One Drop Of Nonsense

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

You, dear reader currently reading this, are almost certainly of miscegenated race (to use the good old, racially-loaded word of the 19th century.) And by that I mean that within the last two thousand years or so you have received blood from someone whom an American would identify at first sight as “another race.”

The exceptions are people from populations so isolated over the last two thousand years or so that they are effectively a single “race.” And even those, if you look beyond two thousand years are more meaningful mixes of well… the original human “races” or perhaps “Subspecies” is a better term here: Homo Sapiens, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Nadeli, Homo Denisovan, Homo Soloensis. I’m probably missing ten or so of them, because every time I dip in after a while away there is another species discovered that contributed to our DNA.

I’ll note that those ancient species had a heck of a lot more differences from each other than any of our so called “races” which are mostly indistinguishable under the microscope, unless you’re looking for specific diseases of isolated populations, and even that, often, is not congruent with what we view as racial characteristics.

I have to tell you one of the things that drives me completely bonkers about my fellow Americans born and raised here is the way they’re completely obsessed with reading racial tea leaves.

I had a moment of shock when a friend and I selected someone for the cover of a romance who looked rather like a girl who is my cousin on both sides of the family (mom’s cousin married dad’s cousin) and the writer objected because the cover was “obviously” Hispanic and the character wasn’t.

Here I must point out that Hispanic and Latin are CULTURES, not races. Though Americans moved happily from the identification of a common culture to considering it a “race” and now insist you have to have Indian blood to belong to either, all of which is frankly goofy, since there are Hispanic and Latin cultures where the majority of the people consider themselves white, or for that matter part African.

The obsession with reading racial tea leaves from features strikes me as somewhere between giggle-worthy and the sort of horror you get when you find mom eating live snakes in the kitchen. Because it is for real and actually completely insane.

Part of this, and it worries me a little, because I wonder if it’s intentional malice or a fear of goring the deeply-cherished racial cows of the population, is that history is very poorly taught in the US.

I keep running into well-intentioned people who believe that wherever slavery existed black people were always slaves and white people masters.

I will illustrate this by mentioning the priest who on the feast day of St. Perpetua and St. Felicity gave a sermon on how the two saints overcame “racial prejudice” and proceeded, in the happy assumption that one of them was black and one white. This is in fact possible — I bow to Suburbanshee if she has sure knowledge — but not absolutely sure just from the fact one owned the other. It’s entirely possible (and some of the orthodox icons depict them this way) that one of them was of Mediterranean subrace and the other blond. BUT even if one of them was black, under Roman rules, the black one might very well be the mistress and the white one the slave.

HOWEVER every single depiction by and for Americans represent the slave as black. And a priest, who surely learned some Roman history in seminary (I PRESUME) also assumed this as correct.

This amounts to a rat’s nest of racial idiocy in American heads. Many schools teach — by default — that white people invented slavery to enslave black people. This discomfits both races, because it makes blacks feel both righteously oppressed and also that there must be something profoundly broken with them, else who could they have been thus selected for oppression. At best it stokes permanent anger at the world and white people. At worst it creates utter despondency. (Note that a lot of black parents object to CRT on that exact ground.)

To come up with that just-so story, it requires ignoring the fact that in fact slavery continues in Africa, and that the enslaved are mostly Africans, but also any skin color that comes within the slaver’s grip.

It also requires ignoring that every possible and impossible race imaginable has been both slaver and enslaved. The reason for this is simple: in subsistence societies there is always some number of tasks that no one with free will will want to do. Also, because humans are flawed and derived from Great Apes, we find we like owning vanquished enemies. At its origin, slavery is the “merciful” option, where instead of killing every member of the defeated tribe, you kept the inoffensive ones alive but as slaves, so that you could control them and they wouldn’t endanger your tribe. Which means most slaves were originally almost indistinguishable from the slavers. And yes, that you’re descended from uncountable numbers of slaves and their owners, be you black as pitch or blond as a Viking.

Yes, the most recent iteration of slaves, in modern Europe/America were Africans, mostly because on discovery of Africa the Europeans plugged into existing networks of slave trading. In other words, because African slaves were plentiful and cheap.

I’ll also note that since the industrial revolution, and through long and patient work of Christians, there were groups opposing slavery. In fact,t here were some working tirelessly from the sixteenth century or so on (That we know of.) These people were mostly “white” Europeans, of well-to-backgrounds, who fought tirelessly for the freedom of the enslaved, despite the fact that the enslaved looked quite different from them.

I’ll note in passing that yes, the Portuguese, Italians, Greeks and other Mediterranean sub races were often viewed by Northern Europeans as a “lighter African” mostly I believe because we tan, though possibly also because there were more black Roman citizens among us. Maybe.

Also, because of Othello the moor, Englishmen tend to think of “Moor” as black. Which is somewhat crazy cakes. The Middle East/North Africa of Mohammed was a boiling mess of remains of Roman mercenaries, Africans, etc. So, they were a ah “melting pot.” However, through the long (around 1000 years) occupation of the peninsula, the “Moors” became practically indistinguishable from anyone else, largely through enthusiastic taking of slaves on both sides of the moveable frontier.

Sure, you can say that the South of Portugal, which contains a higher rate of Mouriscos (secret Moors. Eh, in some variety) than the rest of the country is generally more tan, shorter, and of more gracile build than the North. But that assumption that this is because of “moors” would ignore the fact that the starting populations of both sides were different (The North being notably Celtic, the South having more Greek Colonies) and that the contributions to the genetic pool were by and large different. (Won’t bore you, but the South was more Visigothic, and the North more Swabian.)

In other words, looking at current populations for the characteristics of past races is sort of like looking at linguistics, and deciding that “HUman” is propaganda, since it refers only to races other than white, being derived form Hue-man. (No, it’s not. Just like History is not His-story. Both are insane and cause me to scream and foam at the mouth.)

Incidentally, the same applies to 23-and-me which compares your genetics to those of current populations. This means that even if you have fairy well documented Amerindian ancestry from the North East, that will show as “English or Irish” mostly because those tribes stopped existing, subsumed by English and Irish populations, which means that this is how they’ll show.

So, even if your “genetics” show as pure Scandinavian, Germanic, British, whatever, let me reassure you that you are in fact miscegenated as is the rest of the human race.

(It was hilarious before they had enough of a Portuguese sample, to see my genetics show up as…. well, all of Europe, part of Africa, and a decent amount of Amerindian. They have …. shaken out differently now.)

Anyway, all this came to a head with my watching the Bridgerton series. As other people know, it bothers the living daylights out of me to cast well-known historical figures as another race. Not because there can’t be decent actors of another race, but because I know there is a percentage of the population who takes fictional movies and shows as revealing “the truth.”

My mom, who is better educated (alas) than most American high school graduates is one of those. She will adapt her vision of the past according to some crazy movie she just watched. (The number of arguments I’ve had.)

For those who haven’t watched Bridgerton (bog standard regency romances, with gorgeous, if not period-accurate clothing) they cast a certain number of noblemen as black or indian or other “races” and the English Queen in Bridgerton is black.

The buried history in the mini-series (suggested and Heinleined in) is that black and white people coexisted in England side by side, until the king married a black Queen, and then suddenly mixed marriages were allowed.

This is obviously a fantastic parallel world history. Yes,t here were black people in England in the regency. I’m sorry to tell you there were very few and 99% of them were slaves or servants brought by people who had lived in Africa.

There was no “black nobility” and no system of apartheid.

HOWEVER as we found out, American people absolutely believe this nonsense. They believe Queen Charlotte (mostly German, honestly) was “black” based on a very bad portrait and rumors of a Moorish ancestress. (Note this rumor was almost certainly political slander. Also that Moor at that time in the peninsula depending on whether in the South or the North might mean slim, small and tan, but did not mean AFRICAN.) Weirdly the best debunking I found was from Quora.

HOWEVER I also found endless pages of well-educated black-Americans celebrating Queen Charlotte for “Black history month.”

Let me also point out that both the Queen and her husband (Yes, mad king George) were ardent abolitionists and that did she have any legitimate hint of African blood ALL the opposition would have fixated on this, and the caricatures would have been next level. However this never happened. Queen Charlotte was and looked German, even if a portrait can imply “stereotypical” African features…. As long as you remember that those features exist in a lot of other races, and that a lot of them are also Neanderthal.

Sure, if you go with the one drop theory, Queen Charlotte was black. So is everyone else. EVERYONE else, even those whose 23andme swears they’re pure Scandinavian. Because sometime in the last two thousand years all of us got an African ancestor, somewhere, on one of the many, many lines that fed into our family. (Note genealogy is also a lie to some extent, since it’s impossible to follow every single female (if you’re tracking the male. Vice versa otherwise) line that dropped into your family, and everyone who fed into every other of those lines.)

The problem is that it was the rats in the head of the American black producers of the series that led them to create this entire parallel universe which they THINK IS TRUE on the basis of “well the queen was black.” WITHOUT LOOKING.

And now those rats are reproducing everywhere, but most notably in black American heads, who now believe that “Well, the king married a black queen, so it must be true that the Americans rebelled to keep enslaving the black people.”

This is all not just arrant nonsense, but poisonous bullshit, and has no contact whatsoever with reality.

What can we do about it?

Correct it, ruthlessly, whenever we come across it. And keep pointing out that a queen who was blond and blue eyed was not in fact “black” unless everyone is. And that reading racial tea leaves is a pseudo-science, like phrenology.

I would very much appreciate if we could put this behind us so may family doesn’t keep getting asked “what is your racial background” by complete strangers. (And not just census takers, whom I like to answer with “human.”)

