A Few Thoughts On Life & Learning
The Diversity of Personalities
When we think of diversity, we tend to think in terms of complexion, sex, or sexual identification.
When I speaK of diversity within a community I am speaking of diversity of personalities. Complexion, or race as we call it, is not all of one personality—all white people, all Asians, etc. are not of necessity, in fact, simply all of uniform personality. When Donald Trump pointed out “my black” in his audience, he did not of course mean to indicate that “his black” was different than those dastardly blacks he detests, but that “his black” was chocolate coated white. When Joe Biden proudly announced his cabinet containing a homosexual, women, hispanics, blacks etc., I’m thinking to myself, “why does this matter?”And yet it does matter to many of us, it matters to say he is not denying any category of normally considered cultural classification. Unfortunately the categories of classification that would have relevance to me were not present except for Marty Walsh whom I found the only really diverse nominee—a nominee from the working, rather than the intellectual class. I personally don’t care one whit about the diversities mentioned in the first paragraph when they all come from the intelligentsia, primarily east coast and Ivy League educated. I looked at his cabinet as one lacking in diversity of life experience.
Unfortunately the diversity Biden pointed out in his cabinet of firsts is what most people point to when they speak of diversity. And unfortunately, needing to have a cabinet of diverse stereotypes is still a cabinet lacking in diversity of experience, education and background. Is Pete Buttigieg the personality of all gay men in America? Isn’t that just as stereotypically undiverse thinking as believing all women think the same, all blacks, all Asians, all Hispanics, all Native-Americans? When polls tell us 61% of Hispanics or 47% of this race favor such and such a policy, what conclusion am I supposed to make from that? That the 39% of hispanics who don’t believe such and such are not representative of hispanic thought and only the 61% majority are? What does that tell me about diversity except that our stereotypes about diversity are themselves nothing but stereotypes? If you tell me cops kill black Americans and blacks protest does that mean cops kill only black people and cops hate black people? What if we analyze and reverse the statement to class. What if we see how many people that make over $100,00 a year are killed by police in any given year. I can’t find any statistical analysis of that. If anyone does, please, please let me know, but otherwise I’m inclined to believe the percentage is so insignificantly low as to be irrelevant and that’s why such statistics don’t exist. But we have a little indication from the income of incarcerated people. On average people who are incarcerated have a mean income 48% lower than the mean income of those who do not. If we determine that the greatest direct police activity is within areas where there is the highest percentages of incarcerations, then we determine that income is more directly related to police killings.
Black Americans are only 13.6% of American citizens, but 19.5 percent , or one out of five are below poverty rate and yet 27% of those who were killed by police last year (two years after the national George Floyd demonstrations almost the same as prior). Now we could analyze this by every race, etc, but ultimately it will reflect very similar patterns. The higher the percentage of the race that is below poverty, or borderline poverty, the higher likelihood they might be killed by police. And while 73% of citizens killed by police are not black, 86.4% of all Americans are not black. And this does both show us that black citizens are killed by police nearly double their population percentage. But if we link it to the percentage of their population that is below the poverty rate that is killed by race we find something significant. Of the 73% non-blacks killed by police last year less than 2% were above poverty rate and yet black citizens above the official poverty rate were killed by police at eight percentage points higher than their percentage of officially poor.
So let’s look at two points these statistics illustrate. First nearly all, 90%, of deaths that occurred by police activity were against citizens of our lowest economic class, so it is untrue to say police kill only black citizens, we have to assume that anyone of a lower economic status has a higher probability of being killed by police in any given year. And yet of the 10% who are above the poverty level, but presumably still below $100,000 that are absent any statistics, 80% of that 10% are black. And if you add that to the fact that blacks are 38% of the incarcerated, double their percentage of those below poverty levels, and almost triple their percentage of the overall population, we can see CRT is very discernibly knowable. So it is not “woke” in any sense not true, but very “unwoke” in the sense that it is not of top concern.
So this shows me both that black citizens who are of the lowest classes are regarded as equally unimportant as are all citizens of the lowest class and diversity needs to be centered not on specificities of race, etc, but that there is a much stronger tendency by official (state) policy to attempt to keep black citizens from transcending the lowest classes. And this seems to hold true until they can ascend out of their class to a greater extent before they can become “Trump’s black.”
So the stereotype does certainly play a role in the perceptions of diversity. Even though I do not believe it should. Even though I believe true diversity is genetic diversity. And genetic studies have well determined that complexion is not a significant allele in determining any human capabilities. We assume our earliest evolutionary ancestors were black. But they could have been brown since many of the earliest migrations, pre homo sapiens, ended up migrating to and settling in the eastern part of the world.
