The Ethics of Color

The Fears that Follow

Jun 28, 2025

But the key to understanding pigmentation is not pure one-on-one Mendelian. In other words we do not get one gene for blue eyes from our mother, and one for brown eyes from our father, and therefore have brown eyes because blue is recessive. That’s not how it works. We have 23 chromosomes each with a set of DNA from our father and another from our mother and your features, your pigmentation, your personality are all not tied to one particular gene but multiple genes from both parents that interact with each other…there is simply no single gene for pigmentation of any kind, including pigmentation for eyes or hair.

In other words, pigmentation is not the monogenic inheritance we learn in school. (One cannot have blue eyes unless one has a blue-eyed gene from each parent because blue eyes are recessive) and modern genetic research has determined eye color is a tandem of two primary genes not one passed from each parent to child that creates a monogenic dominant-recessive gene hierarchy.

So what actually happens is that these genes, called OCA2 and HERC2, that determine eye color and therefore it is tissue and blood vessels of the iris (the colored part of the eye around the pupil) and the HERC2 gene is needed to help turn on the OCA2 gene to cause it to produce this pigment, resulting in brown eyes. If a person has a non-functioning OCA2 gene, they will always have blue eyes, because the HERC2 gene can't make the broken OCA2 gene work. Likewise, if a person has a HERC2 gene which doesn't work, the OCA2 gene will “underachieve,” failing to produce enough pigment to make brown eyes, resulting in blue eyes. These two genes aren't directly related to each other, yet they affect each other. . In this dependent relationship, both of these genes must work to give an individual brown eyes, a genetic relationship known as “epistasis.” Because of this process, it is actually possible (although rare) for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child. If one parent passes on a working HERC2 gene and one passes on a working OCA2 gene, rather than the broken version of each, the resulting child could have brown eyes.

While blue eyes are predominantly associated with northern europe, and the heaviest concentration in Europe in Estonia and Finland, where not having blue eyes would be rare; as a genetic pigmentation, blue eyes have developed strongly in several other non-European populations that have been carried into these populations due to the founder effect caused by these populations becoming genetic isolation.

In these populations, like the Solomon Islanders, the frequency of blue eyes is not due to inbreeding but the genetic isolation that resulted in the founder effect increasing the frequency of blue-eyed inheritance. The increased frequency in Estonia-Finnish is due to the same founder effect because after the first Steppe wave into the region a stacity developed and there was not a great deal of further migration into the region.

However blonde hair is developed entirely differently, and while many brunettes long to lighten their hair, this fair-haired idiot preferred to darken it because darker hair protected a balding scalp from u-v rays and a burned scalp.

Over the past few years, studies of genetic variation in thousands of people have linked at least eight DNA regions to blondness based on the fact that a certain DNA letter, or base, was found in people with that hair color but not in people with other hair colors. Some of those base changes, or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), were found in genes involved in the production of pigments, such as melanin. Mutations in these genes typically affect skin and hair color.

But for blonde hair there are other SNPs that lie outside the melanin genes, but could be part of the regulatory DNA that helps control the function of genes nearby. Changes in that regulatory DNA could result in hair color but not skin color change, or vice versa (darker or lighter patches on the body), because there is also regulatory DNA that can affect gene activity in just certain parts of the body. But blonde hair develops in different populations due to different genetic differences.
Studies have shown that in northern Europeans, the closest gene to an SNP that was strongly linked to blondness was KITLG, which codes for a protein that is key to making sure cells go to their proper places in the body and specialize accordingly. What has been discovered is that only a slightened amount of the protein could reduce KITLG by 20% leading to lightened (blonde hair).

But it is an insufficiency in an entirely different gene, the TYRP1 gene, that creates a high variant frequency in some Melanesian communities with blonde hair. But when it comes to your skin pigmentation there are approximately fifteen genes that have been directly associated with these variations in humans that cannot be best defined by studying “white” v. “black” phenotypes, but becomes clearer as geneticists have investigated the polygenicity of African populations and while it is determined that skin pigmentation is highly heritable, the loci explains only a small fraction of the variances.

Baseline skin pigmentation is a complex, polygenic trait . Despite this, recent studies have been able to identify how the genes associated with SLC24A5, TYRP1 , SMARCA2/VLDLR, and SNX13, can vary in many degrees even in genetically similar populations due to environmental effects upon the pigmentation.

I suppose that has long been obvious, and has led to the idea of skin pigmentation being related to the loci and that being the reason that Europeans became light skinned as some kind of genetic advantage. But dark-skinned people lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years before they became light skinned. But there is an obvious environmental effect on coloration no matter the genetic effect.

There is also a genetic link between “white” pigmentation and lactose tolerance that is being studied. And I am quite sure that there was some connection to the steppe ability to ingest lactose and lighter pigmentation. There is also a known connection between vitamin d deficiency and violence. I’m not sure yet what this means because the Masai are quite dark-skinned and lactose tolerant while Americans brought from other parts of Africa three centuries ago have increase lactose intolerance, with nearly seventy per cent remaining completely unable to ingest lactose and another twenty per cent that suffer some digestive difficulties.