Look, in the end, the darkest African and the lightest Scandinavian have more in common with each other than not. To pretend otherwise is arrant nonsense.

Yes, our far-distant ancestors developed racism as a necessary survival tool (along with the uncanny valley discomfort) because you could fall into the hands of another hominin band and become “food”. (The chimps are less discriminating and will also eat babies of their own band.)

We are now past that, and I would like it not to return. Yes, there are physical characteristics that go with certain character traits, but it’s harder to track than you think, and they’re often things that have nothing to do with race, let alone racial stereotypes.

We all have one drop of slaves and enslaved, or saints, sinners, murderers, murder victims, kings and peasants, ascetics and whores. And we all have all the inclinations of all of mankind in varying degrees.

It’s what you make of it and with it that determines whether you can wear “human” as a crown, or in fact get cast out of the human race for shoving in line.

It’s time to stop with the nonsense.

(Update: fixed wrong word. Thank you John S. for pointing it out. The other one still comes up first for me, but I’m coming to the conclusion my search engine is weird.)

339 thoughts on “One Drop Of Nonsense”

  1. I’m sitting in the cafeteria giggling a little at an imagined conversation.

    Me: “… So, St. Patrick was black, then? ‘Cause his whole backstory was getting enslaved by the Irish…”

    Them: (presumably) “Uh, well… No, you idiotic Christian, St. Patrick wasn’t even real! He’s just a myth invented by your church!”

    Me: (giving up) “Well then, who drove the snakes out of Ireland, huh? Huh? Answer me THAT!”

        2. That sounds like someone who just volunteered to be thrown into the Celtic Sea to see how long he lasts.

    3. My first guess is, there were never any snakes in Ireland in the first place. It’s an island in a cold sea, so the barriers to snakes reaching Ireland could be insurmountable.
      ———————————
      Remember when you could walk down a sidewalk, and the worst thing you worried about was stepping in dogshit?

      2. Nah. Have to disagree. If there were no snakes in Ireland originally, whenever that was, some asshoe would have imported some and turned them loose just for fun. He probably had blue hair, too.

      3. If you go waaaaayyyy back, to when the land access between Europe, Britain, and Ireland was still open, apparently there were a few reptiles that managed to make it that far. Then the sea-level rose, and I suspect the climate burp called the Younger Dryas finished off most reptiles. It’s been a while since I read about that period in Ireland’s prehistory, so I might be misremembering.

    4. St Patrick was also one of the hostages of the legendary Niall of the Nine Hostages, and escaped…

  2. The big headache is that there are racial profiteers, who aggravate the issue for power and profit. It’s not new…I’ve read comments from 150 years ago bewailing the fact. But it does the general public no good.

    There’s also an appalling ignorance of basic history. Which irks me to no end. You study history to learn from the mistakes of others…because some of those blunders have fatal consequences.

    1. Leftists need to push division and strife to achieve power and impose their agenda. There must always be someone to hate, and goats to be scaped. Class warfare didn’t work to impose their totalitarian agenda so they are going back to race.

  3. Amen.

    I have also had two reports (Beck and Clay and Buck) on the new pseudohistory movie The Warrior Queen, about an African tribe with basically an all-female King’s guard (and harem), that enslaved or beheaded their enemies until defeated by the French; the movie pointedly ignoring everything that couldn’t be twisted into a conventional anti-colonial narrative.

    1. Worse, they were slavers. Hollywood just glorified a bunch of slave-raiders. Because Black Woman Power.

  4. Oh well, if you go back far enough you can ‘prove’ anything you like about your ancestors. I can claim descent from Charlemagne the Great of France, because my family name was attached to a noble of that House and the first known bearer of it had a prefix which can, with some effort, be translated as ‘son of the king’. So kindly curtsey deeply if we should ever meet, and in return I will bow deeply in respect for your own ancestry.

    1. If the lineage information is right, I’m a direct descendant of Sommerled, founder of Clan Donald, Lord of the Isles, and conqueror of half of what is now Scotland (pay no attention to those Lowlanders in Edinburgh).

      Which counts for nothing when confronted by a vending machine. 🙂

      1. The direct male line descendant of Gengis Khan drives a bulldozer in England.
        And gets flustered by a man in a bathrobe.

      2. I got El Cid in the genetic lottery. King Henry the VIII more recently, through one of his “ladies.” (My Mom spent 10+ hours per day on genealogical research).

    3. Given the number of official wives, official lady-friends, and probable one-night-stands Charlemagne had, there’s a lot of truth in calling him “The Father of Europe.”

      What fascinates me is how competent Charles V’s bastards were compared to his legitimate children. (Granted, Phillip II had some disadvantages, including trying to micromanage the New World while sitting in Madrid . . .)

        1. Yes. The Austrian Habsburgs managed just enough out-crosses to keep things working after the Spanish side got to be too close kin to themselves. (We will not discuss Franz Josef marrying his first cousin, and the results.)

    4. And I’ve read that statistically, everyone with European ancestry is descended from Temujin . Time to resurrect the Golden Horde? 🙂

      1. Actually, I misspoke; “descended from” implies direct line of descent. A better phrasing would have been “related to”. Still might be time for that resurrection, though… 🙂

  5. There’s another point that needs to be made, and that is the pernicious, “looks just like me,” nonsense. The idea that someone can only learn from or be inspired by someone who “looks like me” will cut you off from a whole lot of good examples. Kids need to be taught – EXPECTED – to use a bit of imagination. It’s good for them.

    1. Ah, but as a “White” I’m supposed to “learn” from those who don’t “looks just like me”. [Very Big Crazy Grin]

    2. This.

      One, among other things it cuts one off from imagining that one could do a new thing.

      Secondly, bureaucratic efforts to promote ‘role models’ seem to select information that makes the subjects sound like a bunch of useless ninnies.

      There are vanishingly few Full Bob level and flavor of nutjobs wandering around in the world. Can I only serve as a ‘role model’ to myself some of the time?

      Nonsense. Even if we ignore the individual ‘like me’ categories, I have found too many people with similar gifts, who are not strictly of my flavor of ancestry. A couple of very useful-to-me guys had Dutch and Swiss ancestry, which I do not have knowledge of.

      And, when I was a kid George Washington Carver was very useful to me. That stubbornness, that use of self knowledge to find the tasks that mattered to /him/.

      The bureaucracies that chase these ideas mostly do not have thinking that I find a positive example to learn from.

      I am not a bureaucracy, I find folks with useful mental tools for me to work from and apply by looking at individuals, and trying to understand what their thinking is. Okay, study of bureaucracy also has utility*.

      *Bureaucracy, automated machinery, and individual humans. Each has tasks that they are most suited to performing. Each has tasks that they are horrible with, compared to the best alternative.

  6. One “funny” thing about genetic testing is that only South American “Amerindians” genetics can be tested against.

    The North America Amerindian Tribes have refused to allow their genetics used in the testing.

    So if you take a genetic test and it “shows” that you have Amerindian genes, it only “means” that there’s a match against South American Amerindian genes not North American Amerindian genes. 😆

    3. reportedly, this is supported by many tribal leaders because they’re concerned how their tests might come out.

      1. Chuckle Chuckle

        The “Official” explanation is that the tribes don’t want people to claim “tribal membership” unless they have a documented history to support their claim.

      2. I understand that the genetic heritage companies are having a hard time penetrating the East Asian market (and thus building a database from that part of the world for comparing esp. Americans to), because they know how their tests are going to come out: “Yup, you’re 98.8% Korean. Just like you figured. That’ll be $100, please.”

        1. G If they ever did there might be some startled people of Italian or Hispanic descent. Apparently when Hideyoshi had his samurai invade Korea, a lot of people got taken as slaves, and some of them got bought by various European traders. Koreans ended up all the way in Italy and Mexico!

          1. Reportedly a bunch of out-of-work samurai ended up in Mexico City as bodyguards and mercenaries after Tokugawa put an end to the civil wars.

            1. That is far more believable than “The Olmec were African because of the features on the giant heads.” (Which falls apart if you look at other Olmec art, but that doesn’t stop the crazies.)

  7. “the king married a black queen, so it must be true that the Americans rebelled to keep enslaving the black people.”

    Uh huh. uh huh. yep. WHAT????

    Sorry, I must have fallen asleep under a rock somewhere. What kind of blithering ignorami actually believe that?

    Are there any slaves in my tree? More than likely; although not recently. You’d have to go back to feudal times for that. And there’s no African or Asian identifiable in the past 1000 years. But here’s the thing. Assuming a generation of 20 years (and that’s actually probably as much as 5 years longer than an actual generation for at about half that time), that’s 50 generations. The thing is, after seven generations, the input of each of those 128 Great, great, great, great, great grandparents is less than 1%. At 15 generations there’s over 16 thousand contributors. 50 generations ends up at 562 trillion; more people than have existed since H.Sap. came into existence, which means you’re going to have a bunch of inbreeding back into your tree, which really messes with the percentages of who contributes what.

    Point is, any Africanization I’ve had in my genetic tree has basically been bred out to the point I have the “average” or less of the “general” white population. But here’s the rub, if you check the past 4 to 7 generations in my family, NONE of them owned slaves, and therefore are not responsible for any “reparations”. If you go back farther than that, now you run into the territory of there being enslaved members in my family tree, which means I’d be someone owed “reparations” then. But who’s going to pay? The odds are, any payee and payer are likely to be equally descendants of victims and victimizers. Thats’ why talk of reparations at this point is both nonsense, and a con game, by ignorant, or criminally minded people.

    1. But here’s the rub, if you check the past 4 to 7 generations in my family, NONE of them owned slaves, and therefore are not responsible for any “reparations”.

