Of all the recent corruptions of language and forbidden subjects, those who have read me a while know that the one guaranteed to make me foam at the mouth is confusing culture with race.
I think it started, somewhere, in the entire Marxist subculture, where they believe everyone is full of secret thoughts and keeps conspiracy within himself, which is why we get the bizarre idea that people can have “false consciousness” that works against them. It is a thing of mystery religions – and Marxism has always been one – to fold thought upon thought until it means something quite different from what the plain words mean.
I think it started at the top, or in the inner circles, in the sacredness of faculty lounges, and went something like this: if you criticize Islam’s treatment of women, you’re not really criticizing that because you’re a dirty capitalist pig (or an un-enlightened worker) so you can have no solidarity with these women (something reserved for Marxists.) So, your outrage about making women going around covered in ill-fitting slip covers which hamper their vision and cause all sorts of issues, MUST really be raised by the fact that most practitioners of the religion are three shades darker than the average Englishman, or about the color of your Italian on a summer day. Thereby, the appropriate answer to “I think the whole Burka nonsense has got to stop. Sure, a woman can do that to herself if she wants to, but in these cultures, what choice do they have. We should – at the very least – talk against it.” is “Racist!”
However, as other religions heavy on theology have found, what is decreed in the inner circle and makes perfect sense after lengthy discussion, is corrupted to a tautology among the foot soldiers. The Catholic Church has long compounded with this and allowed the worship of old pagan gods under a Christian name because once the masses get something in their heads there’s no getting it out.
At the foot soldier level of Marxism – at the level that middle school assignments are written and news articles are spun – the whole justification behind responding to criticism of a culture with cries of “racism” was lost. It might in fact not have made much sense to the every day man. Well, think about it. It couldn’t. How is criticizing Islam’s treatment of women racist, but criticizing Italian Catholics morality rules not only not racist but strongly encouraged. Having – more than likely – the blood of both in my veins, I challenge you to look at my younger son and tell me whether he has Greek features, Roman features, Jewish features or Arab features. (Actually you could drop him into the middle of a New York City Jewish enclave and you’d never find him again. But us living in the west, normally people think he’s Mexican, which goes beyond making no sense, but never mind.)
People on the street have a way of seeing these things very clearly, not being educated enough to suspect themselves of heresy or to interrogate their own motives when the motives are plain as the nose on their face.
So, faced with the high-priests of Marxism which are also, for our sins, the high priests of our culture and education (I have great hopes this will change with the new media) and their absolute certainty that criticizing (certain) cultures is racism, they had to find their own justification.
The justification they found was the one that made sense. The fact that it ties into very old prejudices and is IN FACT one of the supporting pegs of racism makes no difference, because to the people on the street, the high lords of culture MUST know better, so this must have been proven by studies or something.
And now, in schools and newspapers, I keep stumbling on this thing: culture is race and race is culture. Culture runs hereditary in the veins; is transmitted through the DNA.
Sarah, you say, you got this by the wrong end. It can’t possibly be true. No? Let’s leave aside for a moment the idiotic assignments that they give the kids in school, in which they are to write about their culture – by which they mean their ancestry. (Don’t believe me? Test it. Have your kid write about his culture as an SF fan. But most teachers make sure the kids know it’s their ancestry, in the written description of the assigment.)
As someone who comes from a different culture, I tell you that not a week goes by without someone asking me – in cocksure assurance they’re on the side of gods – whether I’ve taught my children their culture. (The answer can get very interesting depending on how p*ssy I feel that particular day.) By which they mean, of course, have I taught them Portuguese? (Actually I lie, given younger kid’s look and my accent, they mean have I taught them Spanish or Russian. But never mind that.) This despite the fact their father is of (mostly) Anglo Saxon stock with a few more exotic encrustations.
I think the two kids have spent – if you aggregate all the visits – a grand total of three months in Portugal in their entire life. Usually in two-week installments. Sure, they like my parents. Sure, they like the monuments. Sure, they’re horrified by the drivers on the roads. BUT ultimately they visit Portugal like one visits an exotic location. It is not their culture. It will never be their culture. Heck, after twenty eight years, it is no longer my culture. I have nothing against Portuguese culture. (I lie. I do. But that’s because I think it shackles its people, who frankly, deserve better.) I have fond memories of growing up in it. Some things – drivers education, (paradoxically), marriage (where civil and religious are strenuously separated) and teacher education it even does better than we do. But, by and large I prefer America, which is why I made the choice I did. HOW could this make Portuguese my KIDS’ “Culture” unless they believe it’s inherited?
There are other instances. Considering “Hispanic” a race by government fiat is one of those. Oh, sure, Mexicans are somewhat more distinct (though I’ve seen many a Mexican who could blend unnoticed with the peasants in a Portuguese village.) HOWEVER (even if they’ve now rationalized it by making Portuguese also Hispanic, probably driven mad by the idea that Fernandez was Hispanic, but Fernandes wasn’t. Or Marquez and Marques, or…) your average Portuguese or Spaniard can – and in my case does. Hey, do YOU have anything against discounts in ethnic restaurants? I don’t. I only have writer money – pass as Greek, Italian, Arab, and – in some circumstances – Russian.
This assumption is part of what is buggering up our – needs to be tossed out and start clean – adoption policy too: the reason that they try to place “ethnic” children with “ethnic” parents, even though there might be a hundred white yuppies ready to adopt them. (No, the explanation is NOT that the child should look like the parents or horror ensues – if it were, then someone would by now have mentioned the hundreds of Asian children brought up by white parents who are Valedictorians in half the highschools across the land, and by and large as well adjusted as any of their generation.)
[I would like to blame on this the “put child with birth parent if absolutely possible, even when prospective adopter is healthy, wealthy and wise, and birth parent has three convictions for child abuse” but I’m afraid that’s just Rousseaunian stupidity.]
And then there was the genius who accused me of racism for writing a story in which China was full-throttle capitalist (parallel world. Split around the fourteenth century) while the west was mired in communism. Because, you see, the Chinese soul cares for other things than individual achievement, and certainly not for money. They are communal and they– Sorry. Gagged on a bit of irony there.
But Sarah, you say, there IS a correlation between race/sub-race and culture. You can see traces of Germany in Pennsylvania. You can’t deny that areas of heavy English colonization are British-feeling. You–
Oh, my sweet auntie Mary. Please. Areas of colonization means entire groups of people who came here together. Culture is a function of the group, not the individual. Say instead of moving here alone, my best friend and her sister – the three of us were inseparable much of our growing up years – had married guys who went to school with Dan, and who found jobs together, and the six of us moved around in a mini-enclave. THEN my kids would have Portuguese as at least a sub-culture. Because it would be impossible for us, together, not to keep some of the behavior, gestures and attitudes we grew up with. The kids would then get it. It wouldn’t be their dominant culture, but it would be there. (My best friend and her sister, in fact, married Frenchmen and live near each other, and their kids retain some Portuguese culture as a result.)
There have been estimates that some tenements in NYC were entire Italian villages. Trust me, in those circumstances, the culture remains, at least as traces.
But take a person alone – particularly take an infant – and drop him into another culture, with no one to teach him to behave as his ancestors did, and he will simply learn the new culture as his. There are countless examples, and not just of cross-cultural adoptions in our day, but of children kidnaped during tribal raids, or children-hostages taken very young, and becoming as much part of the host culture as anyone born to it.
