know but it is a possibility for sure.

Hate to say it, but your first question.... based on pattern analysis would be "much more likely" however, the supportive evidence for being overly cautious with certain members of society almost makes up for his initial reaction (NOT the outcome or conduct).

Your second question (in light of the directly above response) would be "No, but" they probably would have allowed more for a demographic that (per-capita, again it's not an excuse, but it's an undeniable reality currently) does not exhibit violent response when interacted with.

so... in short, it's too complex for a quick label (his motivation)....... But the outcome deserves a response, the magnitude of which I cannot comment on.

Agape

1st June 2020, 04:13

Hmm, no & no. If you squeeze or press someone’s neck at that particular point and render them breathless, the chance they would “come back” decreases with every minute.
You and the cop were taught this and tested it number of times in medical and martial arts training. He had 8 minutes to think about it. That’s a lots of time to decide whether you intend to kill the man or not.
Time goes very slowly in those critical moments, it expands exponentially. Quite like in meditation.
So it can’t be qualified as “accidental killing”.

Why does it happen ? You should know. Sadistic tendencies and killer switch, there is whole depersonalisation moment arising in some individuals.
No system can successfully deal with those people. Some of them seek deployments as prison guards, some go to military, unfortunately some exist within police force but there are sadistic nurses and doctors as well.

It starts in childhood but is often enhanced by receiving hurtful emotional and physical experiences from others and learning to “confirm” sadistic behaviour as necessary means to survival.

In simple terms you could also say the man flipped out of control.

They are not “intelligent” while doing this, it’s a predator prey instinct taking over.

So no, it could have been anyone else in that place, child, woman, colours don’t play major difference.

There will be some report from the forensic psychiatrist on it for sure and how that man defends himself but don’t expect “truth”.

There is no “deeper intellectual truth” behind this. Deeper instinct yes, collective instinct of superiority and survival of yourself as the predator alone yes.

Not dissimilar to the orca in Orlando Marine Life killing her “cherished” trainer.

🐳

Billy Vasiliadis

1st June 2020, 05:00

I would SLIGHTLY agree with this statement, but more so think/assume (not that it's an excuse) that they mostly interact with people that are doing things deemed unacceptable by society or the legal system (usually both) which causes a temperament and bias that is not cohesive to "protect and serve" when you think of the original intention of that group of words.

This is also what I was trying to include when I mentioned training. I should have used a better word.

The very job itself colours a persons mind in such a way, that you can see how it breeds unfortunate views of others. If day in day out you are being confronted with violence and crime, what is that going to do to your attitudes and beliefs?

I imagine it takes a person truly committed to justice to not slip. And for those who don't care much for justice, well, you see the kinds of actions that result (this one now being one example, how much more do we not even hear about).

Your second question (in light of the directly above response) would be "No, but" they probably would have allowed more for a demographic that (per-capita, again it's not an excuse, but it's an undeniable reality currently) does not exhibit violent response when interacted with.

Isn't this just a vicious circle though? Violence begets violence right? I understand that this is a complex issue but I do believe that most people are decent (maybe not quite good, but decent), and if they have a decent quality of life and avenues of fulfilling their potentials, they wouldn't engage in violence or crime.

The solution seems to be greater freedom, not more policing (not that you are saying this).

Sarah Rainsong

3rd June 2020, 15:25

:bump:

I would be so very interested to read Mark/Rahkyt's thoughts and feelings about the murder of George Floyd.

The murder of George Floyd in police hands, Minneapolis, 25 May 2020 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?111084-The-murder-of-George-Floyd-in-police-hands-Minneapolis-25-May-2020)

Mark/Rahkyt, I realize that you did respond a bit on another thread to this issue, but I too would like to hear more of your thoughts.

Mike

4th June 2020, 05:59

AutumnW

4th June 2020, 07:57

Egotistical ****?? You called??😀. LOL. You're not the only one. I'm sure I've shared this story before... about being on a forum and reading some random post and thinking how much I agreed with the poster but what an arrogant S.O.B he came off as. So I checked to see who wrote it and it was me, a month before! It still cracks me up. What a pain in the ass!

Anyway... Will answer as soon as my batteries recharge. Just climbing into my pod now. Talk soon!😉

Star Tsar

4th June 2020, 08:10

Discovery Science

Human Zoos: America's Forgotten History Of Scientific Racism

Published 17th February 2019

nY6Zrol5QEk

Agape

4th June 2020, 16:45

To our common soul and self defence and to improve understanding of some of our parent generations I wish to say the following: many of my and younger generation people I’ve noticed also we do not identify ourselves by colours.
It’s a pure nonsense from my perspective, we all here on this planet are “people of colour”.

I may be bit pale but my eyes see thousands of shades and colours.

I lived in India since I were 19 year old on and off, that’s some 27 years now and within Tibetan community. I don’t feel any specific preference for “pale faces”.