      I know for a fact that one of my ancestors in my paternal grandmother’s family was the Little Missy on an Alabama plantation in the 1850s, which is 5 or 6 generations back, I lost count.

      On the other hand, all the men of military age in her family were killed in the war, the survivors lost all their property, they had to split up to survive, and at age 15 she had to marry a much older man (a carpetbagger) just to not starve. (He died several years later and she remarried to my G^x-father). So I kinda think that one branch of the family already paid their reparations.

      Not that it matters. I never owned a slave, no current American-born black ever was a slave, and I’m unaware of any oppressing I’ve done lately, so I feel no guilt at all for something somebody did 170 years ago even if I am distantly related to them.

      1. My maternal great grandparents apparently owned slaves, of the “domestic servant,” sort. They supposedly stayed with the family voluntarily. I don’t know of any others, but there are a lot of football players with my maiden name who are roughly the color of a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar.

        1. Husband’s grandmother’s mom, same deal; she was a family member, though one with the unusual position of being able to plausible deniability write letters to the disowned daughter.

          Definitely stayed with them voluntarily, when the great-grandmother was widowed they had some really hard years.

          1. Matches what I found in NM. The last slave died in the 1930s. She had refused manumission and is buried in the family graveyard. The then-patriarch of the family was quite up-front about it during an interview in the 1960s, and showed the reporter the grave and other stuff.

            1. “She had refused manumission”
              Which is something that most people don’t understand about slavery, or humans in general for that matter. Many people will sell their independence for the basic needs (thanks Maslow) when they have benevolent ownership, or even the illusion of benevolence.

              Oddly enough, I suspect that had the founders given slaves the ‘right ‘ to vote, and not just used them for 3/4ths of a person for representation, they’d have pretty much voted in lockstep with their master’s wishes. Which shudder sounds an awful lot like members of political parties nowadays.

              2. There’s an Anglo-Saxon document — will, I think — where a woman frees those who gave her their heads for food in the evil times. Also some purchased slaves. Oddly enough, except for the children of the slaves she got by those means, I don’t think she mentioned any slaves born as her property.

              3. In the Old Testament, a Jewish slave could tell his master, “I don’t want to leave, my wife and children are here and you’re a good master.” The master would then take the slave and pierce his ear, and he became a permanent slave.

  8. Yes… good points by our host and all. To which I wish to add this: It ain’t racial, it’s behavior.

    So, long ago in a place close by I was running a class of a bunch of new rookies on basic CPR and we had large group and a bunch of manikins for the class. When we ordered our manikins we got a ‘mixed’ bunch so some were beige, tan-ish and black. One recruit had an issue and the instructor with them, being actually speechless referred him to me as the lead trainer… He couldn’t give mouth to mouth to the manikin in his group as it was black and he was white.

    I didn’t really know what to think right then so it was “Office, Now!” and I got the director and we talked to him. The guy was serious and how he got as far as the academy I have no idea but he was allowed to go and follow his heart in the pursuit of other opportunities. To this day I am still amazed at such a person. Yeah, I know they are out there but I never really expected to actually meet one that fully crazy.

  9. The “different races” stuff spread by mincing Darwinist nancy-boys (trying to grift free work from slaves or reparations from people uninvolved in the former) was as putrid and false as “different classes” espoused by Marx, Engels, and their camp-followers. And for the same “divide and conquer” purposes. They want their old wonder-twin aristocrat powers re-activated.

    Unfortunately, hanging all the deluded would pollute the air, tossing them into rivers would kill the fish, and Musk hasn’t built enough rockets yet to send them the penal colonies in the Belt.

    Oh. Wait. Was that insensitive? Far be it from me to insult mincing nancy-boys or putrid camp followers by my in-eloquent conflation with racists and fascists.

    Meanwhile, please get back to having a wonderful weekend!

    1. No, the “mincing Darwinist nancy-boys” shouldn’t be put on the rockets, unless it’s to drop them into the sun.

      Sure, they’re just as much pollution there as anywhere else they could be dropped, but given the sun could swallow Earth without so much as blinking even the most toxic of a-holes wouldn’t despoil Sol.

      1. Too much delta-V to drop them into the Sun. Just shoot them on a suborbital trajectory and neglect to include a heat shield.

      2. Wait. You thought we’d put them in pre-built structures in the Belt?. In my plan they’d be dropped off and expected to build their own shelters… of course, we’d leave them the air in their suits.

        1. You had kind of left out that little detail, yes.

          But I object to wasting any ∆v on those clowns (with apologies to Bozo et al). They won’t work, they’ll whine/bitch/moan the entire time (though that whole “in space, no one can hear you scream” thing does come into play), and they would need continuous supervision to keep them from screwing things up by accident or intent.

          1. We REALLY need to come up with a working FTL drive. Although I doubt the rest of the universe would appreciate our shipping the scum and villains to other worlds. We should leave them here and go find, or build, better opportunities out there.

            If I did have the ability to teleport, and take someone with me, I think I’d be popping in on all the Leftists in the world, and dumping them on the French Southern and Antarctic lands with just the clothes on their backs.

          1. But then Drill Instructors could no longer say that recruits in Boot Camp were the onluy things lower than whale sh-t in the Marianas Trench!

      2. Eww. No. Definitely not. They are poison. Not matter what format.

        No heat shield rocket shot into the sun, sounds about right.

  11. I think the most jaw-dropping racial stupidities I’ve heard of recently was the reaction of a group of morons-of-color on, IIRC, Twitter (which is a cesspool of rampant idiocy anyway), about a facial reconstruction based on the presumed skull of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. A very elegant, middle-eastern appearing woman. The morons were outraged because the reconstruction artist had given Nefertiti “white” skin, and they apparently believed the currently-pervasive nonsense about ancient Egyptians being Sub-Saharan black. It had entirely escaped them that there was a very famous and realistic contemporary sculpture of Nefertiti showing her as having a pale brown, Mediterranean color of skin.

    1. But but but!! Herodotus referred to Black Egypt!!! So the Egyptians were Black!!!!

      /eyeroll

      No, seriously, when my first wife and I moved in together she was a senior in college, and one of her courses had her read a book that claimed exactly that. I nearly popped a vein explaining to her how it was total BS. That might have been the same book that claimed that Greek philosophy was derived from Sub-Saharan African tribal wisdom via Egypt.

      (FYI “Black Egypt” refers to the soil of the Nile valley, as opposed to “Red Egypt” which is the soil of the desert. Sheesh.)

      Undoubtedly some ancient Egyptians were Nubian, since we know there was a lot of transfer across that frontier in both directions. Egyptian art had no trouble distinguishing men who were dark brown of skin vs. the vast mass who they painted in a red-brown color.

      Ultimately I blame Mary Beard for the Bridgerton nonsense, with her “there have always been blacks in England” crap. Sure, maybe some Nubians or Nubio-Egyptians joined the Roman legions, and maybe some of them got stationed in Britannia. But how many? 10? 100? And if they stayed and married, how long until nobody remembered because their descendants looked like everyone around them, i.e. they were genetically assimilated. And then, dear Mary, exactly how many black Africans were in England in, say, 1066? Numbers, please.

      But no, Beard is a GoodLiberalPerson, so she just had to betray her craft and make an ahistorical argument just so she could pwn the Tories. /eyerollagain

        1. That requires actual work to find, learn, and talk about. It’s sooooo much easier to make up a story that you really, really wish were true.

        2. Define “sub-Saharan” though. Nubia is roughly modern northern Sudan, so while the people were “black” they would have been more like modern Ethiopians than, say, Nigerians. The Sahel is technically sub-Saharan, but not what we Americans usually think of when we use the term.

      2. Stirling had fun with that in the Nantucket trilogy. One black Coast Guard cadet was sent to Egypt (by the sociopathic William Walker), and was severely disillusioned by what he found. Mind you, to his credit he went the, “Well, if my beloved Black Empires of Africa don’t exist, I’ll create one,” route.

        1. According to Stirling, his plans (in Africa) more involve “spreading technology/ways to do things” than being Heap Big Conqueror.

          He might be a “local power” but is more concerned with others learning what he has to teach.

          Oh, of the “Walker Followers”, I liked him the best.

          1. In the end Egypt rejected him when TPTB got the chance. Outsider from the beginning, to through the end. Nantucket came calling. If he’d listened and paid attention in the beginning to those more knowledgeable he’d been a lot better off.

            1. Nod.

              In some ways, he was a tragic character but in other ways he dealt with his self-inflicted problems. IE He didn’t whine but worked out how to deal with his problems.

              And yes, he knew that the Egyptian Powers-That-Be hated him and made plans to move his operations deeper into Africa.

              I found him likeable and would love to read stories about his “adventures” deeper in Africa.

              1. “I found him likeable and would love to read stories about his “adventures” deeper in Africa.”

                ….
                Self inflicted. But he was as much a victim of Walker as the kidnapped Martain.

                He never got a chance to have “adventures” deeper in Africa. Made preparations to move, yes. But Marian came calling before that could happen. Toward the end of “On the Ocean of Eternity”, more of the battle in the short story in an anthology. Egyptian army is defeated, and McAndrew is captured in the end. But, I agree. It would have been different to see what happened had he succeeded in relocating deeper into Africa away from the direct reach of Egypt and Nantucket.

                1. I never saw him “captured” in the Last Novel and S. M. Stirling has said that he went deep into Africa.

                  1. Time for a re-read. (For me.) There is the “Riding Shotgun to Armageddon” short story that details the actual battle between the forces of Nantucket and Egypt forces, where Egypt armies lost despite having the new technology. I thought he was captured then. But maybe he got away. In any rate, you are not the only one wanting more stories from the series.