There might be a very weak correlation between certain hereditary traits and certain cultures, but I doubt it. Most cultures extant are simply not old enough for genetic selection to make any difference. Take Chinese, probably the oldest, literate culture around, with a continuous history. That culture has changed. For certain regions and certain times, individualism (even if on different terms than in the West) was an esteemed trait (this is what I based my story on.) And certainly the children raised in the US by American parents aren’t any less individualistic or competitive (!) than their peers.
Culture is a thing of the group, not of the individual. As such we can and SHOULD be able to criticize cultures for their worst aspects – and that includes our own, but shouldn’t be limited to it. I think for instance that burkas are a ridiculous and demeaning impairment on women (And please, please, please, hold your breath on how they are beautiful and a sign of respect. I have an idea, let’s respect arab men too. Let’s see how they like living under bed sheets.) I think that Portuguese are a very capable people shackled to a culture that promotes – nay, encourages – sloppiness, lack of zeal and patronage (there are reasons for all of this in Portuguese history, ranging from the patronage of the Roman system – which is why it extends from Greece to South America, the same bizarre corrupt system based on nepotism and side-dealing – to the fact that at various times the area that’s now Portugal was occupied by alien overlords, be they Moorish or Germanic. Sloppiness in fulfilling orders is only sense in that case.) And I think our own cultural confusion of culture and race is insane, and possibly suicidal.
Race can’t be changed. What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh. Culture can. It can be changed at an individual level, when a culture is simply hampering a human being. And it can be changed at a whole nation (or national group) level. For instance, we now bathe everyday, something that would have horrified our ancestors. And no longer is wife beating no longer acceptable, neither is child-beating. (About child-slapping I’m somewhat more ambivalent, but that’s a subject for a whole other post. I’ll just say I too disapprove of child-beating.) These are major structural culture changes. So you can change the culture without changing the race.
That is, if we are willing to stop playing Marxist games and assuming that the reason people disapprove of forced child marriage in Islam is that Arabs tan as dark as Italians.
If we’re not, the human culture that carries the torch of human freedom and improvement of human conditions will shift – possibly slowly – somewhere else – possibly India.
And whatever the culture is that promotes the most freedom for the individual, from private choices to wealth production will be the culture I’ll endorse, whether most of the people in it are white, black, purple, or striped like Zebras (well, you never know. Aliens and Gen mod.)
You see, I am an unabashed culturist. And when it comes to culture, the one I prefer is the one that allows each person to pursue his enlightened self interest. None of them will be perfect, but I’ll choose the best I can.
According To Hoyt 
Amen Sister Sarah!!!
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I can’t speak to other places, but the conflation of “race – class – culture” in the US South seems to have begun in the early 1700s with the introduction of African slaves as a replacement for English indentured servants. Escaped indentured servants could (and did) blend in with the “free” population, while Africans did not. There were other reasons for the change from semi-free to enslaved labor sources, but that is where the conflation of race with class and culture began in the South. I suspect that Marx, with a healthy dash of Spencer, provided the “scientific” and “objective” reason for the modern muddle. Combine it with political expedience and the ability to get grants and hey presto! The poison (and stupidity) spreads.
By Spencer, I mean the sort of strained logic you see today: “Capitalists are bad. Capitalists were most commonly people of European descent. Therefore, people of European descent are prone to be worse than people of non-European descent. Therefore, European ideas like legal equality of men and women might be suspect and can’t be applied to others, because Europeans are bad people, ” and so on.
Peter Kolchin’s books about slavery, serfdom, and other unfree labor systems are well worth skimming if you are writing about cultures that include that. He does a lot of comparative work between Old World and New World enslaved labor.
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I’ve read a theory that one of the reasons America was able to develop a relatively class-less society so quickly was that it did have an absolute class structure, based on race. All that mattered was to have European ancestry, and it didn’t matter that you were the lowest of the low back in Europe; in America, you could rise (frankly, you had to be of the right European background there, too, and the right religious one as well).
I don’t like this, but I suspect it might be true. It was a huge evolution from the feudal mindset to get even that far, and I’ve noticed that societal evolution is extremely slow (which is overall a good thing in the long run). Rights have always been extended slowly. And, after all, even most males didn’t have the vote at first, you had to own a certain amount of property. Rights and privileges have been extended gradually and only relatively recently have included all adult citizens (frankly, I think it’s gone a bit too far, and would raise the voting age to 25 unless you’re in the military, but I’m an old fogey, I admit).
That said, I am uncomfortable with broad sweeping statements like this, particularly when they have the word “class” in them, and I am heartened by all the stories of individuals, of all races and genders and social classes, who’ve managed to defy convention and succeed and gain respect and position regardless.
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I don’t THINK it was true, Laurie. I think the difference was two fortuitous bits: a lot of the people had to leave their language behind, when they came here (and came from a lot of different places) and we were colonized first during the enlightenment and provided refuge to a lot of “enlightened” rebels. Yeah, in New England race and religion counted for a lot, but the further west you went the less it counted. (Yes, Africans and Asians suffered uniquely there. That’s historical. Fine. they don’t now. Let’s go forward, not back.)
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Agreed, I want to go forward, not back. I’m just curious about the evolution. People who bring up things that far in the past to justify their position today are just looking for excuses.
That said, I’d rather go with your thinking. And I’ve been hearing some restored history recently that contradicts all this (particularly about the status of free African Americans early on) that I find very heartening. Yes, race and religion counted, but a lot less than has been said in our history classes.
(Don’t get me started on these “white privilege” people! Everyone faces handicaps and disadvantages. Yes, some are worse than others, but there are much harder ones than race.)
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I don’t know anything about Asians in the East, but frankly if you look at practically any time period more than 50 years ago, Africans suffered less at that time in the West as compared to those Africans in the East.
And yes Laurie, they have conveniently purged as much information about early free blacks from history as they conveniently can.
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I noticed the purging of free blacks from history because of watching a few ancestory programs like “who do you think you are.” One guy found that his ancestor was a free black who owned slaves. It was a severe shock to his system. They tried to say it was because he owned members of family; however, all family members were free and had been free a long time.
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I recall hearing, on NPR back before it became primary propaganda arm of the State, a historian asserting that the first slave-owner in the American Colonies was a Black man, who had sued to convert a “due to expire” personal servitude contract to slave status on the grounds that the person had failed to adhere to the terms of his contract and had not provided services commensurate with his upkeep. I don’t believe everything just any historian says, but that brief bit of an interview has remained with me over the years.
As always, for anyone interested in a not politically correct view of History, I recommend Googling the Wilmington Race Riots of 1898, to hear how a bourgeois Black society was run out of Wilmington into the surrounding swamps and their property declared “abandoned” and seized by their persecutors.
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Here is a link to an article that appeared in the Washington Times, about blacks that fought for the Confederacy, both slaves and free blacks.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/blacks.htm
Also check out the life of Holt Collier, the only slave listed as a soldier by the state of Mississipi’s Department of Archives and History. He was quite a character, raised as a rather priviliged slave when his master left to fight in the Civil War he stowed away on a riverboat and joined him, fighting for the south. By all historical accounts serving with skill and bravery. He had many white planter friends both from his serving in the war and his subsequent life as a guide for well heeled hunters (he guided President Theodore Roosevelt multiple times and is indirectly responsible for the Teddy Bear do to one of those hunts). After the war his strong personality, service in the war, and friendship with influential Mississipians caused him to get in trouble with the carpetbaggers running the state. Several times his white planter friends stood up for him in court, to prevent his imprisonment or even execution. He also once was the only black amid several hundred whites who staged a protest march in Greeneville against the carpetbaggers.
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Some accounts have his master freeing Collier before leaving for the war, and others have him serving as a slave. Regardless, he obviously had more freedom of choice than most slaves and did much what he wanted to.
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In the early 1800s, it became more and more expensive to free slaves – I recall something on the order of over $1000 in that period’s money, not today’s, but I could have that wrong. A lot of people who wanted to free slaves couldn’t afford to. (I wonder if, as some people saw the end of slavery coming and tried to fight it, they made it more and more restrictive – similar things happened in France before the revolution.)
I read an account of two half-sisters, one free, one a slave, who were brought up as sisters and lived together as sisters. The free sister wanted to free the slave sister, but the slave sister didn’t think it was worth the cost and didn’t see that it would make any real difference. (The tragedy is that it did, because the free sister married, her husband thus owned all her property and he sold the slave sister down the river.)
People find ways around restrictive systems. I’m not justifying slavery (I find the idea of slavery so revolting I find it hard to even speak about), but good people find ways to live. (Though slavery created bad people – Frederick Douglass’s autobiography speaks about watching a very good woman turn into a bad one by becoming a slave owner. Douglass was a good-enough man to still care deeply for the good woman she’d been before – she was the one who taught him to read.)
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I have many times read that in the mid-1800’s it was cheaper to hire someone, than it was to feed and clothe a slave. I haven’t done the research to see if this was actually true or not (and I just managed to drop a cookie fresh from the oven on my keyboard, smearing melted chocolate chip all over it, so I’m going to clean that up before I try and look it up ;) ) But the fact that it was close enough to being true to be a viable arguement says something about the wages of the time.
People were not expected to make a living at their job, but to have to supplement it.
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IIRC, in order to free a slave you had to provide an income sufficient to support him/her. This was to prevent slaves being discarded when “old and used up.” Slaves represented significant capital assets, unlike employees in Northern mills who represented interchangeable consumables. Not saying I approve, merely describing what was.
Somewhere ’round heah I have a book reviewing the laws governing slavery, addressing such fascinating issues as the owner’s responsibilities in regard to a slave’s crimes, such as theft. Clearly the interest was to prevent the slave equivalent of Faginy, balanced against protection of the owner from being held accountable for acts of the chattel. Much simpler to not own slaves, methinks.
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Part of the costs entailed in some states were laws that said that if you were to free a slave he/she had to have a means of support, generally meaning setting said slave up in employment. The reasoning behind this was not necessarily evil, it kept people from freeing injured, ill or elderly slaves to keep from having to provide for them.
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A lot of what we think of as “cultural” is actually “developmental”. A society that has been living in the same territory for a thousand years has built up quite an infrastructure, both at the village level and at the general territory level. When those same people came to North America, most of that wasn’t there. If it were to exist, they would have to build it. That creates an entirely different mindset from that of inheriting an infrastructure, and the culture surrounding it. What of that culture could be transported to the new world was (German Pennsylvania, the Texas Hill Country, New England), while the rest was either dropped or significantly modified to fit the new social order.
My ancestry is from Scotland, mainly from the Hebrides. It’s a blend of Celtic and Pictish, with a dollop of Scandinavian and who knows what else. Once they arrived in the New World, they added Creek, French, and some Spanish as they migrated from Georgia to Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond. Personally, I consider myself a militant Individualist, which gave my military bosses fits.
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Laurie, there’s one period and place where a group of whites were regarded as being less than blacks, and that was the Irish in the South between 1830-1861. The reason was economics. Black slaves cost a LOT of money after the ban on importation in 1808. Irish were cheaper than dirt (in some cases literally), so they did the most dangerous labor in timber and construction work. You could always hire more Irish, but slaves were an investment. History really is a strange place, isn’t it?
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Yes, history is wonderful when you get into the details, where the real people are. ^_^
Anti-Irish feelings were around even in the early 20th century. When my mom told her future mother-in-law, my grandmother, that she had some Irish in her, my grandmother looked horrified and said, “Well, don’t tell anyone!” (I loved this grandmother dearly, but her only flaw was snobbery picked up from her mother. Interestingly, going through ancestry.com shows some Irish in her husband’s line back in the 1800s.)
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Snobbery often reflects a suppressed shame.
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In the case of what little I know of her mother, that would make sense – she was apparently pretty overbearing. Insisted on a house on the ritziest street in Dallas when her husband didn’t have the salary.
I think with my grandmother, it was more a case of “We must live up to these standards” being drilled into her. And also that Americans in the early 20th century still felt culturally inferior to Europe (America wasn’t a world power back then). And she was a huge reader (she said the neighbors down the street were the local equivalent of the Beverly Hillbillies who struck oil in the backyard and moved to the big city. They had a standing agreement with Neiman Marcus to send them a copy of every book they sold, which they never read and gave away at the end of the month, and grandmother was right there at the door at the give-aways). I love books, but you can pick up some odd ideas from them if you don’t measure them against reality.
By the time I knew her, she pushed standards as far as behavior and education, but that’s as far as it went. Granted, my mother, the daughter-in-law marrying the oldest son, came from the wrong side of the tracks, so my grandmother would have had to get over it.
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They had a standing agreement with Neiman Marcus to send them a copy of every book they sold, which they never read and gave away at the end of the month …
Uh… buh… wha?!?
I simply cannot understand this. Not just the “never reading books” thing, which I cannot understand either — I know intellectually that many people aren’t readers, but it’s such a foreign concept to me that I have an incredibly hard time grasping how those people think — but the whole “buying stuff you never intend to use” thing. WHY? What’s the point? Was this some sort of status display? (Which is another thing that I can’t understand, even though intellectually I know some people do this).
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Seconded along the line.
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Yup, a status thing. Or so I assume. It does boggle the mind, doesn’t it. Though there are worse status things than books.
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Yes, and at least they would give the books away to people who would read them.
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Another major factor (in my mind the primary one, but YMMV) to the ‘European-descended people are evil’ concept is an asinine belief in the Noble Savage myth. Of course socialism plays a part in that angle as well, since that myth was a part of the philosophy of Rousseau.
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And guilt-based idealization as apology for when the “Noble Savage” was “Subhuman Vermin.”
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And yet the truth is somewhere between. Most savages are humans whose culture constrains or forces them to do things that we consider repugnant (and which are, objectively. I will not defend stuff like human sacrifice.)
Actually I think you’re overthinking it, though. Noble savage myths are an excuse for people in Western Society to ignore the cultural norms they personally don’t like. (Say, monogamy. Hygiene.) The concern for “the other” is a front.
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Another “concern” I believe is phony: “concern” about population growth.
I think this is really just a concern, by people to whom abortion is central to their active sex life, that they will be outbred and outvoted.
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You are correct.
I’ve had this theory for a long time world population is no longer growing. YES I know, we have all these numbers. Lies, damn lies and statistics. Most countries in the world are net receivers (loan, loan forgiveness, etc) and those when in the form of “rescue founds” are always per capita. Our big cities make up people to account for “undercounted” population. And that’s here, and TRUST ME we’re almost painfully honest. In other countries? Most of those population numbers are PFA. I want to do a post about this, I just haven’t got around to it. I think one of the underlying causes of the current worldwide economic crisis — besides marxism, and that’s a big cause — is that the population is ALREADY falling.
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I don’t think all concern from all people is phony. I think that some humans have compassion and a binary sense of the world. If X is wrong, then the OPPOSITE of X must be Right! It’s horrible how these peoples were treated (…often true…), so it must be that everything claimed of them, to justify that horrible treatment, must be entirely opposite.
Sure, there’s a lot of concern trolling, and there’s a lot of “well, I will feel good about myself for being soooo sympathetic towards these poor noble savages” (or whatever), but… I suspect a lot of people just don’t have a sense of nuance beyond kindergarten-level bright, primary colors.
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(Or, as I am feverish and only just now realized, I do believe that the phrase, “Ascribe not to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity,” may have a certain application here. Of course, the conscious and unconscious malice can run under the radar of the… nuance-impaired… which muddies the issue…)
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Okay, you’re right. But I was talking at least in part about the early followers of Rosseau, who didn’t think that other people were treated terribly, they just thought society prevented their being the noble savages they were meant to be and so the belief allowed them to throw off anything they didn’t like.
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The Aztecs had a very elaborate cultural system, but they practiced human sacrifice. Oops! Am I allowed to say that of a Native American culture?
Momma’s father was a doctor, who was known to say the indoor plumbing was probably the single greatest development in human health care. It may have been one of the Wesleys that said cleanliness is next to Godliness, but my Momma would have said that without it you shouldn’t get near to her.
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oh yea – :-) polynesians … didn’t they throw virgins into a volcano? Or did I get that one wrong. Aztecs were known for their bloodiness. Although the Spaniards at the time were known for their warring.
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ALL humans are known for their warring. The Aztecs warred too — for the war prisoners to sacrifice.
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True –
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YES! They made that myth into their Eden-and-fall myth. If they at least admitted they are a religion and confined their lunacy to Friday services (well, solidarity with Muslims) down at the people’s houses!
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It is interesting how contemporary society misconstrues culture and race. Having studied (Anthropological, Sociological, Psychological) culture intensively before Anthropology went off the rails in the mid-80s it is a topic intensely interesting to me — so, to avoid extensive intellectual meandering I will limit myself to a few brief observations.
If “race” is essentially a matter of skin pigmentation, howcome physical anthropologists can tell a skeleton’s race? “Racism” is the contemporary version of charges of “Fascism” – the semantic equivalent of “Bad Doggie!”
“Culture” has survived the MSM’s propagation of the concept about as well as any other scientific concept has: poorly. What the actual concept of culture has in common with the popularly expressed idea of culture is very very little. We have conflated at least three different concepts of culture into a single term.
When somebody asks “have you taught your kids their culture?” what they are really inquiring about is heritage. In the classic understanding of “culture” the question becomes tautological: what you teach the kids is, by definition, their culture.
Conflating race and culture is racist, assuming that the two concepts are equivalent.
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Too often to be a coincidence – for positions that are going to declare very extreme and/or unpopular policies, I’ve noticed a tendency toward candidates of “minority” backgrounds, which means any criticism of the policy will be met with an accusation of bigotry or racism. I’m cynical enough to think this is a deliberate strategy.
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It is curious that we now deny the cultural integrity of the European immigrants to America of a century ago. Back in 1900 equating a German with a Spaniard, an Italian, a Czech, a Pole, a Russ, a Slav would have been as absurd as conflating a Scot with a Brit with a Mersian with a Northumbian with a Saxon and calling them all Anglians was in 800 AD.
It is equally disrespectful of Culture and Race to view the various sub-Saharan African cultures, from Abyssinians to Zulus as being all one culture. I could develop the same argument about the Indian subcontinent or China or prett any other large-scale “culture.” Sorting large masses of humanity into convenient groups is the meat and potatoes of Academic advancement and of politicians*, but propagates an offensive absurdity and, most importantly, eradicates the humanity of individuals.
*Much of the politicians’ art of targeting their pandering to “groups” such as “Women” or “African-Americans” ignores the very meaningful subdivisions of those groups. For “women” the more salient traits predicting voting trends are often the divisions between single/married, with or without children, and occupation — the differences between waitress and law school professor are more profound than their shared “womanhood.” Similarly, the issue of being African-American is probably less important than church attendance and occupation, to name just two differentials. Treating “gender” and “race” as the most important facts of existence is sexist and racist, in spite of the claims that failing to count people by whether they void their bladders while sitting or standing is sexist.
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Except for the blue eyes, you can drop a couple of my brothers in any Arab country and they would be considered an Arab until they opened their mouths. I found recently that on my paternal DNA side that we have DNA match to many Arabs, and several Jewish families. According to the migration map my family left the mid-East to go to Northern Europe. So yea the mixes we think so distinct when we think of race … is NOT. However culture is pretty distinct.
We have the European-American culture with the Mormon mix. Arab culture is foreign to us. And so forth. I am sure a lot of people if they actually looked at their genetic DNA would become surprised.
Plus I am seeing a lot of words being subjugated into the Marxist meanings. Just a waste of good words too.
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Ho, yes! So much here. Random thoughts follow. ^_^
While I haven’t run across people who have stated that culture is in the DNA – the closest to that is the idea that a child adopted by parents of a different race should keep in touch with their heritage, which can get silly, I suppose. What I see more often is the idea that humans are all about nurture, no nature, even down to talent and achievement, which is just as idiotic, but it’s a way for small-minded people to look at someone else’s success and say, well, it’s all because he was the right social class/race/culture/etc. One of the worst things I’ve seen is crab bucket thinking. People don’t keep other people down. People keep themselves down, they’re imprisoned by the shackles in their own heads, and those are heavily cultural. Sometimes it’s “If I do that (talk correctly, get an education, etc), I’m betraying my culture,” sometimes it’s “Those snots would never let me join them” and sometimes it’s “I could never do that, I’m too lowly.”
On burkas, I’ve said the same kind of thing – why is it only the woman’s body that is considered so obscene it must remain covered in public? If men were wearing them, too, that would be different, but they don’t. I’m not wild about the neck to ankle coats and head scarves, either, but at least they leave the faces visible. There’s something especially repugnant about covering women’s faces. (A friend of mine had an Islamic gal as a classmate and asked her about it. The gal said, I love my religion. I hate my culture.)
And as for criticizing other cultures, and claims that that’s somehow racist – western culture used to do all the same things, right down to the treatment of women (and children and animals). Western culture evolved, so can any other culture. (Western culture did have the advantage that Christianity, when you get down to the source documents, has very few absolute declared rules beyond the Ten Commandments, which makes evolving a lot easier.) But it’s gotten insane, hasn’t it – Elizabeth Moon was de-invited as Guest of Honor at a convention in Wisconsin because she posted some blunt but accurate cultural criticisms, and talked about this very subject.
One way to get around things is to re-define culture. When I say “culture,” I mean things like food and art (and America needs help with all of these – I’ll take wonderful Mexican folk art over gallery crap any day ^_^). If western parents want their adopted Chinese daughters to know more about their heritage, it does mean that I get to see Chinese New Year celebrated in Houston, Texas, which is fine with me.