People are lovable because everyone is different and unique. Our souls like rainbows display and reflect all colours of the spectral universe.

People , some of them anyway and before they learn to see will keep labelling and grouping and categorising. It’s like one of those dumb computer games or names repeated ad nauseam. It’s knocking the wits out of me but lets sadly agree that this world is partially inhabited by idiots.
Clinically speaking people who can not get the point even after many intelligent explanations but like adult babies regressed mentally to toddler age keep banging their fists against their wooden cradle, demanding all the same stuff everyday.

In some cases since they seem to be bright otherwise it’s probably fault of their mothers for not giving them the right amount of love and support when they still needed it.

I believe that in thousand years or less the very word for “racism” and its obscure meaning will be unknown and absent from vocabularies.

There will be new wave of ETs coming for visit as well but the word aliens too will be forgotten.

This darkness and sufferings of human souls will be washed because it’s washable.

There will be more genders too and more kinds of new humans than we imagine now.

Humanity is like a flower with millions of petals and colours to it.

This awful time of planetary retardation will be overcome

🌸

AutumnW

4th June 2020, 21:30

So Jess I'm glad you pushed me on this one because it turns out I had a little bit to learn here. That's great on the one hand and aggravating on the other; great cuz I've learned some new stuff and aggravating because i can often be an egotistic c#nt who likes to believe I already know everything, and it's alarming and disconcerting to that side of me when I realize I don't:)...so damn you (and thank you)

One of the frequent grievances from black activists is that whites "had a 400 year head start" in America. I've heard this for a while now and it's always confused me. I was aware that the US, as a country, was roughly 250 years old, and I was also aware that some Europeans had arrived earlier, obviously ('1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue'..how could I forget that one?); and I was aware of what my history books had told me about the time between 1492 and the early 1600's, when the first English colony was established; oh, and I'd also seen "Last of the Mohicans". So my knowledge of the African presence in the US is mostly from slavery onwards. I was dimly aware that some Africans had been here prior, but up until now didn't know much about it (and I still don't, to be honest). Maybe Mark will arrive and school me a little.

Mike, I don't know the exact number of years blacks were brought here either. I DO know it wasn't on an all you can eat and drink, party hardy, adventure cruise. On the other hand, it was kind of an adventure in experiencing brutality, sadism, starvation and death.

Some other fun facts:

- the ancestors of our living Native Americans arrived from Asia roughly 15,000 years ago, possibly much earlier (from Asia via Beringia)

- their name for the country was "turtle island"

Yes, and some North Eastern tribe, I heard about possibly came from France. How weird is that. Imagine trying to find a decent croissant once you hit the shores of Turtle Island! I have a good friend who is Coast Salish and she is a dead ringer for a Polynesian Hawaiian. She claims that the North American indigenous are a bit of a mix, but mostly from Asia with some of the Coast Salish having Polynesian blood.

- roughly 500 years before Columbus arrived, America was discovered by some bold ass Vikings led by a dude named Leif Eriksson

Knew that one!

- before 1492, Mexico, Central America, and much of the southwest US was known as Meso America, or Middle America

or however the native peoples referred to it. Maybe shell of the turtle.

...but back to the topic. Some googling revealed this quote: the first 19 or so Africans to reach the British colonies arrived in Point Comfort, Virginia, near Jamestown, in 1619

...though this is almost universally believed to be untrue. Apparently the first Africans actually arrived 600 years ago...some thought to be free and and some thought to be slaves. It appears they arrived after the Spanish and the French but much sooner than the English.

That would have Africans arriving in NA before the Spanish and French, if my math is correct. 600 years ago is 1420.

My feeling is that life was damn near hell for anyone who arrived in America in the 1400's. Not really knowing the status of the Africans here during that time, I can't really say if they had it any worse than the French or the Spanish or the English. So I don't know if the "head start" began back then or 200 years later.

Life was Hell for everyone before modern general anaesthetic and flush toilets, as far as I'm concerned. But it was double Hell for those who weren't in positions of authority and control, I figur'

Yes, and per your point - the Natives have the real claim to this land. They've had it worse than all of us put together..and that's really an entirely different topic. It's interesting that they are almost never mentioned when the topic of racism is brought up.. and the reason for that is simple: there's like 4 of them left.

In Canada they are more visible. They suffered horrendously, but had home team advantage when it came to fighting the original settlers, so probably have always gotten more respect than those displaced away from their point of origin,and placed immediately under the scrutinizing eyes of their masters-- so placed in a position where it was hard to organize to fight.

Black Africans were often separated from their parents and children as well. Indigenous people didn't go through that particular Hell. Being removed from your family in those conditions is the most traumatic thing a person can go through. It has caused multi generational trauma, including physical effects.