                2. Alston asked for him, but the bigot in charge of the Egyptian force refused her. His fate isn’t mentioned in the novel. (I just reread it).

                  Walker’s followers were a mixed bag, for sure. Some had good points, some were as evil as he was. The weakest one to me was Mittler, who just sort of appeared out of nowhere when he was needed to advance the plot.

                  1. Yep, he just “appeared”.

                    Another person who “just appeared” was the Arab who raised racing camels who “just happened” to be vacationing on Nantucket. 😆

                  2. Re: Mittler — Agree. OTOH other than McAndrews, Martin, his “friend”, Alice, and Isketerol, and a couple of others, while we know these weren’t the only ones on the ship to go with Walker, on his ship, don’t remember exactly how many, nor are we given list of names, or “resumes”. Which leaves the option for people like Mittler, to add to the plot later (and anyone else needed, ditto on the Islander side, like the Hollard siblings). Mittler I didn’t take as former Navy, but from civilian population. An international visitor, early in the season? After all Arnstein is one such an early visitor to the island. I can’t see Mittler as a local from Nantucket.

    2. Well, Twitter just had another spasm of, “Just wait until those evangelical Christians realize Jesus was brown,” nonsense. Someone produced an image, supposedly done by AI, showing an attractive man with a large nose, dark eyes, dark hair and brown skin. But the “intelligent,” folks know, just know, all us mouth-breathing evangelicals firmly believe Christ was a blue-eyed blond.

      1. I’ve always wondered where that Blue-Eyed Blond Christ came from.

        Growing up, I only saw pictures of Christ with Dark-Brown Hair, tanned skin and Brown Eyes.

        1. I’ve seen some portraits (often of Christ with children) showing Him with long blond hair, lightly tanned skin and blue eyes. They probably mostly turn up in Protestant churches.
          I had fun telling the Twitterati that yes, we know, no, it doesn’t bother us – and aren’t they familiar with imagery like the Black Virgin?

                1. I think my favorite is Vulcan Jesus.

                  Oh gosh…. now I gotta see if I can find a Klingon Jesus!

                    2. To be clear, while devotion to various Recognized Apparitions (“someone looked at and said no worries”) is allowed, it’s not required…
                      and I’ve never LIKED our Lady of Guadalupe.

                      But Our Lady of Akita?

                      ….she feels like family.

        3. Have you looked at the images that come up with a search for “Blonde Christ”?

          There’s one that I’d call a blond, the first page– the rest look like he’s got sunlight on medium-brown hair.

      2. Of course, Christ was a Jew and Jews in that part of the world were nicely tanned Whites.

        Oh, there was a “discussion” of the “brown Christ” on Baen’s Bar and one person said that he/she couldn’t follow a “White Christ” because “Whites are the oppressors”.

        I may have commented that said more about that person than about the Christ. 😦

      3. They get REALLY PISSED when you give them a funky look and ask if they have really never heard of the “My boss is a Jewish carpenter” bumper sticker.

        1. I went with, “You mean, Jews aren’t white? That means they’re oppressed, right? How do you feel about the Palestinians?”
          Not quite those words, but that was the sense of it. I enjoyed that.

          2. These days many “anti-Zionists” claim that the Jews living in Israel and the ones who lived there prior to the Diaspora aren’t actually related. The claim is that the current Israelis are just a random group who, for whatever reason, decided to expropriate the racial identity.

            1. Yes, some random group decided to take the identity of people who’ve been kicked around for 2500 years or so, just for kicks. Right.
              I admit, I was sorry when Ancestry removed the, “1 percent Eastern European Jew,” from my profile. Now they say if you look up Northern European in the dictionary, you’ll find my picture.

              1. Jihadists have been trying to both wipe out all the living Jews in the world and erase Jews from history since the very founding of Islam. The left of course eagerly joins them in this effort, as it is a mutual goal for leftists and Jihadists.

                Of course the Romans tried to do the same thing even earlier, and such an effort was thwarted in Persia even prior to that.

            1. “I am trying.”

              Slow pan across to San at the Con, desperately avoiding eye contact.

              #sorrynotsorry

              *It was nice to meet you last week.

            2. I have realized the best way to look at it, is to think of the parent child relationship. When your kid is trying to stand up for the first time, keeps falling. Has no clue, but is trying. When he finally shakily manages to hang on for 5 seconds, the grandparents get the excited call. Bobbie can stand up!!!!

              With God it is the same way, he lets us free to fall. Knows we will fail. Knows we will keep falling on our face, but lets us try. Is overjoyed when we do the equivalent of the babe standing. This is the amazing part of the divine relationship.

              My 3 goals:
              That everyone I meet will be made more joyful.
              That I make people think.
              That I reflect God perfectly.

              I will fail at all. He appreciates that I try.

      4. What did Jesus look like? The one image that consistently comes to mind to me is the head and shoulders painting by I think Sallman in 1941. Except I think the skin should be a bit darker, the nose more prominent, more facial hair and less well groomed. Jesus wasn’t black, and he sure wasn’t Irish. Put him in modern clothing and drop him anywhere in the middle east, and nobody would notice him until he opened his mouth.

      5. If the guy had been a blue eyed blond, he would quickly have been lobster red. The Israeli sun is not kind to us whiteys. ..

    3. And here I’ve been skimming academic articles all year long on the prehistoric archaeology of Egypt and Nubia that indicate that they were largely settled by immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean, so that by Mesolithic and Neolithic times the movement was more Into Africa than out of it, whatever may have happened earlier.

  12. It seems impossible to rid ourselves of this pernicious nonsense. Trump actually asked a crowd of mostly black people whether they preferred being called black or African-American. The overwhelming shout back was, “Black!” One of my biggest chuckles came a few years ago with an American reporter in South Africa calling black South Africans African American. She realized her mistake but couldn’t think of how to correct it because she had been so inculcated to not call people black.

    There is only one race of humans on the planet currently–the human race.

      1. And many of them rooted for the Washington Redskins. The only annoyance (minor) that I have with the Boston Celtics is that everyone insists on pronouncing it with a soft “c”. It’s Keltic, fools! 🙂

      2. Yes. I remember finding a blog / site of American Indians discussing Trump before the 2020 election. In one of the conversations they mentioned preferring being called Indian. I got the impression they thought it amusing that the Europeans were so wrong about where they were.

      4. These days even “Native American” isn’t progressive enough. It’s “Indigenous Peoples”, iirc.

        The members of the tribes HATE that, from what I’ve seen.

          1. First Nations is a Canadian term which isn’t common (to the best of my knowledge) in the US.

              1. Unless you’re a BIPOC individual who hates that term. Then you are a [very bad words not used on this Blog], at least according to the people who insist on using BIPOC.

                1. BIPOC exists for one reason only:

                  The wrong kinds of color were calling themselves Person of Color and the race hustlers didn’t want to be sidelined.

                  Is it getting cynical in here or is that just me?

                  1. Not really.

                    The “Race Hustlers” have to keep changing the terms because the peons keep getting too used to the “old” terms and the “Race Hustlers” can’t stand the peons using the Proper Terms Used By Those Who Are The Superior Beings.

                    Oh Captain Comic, your problem is that you’re not cynical enough. 😈

                2. BIPOC exists for one reason only:

                  The wrong kinds of color were getting attention as People of Color and bothering the race hustlers.

                  Is it getting cynical in here or is that just me?

                  1. Sorry for double post. Phone is fighting me.

                    Which wouldn’t be so bad except for the embarrassment of losing.

            3. On the other hand, “Inuit” is a Canadian term for the indigenous inhabitants of the Canadian far north that is widely used as applying to all the branches of that culture group. The Inupiaq of northern Alaska and especially the Yupik of southeastern Alaska have a beef with that. (Which is why I literally personally heard a Yupik elder say that “Eskimo” was acceptable as a blanket term.)

        2. Indigenous or Native American – doesn’t matter. I’m both because I was born here. My ancestry doesn’t matter for that.

          1. That’s where the idiots in Washington throughout history royally screwed up. By forcing native indigenous people of America onto reservations, basically ghettoing and apartheiding them, they greatly retarded assimilation. In that respect, TPTB were a lot more stupid than the Romans.

            1. Well, the other realistic option at the time was “kill them all”, so reservations were the best choice. Besides, US law had always recognized the several tribes as independent and sovereign nations, so giving them some defined territory would theoretically reduce friction with the US.

              But after 1924, when Indians were made de jure American citizens, and there was no longer any restriction on movement, the lack of assimilation or just moving to where there are jobs is pretty much on the Indians themselves.

              1. I’ve been catching up on books I never read, and am currently reading Democracy in America by de Toqueville. Chapter XVIII (that’s 18 to you and me) of the first book, ‘Future Condition Of Three Races In The United States’ is extraordinarily perceptive and prescient about the inability of the Indians to successfully assimilate into “civilized” society, since their culture and all their instincts rebelled against it. Also having existed as hunter/gatherers, there was too much of a gap into what a European style society was and expected for any but a few to assimilate even if they were legally given the chance.

                Later parts of the chapter discuss the future difficulties faced by the enslaved to gaining, and even profiting from emancipation, and the contradictions between North and South that led inevitably (although he didn’t see it) to The Civil War.

                1. I have always thought that the various Native American Indian tribes which had a better chance of assimilating were those whose culture incorporated farming, weaving, herding and potting – not those who were hunters and raiders, exclusively – like the Cherokee, who embraced the same level of tech and culture as their Anglo/European-derived neighbors. The Navaho/Zuni reservations in the far west had their problems and still do … but they had a slightly easier path to adjusting, than those who were of a warrior-raiding-hunting culture. They were somewhat on an easier path to American life as we knew it in the 19th century. The warrior-raiders had nothing, absolutely nothing to carry on with, once that method of life was cut off from them late in the 19th century.
                  YMMV, of course

                  1. Yes, warrior-raiding cultures are not conducive to anyone, including the long-term prospects of the raiders. All groups of people require people functioning as protectors against predators of 2 or 4 legged variety. The problem is, being an effective protector requires that person to devote time from building and producing in training and maintaining those protection skills.

                  2. That pretty well matches our travel experiences. My husband thinks of the Southern Cheyenne nurse (she was emphatic about the “Southern” part) who took care of him in the heart center in Oklahoma, vs the bitter, angry self-published male author we encountered on the Crow reservation in Wyoming. BTW, he was big on “communal ownership,” while he yearned for a return to traditional tribal ways.

            2. A lot of folks left the tribe.

              I’m trying to keep this short. 😀

              They just couldn’t live off of the rez and follow the rez rules– which was a huge problem in many areas because of the way someone would be “not part of my tribe” when it came to stopping them from bandit activities, but they’d buy the fruits of the banditry.

              Indian Schools are also infamous for the terrible, terrible act of teaching Indian kids how to interact with other Americans. (I suspect a lot of the outrage was how folks identified the “translators” didn’t do a very clear job on translating the agreements, which let them line their own pockets.)

              The Professional Indians spend a lot of time and effort insisting that the only way one can really be an Indian is by being a registered member.

              I’ve got a cousin who’s Paiute who is no longer a “real” Indian because he recognized the rez culture was toxic and escaped; as best we know, the other cousins of my generation are dead. Self inflicted, not direct.

        3. It’s almost as bad as LatinX.

          And an experienced man knows not to call a Mexican an Guatemalan, nor a Korean an Japanese.

      5. Russel Means, while campaigning for the 1988 Libertarian Party presidential nomination told us at the MN state party convention, “I am an American Indian. If you were born in the U.S., you are native American.”

        1. In Alaska it’s the other way around: my mother used to tell me that while I could claim to be a native Alaskan, I was not an Alaska Native.

      6. Humans are neither ‘indigenous’ nor ‘native’ to the North/Central/South American continent. We did not originate here. The first humans migrated to these continents some 17,000 years ago. Practically yesterday, compared to the 300,000 years they lived in the Eastern Hemisphere.

        Quibbling about who’s been here a few hundred or thousand years longer than somebody else is sophistry.
        ———————————
        Na’Toth: “Are you Ambassador G’Kar?”

        G’Kar: “This is Ambassador G’Kar’s quarters. This is Ambassador G’Kar’s table. This is Ambassador G’Kar’s dinner. What part of this progression escapes you?”

        1. The problem with that is that by that logic, technically every human on Earth is native African. We are, of course, but good luck getting that adopted; it would make every race hustler’s head explode. A result to be cherished, but unlikely.

          I’ll stick with “you’re a native of the location where you were born”.

            1. Only in that it allows no simple distinction between populations. I probably should have tried for a better word than “problem”, but it was the first thing that came to mind.

        2. How far do you take it? We are “native,” technically, to only one isolated camp in one isolated area of Africa, where two people met and other people resulted from the meeting.

          1. Almost certainly a fairly large number of camps/tribes/families in the area, all interbreeding, but point taken.

    2. They would call Maori and Tongans ‘African-Americans’ too.
      ———————————
      Why do so many idiots believe that our problems will be solved by the same shitheads that caused them?

  13. As I have noted before, my mother’s side is German-from-Russia, settled near Odessa. While everyone else is white as a bedsheet, one of her sisters is mocha. When younger, she could tan as dark, or darker, than one of the rather loud leftist SF writers.

      1. I saw your fellow white male Mormon sister, Natali Morris on Redacted. 😀

        I think she has tanned darker since her family moved to Portugal.

        My uncle, whose father was from Germany, tanned super dark. Made a small scene at his wedding when all the Texas Wendish biddies were bitching in German that my aunt married a Mexican while he understood every word they were saying.

    2. Similar.

      My family on both sides is entirely northwestern European, mostly British with a bit of German. But there was a family story that one of my name line had married a Cherokee in the early days of the Arkansas Territory. This is false and based on a confusion of two unrelated men both named William [lastname] but with different middle initials, who happened to be in the Arkansas/Tennessee area at the same time, and the one I’m not related to was a US Indian Agent.

      But when I posted this research to Facebook, my aunt commented that she had always believed the story because her Great Aunt Somethingorother “looked just like a squaw” with her tan skin and her long straight black hair.

      Yeah, genetics is weird.

      2. Lordy Lordy Lordy.
        I swear my aunts and cousins were going to lynch me when my genealogical research pretty much debunked the family legend of us being descended from minor German nobility of being von Houstenbergs. My paternal great grandmother was baptized in Hannover, and immigrated to this country as Emma von Kalm. But Houst has stayed consistent in spelling for at least 5 generations, including 2 in Germany, and basically trace down to the Bohemia area (northwest Czech Republic). You can find quite a number of Housts there today; from painters, to business people, to race car drivers. Heck, some of them even bear a resemblance to me, even after all those generations.

        1. If she was a “von” anything, that indicates minor nobility (at least that’s how I understand it), so maybe not von Houstenberg, but still nobility.

          1. That’s part of the point. These oral traditions get changed around that the truth is highly distorted, or disappears entirely. And that’s without people inventing a past out of whole cloth.

            1. OK; point taken. And FWIW I agree; one of my great aunts insisted that she (and therefore my grandfather) was one-eighth Indian/Native American/indigenous/whatever-the-current-fetish-is (Cherokee, IIRC), and no one could refute her. I’ll go with it as “possible, but unproven”. 🙂

                1. No real surprise; the myths are “living documents”, and oral traditions are subject to repeated revision.

                  1. pffttts!
                    Okay, gotta wipe the coffee off the monitor.
                    Oral traditions are subject to repeated revision.
                    Admittedly, most of us here are not historians, but all of us are story tellers of some stripe; and how often do we go back and edit our tales?

                    2. OK, OK; I thought what I meant, that over generations the stories passed down would change (think “multi-generational game of telephone”), would be obvious, but I guess not.

                      As to how often most people edit their tales, you never sat around with a few buddies and a few pitchers, swapping “sea stories”? 🙂

                    3. Sigh. It’s not even that. So I was raised with my brother and a much older female cousin who lived with grandma and grandad (we lived next door.)
                      I’ve always explained this to my kids. Imagine my surprise when I realized they thought I had an older sister, as well as a brother.
                      Heck, though I explained again for all I know they still think it. What will they tell their kids? what will their kids understand?

                    4. Yep. Sometimes the tales are changed by the teller for better effect, sometimes because of incomplete or misunderstood transmission or observation (your example, I believe), sometimes (hopefully rarely) for malicious reasons. But they do get changed, as you point out within the current generation. And sometimes not even the teller knows the tales were embroidered after sufficient time and retellings.

            2. Oral traditions are tricky. My mother’s family had an oral tradition that ‘grandma’ (great or great-great) was Blackfoot indian. My mother got heavily into genealogy after retiring and traced all the grandmas back 6-7 generations. Not an indian to be found.

              On the other hand, she found a great grandfather known as the ‘Terror of Utah’, who was ‘hung while escaping arrest’ by the cavalry after they failed to catch a local tribe by surprise in an attempt to wipe them out. Which might be where the stories came from originally.

              1. Note, records matter.

                I have a… cousin that’s called aunt… who is SURE my grandmother had a totally different name, based off of a really screwed up census.

                There are literally no names set right, an older sibling becomes a “boarder,” they lost a toddler….

                But she’s a leeeeeetl crazy so a new Family Scandal where everyone involved (including wives of siblings) is safely dead is right up her alley.

    3. Similar. You should see my farmer uncle and his son. Another uncle in construction, same. When tanned we are all darker than the cackle-fraud-in-waiting VP, or AOC. OTOH that might be partly because great grands, or great-great-grands, might have come from the plantation to Oregon under “passes for white”, taking the name of the plantation. Grandpa died when I was 2, and the uncles were 8 and 10, and neither did dad (he was 22). They never knew the grandparents on that side, being gone before grandpa married grandma. Or it comes from grandma’s father, and her mother’s side. Former was what is called “black Scot” – Very deep black hair, that never fully grays, and tans (i.e. not a red head). And the Applegates aren’t known for being particularly fair in coloring. Point is … we have no clue. We don’t know the history from paternal grandfather. (Paternal grandmother we’ve got reams of partial history, one family line at any rate, back to 1645, or there about.)

  14. We’re in the golden age of propaganda.
    Why?
    Because seeing is believing.
    And people are lazy.
    It takes intellectual effort to sift “I saw this on TV” from “I saw this”, especially if it’s not something you have direct contact with. And that you don’t care very much about.
    That goes double when all your official and unofficial information sources are pushing the same coordinated line.

    1. Add to that, the argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy.
      It’s “nice” to assume the people pushing a radical line mean well and are arguing in good faith,
      And even if they reject the argument that the US was founded in 1619, or that Justice Kavanaugh was organizing gang rapes in high school, they’ll strike a moralistic pose of being above it all, and blather about “both sides”.

  15. the identification of a common culture to considering it a “race” and now insist you have to have Indian blood to belong to either

    The word they’re looking for is “mestizo”, and to be fair the “Hispanic” country we’re most familiar with is highly-mestizo Mexico.

    It’s funny, though: in my experience “mestizo” is usually an insult from one Mexican to another, although it’s still technically acceptable in the US in a way that “mulatto” (black+white) is not, and “zambo” (black+indian) is completely unknown.

  16. Odds and ends…

    When holding discussions like these, it’s sometimes helpful to note the root of the word “slave”. In this case, that would be “Slav”, i.e. the race generally found in Eastern Europe. They were a popular race for raiders to enslave, so…

    There’s a popular computer RPG set in Hungary called “Kingdom Come: Deliverance”. When it came out, it caught a lot of flack from certain corners because everyone in the game is white. Weird, that.

    There’s an article floating around from one of the major British left-leaning newspapers claiming that there were lots of blacks and other minorities among the Vikings. I can’t remember the details of the argument, but it was entirely nonsense.

    1. I chuckle at the “Archaeologists found Arabic coins in Viking hoards, thus Vikings were Muslims” or “thus Arabs visited the Vikings in large numbers.” Granted, given the way some Muslims and Vikings roamed, people turning up in unusual places wouldn’t surprise me at all. In large numbers? Ah, nope.

      But the concept that coins traveled farther than most people apparently escapes our would-be discoverer of “buried history.”

      1. the concept that coins traveled farther than most people

        Which is funny, because the liberal Received Wisdom™ in the ancient history/archaeology field is “Pots Not People”.

      2. And it’s not just coins. An acquaintance from the tribes in the Dakotas was quite adept at finding arrowhead caches in the woods around here. In my experience, local stone tools were made from obsidian, while one of his freshly dug up finds was a group of flint heads.

        If Lewis and Clark could make it from Saint Louis to the Oregon coast, it shouldn’t surprise anybody that rock artifacts from the central USA (as far as I know) to just east of the Cascades.

        No idea if his hobby was anywhere near legal, though that batch came from private land. Not his, though…

        And I’m told that the Modoc tribe tended to use the Klamaths as slaves. OTOH, the Klamath were & are better at political games, so dealings with the three “combined” tribes can get interesting. (The Yahooskin seem to be the silent group. OTOH, they’re related to the Snake River tribe(s) to the NE and are a minority compared to the two others.)

  17. Race, the study of same and all the BALDERDASH that thus ensued is nothing more or less than Spencerian social Darwinism, and has all the scientific rigor of Phrenology or Astrology.

    It irritates me intensely, and I resist any and all public regulations based on it or referring to it.

    The malaise currently on display in publishing, wherein only “Authors of Colour” are to be read and celebrated to the exclusion of “Authors of Pallor” is a wonderful example. Skin-tone, dear Lefties, does not confer special abilities or special insight.

    2. The Graphic Novel librarian at my local branch stating that she would in the future stock products ONLY produced by ‘marginalized’ auteurs.

    3. What the idiots miss is that it also doesn’t confer information about purported race. The definitions of various “races” in “Withit’s Dictionary” in “There Will Be Time”, every one of which includes “…from the skin colour, which ranges from brown to ivory”, is damn close to correct.

  18. I can think of one place where “where did your ancestors come from” is truly important, and that’s if you come down with certain medical conditions. Is it asthma or a sickle-cell crisis? They can look similar on the surface, but need very different treatment. What about Tay-Sachs, and a few other things? There, being able to trace ancestry and say, “OK, you may have a higher than average chance of developing the following problems,” can be important.

    1. I had a very strange conversation with a coworker in the bathroom when she saw me apply zinc oxide sunscreen (Sherwin Williams exterior latex white) before going out to lunch. I explained to her that no, it wasn’t my base makeup, it was sunscreen, because I have rosacea and have to protect my skin…
      After she asked many questions about what rosacea was and whether it was serious (skin condition generally found in people of Celtic extraction and very pale skin, can if untreated cause ugly oozing bumps on the skin or blindness in extreme cases) and whether she should worry about it…

      Co worker was a middling dark black woman. I mean, it’s possible that she could develop it, but honestly I think she was worried for no reason.

      1. When Mom was diagnosed with cancer, it was because she went blind. They were able to fix the problem easily, but the doctor said this disease ONLY hits black women and diabetic children, so he ordered a chest x-ray. No idea how those are connected, but that was the sequence.

    2. Yeah, I’m a carrier for Tay-Sachs. Thanks to my mom’s genealogy work, it probably entered my line through the Quebecois mutation. Not an Ashkenazi Jew or Cajun in sight.

    3. And even then you’re better off just doing the genetic tests. It’s not like you can be certain that Great^N-grandma didn’t have a fling with the mailman.

  19. Interestingly, I seemed to remember that one famous author had a Blond Christ.

    And yes, Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur, described the Christ as having Blond Hair.

    So, while the Blond Christ is historically nonsense, it does have a history.

    1. Define blond, though.

      I’ve got brown hair. At best, I’ve got red highlights.

      I was (successfully) identified in El Paso as “The red-head.”

      1. Quote from Ben-Hur, Book Two, Chapter VI

        The hand laid kindly upon his shoulder awoke the unfortunate Judah, and,
        looking up, he saw a face he never forgot—the face of a boy about his own
        age, shaded by locks of yellowish bright chestnut hair; a face lighted by
        dark-blue eyes, at the time so soft, so appealing, so full of love and holy
        purpose, that they had all the power of command and will. The spirit of the
        Jew, hardened though it was by days and nights of suffering, and so embittered
        by wrong that its dreams of revenge took in all the world, melted under the
        stranger’s look, and became as a child’s. He put his lips to the
        pitcher, and drank long and deep. Not a word was said to him, nor did he say a
        word.

        End Quote

        The person give Judah the water is later in the chapter identified as Jesus, the son of Mary.

        Admittedly, “chestnut hair” is a type of brown hair but there was the “yellowish bright” part. And of course, Jesus’s eyes were described as dark-blue.

        Of course, this is from a book written by a former Union general. 😉

        1. :grumbles about a lack of historical references for “this, this is what I mean”:

          It’s like the dang recipes, “add this until it looks right.”

              1. Let’s be gentle toward Lew Wallace.

                He never visited the Middle East before he wrote this book.

                And he described Joseph (in that chapter) as wearing a turban which may not be likely headwear for a Jew of that time & place. 😀

                1. :shrugs:

                  The symbolic power of stuff is a definite Thing, I’m just struggling with ‘try to see what author was tying to say’.

                  :pokes at motive: It…feels like it’s more important, to understand what folks say.

                  It’s like the “Moses had horns”– which is a visual sort of pun on what it SAID from Moses coming down, and recognized He Got The Powah!
                  So, if someone is freaking glowing with holyness— how do you show that?

              2. Hmm. Nice set of young ladies.
                I may be old, and a bit curmudgeonly, but I still like to look at pretty women. Even if I get a bit tongue-tied talking with them.

              1. It’s like, “flax.en hair.” (WPDE). Processed line flax is hairy. Tow is the short fibers combed out of the flax. Ironically, flax ranges from light brown to grayish. Not blond at all.

              2. My understanding is that most people who are “tow-headed” as small children turn dark as they get older. My mother certainly did. Her hair in child photos looks white but was dark brown, nearly black as an adult.

                As perhaps a genetic echo of this, my hair was medium blond when I was five or six, but darkened to medium brown thereafter.

                1. I’ve been told I was a tow-head as a child. Darkened to dark brown with red highlights before I remember. (Sister was born blond. While she stayed blond way longer, she was really a honey brown by college.) The red highlights turned white in my 20’s. Started coloring it age 30. Sometime in late 50’s started coming in salt/pepper and everything in between. Always used “non-permanent” color (can’t take the chemicals in the other), in that it fades. Never intended to hide the change, just tone it down as it wasn’t universal. After almost 3 years of no color I am accused of coloring “blond”. No. 100% natural now. It does come across as white tow-head. Fair enough, a lot more white (salt) than the black (pepper), gray, and very light brown.

                  1. Yep – I was a very fair blond as a child, as a teenager, light brown with yellow highlights. as an adult – medium to medium dark brown. The Daughter Unit was also a fair white-blond, later on a medium blond. Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson is presently a feathery pale brown as to hair, with blond and russet highlights. He’ll be a brunette as an adult, I am certain.

                3. I was a platinum blond as a toddler. By adulthood it was dark brown with red and gold highlights. Now, it’s dark brown going heavily to silver…..I miss that chestnut hair like parts of the rest of my younger body, but I get a lot of compliments on the silver streaks.

                4. When we were little girls, you could tell me and my two sisters apart in photos, despite powerful family resemblances, by not only height differences but hair color. Whoever had the darkest was my older sister, and whoever had the lightest was my younger.

                  Then I hit 12 and my hair shot to its dark brunette (my older sister caught up in time, but only by the time she was 20). And the little sister hit 12 and shot up in inches (and neither of us caught up to that).

                  Now you have to know us very well. As in, I have had long conversations with people at cons who didn’t realize I wasn’t my older sister until after.

                  1. Our son and his cousins. We have pictures from first Christmas, and on going. 100% familiar family. Very much related. Then for giggles. Ask which One, one and only one, of 8, is adopted. Hint, it isn’t one of the 3 blonds. No one can tell. Neither of the bio-parents are near relations.

    2. It’s actually not impossible. Remember this was invaded Israel, and invaded by Romans at that. Now this would be “Portuguese Blond” which is a light brown, but….

      1. Plus 70 years in Persia, plus the OT theme of, “the Jewish leadership will marry just about anyone. ”
        What folks seem to forget is the Isaiah passage that suggests the Suffering Servant will be ugly, or at least unattractive.

  20. Off topic, though they are the most xenophobic people on earth, Strange things in China. Rumors of coup against Xi. There is NO, repeat NO reliable information right now.

    2. Saw tweet suggesting all transport in and out of Beijing was shut down. Lots of scoffing, but wonder how much of that was bots. Epoch Times noting mass flight cancelations and Xi dropping out of public view but admits to not knowing what’s going on.