I think one of our culture’s biggest strength is that we criticize it. That shows how strong it is. (I notice left-wingers can’t take criticism and never criticize or laugh at themselves, which is very telling). There’s something seriously wrong with someone who can’t laugh at himself, or a culture that can’t stand criticism and can’t laugh at itself. That means a person or culture who can’t acknowledge imperfections and the idea that we’re all imperfect humans, trying to do the best we can.
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“There’s something especially repugnant about covering women’s faces”
Depends on how repugnant the womans face being covered is /runs and hides/
Seriously I agree with you, but that line was just itching for a smartalec reply.
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*blows raspberry at bearcat* ^_^
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Joins Laurie in blowing raspberry at ursine feline.
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As a woman of Mediterranean ancestry approaching 50, I have seriously contemplated the wisdom of ancestresses whose billowy blouses and skirts left EVERYTHING to the imagination. Keep your face okay, and you can still be a siren. :-P Bathing suits are an instrument of male oppression. (YES, I AM joking — and running away.)
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Actually, the burka makes sense if you live in a desert climate with hot sun and wind (apparently black is cooler in heat with a wind) and blowing sand and not a lot of water to bathe in frequently. But the men covered up everything, too, and had beards to cover faces.
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also, in tribal cultures with no law, you don’t display your women. Guys from the other tribe might want them. No reason to invite an attack.
BUT that time is far behind, and I hope doesn’t come back!
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That time is over in some places. It is not at all clear to me that it is over in all places at this time. Furthermore, even in places where it is gone, it seems quite likely that it could come back with the right societal collapse.
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Well, one advantage for living in a suppressive culture, being fully covered might occasionally make it easier to get away with crap as long as you don’t get caught on the spot. Witness: It was a woman. Police: Could you identify her? Witness: Well, her burka was the same blue every second woman wears…
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yes. Men do wear burkas for the same thing.
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Considering the biophysical response of a typical male upon seeing a comely young lass in a bikini, and considering how comfortable that isn’t when wearing a jock strap and sung wet trunks, I quite agree that women’s swimwear is an instrument for the oppression of males.
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That reminds me of the article I read once which equated the “Southern Belle” style of dress as instruments of male oppression. The scary part, if I remember the article correctly, was that the writer didn’t debate this as if it were to be proven, rather, she took it as an axiom.
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I luuuuuuved it when Karen Armstrong and a few others said the the burka/chador was originally from the Byzantine Empire and so (by heavy implication) it’s the fault of the Christians. No, the full-body veil and cloak combination is a development based on two verses from the Koran. In fact, even in Saudi, Bedouin women keep their eyes uncovered as a safety precaution and so they can work.
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“Conflating race and culture is racist… ”
I prefer “stupid” or “evil” depending upon the speaker. If the speaker has the intellectual capacity to be aware of the lie he’s uttering, then “evil stupidity” works for me. Something as destructive as equating culture and race and then basing a policy of accusations of racism on cultural preferences is worthy of no less than the harshest condemnation.
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Culture, to me, is the human race’s desire to belong and understand others. That doesn’t make the general stereotypes true, just accepted by those who won’t look deeper.
I think lumping a large group of people into a single “culture” is intellectually lazy. RES above touches on the point that even within certain “cultures” there exists highly differentiated aspects where one will look alien to another member from a different subset.
I heard all the time about “Arab culture” before OIF. Then I experienced it and saw that the same culture didn’t even exist within the same tribes or cities, much less within so large a group. Culture is learned and is not dependent on your skin color or your language preference.
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Culture and race are not the same thing, if they were Jews and Arabs would act the same (after all they have a large percentage of the same DNA).
I am unabashedly culturally biased, but call me racist and I start to see red. I don’t give a durn what color your skin is, just how you act.
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I don’t give a durn what color your skin is, just how you act.
Preeeeee-cisely. The assumption that, say, all people with “black” skin (which is really more of a chocolate-brown color anyway) will act alike is itself racist. Someone who grew up in American urban culture is going to have very different attitudes towards life, work, etc. than someone who grew up in Kenya and immigrated to the U.S. as an adult. (Incidentally, if you want to hear a full-fledged rant about laziness and entitlement, ask a Kenyan what he thinks of African-American culture sometime. Just be aware of who’s around you that might overhear — some heads may explode from the cognitive dissonance of hearing a black person expressing such “racist” attitudes. And yes, those are contempt-quotes.)
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I shall crib your explanation and use it, instead of the tedious one I already have, when asked why my children don’t speak Spanish. Mine has to do with the fact that you can’t (usually) teach small children a different language unless one adult in their early years speaks it to them most of the time (fulltime is better), and I wasn’t willing to communicate with my own children in a language that is not my main preference (and homeschool them in it); their father’s Spanish is pitiful (he did three levels at the local community college, would never let me help, and gave up).
Eight different Europeans had to leave the old continent and move to the US for my kids to exist. I think that’s cool. The result appears ‘white,’ which is convenient (that thing about playing the game with the lowest difficulty setting, except for the girl) – though I was careful never to designate them as that (we like our ancestors, and their 4 grandparents are still with us).
Last piece of total trivia: when I went to India as a Girl Guide, representing Mexico (and no, I don’t look ‘Mexican’, whatever that means – I am always surprising people by eavesdropping on their conversations, after which we all go into the tedious explanations of why I look ‘American’), one of the things that made me homesick was that the Indians (except for dress) reminded me so much of Mexicans in similar occupations, up to and including the Indian cook who watched my partner and me try to make tortillas by hand, smiled, took some masa, and quickly patted out a perfect one (from years of making chappatis).
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I ACTUALLY tried to speak Portuguese to Robert for the first 2 years, because I thought “bilingual/better.”
He IGNORED ME. Except for a couple of words, he picked up nothing. I guess to him Portuguese was gibberish because I didn’t COMMUNICATE with anyone in it. (Dan doesn’t speak it.) The funny thing is both of them do this long comedy routine in “fake Portuguese” from hearing me speak to my mom on the phone.
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My parents would speak Spanish when they wanted to talk about something that went over my head. This did not make me learn it; rather the opposite. I’m a monoglot. (I can count to 20 in spanish, and know a handful of words… but I know a handful of Japanese words, too, from watching subtitled anime (you get much more nuance that way!).)
*sigh*
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My older son would rather learn Russian than Portuguese. Eh.
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Perhaps Russian is better to swear in? *beth holds the halo above her head with a stick*
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I also only really have English, and prefer subtitles to dubbing. However, I don’t do it to avoid missing nuance. I process text better than sound, so reading and keeping track of everything visually, while just ignoring the voices is a lot easier.
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I was blessed to have other Portuguese speakers around when my oldest was little, making it easier for me to be consistent with him and for him to associate it as a language. Some of his first words were in Portuguese, and he was at least two before he started calling them ‘shoes’ instead of ‘papos’ (his baby speak version of ‘sapatos’). In the end I gave up speaking it with him because I was tired of getting grief from my brother and my father-in-law for not speaking English. Nothing harsh, but I was stressed out and the teasing was just too much. I’ve regretted giving up ever since, but lacked the determination to return to it when they are already quite fluent in English. And so the boys only know a few words and phrases – mostly ones they hear when they’re in trouble.
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oh. well, one word Robert learned was typical Portuguese first word “Da-me” — give me. Pronounced… the way you expect (for others than Free-Range.) So there I was in a bank in South Carolina. Southern dowager behind me. Robert must have been under a year, and was throwing a “I’m bored” fit, which included asking for everything, including the light fixtures and the red tape. Everything was “da-me, da-me.” And as I turn around, to see if Dan could take over in line and let me take the kid outside, the lady behind me looks down her long nose and goes “Aren’t THOSE the words they ALWAYS learn first?” And I realized she heard “d*mn” Given the Portuguese word for knife — faca — I almost gave up the whole thing then.
The boys now know a nice lengthy spew of “those words” because I apparently always say the same, in the same order, when I burn myself in the kitchen. As a result when Robert broke his ACL and the medic was feeling at his knee, he said the whole diatribe. And the medic, whose mom turned out to be Spanish, paused and said “What was that about my mom?” To this day Robert thinks that was unusually bad luck, getting a Spanish speaker for a medic.
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… including the Indian cook who watched my partner and me try to make tortillas by hand, smiled, took some masa, and quickly patted out a perfect one (from years of making chappatis).
There are versions of Roti and Paratha from the Punjab region uses cornmeal in their preparation.
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I have a far easier time recognizing the fact that culture has been conflated with race than I ever had seeing how others viewed the terms “Talent” and “Genius” in your post a few days ago. I’ve seen stories of third-generation part-Asians being asked about their “culture,” and receiving looks of disbelief when they tell the questioner about their American culture, followed by “No, I meant your Asian culture.” (also – Asian? That’s probably as crazy as “hispanic”. How broad of a classification is that, anyway?
I find it interesting, however, that many of the most-enjoyed stories out there are about a child being taken a reared in a culture he or she was not born to, and excelling in that culture (Tarzan is the only one that comes immediately to mind, and he wasn’t even raised by humans, though I know there are more), and yet these goofs assume that race and culture go hand in hand.
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“How broad of a classification is that, anyway?”
No no, they’re all the same, man! You know Siberians have so much in common with the Hmong, and they’re both almost indistinguishable from the Japanese! /sarc
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Was Tarzan African (he was born in Africa), English (his parents were English), or Ape (he was raised as an Ape)?
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Brilliant! Here, have a cookie. *hands bearcat a snickerdoodle*
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Ape.
I raised boys. APE is a no-brainer. I was talking to my mom about younger boy the other day and she said “Congratulations on getting him to the homo sapiens sapiens stage, now let’s try for worthwhile human being.” And that’s about that.
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My grandmother said every adult male is a miracle. I’m not sure if she meant that they didn’t manage to destroy themselves or their parents didn’t kill them. (She had three boys.)
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I routinely told my boys “if you live to be 18” and it was for both those reasons, though Robert was more the second and Marshall more the first. For a while there, we were on first name terms with emergency room docs because of Marsh. This included the famous “Dancing in socks on the edge of claw-foot bathtub incident” that we blame for ALL his insanity (though it might have proven he was insane already.)
Mind you, women aren’t much better. I suspect if I had a daughter, the threat of the barrel and being fed through the hole would have been made. And some — me — are as bad as the boys. As late as 19 I was hanging by my legs from the cover over the kitchen door in order to greet my brother with a “good evnink” as he came out. (And was totally puzzled when he said I’d never be civilized. Sigh.)
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My Daddy used to tell me that I wouldn’t make sixteen, either he would kill me or I would kill myself — he didn’t know which would come first. I have considered every birthday since as pure gravy. ;-)
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I think I’ve mentioned that my wife compares me to a Silverback Gorilla, so yeah, probably ape.
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There was a Chinese couple in our Church (both born outside the US) and their boys were raised in the US.
Their boys were all American kids. [Wink]
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My great-grandparents immigrated around the turn of the (last) century. Perhaps it was WW1, but there was an extreme pressure to be “American” and speak English. The result was that whole communities that did have a non-English language in common, refused to teach their children. It went from arguments about what language bible to use (Norwegian was good enough for Abraham, it’s good enough for me!) to my father’s generation mostly only hearing Norwegian when his parents were discussing Christmas presents in front of the kids, or those mostly meaningless phrases like Uff da sprinkled in the English.
A lot of the culture was kept, certainly traditions around holidays and whatnot, as well as an interest in and pride in cultural heroes (my brother’s name is Leif.) But the language was lost. And there is a lot of sadness and regret about that.
It may seem foolish, and maybe its annoying, but I find myself encouraging newer immigrants to hold on to what they can. There is a reason that Americans seem compulsive about researching family histories and lineages.
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Synova,
no offense, but those things are better in the rearview mirror. It’s the same thing as everyone wanting to have ANCESTORS, it’s those pesky grandparents who are a pain.
My kids are growing up here. They are American. That’s the culture they have to navigate. I don’t oppose their studying language or culture on their own, but they should do it as adults, taking an interest. Some stuff they get, from my stories, like stuff around the holidays. But that’s the “how quaint” not the hampering level of culture. In Portugal culture and history can feel like a ball and chain on one’s entire life. I don’t want to import that effect.
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Don’t know. There is not one American Christmas, or Easter, or Chanukah or even Thanksgiving. I have lived in a few different regions and experienced this. Yes, part of this is the influence of your various families’ places of origin. But it also has to do with the region in which the family settled, and the profession and socio-economic niche in which your family landed.
Even the within multi generational white America there is no one ‘culture.’ Do you eat roast beef or turkey on Christmas, lamb or ham at Easter? Do you attend an evening candle lighting on Christmas Eve, Midnight Mass, or skip the whole church thing? Do you grill in your back yard with friend on Fourth of July, or picnic with cold fried chicken?
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For me and mine, my goal is a sort of cultural fusionism. I am an American first and foremost, but there are aspects of my heritage that I want to be a part of my family culture. The Oyster Wife and I are typical mutts, and it gives me a great opportunity to pick and choose the best parts of our family history to emphasize. The practicality of my English ancestors, the rebelliousness of her IRA-sympathyzing Irish stock, the livestock acquisition habits of my Scottish roots… :) Of course I want to know the languages and speak them (someday), but living in the here and now is the most important part.
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Yours too? Mine were “encouraged” to depart Scotland during the Rough Wooing, then “persuaded” to depart Ulster for North America, where it was “suggested” that west of the Mississippi might be a better locale. Apparently the neighbors’ livestock liked some of my ancestors so much that the cattle, horses, and pigs would follow them to the new locations.
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So that’s where my livestock went – course as a Viking my young teenage males would bring home treasures, slaves, etc. It kept the young men busy and out of the women’s hair. lol
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Mine were more recent. My Grandpa used to talk about rounding up mustangs and driving them to Canada to sell (from Montana). Since he used to do this with the Sheriff it was ok :)
When doing something illegal it is always helpful to have the law enforcement working beside you ;) The morals you learn from your ancestors are sometimes interesting.
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Heh, my great grand father was the first police chief of Finney County Kansas. One day he got word a couple of bank robbers were coming in on the evening train from Scott City, so he and another officer were waiting when they got off — and just shot them. Apparently it was cheaper than a trial and hanging them. This was in about 1911…
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Did he shoot them with a 1911?
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The most embarrassing aspect of American ethnicity is how little we really know about our “cultures.” Africa is home to a vast number of very different cultures, and almost no black Americans have any idea where their ancestors came from. We (mostly?) whites generally have not much more knowledge. I went to a few Quinn family reunions, and the short printed family histories began after the Revolution and skipped daintily over the US Civil War ( I think we were descended from a fifth son of the Anglified Quins one n given a King’s grant near Charlotte NC and probably sided with the Brits.) And there were the usual bits of background you didn’t talk about. Everyone ignored how Jewish my dad looked, rather like most people back east ignored Dan’s Native American appearance. And the same obscure origins (anyone know if the Dutch name “Detter”, grandmother paternal side, has any Jewish significance? Sarah says she was astonished at how much my Dad looked as if he were Portuguese of Jewish ancestry. Nose like a David in a classic painting, olive skin even in the latter years he spent mostly indoors.) My Scottish clans on my mother’s side are Calhoun (Colquohon originally, I found out a few years ago) and Buchanan. I no nothing about them aside from what I’ve read; they showed up in the Blue Ridge mountains about the time of Culloden, and apparently thought it was pointless and dangerous to tell their kids how they came to be there. Recently I found a mention of a Buchanan at the end of a line in an old Scottish poem, and from the last word of the next line I know my mother and her people were pronouncing the name the way the old Scots did: “BUCK-kannon.”
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The Calhoun’s I knew about in the Blue Ridge mountains raised hounds, but I have no idea of why they showed up there.
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Charles, you might try the clan listings in the clan classifieds of “The Highlander” magazine. Their back issues might also have articles about Calhoun and Buchanan. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen articles mentioning them.
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One “fun” about Americans tracing our ancestors is that some of them may have changed their names. Dad tried tracing the Howard line but ended with a Howard who came to Indiana (if I remember correctly) from Kentucky. However, Dad was never able to find a trace of him where he said he was from. Dad wondered if he wasn’t a Howard when he left. [Evil Grin]
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Oh yea – we found interesting lines like that – DNA helps sometimes… plus it might be just embarrassment. One of my hubby’s lines lost their Virginia estate after the death of the owner. His wife and children went to Kentucky and then some of the children went to Mississippi. Half of the family fought for the Yankees and half for the Rebs. It was definitely the history of the Civil War. The family that fought for the Yankees (most of the family were Rebs) –parents died, and the children were raised by an uncle. They lost the rest of the family due to hard feelings.
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Everybody in Odessa was sure that my mom was an Odessan Jew. They kept asking her for directions, and she doesn’t speak a word of Russian or Ukrainian or nothin’. My dad is fluent in Russian, so he was pretty amused, to say the least. :) It turned out that one of the families on her side of the family was Jewish, way back, and that some of them emigrated to Odessa, and they all have their hair go speckled black and white like hers went. But we’re a pretty mongrel bunch, so no ancestry info we get is likely to surprise us!
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Two things: my boss in Charlotte was Russian and convinced I was Russian also. He used to walk behind me and mutter something in Russian and when I told him I didn’t understand it, he told me that we’d all said what we had to say to get in the cold war. :-P
Second I KNOW at least one of my line is Iberian Jews (conversos) and from what I’ve been able to determine, at least three of them are. Recently I read on the web of a gene found amid Iberian Jews that leads to frequent pneumonia. (In fact, I found out later, my mom had pneumonia so often she now has emphisema from the continuous infection) I went “funny. I always thought that was because I was so premature.” And then I went “Well, guess that explains why Robert, not premature, built like a brick sh*thouse had pneumonia twice before eighteen, and Marshall ditto” Then I read further and found this was a recessive gene, which means both parents had to carry it. And then I went “Hey, sweetie, I KNOW what one of your ancestresses did with the olive-skinned peddler behind the kitchen door!”
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Oh that is funny – I guess being Sumerian isn’t a bad thing then?
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One other bit of “tom-foolery” that went on in the deep, dark, past was the invasion of northern Spain and Portugal by Celts around 300BC, and then again in a couple of later migrations. So you could end up with red-headed, fair-skinned, freckled, blue-eyed Iberians. In my case, the blue eyes and brown hair of my Scottish ancestors dominate over the Amerind ancestry, although most of us have the high cheekbones and wide face.
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Well – my grandfather said there was American Indian blood in us except I can’t find it. But we have the crocked little fingers, large earlobes, one of my eyes has an eyelid that sinks, and the toes. I have a wide toe box. i can’t wear normal shoes. I found that out when I started having foot problems. I was shoving my feet in normal shoes and my toes were hurting. So… I am blonde blue-eyed, and the structure of a Viking with the other stuff. My great-grandmother was dark. (dark hair, blue eyes, and also those characteristics)… and except for the coloring i look very much like her. –so yea, there is probably a dab in us ;-)
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Wide toe boxes are also saxon. And I have the crooked little fingers and I’d bet you money I have no Amerindian blood.
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ummm,,, so it is a yea/nay – I’ll have to do a autosomonol DNA to see what percentage – and if it would be a definite answer.
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It would be amusing to get a DNA test for me… According to my mom’s mom, who did all the genealogy stuff, the family line has a branch that basically goes into Tennassee, turns into a gordian knot of inbreeding (“The Rayes married the Pratts and the Pratts married the Rayes till everyone started calling them the Raye-Pratts.”), and comes out again.
On the other side, there’s my grandad, who was born in 1900, and died in 2003. His dad was a circuit-riding preacher and that’s all I know. :(
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BTW even though I don’t have balance when walking, bicycling or other activities, I was really good at running and karate…. I think it was the feet. ;-)
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It is. There was an article on Scientific American about how Saxon feet give you an advantage when running on unstable terrain.
My boys, somehow, both got the ugliest feet on G-d’s green earth. Also hardest to shoe. Size 17 and 13. Wide, of course.
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Oh yea – advantage is right. I used to run through the desert, when I was well… and yes – WIDE of course. I am size nine and I had to finally call Nike to get a pair of shoes to fit my feet. Nothing around here was bigger than a size B for women. It was like pushing my feet into Cinderella’s slipper.
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Amazon. It’s how we get boa… shoes for Robert.
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For awhile I was wearing men shoes (size seven medium) and they fit. And then the hubby started borrowing them. *snort I have the same size feet and bigger hands than he has.
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I’m your basic European mutt – German, Irish, English, Welsh, Dutch, Danish. However, eight generations back, my dad found a full blooded Cherokee in our family tree. I laugh about the three definite genetic features that line gave me, two good and one not so good. Plus it’s fun to talk about being kept down by da man. :-P
The two good – lack of facial hair means I only have to shave every two to three days(got me made fun of when I was a teenager, but now that most adults complain about shaving being a pain in the ass, I get to laugh at them); and I am immune to poinon oak and poison ivy. Given what I’ve done with most of my adult life, that’s a good thing.
The bad – the side of my family that has Cherokee also has a propensity towards alcoholism. Damn that fire water! (Another good reason I don’t drink :-D )
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I didn’t know immunity to poison oak was hereditary, (although it makes sense it would be). While not completely immune, I have little reaction to it, when guys I worked with would get it bad and have to go to the doctor and get steriods to take; I would get half a dozen bumps like mosquito bites. I did know a guy that was immune completely once though, he used to cut it with a power saw, paying no attention to where the chips (with plenty of sap on them obviously) were flying because it didn’t bother him. You did not get behind him when he was running a saw anywhere there was poison oak.
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Weird stuff — I once got into poison oak and my legs swelled up to three times the size… also, I’m not allergic to mosquitoes in EUROPE. Here, this huge lump forms under my skin and hurts like heck, and eventually bursts. This is made worse by the fact that ON EITHER CONTINENT I’m haute mosquito cuisine. They flock to me. Which is one of the reasons I can’t QUITE bring myself to leave Colorado.
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I am also tasty on both continents. I don’t know about poison oak since I don’t remember ever running into it. But I do know that there is a cure for the stinging nettle phenomenon. I can’t remember the plant, but it grows close to it. You just rub it on the stinging and it goes away.
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rubbing mud on stinging nettles also works well.
I am very allergic to bees on the West Coast, the ones in Idaho however do not affect me. I know several other people that are allergic to bees on the coast that have came here to Idaho and been stung, all of them were either not affected, or very mildly so compared to their reactions to coastal bees. I have no idea why this is, since I know of at least one person who grew up here who is very allergic to the local bees, but on the whole allergic reactions to bees are much less common here.
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I am not allergic to bees or wasps. Not even a bump and I have been stung by Idaho and Utah bees several times. I don’t like being stung though.
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As for coastal bees – I don’t think I have ever been stung. I have been around Africanized bees and they don’t even bother me. It was strange. Of course I leave them alone too. ;-)
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Wow, this stuff of not being allergic to the same species in different regions is weird. The mosquitoes, not so much, because the bacteria load would be different.
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I’m also immune to poison oak and poison ivy, I used to PLAY with the darned stuff. Mosquitoes don’t bite me, and when they do, they frequently die. I’ve been bee-stung, snake-bit, and scorpion-stung so many times, I’m immune to them, also. Something about growing up wild in the woods of central Louisiana… My poor wife is mosquito-bait in capital letters. Of course, all that, plus some other schtuff I’ve done over the past 55 years or more, is coming out now in osteoarthritis, diabetes, sleep apnea, tinnitus, and a half-dozen other ailments, major and minor.
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It is amazing what the human body can become immune to. I didn’t grow up around poison oak, or snakes (and have never been snake-bit). I did grow up drinking out of creeks and beaver ponds though, and much like the Mexicans from Mexico, I am immune to giardia, I can drink the same water that will make others deathly ill, with no ill effects whatsoever.
And I didn’t have a reaction to bee stings until I had been stung at least 30 times, so even though the local bees don’t bother me, I still carry Benadryl during the summer, just in case one does some day.
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It’s possible you’re not human?
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Wait – there are humans here? (Running away!!!) :-)
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The fun thing was, as a child, to chase the other kids with poison ivy or poison oak in my hands and yell, “I’m coming for you!”
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I knew a guy. Apparently, when he was a kid, he was very immune to Poison Ivy, (IIRC, Poison Ivy, Poison Oak, and Poison Sumac have the same active compound.) His brother, on the other hand, was so sensitive that he got real sick just going outside, from the pollen, and was kept inside. He was apparently so jealous of his brother staying inside, away from the chores, that he tried eating poison ivy, to no ill effect.
He is said to have had a weaker, but still abnormally strong tolerance for the stuff later in life. Some of his grandkids had a higher tolerance for Poison Ivy, and some didn’t.
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My brother is like that. His immunity to poison oak and poison ivy is less than mine, but they still don’t make him really sick. He also has a box-full of other allergies, including allergies to most wood pollen. He has a degree in forestry, of all things.
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When I was a kid I had severe allergies to most pollens, dusts, and molds as well as mild asthma. When I was in about first grade I remember the doctor showing my parents x-rays of my lungs. They were over fifty percent dark like a smoker with severe emphazyma. He told them I would never be able to run, and should be kept inside with a air filter running (and away from people that smoked). Obviously he didn’t know me that well, as I was a hyperactive child who went most places on the run, and spent practically all my time outside. My parents did try to get my grandpa’s to not smoke around me (or at least not in enclosed spaces) but since one smoked 4 packs a day, and the other smoked 5+ this was somewhat of a lost cause. (If you got them in the same room together my dad used to say that you had to lie on the floor to see across the room).
By the time I was in junior high I was running 10 mile races, so I take much of what doctors say with a grain of salt
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Oh, no. Look, in the North we had so much contact with English, if I don’t have a decent amount of English, I’d be shocked. Yes, I mean to do the DNA test, Cyn, but there’s no rush. I KNOW I have Irish, and possibly Scottish, so… (shrug) Three of my grandparents were blue eyed and two were blond. I have dark hair but hazel eyes. Mom has dark hair but is green eyed… It wouldn’t even be that surprising for Dan and I, if we’d had a couple more kids to have thrown off a blue eyed blond or redhead. Even though people would have looked at us funny. As is both boys are way darker than us, and way BIGGER — taller, and built on a larger scale. They look adopted.
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Recessive genes are funny – both my parents had/have brown eyes, my eyes are so dark they’re almost black, my wife’s parents both had brown eyes, yet hers are a strange, very light brown with green and blue in them, and both boys have ice blue eyes. I occasionally ask her whether it was the mailman or just some random guy who fathered our children.
Then I duck, of course… ;-)
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Snicker. People looked at my sibling, my parents, and I, and then would ask sib or me which one of our parents worked at the nuke plant upstream from town! Just skip-generation recessives striking again.
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The center of my eyes is green, surrounded by hazel. Both kids have informed me this is weird.
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The center of my eyes (iris not pupil) are a lighter hazel, surrounded by a darker hazel that at times looks green, and at times looks blue.
I have ID’s that variously describe my eyes as blue, green, and brown. They have never been close to brown, and I would have argued this at the time I got the ID if I would have noticed.
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My mom has brown-and-teal eyes. (My sire has blue, as I recall.) I have a thin ring of light brown around my pupils, then they go to a mottled lightish-green, with a dark teal band around the very outside. They’re not really green, and they’re not blue, so my driver’s license says “gray.” My spouse informs me that in some light, the brown looks purple. I make O_o faces at him.
He, and his whole family, are pure blue-eyed. Our kid has silvery gray-blue eyes (one of which has markings that read, clock-like, 9:20 or so), of the sort that I surely wish I had!
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My eyes are blue with a dark blue ring around it.
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Wow, Beth, you’ve got way too many things in common with my wife (who is also Beth). I described it differently, but that’s pretty much the way her eye color is.
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Recently I read on the web of a gene found amid Iberian Jews that leads to frequent pneumonia.
Interesting.
Momma’s momma could trace her line to the finer families of pre-revolutionary America and some of those Scots who had settled in the southern Appalachians as well. Momma’s father’s family had settled in the Russian pale after being kicked out of the Iberian peninsula for being Jewish. His mother had been sent to New York ahead of yet another round of pogroms.
Momma had pneumonia at least six times growing up, as well as a number of other illnesses. It was written off under the shoe maker’s principle: as the shoe maker’s children have no shoes, the doctor and nurses’ child got sick.
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Um… we’re related somewhere back in time ;)
Actually there are so many characteristics Dan and I have in common that eventually when we do the cheek swab thing and they tell you who your nearest “relatives” are living near you, they’ll say “funny thing..”
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As long as you don’t wind up charged with incest based on DNA testing…
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My aunt works in a doctors office, and her children were always sick growing up. We always attributed it to her bringing home the various cruds from working around sick people all day.
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Could be, but during WWII Momma was often farmed out to her grandfather in south Georgia, as her parents were both officers in the Navy medical corps.
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