Racism is a numbers game: the largest groups get the most heat while the most oppressed groups get very little attention for being oppressed, because they're small and incapable of making much noise...and unless you're making some noise, no one seems to care. Math. So in that sense the accusations can be a little distorted..and the grievances from anyone not talking about the Natives, disingenuous. I don't think whites, currently, possess a racism that blacks or asians or indians don't also possess. It's no worse, generally. There's just more of us(in the U.S). So an advantage exists in that sense. It's as deliberate as it is arbitrary.

There will be many exceptions to this but Asians who are not educated and don't travel outside of Asia are possibly the most bigoted people on earth. It's the same with whites who don't have the opportunity or inclination to travel. Their world view isn't as global as it could be. Racism isn't just about dislikes, hatreds, fears, it's about having contempt for, or feeling superior to.

If you have ever felt someone's deep contempt and disrespect, you know it's the worst. I have only experienced it once with a close family member and it took tremendous emotional and mental jujitsu and self control to not give in to reacting to it. Yikes. But if you are getting just a little of that, as a black person, from too many white or Asian people? Aye aye aye! I think I'd erupt.

Yes, black settlers/slaves were here long before the British colonies, but come 1776 anyway.. not nearly as many as whites. European whites held the cards and started a country for themselves. They did it for all sorts of advantages, some of which still exist today. The point I was sort of making before was: is that so unfair?

I get the feeling I'm misunderstanding your question though.

I think it is fair if the advantages you carve out for yourself through the country you are creating, aren't done on the backs of black slave labor -- after clearing the country of most of the Indigenous people.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Mike, See my response above, in italics.:waving:

Chester

7th June 2020, 15:24

No one can do the personal work one might need to do to overcome their own harboring of any form of racism. Most of the planet agrees that racism is a human trait the entire planet's population should transcend as a whole.

But personal transformation here and there over the course of years doesn't seem to generate needed actual, practical change. At least that's my observation and conclusion.

I have been searching through every aspect of my being, my soul, my heart (sometimes they seem the same... at least directly connected)... and I have used the faculty of my own (sadly all too limited) mind, striving to find a solution. This is where I realized that if I don't start from the ground up and I don't start locally (or regionally as in the case of the US, my country of birth and my country of citizenship and residency), do I really think a realistic, practical solution could be found? One that actually has a chance to be embraced by enough folks who could organize and actualize the change?

First, there has to be an identification of a specific problem and a specific goal that reflects the desired change.

So, for me, considering the above, the problem I see is the problem experienced by the US black community. Yes, racism, especially systemic and institutionalized racism is found all over the world still to this day, but America has a specific, identifiable and unique form of the problem and so it is upon this that I wish focus.

So... back to seeking a change - where would I need to start to find such a possibility? Where might any of us start?

I think I have the best answer to that.

History. Ahhhh, but there's a problem with that, yes? Whose history?

Not pretending there's a true, objective history available to all which all would accept as such, I have at least identified from where the various potentially qualifying histories might come. And that would have to be from members of the American black community. And why I believe this is where I have to start, is because it is the American black community that has been exploited, abused and yes, victimized over the centuries and this has never stopped. And in this regard, what we are seeing now on the streets of major cities in the US is, again, at least in part, another exploitation and abuse of the American black community - catalyzed by, once again, generating an example that became a symbol of victimization, the murder of George Floyd.

But of course, it is not just that. In fact, that is not the primary reason for the current further breakdown of civil society in the US. It is because the black community in the US has reached (again) the true and justified boiling point. So what did Americans expect would one day happen? What did the world that is seeing the spillover of reaction to racism think would happen?

So, back to history - the history of US white (and the rest) on black racism needs to come from those in the black community who have studied that history and know that history... and most importantly, have personally lived with that history and lived with the current reality (which looks pretty much the same from the POV of my American black friends).

But this then sets up another problem. Can the true history... the honest, objective history of black America be told while avoiding any sort of political slant or any sort of political ideological underpinning which would smack of bias towards that political party and/or political ideology?

I haven't found it yet. Every source I have sought either directly includes at least a bias towards a political ideology or strongly hints at it. And as worked up as everyone is in the US (and we should include everyone not in or from the US but who has their focus directed upon the US)... as worked up as we/they all appear to be, especially at this time, how realistic is it that these histories be read where a single reader might actually rise above their own political and politically ideological bias, read past, above, through the inherent bias, and avoid getting stuck on politics? One political ideology? ...and instead extract the actual truthful history of how American blacks and America as a whole got to where it is today? Because unless we (yes, I am using "we" now), can do this, how the hell are we who are not black Americans ever going to stand in the shoes of the American black... stand with enough understanding of the actual reality of the history of the black community from the heart and soul of each and every black American that carries this history within them? And how will an American black, if they do not know the true, objective history as to how they got to where they are at now ever reach a point where they would be willing work with Americans as a whole towards real solution? How many times have black Americans been burned? How many times have black Americans found themselves under an impossible metaphorical "knee?" - again and again and again?

So I have made it my #1 task to seek these histories out and, when I have each one, I will present it. I hope a reader will strive to read with an open mind with regards to any political component, especially with regards to a political ideology.

I also hope others might contribute in producing a true rendition of centuries of connected history as seen and experienced by black Americans.

American blacks are not the only group targeted by racism. The global black community is not the only ethnic, racial or cultural group that is targeted by racism. But it will be the American black community history I will be focusing on as, IMO, one has to start somewhere and this feels like the best place to start - stay tuned.

AutumnW

7th June 2020, 18:29

Chester,

Thanks so much for your contributions to this thread. I particularly appreciated your very honest and open revelation of your own experience of being white and from a middle or upper class family, in jail....as opposed to someone who is poor and black. I don't imagine poor and white fare very well either, but blacks really have the book thrown at them, as you illustrated.

And yes, history, as it is taught by the colonizers and those who dominate through force, will always be angled. Thanks for making that point, too!:clapping:

Agape

8th June 2020, 08:10

Chester and collective,

please allow me to add few personal observations here, freely as my mind flows🙏

Since I don’t believe in racism. But trying to nip the point in the bud so to say, observing this from evolutionary perspective through out many different cultures.

Xenophobia - the fear of otherness- is the easiest to observe on personal and family level.
It’s because each human being with few exceptions is an Original master piece possessing unique combination of genes and part of the greater Original , the Lotus Flower of Humanity.
If we were all the same with somebody, it would not be us.

As our parents were different from us so will be our children.

If genetic engineering wipes out differences we would be boring bunch of drones.

Where there are differences there is an adaptation process required.

Though natural at first it takes ages to get accustomed to the bodies of your human parents and differences between you and them.

It then takes years of learning to coexist with other people in the family, for some of us, our natural lifetime :)

Most people who forever left their home in States, Nigeria, the UK, Japan or somewhere else equally posh and homely did it so because between them and their environment/parents/other selves there was a gap, of difference and unique understanding of life pulled us elsewhere.

Back to where xenophobia reveals itself, in hating your ears perhaps or the mishap of fathers thumb.
May be you hated the way they were talking to you when you were young and thought you are stupid.
The way they revealed themselves and their couch manners.

May be they never wanted to lift off from the ground and feared the sky and the big world though they talked like they’ve been everywhere and knew it all :)

They never wanted you to be you and your color did not matter.

It was the opinion that mattered and whether it agreed with theirs and which side of family are you on. You’re 4 year old, takes sides :)

20 years later you’re still you after you’ve tried almost everything, it’s not them.

Learning to love and accept other people with their uniqueness and differences, it takes lots of work and you need to take it one by one really,
like in family.

It takes years before we get accustomed to how everyone look like and sound like around the globe and before we look to each other’s eyes with that knowing look.
Before we stop feeling so shy about us, then about them, then about knowing.

But it’s definitely worth it.

If you take small step within you 🙏it may equal big leap for humanity

🙏❤️🙏🕊🕊🕊

rgray222

8th June 2020, 18:08

These are just random thoughts regarding race. My internal dialogue. Some of these thoughts may certainly be controversial but that is OK with me because (like you) I am just trying to figure this out.

The media and politicians have been saying for decades that we need to have a conversation about race. Then they point out statements from people they believe are racist. The only reason you would call someone a racist is to silence them, to prevent a conversation. It makes no sense.

If you hear someone make a racist remark don't you want to keep them talking to show them how hurtful those remarks might be the black community. Silence is the best friend of racism.

Many prominent figures and ordinary citizens have been intimidated into silence, people are unsure of what truly is a racist remark. At the very least you might want to get clarification to understand what the offending party actually meant before shouting racist. Words that might seem racist on the first pass may not be racist at all.

My way of determining if words are racist is to turn those words around and apply the same meaning to my race. If I find it offensive than it is most likely racist.

Are the police really at the heart of the current protest and riots or is this an attempt deflect blame away from the real culprit?

What role does white guilt play in all of this? If you feel guilty about your race doesn't it imply that you feel your race is superior.

What role does white privilege play in this, if you feel that you were born with white privilege doesn't that imply that you feel that your race is superior?

Isn't it racist for white politicians to say we can save you from racism? The implication is that black people are incapable of saving themselves.

What is institutional or systemic racism? Nice words but what do they really mean? Words like this make it seem like all police or all white people are guilty of racism. Could that even possibly be true.?

What responsibility does the black community have, if any to solve the race relations problems? At first, this might be construed as a racist thought but when you think about it I honestly believe this might be one of the most important questions on the table.

I believe the media wants to keep the people in a constant hypercritical state on race, politics, environment, and health. They also want people divided and this is evident by their perpetual use of labels.

How much culpability does the media have, if any regarding race?

As much as I want to stay away from politics on this issue it is like ignoring the elephant in the room.
The Civil Rights Bill was passed in the USA in 1964 and it was necessary and good things followed.

Ended segregation of public places, including schools, housing, etc
Banned employment discrimination
It paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968

Lyndon Johnson is credited with passing the Civil Rights Act and it is well documented that he was a racist, this seems to be poetic irony. The truth is, without JFK the Civil Rights Bill would never have seen the light of day.

We have been languishing in a stalemate on race for the last 30 years. I don't believe the USA has moved forward or backward.

The Civil Rights Bill married the black voter to the Democrat party. Since 1965 the Democrats have never received less than 85% of the black vote.

Isn't one of the definitions of insanity doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different outcome?

Why does the black community vote overwhelmingly for democrats who are vehemently opposed to school choice? Why won't the democrats allow minority children access to the best schools?

Why does the black community vote overwhelmingly for democrats who strongly advocate for open borders. Don't these immigrants take jobs away from blacks and keep wages low?

Won't defunding the police hurt minorities in the inner city the most? It seems beyond crazy but I need to try to understand what it all means.

How much, if any of the rioting is all about people trying to get rid of Trump.

Many people have adopted a policy of "worse is better," why?

What does the silent majority think and when will they speak. When they do what will they say?

Does the Democrat party really believe they "own" the black vote and have they gotten so complacent that they make no effort to earn that vote?

Are politics and white guilt enabling the black community?

Does ANTIFA care about race or are they just using the black community to further their own agenda? I believe they could care less about race.

Does the Black Lives Matter Organization really care about race or do they have a political agenda? I struggle with this because they clearly do care about race and they are very politically driven. Then the question becomes do they only care about Black lives when they die at the hands of police or do they care about all black lives?
Am I willing to give BLM organization a pass because I am white?

Everyone seems so intolerant of opposing views do we even stand a chance at any type of dialogue. Silence keeps everything in a static position.

What is the end game? A better society, socialism or to overthrow the government and remake in someone else's vision. If so whose vision and why?

What can I do in my daily life to help eliminate racism?

Deborah (ahamkara)

8th June 2020, 19:22

Last night listened to a live feed on Instagram from Antoine Tucker (montaga) NYD14 candidate for TheNewRightParty. He is not convinced that George Floyd is actually dead - citing the lack of an open casket, and Floyd and Chauvin knew each other, but did not mention or call each other by name during any part of the arrest. Several young Black followers appeared on camera during the chat and echoed a similar scepticism surrounding the events in Minnesota.

Tucker, along with Hotep Jesus (who recently appeared on Alex Jones!), represent a movement among American Black conservatives along the lines of Malcolm X and WB Dubois. They are wary of the use of the Black community by the Democratic Party, and although they acknowledge the problem of racism in America today, they offer a different solution than the one we see in the protests - and are opposed to the idea of "Defunding the Police". They are worth our time and attention.

edina

8th June 2020, 21:05

I don't really know where this would fit? RE: The Democrat photo op...

Is it racism? Is it virtue signaling? Is virtue signalling a subtle form of racism?
I'm seeing a lot of black people get very angry about some of the antics they are seeing ...

Sharing this one because I enjoyed learning more about her culture and the meaning of the fabrics used. (She's African).
1270053042340139008
https://twitter.com/obianuju/status/1270053042340139008

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Last night listened to a live feed on Instagram from Antoine Tucker (montaga) NYD14 candidate for TheNewRightParty. He is not convinced that George Floyd is actually dead - citing the lack of an open casket, and Floyd and Chauvin knew each other, but did not mention or call each other by name during any part of the arrest. Several young Black followers appeared on camera during the chat and echoed a similar scepticism surrounding the events in Minnesota.

Tucker, along with Hotep Jesus (who recently appeared on Alex Jones!), represent a movement among American Black conservatives along the lines of Malcolm X and WB Dubois. They are wary of the use of the Black community by the Democratic Party, and although they acknowledge the problem of racism in America today, they offer a different solution than the one we see in the protests - and are opposed to the idea of "Defunding the Police". They are worth our time and attention.

I follow Antoine on Twitter. Rooting for him to win that District.

Chester

14th June 2020, 22:57

I tried... I worked on it for hours for a week. Every time I would explore a history from the particular view point of the one that was presenting the history... they involved politics which played an intrinsic role in establishing the points they would try and make... in validating their history as "the right history."

I even tried to extract the political elements out of it yet, when I did, it rendered their conclusions senseless.

Rarely do I give up on a goal. With regards to this one (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100738-Racism&p=1359875&viewfull=1#post1359875) - I have.

rgray222

18th June 2020, 20:16

I am genuinely confused and looking for some guidance. I am not trying to be sarcastic or political I am simply looking for some clarification. If Mark or anyone wants to tell me what they think of this issue I would appreciate your comments.

When I first heard that General Mills was going to remove the Aunt Jemima brand I did not think much about it. I considered it another stereotype that needed to go away. Then I found out that Aunt Jemima was based on a real person, Nancy Green, a freed slave. By all accounts, she was charming, affable, and a great cook. She was a storyteller, activist, and missionary. Apparently she died fairly wealthy. By many accounts a millionaire.

Other women went on to pick up the mantle of Aunt Jemima and they seemed to do fine financially. The second woman to portray her was Anna Robinson in 1933. She traveled the country promoting the products and made enough money to buy a 22 room house for her children and where she also rented rooms.

My thoughts are:
Removing this brand is removing a chance to show the real history of a Black Woman that was successful at a time when it was extremely difficult for any black person to succeed but especially women.

This appears to be corporate window dressing. A large corporation wanting to be seen as sympathetic. Dropping the name may have resulted from a tiktok video (https://www.womenshealthmag.com/life/a32892551/aunt-jemima-real-person-nancy-green/) showing a black woman saying "not today" and dumping a box of Aunt Jemima mix down the sink.

When I found out about Nancy Green the racist stereotype melted away I did not think of her as a caricature, she became a real person, one that succeeded against all odds.

If the company had only traded on the name an no actual person was involved or benefited from the products then I would say, let it go with no remorse. Because there is a real-life behind the product I say let it stand and educate people instead of taking the expedient easy way out.

auntjemima.com (http://www.auntjemima.com/our-history)
Wikipedia- Nancy Green (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Green)

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/105195553_10217591879531942_2387285917375663523_n.jpg?_nc_cat=110&_nc_sid=8024bb&_nc_ohc=v9MOZWPejzAAX838EFW&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.xx&oh=6c2941fabce27a0e03a1f3060dad0743&oe=5F1030AC

The article below came out a fews days after I made the post above, I am including it for a bit more context.

Edit: June 23, 2020 To read the full NBC Article: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/relatives-aunt-jemima-actresses-express-concern-history-will-be-erased-n1231769?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma&fbclid=IwAR3hG7NAPD5b1rY_Qhga97e31lrwSRrb8CVzDit-zmRGfyhCdjFTQj9ejOU

Relatives of former Aunt Jemima spokeswomen say they are concerned that their family history will be erased as Quaker Oats' moves to rebrand the syrup and pancake mix.

"I understand the images that white America portrayed us years ago. They painted themselves Black and they portrayed that as us," Vera Harris, whose great aunt, Lillian Richard, traveled the country promoting the Quaker Oats brand and portraying the Aunt Jemima character for more than 20 years, told NBC News. "I understand what Quaker Oats is doing because I'm Black and I don't want a negative image promoted, however, I just don't want her legacy lost, because if her legacy is swept under the rug and washed away, it's as if she never was a person."

Harris added that Richard was recruited to work for Quaker Oats in the 1920s, during a time when there were "no jobs for Black people, especially Black women."

"She took the job to make an honest living to support herself, touring around at fairs, cooking demonstrations and events," Harris said. "When she came back home, they were proud of her and we're still proud of her."

Wind

18th June 2020, 20:38

I think people need to learn to listen. We need to listen to each other more sincerely.

0p0_8h3FbCk

TargeT

18th June 2020, 23:09

Rawhide68

3rd July 2020, 15:23

If you havnt watched this allready, it is worth watching!

Nothing of this info have ever crossed my path, not in school or media that I can remember, amazing.

MwN-Pdfd-Qo

PurpleLama

3rd July 2020, 18:42

Our current (US) situation is (at it's root) an inequality problem, not a racial one.

but it's being leveraged very smartly to do terrible things, we are actively un-making the US.

Good coverage on that topic here:
pRCzZp1J0v0

I love what Weinstein has to say about a lot of things. We need more minds like his in the public eye. For instance (https://medium.com/p/the-articles-of-unity-f544f930d336?source=social.tw&_branch_match_id=757938053261396211).

Bill Ryan

5th July 2020, 17:45

Here's a journey back in time, to 1968. Do some folks remember this?

I'll lay out my stall here immediately. These were three great men. (Yes, three, not just two.)

https://www.history.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_700/MTU3ODc4Njc2NTMzMzU2MjU1/image-placeholder-title.webp
U.S. athletes Tommie Smith, center, and John Carlos raise gloved hands skyward during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner after Smith received the gold and Carlos the bronze for the 200 meter run at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, 1968.

https://history.com/news/1968-mexico-city-olympics-black-power-protest-backlash

How the Black Power Protest at the 1968 Olympics Killed Careers

When Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in protest at the 1968 Summer Games, Australian runner Peter Norman stood by them. It lost him his career.