    3. I am heartily tired of interesting events. I want a year of dull, quiet, “our foreign correspondents are visiting nature reserves in search of wild stories” calm.

      Which is about as likely as my winning the lottery without having bought a ticket.

      2. Wouldn’t it be awesome, though, if Russia AND China AND Iran all collapsed into revolution in the same 12-month period?

        2. Unfortunately, history shows that they’re most likely to only trade one set of oppressive rulers for another, and only after having killed a whole bunch of people.

          1. One can dream. And then one can hope they have to keep themselves at home for a time, merely to avoid losing power.

          2. On the other hand, if one believes in the right of a people or nation to determine for themselves what kind of government they will have, that different flavor of oppressive tyrant might be just what they want.

            1. So America wanted the Fraudster In Chief as President? [Very Big Crazy Grin]

    4. It’s starting to look like what went down in Turkey. One has to wonder if this isn’t just another hundred flowers blooming.

      No one seems to know anything.

      1. I wonder if Xi caught the Wuflu. Given all his, “Zero Covid,” crap, that would be really embarrassing.

          1. Starting to see rumors and articles on Xi’s possible problems on other blogs. But no one can “confirm”.

            1. The Epoch Times (yes, I know) had a piece today saying in essence, “Something’s up, Xi has broken a handful of powerful people this past week, but the ‘this is a military coup’ signs are not there, and other things are not there. People are worried about his going for a third term, but no one’s talking on the record.” There are known unknowns, and some unknown unknowns, in other words.

    5. The China Show mentioned the rumor in their show this weekend. But they also said that they were only reporting it to let people know that they’d heard about it (so viewers wouldn’t send them alerts about the rumor), and they’d been unable to get any solid information on it.

    6. Best summary of possible players involved that I have seen is this India TV News article, last updated Saturday: https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world/china-president-xi-jinping-under-house-arrest-pla-cpc-latest-updates-2022-09-24-811117

      It names Song Ping, Hu Jintao, and Wen Jibao as the civilian architects of a possible overthrow of Xi. It may or may not be true, but it feels like the name-dropping would require more research to invent than most modern news sources in any country would bother with. If it’s wishcasting, I would take it as wishcasting with roots in the Indian intelligence community, or some intelligence community they trade info with.

      None of these guys are people most Westerners would see eye to eye with, though they’re not necessarily the worst their country has to offer either. Song Ping is the last surviving member of the post-Gang of Four generation of CCP bigshots. Hu Jintao and Wen Jibao are protegees of his who were players in the 00s and early 10s. The former seems pretty boilerplate CCP, the latter has made faint, ambiguous noises in favor of freedom of expression and “universal values” (CCP official line is that there are no such thing), and got into trouble for getting rich in one of the previous boom cycles.

      1. Not going to mention the minor detail that Hu Jintao was the leader of Mainland China immediately before Xi?

  21. I live in an area in Arizona which has Europeans, hispanics (primarily originally Mexican), land grant Spanish, and blacks, in more or less that order…I have never heard anyone talk about race….and there is plenty of mingling..

    1. That’s because only racists talk incessantly about race and constantly obsess over it. It’s not a subject of much discussion in my part of Arizona, either.

  22. I forgot to add Native American, of which we have a significant number as well, often mixed with other races…Several in my dojo alone, and good guys…

      1. Well, excepting yourself of course. But nobody has to be native American except the President and Vice President. Everybody else only has to sign on to The Constitution, and we’re all good.

          1. The President doesn’t have to be Native..he only has to be born in a US jurisdiction, and even that is increasingly ignored…In 2008, both candidates were sketchy in that respect…

            2. The President just has to be born a US Citizen. McCain’s parents were both citizens, so he’s covered, and Obama’s mother was a citizen and he was born in the US, so he’s covered as well.

              1. The view of the first Congress was that anyone born both of whose parents were US Citizens should be treated as natural born citizens, with exceptions that Congress determined, for example if the father had never been a US resident…It’s never been tested in SCOTUS..But assuming that’s the case, McCain would pass muster, but Obama would need to show that he was born in the US to an American mother…

                1. Obama refused to provide a birth certificate, the Hawaiian official in charge of that was murdered, and 2 years into his term, Obama’s people produced an obviously fraudulent certificate that wasn’t even properly filled out…I’m an attorney, and I know what 1961 birth certificates look like…

                  1. And of course his very own first book in the “:about the author” part expressly stated he was born in Kenya. And then they wonder why people raise questions. Of course to do so was denounced as racist and blamed on Republicans, even though it was Team Hillary who first raised the question, as Hillary sought to get rid of the one candidate who presented a threat to win the nomination that would, in her view, see her crowned as she was entitled to be.

      2. Actually, I call them Indians, or by their tribal name–one guy was Lakota Sioux..But native anywhere just means got-there-before-you…Jack Vance made this point…

  23. There is also a test of whether guilt should be considered infinitely heritable.

    It is statistically improbable that a human alive today has zero capital offenders in their ancestry.

    If there is any human H, that a person believes should not be killed, on the ground that H is innocent, this implies that the person might be inconsistent if they apply heritability of guilt to anyone.

    Fundamentally also, opposing the institution of chattel slavery tends to require the assumption that guilt is not heritable.

    1. The activists managed to back into Original Sin, but without the “redemption is possible” stuff that usually comes with it. (Which proves yet again that there is not such thing as an original sin. They’ve all been tried at least once already.)

      1. You may conditionally absolve yourself of your original anti-progressive sin by the works of always supporting the Party.

        Loud applause is the starting point.

  24. Notice how all the policies Democrats are pushing to impose their racial spoils system moves ever so closer the infamous Nuremberg Laws that the Nazi’s imposed (inspired in part by one Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood). The Riefenstahl-esque backdrop to the speech they trotted Biden out for was NOT an accident.

        1. The Nazis and American leftists shared, and still share, a complete and total rabid hatred of Jews.

          1. It’s more nuanced than that.

            Consider that many of the powerful on the left are Jewish. Also many of the Soviets and a few of the Nazis in Germany were Jewish and willingly oppressed Jews. Soros seemed to enjoy it.

            When I posed this question to my learned Jewish friend, he replied that there are many different groups among the Jewish with different motives, just like there are in many groups whether they are Jewish, Christian, Islamic, white, black, Asian, etc… Evil people are evil to everyone, including their own.

            Things get crazy in Ukraine when you consider that the Jewish President is that is allied with followers that worship Stepan Bandera. Factor in the Homodor and the origins of Marxism and the plot is more twisty.

            In the US “right” there is a full spectrum of beliefs from Judeo-Christian Civil Nationalism to Christian Nationalism to hard core hatred.

            Who knows how the left breaks down in the US? I can’t figure the factions except there seem to be a bunch that just want to see the world burn…

            1. Many Jews on the left are Marxists before they are Jews and are very much in the “Jews deserve to be punished” category in much the same way leftists feel about anyone who is successful in private business.

              Some are the equivalent of RINO’s, Jews in name only, who may on the surface practice Judaism and profess belief, will quickly condemn everyone who isn’t willing to subordinate their religious views to the state, and will demand that government mandate things that are utterly contrary to Judaism. In essence, their Judaism provides for a state veto over ones beliefs and practices.

              They are no different than the self-proclaimed “observant Catholics” like Biden and Pelosi who believe that abortion should be allowed without restriction up until birth.

  25. If you check the etymology of “slave” you will find that it derives from “Slav,” because so many Slavs were enslaved by the Byzantines that the default image of a slave was that of a Serb or Bulgarian or Belarussian.

  26. Among my DNA matches- someone who traces their tree in Goa back through 5 generation in Goa. On all the branches. Which means pretty much Portuguese. I have no known or traceable ancestors from Portugal or Goa.

    Same thing with someone from Hawaii.

    And another one from Puerto Rico, though they go back to Spain, where again, I have no known or traceable ancestors.

    You know what I do have? A grandfather, his 3 brothers, my uncle, and a bunch or other distant cousins sharing their surname, who’ve been merchant sailors since just about 1900 or so. (And other sailors from other lines before that)

    And I have a whole bunch of ancestral relations who were missionaries in Japan, China, Hawaii, and the Philippines, of places I know.

    Everyone knows sailors have a woman in every port. Maybe just for a night, but… And anyone who thinks all missionaries were sexually pure and would never do the dirty deed with natives… well, I know the history of those family branches. And it wouldn’t surprise me if they also left some children behind.

    All my traceable ancestry comes from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. And they didn’t start mixing it up until they got to North America. There’s a lot more mixing between them here then there is there.

    My wife brings Bohemian to the mix for our children. Her grandmother was very insistent- “We’re BOHEMIAN!”, as in not German or anything else. Currently in the Czech Republic, which was part of Czechoslovakia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire…

    And I agree that a lot of us who have documented family here since the 1500s have unknown (and likely unknowable) amounts of Amerindian DNA in us. But then there’s another thing. They didn’t have cameras way back when, but there are drawings and paintings of Indians from the time. The East Coast Indians have a lot more European facial features then the West Coast and Central Plains Indians, and the North American West Coast Indians a lot more Asiatic features, and the West Coast South American more Pacific Islander features… Roman coins have been dug up in Michigan. And other places. An interesting link I just found- that I haven’t verified yet, but…
    https://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/library/commentary/id/3764/suppressed-archaeology-part-five.htm

  27. Um ….

    Apologies for nit-picking, but “mysogenated”?

    Might that be “Miscegenated”? I don’t find the “myso” variation anywhere, and my OED is behind enough boxes I cannot check.

    There is, of course, misogyny, which includes the “o” in the right place.

    1. Sorry, that came up as the word in my search. I was translating from Portuguese, and that kicked up as the right spelling. Also it was early and I was low on coffee. Happens.

  28. Well the French Canadians turn out to be inbred as all hell due to a bunch of history and 800 founding mothers so there’s some purity for you. Purity = inbreeding.

      1. My father is three-quarters French Canadian and that’s the branch we have the most on. (We almost always can get back to “got off the boat,” and since that’s the way we go back 13 generations. . . . )

        Yes, he’s his own cousin many, many, many ways. But we found only one pair of second cousins marrying. Fifth, sixth, farther off — by third cousins you’re no more related than random population.

        1. But the Royal families had restrictions on who was an “appropriate” match, so with a relatively restricted pool of candidates inbreeding was inevitable, with the usual pitfalls. Yes, everyone is related to everyone else, but among the Royals it was a bit more close a relationship than was healthy.

  29. Those genetic screenings are bunk.

    I know for a fact that my family emigrated to America from Brazil and Argentina around 1947, but my tests showed 92% Austro-Germanic.

    Idiots.

    Be right back, I have to ask my mom something.

    1. “I know for a fact that my family emigrated to America from Brazil and Argentina around 1947, but my tests showed 92% Austro-Germanic.”

      Uh oh, you do know what that sounds like, right? 🙂

      2. “And by the way, if I were a clone of Adolf Hitler, wouldn’t I look like Adolf Hitler?”

        –Algerprop Kreiger

      4. Make Hitler 5′ 11″, color his hair brown, and put a pair of glasses on him.
        I was removing my mustache one time and just for giggles, trimmed it that way.
        Almost scared the piss out me.

        1. Bob Newhart had a one man silent skit called “The Man Who Looked Like Hitler”. In it, Newhart plays a guy on a bus who just happens to notice that one of his fellow passengers (invisible to us, as Newhart is the only person in the skit) looks like Adolph.

    2. Actually, a fair number of Germans emigrated to South America. I cite Thomas Sowell, who, describing the effect of culture, cited how they were generally the pioneers in beer industry wherever they settled.

  30. I found out that I have a whole bunch of cousins in India. Before European women started to go out there, the men had local women as mistresses, wives in actual fact. Officers and men, it was very common. It would start as a sleeping dictionary and move on from there. The Indian railways were almost entirely staffed with their offspring, they set up as a caste unto themselves.

    Great story about this. William Gardner, who raised Gardner’s Horse (later 2nd Bengal Lancers, they still exist) in 1809, married a maharajas daughter. In the eyes of certain bigots, this touched the family with the “tar brush”. A bumptious newspaper editor made a big deal of this until Gardner’s grandson, another William, horse whipped the editor for his impertinence.

    2. A whole lot of today’s ‘journalists’ could do with a good horse whipping… 😛
      ———————————
      Wing: ”Have you ever heard the phrase, Living well is the best revenge?”

      Miles: “Where I come from, someone’s head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge.”

    3. Interesting thing about that–her culture was just as rigid. She was probably ostracized (at best) for marrying outside her caste.

    4. I’ve read of a British TV program researching families, and an Irishman learning that his ancestor had married, in India, the daughter of a sergeant and his wife Matilda — Matilda being the name she adopted in baptism, shortly before the wedding.

  31. Back in the 1950s we had one of them mysogenated people in my Aunt’s family. They already had about ten kids. Guy looked like a troll or a leprechaun, or maybe a leper. We were all Irish, so maybe he was wee people. I guess Aunt Mary got around.

  32. It’s odd how the leftists who insist that racism is bad also follow the old “just one drop” standard for deciding who can claim to be of a non-white race. As far as I know, the current science shows that all modern humans had an ancestor way back from Africa. Which, by leftist standards, means that everyone in the US is an African-American.

    Like our hostess, I also put “human” as the answer when race is the question.

    1. The entire hominid clade originated in Africa and spread around the world from there. Everybody has African ancestry if you go back far enough. Some branches developed different skin colors as adaptations to local environmental conditions.
      ———————————
      Why should we have to subsidize rich people’s donations to charity?

  33. One race, the human race. However if a lie is repeated often enough most, or at least many, end up believing it.

    Also if enough fault you ’cause your skin is pink, you start thinking of yourself as pink and proudly pink. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of that going around these days.

  35. Race doesn’t exist!!! RACE us the ultimate determined of everything!!!

    Looks around. Reads historical accounts. Does anthropology…

    Maybe “race” is an equivocal and misused term?

    That’d be the place to start. Remember: first they come for our words.

  36. “Hmmm, form says, Race, Other: I’ll put down ‘Houst'”

    “You can’t put that down! You can’t be a race.”

    “Sure I can. I’m the founding father and all my descendants will be members too.”

    1. I’m writing a story about a woman from another planet stranded on our world. Somebody calls her a ‘white oppressor’ and gets some serious backlash:

      “I am not ‘white’. I am not related to any racial or ethnic group on this planet. I am a minority of ONE, you stupid cow, and I had nothing to do with the last 75,000 years of your history. If you’re looking for oppressors, you’ll have to look somewhere else.”

      1. I wrote a never-to-be-published short story in the Cat Among Dragons universe that described what happened when Commander Rada Ni Drako (known to most humans as Rachel Na Gael) was forced to attend “awareness and sexual harassment training.” It culminated in the moderator running away in tears, and a note being inserted into Rada’s record that she was never, ever to be sent to that sort of thing ever again. beatific kitty smile

        3. In Another World, I Must Train My Dungeon there is a seminar for the newcomers including sexual harassment training and also directions on your will.

  37. And now for something completely different…

    It seems Liz Cheney “won’t be a Republican” if Trump is nominated in 2024.

    Uh, Lizzy, you ain’t a Republican now. You’d be doing us all a favor by making it official.
    ———————————
    The world is full of self-important, self-righteous, obsessed assholes, tormented by the conviction that Somebody, Somewhere is Doing Something they don’t approve of, and driven by a compulsion to Do Something About It at any cost.

  38. So, question to the horde, though probably a bit on the late side, I’ve discovered I probably need to read through the Little House books, and since spouse does not want more stuff in the house I’m loading them up on a kindle.

    It occurs to me, we’ve got a couple of girls, and the oldest will probably be hitting reading age in a couple of years. It might be worth loading her up a kindle or so of fun books of all stripes. Especially with so much in the public domain.

    Any recommendations?

    I’m already planning on loading:
    The Little House books
    Wizard of Oz series
    Narnia
    Lord of the Ring
    Sherlock Holms
    Agatha Christi: Poroit and Ms Marple
    Nevil Shute: Pied Piper, No Highway
    Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers
    Black Sheep
    Autobiographies of Ben Franklin, US Grant and Jimmy Doolittle
    Biography of Nimitz

    The idea is to have a library of cool/fun/useful stuff in it when she’s old enough to just hand it off to her.

    1. The Heinlein juvenile books. I remember:

      Red Planet
      Have Space Suit, Will Travel
      The Star Beast
      Between Planets
      Space Cadet
      Starman Jones
      Citizen Of The Galaxy
      The Rolling Stones

      Tunnel In The Sky is more mid-teen.

      Stowaway To Mars, forgot the author’s name.

      I remember a book about a robot on Ganymede that develops self-awareness and runs away to Mars, but not the title or author.

    2. I remember enjoying the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries. I thought they were fun, as a youngster. Doc Savage, too.

      2. My mom had the complete original Nancy Drew series. I loved them. Of course, Nancy kept a pistol in the glovebox of her Stutz Bearcat and her best pal smoked cigarettes.

    3. Janet Kagan’s Mirabile
      Just about anything by James Schmitz, emphasis on “Agent of Vega,” the Hub stories and “The Witches of Karres.”
      Most Andre Norton (note some of her later books got a tad preachy/dark)

    4. P.M. Griffin’s Star Commandos.

      Bary Hughart’s Li Kao and Number Ten Ox books – Bridge of Birds, The Story of the Stone, and Eight Skilled Gentlemen.

      If you can find the old Animal Encyclopedias… I wish I remembered the titles or who wrote them. They were pre-1990, and I recall spending many happy hours reading about the behavior of great cats or the fact that crayfish have parasites people can catch by eating them.

      Also get a thumpin’ big dictionary so the kids can see word etymology in action!

  40. Slavery is not evil because it is racist, slavery is bad because it is slavery. Slavery is also ancient.( Does that qualify it as Classical?) Interracial slavery did not become commonplace until a leap in transportation technology in the 16th Century allowed slaves sold by Africans to be transported to the Americas to provide sustainable renewable energy for the elites. Technological improvements in energy production later made it possible to eliminate slavery in the West. Within approximately 100 years of the Watt-Wilkinson collaboration that produced an efficient fossil fueled steam engine, slavery was abolished in the West. Slavery reappeared in Germany during the fossil fuel shortage of the first half of the 1940s. (Audrey Hepburn’s step-brother along with many other Belgians, Dutch, French and other Europeans were enslaved to ameliorate the fossil fuel shortage)

  41. Side-note: You can find uses of the term “race” in older writings which do not fit in current thinking. For instance, in the following example “race” is used to mean “family” or “extended family”:
    “It seems natural, does it not? And yet, consider that every Baskerville who goes there meets with an evil fate. I feel sure that if Sir Charles could have spoken with me before his death he would have warned me against bringing this the last of the old race, and the heir to great wealth, to that deadly place.”
    –The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

      1. Sarah, that version of “race” (see Afghan race, etc. commonly used by Kipling and other Victorians) makes a little more sense to me, because it also seems to carry the meaning of “national culture” in addition to the physical.

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