So admittedly, there has not yet been discovered a genetic link between lactose tolerance and pale skin, and the Masai issue remains a drawback to make this claim boldly; nevertheless it is more sensible to suggest people began to have less pigmentation because they were ingesting increased vitamin D internally by drinking milk into adulthood and therefore their skinned paled not because of less u-v exposure but because the changes to the pigmentation were mutated as an advantage because of an increased intake of internal Vitamin D?

And so to hell with what is the “fake news” of skin color. What is relevant is how it is used to devastating effects upon society. And it is not just upon the suppressions the issue is utilized in determining class distinctions based on race.

But the issue of White, at least, can have equally devastating effects on those who wish to classify themselves as white/caucasian. There was a moment not too long when I was making an application for a new bank account and on the application was the inevitable choice of ethnicity:

White/Caucasian

African/American

Hispanic

Native American

Other

Okay the list might vary to slight degrees, but there it is, let us label you something and as always I left myself unlabeled. But this particular bank representative didn’t wish to permit me that choice, even though there was the usual disclaimer that the question was for statistical purposes only and not mandatory and told me I had to make a choice, And I told her that I wished to not make a declaration of being subdivided into a false ethnicity based on skin color.

Well she looked at me, and I’ve been told I look more gray than pale these days, she nevertheless said she would mark me down as Caucasian.
“I’ve no relationship to the Caucasus, “ I told her,

“Huh?,” in momentary confusion, “that just means white,” she then informed me.

“No,” I told her, “it means someone comes from the Caucasus mountain region.”

“No it doesn’t,” she educated me, “it’s just the color of people who are white.”

Always having been a contentions pupil I insisted I didn’t wish to be labeled at all.

“Well then we wouldn’t be able to give you a bank account then” she scolded the ignorant in me with the Ultimate Threat to bring me in line.

Ah, but I flunked myself once again and told her I would choose to not have a bank account (and of course didn’t get one due to my recalcitrant ignorance) and walked out.

But supposing I did begin to allow myself to be brought into the orderliness of this line of labeling people on whether they drink milk or not, then I am in full assembly to be placed into eternal toddlerhood by believing that I, as a white person, could become replaced.

This theme that peoples of darker hues are going to replace white/caucasians is certainly not of any great concern to me unless they actually might get rid of a few insignificant orange people.

But nevertheless I don’t know how whatever hue any person claims to becan be replaced by anyone of another hue if they do not mate with someone of another hue. I mean I can’t think of another way for a hue to be replaced in humanity, absent some type of transfection or mutation, can you?

But after that hateful diatribe for which you are free to castigate me because the only ones who can possibly fear being replaced by those of another are those whose mental and physical growth has been stunted by post-birth anencephaly.

If you think they are taller than two feet tall that is merely an optical illusion;their fears have stunted their learning from ever allowing themselves to grow more than two feet high. And since they have not grown beyond two feet and have to look up at everyone they become fretful of being stomped upon.

Now please don't confuse this with white supremacy which would be the opposite; the supremacist sees himself as somehow the larger . Ah yeah, Jonathan Swift and all that, but no, the Lilliputians recognize Gulliver as a giant, but don’t recognize their own smallness.

The supremacist is more Lilliputian than Brobdingnagian, they think they are much bigger than they are, while the truly big Brobdingnagians stature allows them to live unafraid, and therefore, in a kind of virtuous harmony. Only a small man thinks he is bigger than another.

But those whose brains have stunted their self-perceived growth at toddlerhood see themselves just as inferior to their own “race” as any other and are truly dangerous because of their own sense of inferiority that was stunted when their brain plasticity closed far too early. This brain cloture makes any development or learning impossible beyond the one-track self-hate of themselves and the world in which they can do nothing but fear its very existence in which they find themselves.

What has occurred is that by trying to be supreme to others and by the Europeans attempt to frame themselves superior to those they wished to subject, they saw hue as a striking difference that they could claim as the object of their superiority. But of course those within Europe who wished to claim this superiority really did not want to include all Europeans; or at least they didn’t wish to include the bullions of their rape of the world to all Europeans and so white was superior but some whites were more superior to other whites; leaving some abolished into the canyons of being proclaimed superior because of their color of skin and banished into the canyons of being treated as inferior creating a mind that becomes stunted with slamming doors inside its brain that makes comprehension possible only by means of fear.

And of course the irony (I don’t really believe it’s ironic, I think it might actually be the Real Tiger in the Tank of the conception of the Superior Man) is that the more superior one proclaims himself to be, the more tenuous his position becomes. All kingly dynasties fall, all business dynasties pass, and what always ends up being replaced in those who take superiority upon themselves. And white men who fear being replaced will be replaced by their fears; and anyone who thinks he has some destiny as more important than another only entices the son or the brother or the rival to become the better and the day the new king walks into his palace, the footsteps to replace him are walking beside him creating intolerance and inferior fortitude that intensifies the tigers he tries to defend his superiority with that rage into into his mind and prevent a peaceful sleep knowing full way that he might awaken as Duncan—-that is, usurped by another.

Since Superiority is not a genetic possibility in humanity, its idea is Inferior, and by tying to maintain itself it is continually refurbished by the NewKid with the Crown…and yet no one seems to think not seeking the crown at all might be the better policy if one does not wish to fall victim to being replaced.

The UnUtopian Optimist

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