It’s an iconic image: Two athletes raise their fists on the Olympic podium. The photograph, taken after the 200 meter race at the 1968 Summer Olympics (http://www.history.com/topics/olympic-games) in Mexico City, turned African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos from track-and-field stars into the center of a roiling controversy over their raised-fist salute, a symbol of black power and the human rights movement at large.

But look in the photo and you’ll see another man as well: silver medalist Peter Norman, a white Australian runner. Norman didn’t raise his fist that day, but he stood with Smith and Carlos. Though his show of solidarity ended up destroying Norman’s career, the three athletes’ actions that day would be just one in a line of protests on the athletic stage.

Smith and Carlos, who had won gold and bronze, respectively, agreed to use their medal wins as an opportunity to highlight the social issues roiling the United States at the time. Racial tensions were at a height, and the Civil Rights (http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement)movement had given way to the Black Power movement. African-Americans like Smith and Carlos were frustrated by what they saw as the passive nature of the Civil Rights movement. They sought out active forms of protests and advocated for racial pride, black nationalism and dramatic action rather than incremental change.

It was only months after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/martin-luther-king-jr-assassination), and protests against the Vietnam War were gaining steam as well. In the lead-up to the Olympics, Smith and Carlos helped organize the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a group that reflected their black pride and social consciousness. The group saw the Olympic Games as an opportunity to agitate for better treatment of black athletes and black people around the world. Its demands (http://www.isreview.org/issues/61/feat-zirin.shtml) included hiring more black coaches and rescinding Olympic invitations to Rhodesia and South Africa, both of which practiced apartheid (http://www.history.com/topics/apartheid). Though the project initially proposed a boycott of the Olympics altogether, Smith and Carlos decided to compete in the hopes they could use their achievements as a platform for broader change.

https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU3ODc4NTk4MTQ0NjMyMTM3/image-placeholder-title.jpg
Mexico City police beating a protester during a student march days before the military gunned down hundreds of students during a similiar peaceful march at Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City.

Then, just 10 days before the opening of the Summer Games, an unarmed group of protesters assembled in Mexico City’s Three Cultures Square to plan the next move of the growing Mexican students’ movement. The Mexican government sent in bulldozers to disperse the thousands gathered, and troops fired into the crowd, massacring (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97546687) between four (the government’s official count) and 3,000 students.

Carlos and Smith were deeply affected by these events and the plight of marginalized people around the world. “It was a cry for freedom and for human rights,” Smith told (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/articles/olympic-athletes-who-took-a-stand-593920/#y5HSFO8gwwgwGu8L.99) Smithsonian magazine in 2008. “We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”

The third man on the podium became part of the protest, too, albeit in a less direct way. Before winning silver, Norman was a working-class boy from Melbourne, Australia, born in 1942. His family members were devout members of the Salvation Army, an evangelical group connected with the charitable group better known to Americans. Part of that faith was the belief that all men were equal.

Though he was poor growing up, Norman was an extraordinarily fast runner, and learned to race on spikes that his father, a butcher, borrowed due to lack of funds. In 1960, the teenager burst onto the national running scene as a junior, winning his first major title in Victoria. From then on, he became a major contender (http://athletics.com.au/About-Us/Hall-of-Fame/Peter-Norman) in Australian track and field. A powerful sprinter, his specialty was his finishes—an area in which some short-course runners falter.

https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU3ODc4NTk3ODc2NjU1NDMz/image-placeholder-title.jpg
The final of the Men’s 200 meter event at the 1968 Summer Games. From left to right: Peter Norman of Australia, and Larry Questad, John Carlos and Tommie Smith of the United States.

He displayed that skill during the 200 meter final on October 16, 1968, at Mexico City’s Olympic Stadium. Though Norman had finished strong in the qualifying rounds, he was underestimated by the other runners—until, at the very end of the medal race, he edged in front of John Carlos at the finish line. “Out of nowhere, Norman stormed down the last 50 meters, taking the line before a shocked Carlos,” writes (https://www.cnn.com/2012/04/24/sport/olympics-norman-black-power/index.html) CNN’s James Montague. Norman finished his sprint second with a time of 20.06 seconds and qualified for a silver medal.

At the time, Australia was experiencing racial tensions of its own. For years, it had been governed by its “White Australia Policy,” which dramatically limited immigration to the country by non-white people. While the Australian government welcomed new residents from predominantly white areas like the Baltics, it regularly turned down non-European migrants. In 1966, the government made (http://www.nma.gov.au/online_features/defining_moments/featured/end_of_the_white_australia_policy) the first steps toward abolishing the policy, but its effects reverberated throughout Australia. Non-Australians weren’t the only people discriminated against: Aboriginal Australians, too, were historically oppressed in the country, which forced Aboriginal children into boarding schools, while removing others from their families and placing them with white households.

Norman supported his fellow Olympians’ protest, in part because of the intolerance he had witnessed in Australia. “Australia was not a crucible of tolerance,” notes (https://theconversation.com/i-will-stand-with-you-finally-an-apology-to-peter-norman-10107) Steve Georgakis, a sports studies specialist from Australia. “Norman, a teacher and guided by his Salvation Army faith, took part in the Black Power salute because of this opposition to racism and the White Australia Policy.”

https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU3ODc4NTk4MTQzODQ1NzA1/image-placeholder-title.jpg
Peter Norman, Tommie Smith and John Carlos after receiving their medals.

As the athletes waited to go to the podium, Carlos and Smith told Norman that they planned to use their win as an opportunity to protest. Smith and Carlos decided to appear on the podium bearing symbols of protest and strength: black-socked feet without shoes to bring attention to black poverty, beads to protest lynchings, and raised, black-gloved fists to represent their solidarity and support with black people and oppressed people around the world.

“I looked at my feet in my high socks and thought about all the black poverty I’d seen from Harlem to East Texas. I fingered my beads and thought about the pictures I’d seen of the ‘strange fruit’ swinging from the poplar trees of the South,” Carlos later wrote (https://books.google.com/books?id=zpYxyEMDJjsC&lpg=PA120&ots=POobRN07dJ&dq=%25E2%2580%259CI%2520looked%2520at%2520my%2520feet%2520in%2520my%2520high%2520socks%2520and%2520t hought%2520about%2520all%2520the%2520black%2520poverty%2520I%25E2%2580%2599d%2520seen%2520from%2520H arlem%2520to%2520East%2520Texas.%2520I%2520fingered%2520my%2520beads%2520and%2520thought%2520about%2 520the%2520pictures%2520I%25E2%2580%2599d%2520seen%2520of%2520the%2520%25E2%2580%2598strange%2520fru it%25E2%2580%2599%2520swinging%2520from%2520the%2520poplar%2520trees%2520of%2520the%2520South%252C%2 5E2%2580%259D&pg=PA120#v=onepage&q=%25E2%2580%259CI%2520looked%2520at%2520my%2520feet%2520in%2520my%2520high%2520socks%2520and%2520th ought%2520about%2520all%2520the%2520black%2520poverty%2520I%25E2%2580%2599d%2520seen%2520from%2520Ha rlem%2520to%2520East%2520Texas.%2520I%2520fingered%2520my%2520beads%2520and%2520thought%2520about%25 20the%2520pictures%2520I%25E2%2580%2599d%2520seen%2520of%2520the%2520%25E2%2580%2598strange%2520frui t%25E2%2580%2599%2520swinging%2520from%2520the%2520poplar%2520trees%2520of%2520the%2520South,%25E2%2 580%259D&f=false).

Carlos realized he had forgotten his gloves, and Norman suggested the American athletes share a pair. The Australian also asked how he could support his fellow medalists. They suggested he wear a badge for the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Norman didn’t raise his fist, but by wearing the badge he made his stance clear.

As the American athletes raised their fists, the stadium hushed, then burst into racist sneers and angry insults. Smith and Carlos were rushed from the stadium, suspended by the U.S. team, and kicked out of the Olympic Village for turning their medal ceremony into a political statement. They went home to the United States, only to face serious backlash, including death threats.

However, Carlos and Smith were both gradually re-accepted into the Olympic fold, and went on to careers in professional football before retiring. Norman, meanwhile, was punished severely by the Australian sports establishment. Though he qualified for the Olympic team over and over again, posting the fastest times by far in Australia, he was snubbed by the team in 1972. Rather than allow Norman to compete, the Australians did not send a sprinter at all.

Norman immediately retired from the sport and began to suffer from depression, alcoholism and a painkiller addiction. “During that time,” writes Caroline Frost for the BBC, “he used his silver medal as a doorstop.”

Norman died without being acknowledged for his contributions to the sport. Though he kept his silver medal, he was regularly excluded from events related to the sport. Even when the Olympics came to Sydney in 2000, he was not recognized. When Norman died in 2006, Carlos and Smith, who had kept in touch (https://www.si.com/vault/1993/10/25/106785694/scorecard) with Norman for years, were pallbearers at the Australian’s funeral.

It took until 2012 for the Australian government to apologize for the treatment Norman received in his home country. But even though it cost him his career and much of his happiness, Norman would have done it over again. “I won a silver medal,” he told (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/17/sports/sydney-2000-the-third-man-in-mexico-city.html) the New York Times in 2000. “But really, I ended up running the fastest race of my life to become part of something that transcended the Games.”

Carlos and Smith are still in touch today—and have been publicly supportive of other protesting athletes, including the NFL’s Colin Kaepernick. “What I did was right 48 years ago, and 48 years later it has proven to be right,” Carlos told The Telegraph in 2016. “In 1968 we were on a program for humanity—we are still on the same program today.”