But I would like to throw a monkey wrench into the whole race scheme or original determination. I want to bring into this race discussion the Denisovians. We don’t really have a lot of information about the Denisovians or their origins. But since learning that blue-eyed, blonde-haired, black-skinned Melanesians had probable genetic links to Denisovans my mind has raced into a multitude of speculations. What if race was never a genetic inheritance in humanoid species at all? What if melanin is a by-product of genetic mixing through mating and never had anything to do with races evolving? I don’t know the answer, and there are questions to be asked even within my questions. But first, is it possible that original hominids did not evolve all from one shade, but of multiple shades, like birds, say. It is nonsense to say that lighter shades developed out of the genetic advantage of melanin protection becoming advantageous and thus predominant in colder climes. It is nonsense, because it is demonstrably untrue. The first inhabitants of the northernmost climes, the Inuits and their predecessors never became white, and some are quite dark brown. And the Europeans who moved into what became Scandinavia appear to have already had lighter shading before moving into the area. Some of the people who became European appear to have come from northwest Africa and some seem to have immigrated from the mideast, and yet we know some migrated from east Asia, and yet it is also known that many migrated to northern east Asia and into Korea from southern Asian and they never developed the lighter shades of melanin as the Scandanavians. And it is thought many of the pacific settlers, especially the Melanesians, migrated from north and north central asia who are brown, that are black. When you add that to genetic description that the shadings of humankind is a non-essential allele, or non-specific allele that is determined by a multiplicity of other alleles, color becomes a non-starter. You might also consider the connection between the Sanskrit language and the Germanic languages. And if you absent the skin shadings, and examine facial structures of people from India and Germanic people, as much as a facial type can actually be determined, you can observe certain similarities. Now throw into the mix some very newly released genetic analysis of the swahili race:
“The medieval and early modern Swahili culture of eastern Africa from the seventh century ad was defined by a set of shared features: a common language of African origin (Kiswahili), a shared predominant religion (Islam) and a geographic distribution in coastal towns and villages. People of the Swahili culture lived across a vast coastal region that included northern Mozambique, southern Somalia, Madagascar and the archipelagos of Comoros, Kilwa, Mafia, Zanzibar and Lamu.”
“More than half of the DNA of many of the individuals from coastal towns originates from primarily female ancestors from Africa, with a large proportion—and occasionally more than half—of the DNA coming from Asian ancestors. The Asian ancestry includes components associated with Persia and India, with 80–90% of the Asian DNA originating from Persian men. Peoples of African and Asian origins began to mix by about ad 1000, coinciding with the large-scale adoption of Islam. Before about ad 1500, the Southwest Asian ancestry was mainly Persian-related, consistent with the narrative of the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest history told by people of the Swahili coast3. After this time, the sources of DNA became increasingly Arabian, consistent with evidence of growing interactions with southern Arabia4. Subsequent interactions with Asian and African people further changed the ancestry of present-day people of the Swahili coast in relation to the medieval individuals whose DNA we sequenced.”
Before geneticists began tracing human migrations through common alleles, linguists traced migratory patterns through what might be called linguistic “alleles”. And as my first love in life was words,I was quite enamored with linguistic comparisons and roots of words. Now I find there is much dissent between the two tracings. And while genetic linkages do give us some direction, and probably a more definitive connection of human origins, I do not see how we can discuss the linguistic connections as false. There must be linguistic unifiers between migrations that geneticists should not outright dismiss. And the key, I believe, is going to be how the migrations of humanity connect both their genetic and linguistic alleles, or how peoples who seemingly don’t have common genetic alleles but do have common linguistic ones. My suspicion is that the linguists are correct and genes were more mixed through continued layering of migrations upon each other.
Now before leaving these speculations, I want to mention the “beautiful” people of the Caucasus. White people essentially call themselves after these people. So what we know from both genetic and linguistic migration studies is that the Caucasus was a crossroads of migrations from south to north, from east to west, and from west to east. The result is one of the most concentrated linguistic and genetic mixes of anywhere on earth. And the people are very light skinned, not very fair haired, and let’s face it, have faces that reflect the best features, or what are considered the most attractive features, not just of light skinned people, but a mixtured blending of those features across ethnicities and colors. Pictures of Georgians (granting they are probably pictures of the most attractive of the Georgians), have been shown to viewers of all races and found to be considered very attractive. But it is not only in Georgians, and I assume every single Georgian is not that attractive, but likewise, from the consensus of visual determination, ethnic mixes between any two (or more) ethnicities people often find more attractive, than pure ethnic features. Doesn’t matter what ethnicity, whether it's people who look too “jewish”, too “polynesian, too “native-american”, and this appears to be predominantly thought even by those of those ethnic sects. So I pause to think if not only is race itself of no genetic importance, but is there a possibility that there is a propensity, not a gene that probably can be determined, but nevertheless an internal human genetic propensity towards blending our genes. If this is true, it would seem our defense of racial separateness does not match our own human desire to blend our genes apart from any concept of racial purity, and those who propose such ethnic or racial purity are scratching against the genes of our own genetic desires.
Well of course we are all in the realm of speculation here as I said , but if there may be some truth to my suggestion, then let’s just look at human migration, well before our current conflicts centered on preserving nations and races from impurity. Why did early hominids move about the globe? Well the most commonly assumed reasons are to follow the game and to preserve the environment from overuse of its resources. And I discuss some of this in my book There Never Was… that I’m not going to repeat. There came a time in human prehistory when environmental shift made settling possible so the first reason is not correct, at least after that period. But there were an awful lot of long-distance migrations even before that occurred, and humans before that, probably would have been small enough to not really need such long migrations just to follow game. Some of those who moved to northern climes to hunt mammoths almost certainly did not know they were going to find mammoth to hunt prior to migrating into an area. So to say that’s why they migrated is silly. But what about after settling, and yet before the rise of kingdoms which created another cause of migration. Why did the Apache and Navajo separate from their Athabaskan relatives and move all the way to the desert southwest. The Athabaskans themselves traversed much of the northernmost part of the northern American hemisphere. But surely if it was only because of environmental overload the Apache and Navajo could have found a much more suitable environment nearby. Or someone along the way, before ultimately ending their migration in parts of the most unsuitable and least settled environments, or even continued their journey further south and found a better environment. Of course humans have several abilities that make them adaptable to most environments and that is one reason they have been able to migrate to almost all of the earth. Granting some environments that humans migrated to were capable of maintaining more proximal settlements than others. And certainly a community must have had a limit for survival beyond damaging itself and its ability to survive, but even then, we have groups leaving Asia to settle the south Pacific and the American hemisphere. We have long migrations that bypassed many suitable environments in the interval. Could one of the reasons be that one of the genetic needs in humanity is the need to seek other hominids (until homo sapiens completely dominated and remained the sole hominid species) and that human genetic survival is somehow linked to the need to continually refresh its genes by mating with other groups of hominids or humans.
If any of this could be true, then complexion and ethnicity were not the driving forces of the diversity that humans were seeking at all. The diversity that drove humans to continually migrate must have been something else, something more essential to human survival. And certainly the first efforts in any migration were centered on creating a mixing ethnicities, with Georgia being the crossroads of multiple migratory stopovers and mixing.
A common answer is genocide. We killed off other ethnicities. True that did occur, especially after war seemed to become a large factor in human society. And it may have had a greater part in prehistory than we are aware. But then it might not have. War is more about defending or expanding territory and “genocides” of races to remove them, quite converse to my suggestion, like many other developments post-history, are not about the qualities that allowed us to survive as a species and perhaps (including our ancestors) did change when we began to be civilized. Much of my thought centers on that subject, if civilization was beneficial to human survival or might be dooming our end as a species. Much of my thought is comparative and determinative of how the change has never totally changed our internal genetic culture that allowed us to survive.
But today I am focusing on diversity. It is of political charge today, and through many past generations. But the focus is often on the superiority of some over others, and superiority needs a rationale for its presumed superiorness. This presumption, like many presumptions, comes from our early migrations to seek diversity within our genes, and has been distorted into concepts of superior ethnicities, that in the US centers largely on race and ethnic background. And so in the next essay I want to begin to focus on what I believe modern studies have shown us is what I believe real human diversity and probably what humans were seeking to complete their own needs for survival.
But to conclude I want to return to “wokeness.” Or the problem with anti-wokeness, so to speak. Anti-wokeness, those who charge the woke (I’m not sure of what, trying to learn?) are tearing down our morals, goes to the theme of this newsletter. The entire anti-woke campaign is based on a concept of moral superiority. But in this case, those sometimes cased in values of common morality, is more or less reviving a Spencerian concept of superior beings, who are becoming threatened that they may lose the societal environment that has allowed them to act superiorly.
They are acting out of fear that their power will dissipate and they will no longer be able to act as superiors . It has been a threat since the beginning of some humans attempting to be superior to others. I discuss to some length this conflict that began within a few years of power-taking by early kings and continues to present power-brokers. Subjected majorities do not understand how fearful those who assume superior postures feel threatened by their own assumptions. That they feel threatened must mean they understand their vulnerabilities and actually know they are only assuming their superior posture. To combat an uprising against the subjected minorities they must divide by creating a false sense of indignation, in the case of the anti-woke movement it is an indignant morality against the truth of CRT and LBGQT, the latter I don’t discuss, having little interest in what anyone does in their bedroom (as long as it not due to any type of coercion) and seeing no significance whatsoever except that some are attempting to attack what certain people do. But then bedroom morality has always been an issue for the powerful, one that can proclaim a”badness’ based on any type of sexual behavior, and frankly I have never understood. The men who proclaim sodomy is bad in other men always assumed a right to sodomize other men, the men who claimed oral sex was wrong from the pulpit almost certainly practiced it themselves or were so sexually repressed they never found any sexual pleasure in their own lives and thus probably could never satisfy a partner. I really doubt Krafft-Ebing never once in his entire life ever stroked his own penis and just because everyone who he considered to be “mad” had masturbated in no way meant no one else had ever done so. The topic of sexual proclivities is in itself a madness and nothing but a guise for moral pulpitry to make others fear what the pulpitizer of such things fears from the pulpitized and a diversionary and meaningless tactic. It has no real world importance except that it is used to divide people with a morality that is extremely immoral. And almost all of the political attacks against “woke”ism by its current proponents proves once against the immorality of all morality and the reason there is no morally correct incidental behavior. There is only the justice of seeking the best behavior within any given interaction, and justice that is based on moral proclamations is itself not only unjust, but immoral.
References within text: