So, over time, I learned about people who were different from me, and like anyone else, I formed opinions not just of these people, but opinions of the kinds of people I was beginning to learn about. Most of this ended up having to do with “ethnicity” and that, in turn, was shaped mainly by complexion, hair, and other physical features, and to a lesser but not insignificant degree, religion, cuisine, and other cultural traits. I was getting my identity ducks in a row.

Some of these people tended to be friendly, some scary. Some of them were “safe” and others not (including those that seemed more likely to beat me up or mug me to take my stuff). And some of these different kinds of people seemed to be smarter than others.

When I was growing up, being “smart” was one of those things that was on the table as a matter of discussion and observation. My parents were smart, as were my siblings and I. My mother had a high school degree and my father had a B.A. and some, but not much, graduate work (but he would later teach graduate classes). Among my siblings, we were eventually to hold numerous B.A.s, M.A.s and Ph.D.s. Only a few dads in the neighborhood had jobs you needed to be smart (according to cultural custom) to do, and my father was one of them. All of the moms seemed smart–it was just a question of how much smarter each mom seemed to be than each dad, with variance among the dads being the key determining factor. For my family, they were pretty equal, for the Zs down the street, Mrs. Z was clearly at least double-smart over Mr. Z. For the Across The Street Ks, it was hard to tell…Mr. K was one of the dads with a smart job, but both of them were constantly distracted with their many kids and with making ends meet. Everybody in the neighborhood was distracted with making ends meet.

There were many indicators that my siblings and I were smart. We were the go-to kids for others of our age who needed something figured out or some kind of information. We were always getting recognition in school. None of us knew what a B or a C was. I might have seemed smarter than all my siblings because I was the first kid in my family to be taken out of regular school and put in “smart kid” school. But I’m not. We’re all smart in different ways, except my sister Bunny, who is clearly smarter than all of us. (My sister Elizabeth hated when I would say that.) Anyway, smartness or lack thereof was part of the trope of the neighborhood (along with the other dimensions I mentioned above and will discuss below), especially for preteen kids. Mostly, though, it was an issue that annoyed others in the neighborhood. Like these conversations with my friend Joey, recorded here exactly as they happened (there are some things one does not forget):

Joey: “Hey, Greg. You’re a regular Walking Encyclopedia!”

Greg: “Thanks, Joey. I like to learn lots of stuff.”

Joey: “Mugrphhhmmmft.”

(Mugrphhhmmmft is the sound Joey’s fist makes giving Greg a bloody nose.)

…or this:

Joey: “Hey, Greg. What do you think that is up there?” (Pointing to the moon.)

Greg: “That’s the moon, Joey.”

Joey: “It can’t be the moon because it’s not night time. I know something you don’t know!”

Greg: “It’s the moon, Joey. You can also see it during the day.”

Joey: “My brother says it’s the other side of the Earth. You can only see the moon at night. You’re so stupid. You’re a stupid face!”

Greg: “I don’t know, Joey. Yeah, I guess if your bro…”

Joey: “Mugrphhhmmmft.”

…or this:

Joey: “Hey, Greg. You go to AP school. You must be really smart.”

Greg: “Well, not really. You could go there too, you know. I mean, yeah, it’s for smart kids, and you should go there too because you’re…”

Joey: “Mugrphhhmmmft.”

And so on. I couldn’t win with Joey.

Joey was my “friend,” but he was also the guy who gave me the most bloody lips and bloody noses. I now realize that it may have been an abusive relationship. Alas, there was no concept of such things back then. And the reason I mention Joey is because he was pretty typical of a lot of kids I knew.

Joey had a lot of friends who were like him, who looked like him and acted like him, and and it was kind of obvious that he and his friends formed a kind of racial group with similar characteristics, some physical and some behavioral. I could not possibly help but notice this because these kids–the ones like Joey–were the ones who were most likely to stop me on the street, threaten me or simply attack me, and take my spare change. I formed thoughts along these lines back then, and I look back at it and realize that these were racist thoughts. But to me, as a kid, they were about real differences. They became part of my way of defending and protecting myself. I saw kids that look like Joey, and I crossed the street. Later on in my life, I had to train myself to not do that and to avoid those thoughts.

The group Joey was a member of had a lot of families with only one parent (the mom) and a lot of kids. They all seemed to go to the same church, the kids were all pretty tough, and with only one exception, every time I got mugged or my bike got taken from me it was one of those Joey-kids that did it.

The adults also had traits that allowed them to be divided into different groups. The dads that had “smart jobs” mostly fell into one category, and those families, including the kids, were nicer, the kids would not beat me up and the families were always polite and thoughtful, and so on.

I also met a few of the people my father worked with and this, I’m now very ashamed to admit, contributed to me forming opinions of people in a categorical, and I now realize, racist, sense. As I mentioned, my father and I would have breakfast downtown at the DeWitt Clinton. There were a number of people we met up with most mornings there, and I particularly remember this one guy we would run into a lot, a kind of a “street character” that people called “the mayor” (I guess that was funny) who was in the same “racial” group as Joey (“you can only see the moon at night”) and this individual stood out as, to be honest, not all too smart, and maybe a little violent. He conformed to my expectations.

The place my dad worked had a board of directors, so even though my dad was the director, he answered to the board. We would run into them at the DeWitt Clinton and other places. They seemed not only smart but also were always well dressed, were leaders and powerful individuals, and so on. The board of directors was one style person, one skin color, one way of acting, in total contrast to the “race” that included “the mayor” and “Joey.” We would also run into dad’s main assistant, Brenda, who was in the same “race” as the board of directors, and she was really smart and could easily run the place on her own and was widely respected.

So the contrast between the Joeys and the Brendas was pretty strong. The Joeys were not too smart. They were poor. The families lacked dads. The kids and many of the adults were trouble, prone to violence, always stared at you hard. Their houses were rundown and their lawns covered with junk. The Brendas were well-dressed had more money, were smarter, nicer, better-educated, lived in nicer houses, and had nice yards. I remember as a kid thinking that the Joeys were dangerous and mean, and the Brendas were warm and welcoming. It may have helped that Brenda herself was rather hot, as I recall. And most of my dad’s bosses were of the Brenda group (race, ethnicity, whatever).

And yes, I admit it, I had race-based thoughts. I had a tendency to see someone and look at certain traits…the color of their skin and shape of their hair mainly…and assume certain things, to make certain judgments. As an adult I know that these judgments are both ethically and morally questionable and scientifically indefensible. But for me, back then, they were the reality that I lived in.

One of the strangest things about all of this was this: I could see that the Brendas were in so many ways “better” than the Joeys, but my father, my mother, my siblings, me…we were all Joeys. I was a member of the inferior race.

You see, I was an Irish kid. I lived in an “all white” neighborhood, but all of my neighbors but one (Billy R.) were either Irish or some form of Mediterranean or Eastern European, mainly Polish or Italian. The swarthy Polish and Italian people had stable families (mom and dad at home), the kids were generally well behaved, and it was among these folks that I saw fathers with professions and mothers who were housewives, often with a part time job. Among the pasty-white and freckled, red- and blond-haired Irish I saw, almost without exception, kids who were mean and not very smart, and families like Joey’s and the Ds around the block, where the kids were running especially wild and there was no father in the household. I think Joey’s mom got welfare.

“The mayor” at the DeWitt Clinton was also Irish, and his silly behavior, his forgetfulness, almost clown like demeanor was in stark contrast to the demure, professional behavior of my father’s bosses–the board of directors–80% of whom were African-American. Brenda was also African-American.

Then we moved to a new neighborhood. And everything changed.

We were unusual, my family. Looking back at it, I now realize that this may have been why Joey was always beating me up. I was being “uppity.” When my father started to earn more money with his smart-person job, we moved to a nice house in a nicer, newer neighborhood and suddenly were surrounded by people different from us…by a “race” who typically had better than average jobs, had more money, were known to be smarter, than my kind. Suddenly I was going to a school with a lot more of this new kind of kid than I ever imagined existed. Eventually, as a matter of fact, I even married one of these folk (for a while). So just as my old neighborhood was structured in such a way that I came to accept races and ethnicities as real, meaningful entities, my new neighborhood taught me more of the same.

I later experienced additional transformations that refined my growing race-based thinking. At some point I started working in a very active ghetto, doing archaeology. Here, I found out that most African Americans were actually not well-dressed and seemingly well-off (or at least middle class) but were actually living in really crappy housing. The people I worked with were afraid of the African Americans, and they did steal some of my stuff. I remember feeling more comfortable on days that I worked with my friend Fred, who was an African American, because he knew everybody and was relatively famous, being the brother of an NFL pro. I found out, around the age of 13 from direct experience working every day in the ‘hood, that there was a strong correlation between poverty and skin color in my hometown, and that the Joeys were actually somewhat better off than the African Americans living on Arbor Hill or in the South End.

Another transformation had to do with school. I started out at an all-white, all-Catholic school. Then they took me out of that school and put me in a smart-kid school. There, I met my first African American fellow students and my first non-Catholic fellow students. In fact, there were exactly two of us Irish Catholics in this class, and everyone else was either a non-Catholic Christian or a Jew, and among the non-Catholic Christians were African Americans.

If I drew conclusions at that time, or experienced a refinement of my race-based thinking, I would have to say that black people filled the range from most functional, smartest, most powerful, and most respectable in behavior to least in all these same areas, with whites distributed along the in-between areas, with Jews at the higher end and Irish Catholics at the lowest end.

The move my family made reinforced this transformation. We moved from an all-white but also all-Christian neighborhood to another all-white but mainly Jewish neighborhood. This reinforced the idea of Jewish superiority, because my neighbors were pretty well off, some spoke wisely in exotic foreign accents, many were university professors, and when I went to a new school at about the same time, it was another smart-kid school with piles of Jews and a handful of black students.

Indeed, my first real conversations with a peer about race and biology were at this new school, with my friend Miles. He was very smart and he was Jewish. He used to tell me that Jews would always be smarter than Catholics. Here’s why. Catholics scour the community to find the smartest men to be their leaders and make them the priests. The priests are then not allowed to reproduce. At the same time, Jews scour the community to find the smartest men to be their leaders and make them the rabbis. Not only can the rabbis reproduce, but they are virtually bred…everyone in the community supplies them with resources to maximize their reproductive output.

According to Miles, since this had been going on for 5,000 years for the Jews and 2,000 years for the Catholics, the difference should be immense.

You know what, though? This conversation happened in eight grade, and I promise you that there was never a moment when either Miles or I believed it. We found it hysterically funny. There was never a moment when even one neuron in our brains considered this comparison to be valid. We knew intuitively that it was wrong because by that time we both had a pretty good understanding of the bankruptcy of theories about racial superiority or inferiority.

No, we did not learn this from our parents…our parents had no idea. Our parents had typical white, middle class, 1970s racist ideas, though my father not so much. (Well, I can’t speak for Miles’ mother. I don’t recall her ever uttering a racist word, but we did not have a lot of conversations.) We were not really learning this from school either. We were just two smart guys who had seen enough of the world at an early age (though with different experiences from each other) that conflicted with what society was trying to make us believe to rebel against being assimilated into the Racist Thinking Borg. It probably helped that we happened to be living in a society…in a particular city, at a particular time…that had been undergoing social and structural transformation.

I’m lucky to have had this model rather than the usual race-based model in which whites are superior in every way and blacks are inferior in every way (music, rhythm, sports, excepted), which is the model that most whites and probably many blacks grow up with. I also had the opportunity to see with my own eyes the direct correlation between circumstances and these other traits, as well as to see some pretty overt and nasty racist acts that made me realize the severity of racism as a social modality. I saw and heard things that made me cringe when I was little, and I remember that cringing…even at a very young age the racist model was there for me to absorb, but my actual experiences were telling me that it did not fit.

When I was a kid, we played war. Since we were in denial of our involvement at that time in Viet Nam, and Korea was the “forgotten war,” the war we modeled in our play was World War II. This is the reason for the importance of each dad’s involvement in The Big One. Our status as kids was usually determined in part by this fact.

My dad was in the war. He was in London and he was bombed, and he received a medal from the King of England as well as from the US Army, and it was actually possible for me to sneak kids into the house and show them the medals, which my father kept hidden away in his desk. My status could only have been improved had my father been wounded. Oh, well.

The good guys in the war were the Americans, and the bad guys were the Germans and the Japanese. But then one day I found out that I was half German. Holy crap, that made me half bad guy. This is probably why I had more than a little empathy for Billy R.

Billy R. was the one kid who had no dad but who was not Irish, or at least, as far as I know he was not Irish. His mother was Japanese and his father a Caucasian American who was in the occupation forces after World World II in Japan. Billy’s dad died right around the time he was born, so he never knew him.

Billy’s mom was different because she was Japanese and because she was a single mom. She worked, naturally, as a server and matron in a Chinese restaurant. When the first Japanese restaurant in town opened up, naturally, Billy’s mom worked there. Also, Billy’s mom maintained a garden in her back yard that was the envy of all of the moms. Especially my mom, because Billy’s back yard was over the fence from ours…we were over-the-fence neighbors with the R’s, which made for a special relationship.

Billy was my friend, and whenever any of the kids insisted that Billy be the bad guy in the P.O.W. camp because he was Japanese, I would stick up for him right up until the moment that Joey and his friends would beat both of us up. In truth, Billy mostly avoided playing with the other kids, but he and I would play together in my yard now and then (we could not play in his yard for fear of messing up the nice garden, but in my yard we had some good options).

One day, years later, when I was attending the aforementioned smart-kid school with many Jewish students, I saw Billy again. He had grown huge. He was at my school to play in a wrestling match. He had become the top high school wrestler citywide (and beyond, if memory serves). I wonder if there was a point in time where Joey started to cross the street when he saw Billy R., rather than the other way around?

There was a candy when I was a kid called N-word Babies, and a kind of nut called N-word toes. I remember the day I realized what that word meant. I had been using the word but not knowing what it meant. I found out what it meant while I was standing on the steps leading up to the front porch of my house. I remember sort of holding on to the black metal railing and moving it back and forth a little because it was getting loose (from me sliding down it and swinging from below it, most likely). I can viscerally feel these things right now as I remember this conversation. One of my sisters was there, my mother was there, and the neighbor from next door was there. We were eating N-word Babies. I asked what the word mean, found out, then I asked, wasn’t that a bad thing to say, and I was somewhat sheepishly told yes, it was. It was kind of embarrassing. My memory of this is that we didn’t get N-word Babies any more as a snack and we started calling n-word toes by their other name: Brazil nuts. We also stopped catching n-words by the toe and started catching tigers by the toe instead (while eeny-meeny-minie-moe-ing). (The strange thing was, these candies were not labeled with the n-word, that is just the term people used. I’m not sure if they ever were. But a quick and disturbing search of the Internet will reveal plenty of commercially produced products using that racist term.)

The Jewish shopkeepers on Central Avenue kept vicious dogs behind the counters for protection. If black kids walked into the store, the swinging door allowing access through the counter was unlatched and the dog would chase the kids out. Usually the shopkeeper only needed to threaten the kids and they would leave.

We would always assemble at car accidents to watch the blood and gore. (I lived near a couple of pretty bad corners, and this was the days before seat belts and other safety features). One day there was a bad accident in which a black man was ejected from his car and splattered on the pavement, blood spewing everywhere. There was no ambulance called for him. Instead, the police took him away in a “Paddy Wagon.” I later learned that it was called a “Paddy Wagon” because it is the vehicle used to take drunk Irishmen off to jail on Saturday Nights. So don’t call them that.

Anyway, while they were taking this African American man who had not done anything wrong away in the racistly named vehicle, the conversation included things like the color of his blood (shockingly, it was the same as found in white people similarly spattered on the same pavement in earlier accidents) and his facial features (“his lips are so big…”). These were the conversations among the adults. My memory is that the kids were awestruck by the blood and guts and were mostly standing there quietly, ashen, horrified. I asked an adult…I think it was the guy who ran the dry cleaners in front of which this accident happened…why they were taking him away in a Paddy Wagon. “I don’t know. I guess because he’s a N-word,” was the answer.

My personal experiences and what society was constantly trying to teach me were almost always at odds. I was lucky to have had these contradictory experiences as a kid. This helped prepare me for what I was to encounter years later when I went to Africa for the first time. During the mid-1980s, there were several years where I spent more time each year in Africa than I did in the US. It was almost like I was living there and visiting Cambridge once a year for a truncated semester of coursework. Then, over the next several years, I spent varying amounts of time each year, most years, in Africa. Overall, I’ve spent several person-years living there, in a number of different settings.

If there was a race-based model of intelligence (and there is not), it would have to be somewhat like the model I saw developing with Irish, Black and Jewish people when I was a kid. Pygmies, for instance, not only have very large brains relative to body size, but they are also all very smart. I could argue this on the basis of four years of research with Pygmies. In contrast, the best evidence suggests that the white folks that I have lived among in various US neighborhoods and the white folks I grew up with are of below-average intelligence. Among the African villages, the farmers, there would seem to be a full range of people who really don’t seem to be very sharp at all to people who are veritable geniuses. Among the blacks I knew as I grew up, and among whom I’ve lived since moving out of my hometown and living mainly in “diverse” neighborhoods, I see a similar range of variation. My own experience supports the idea that almost all Jews are smart, just like almost all Pygmies are smart. Maybe the Jews and the Pygmies are closely related.

So there is a full range of black people and a full range of white people, and both groups have their own little special elite groups here and there. This would be the model that my experience suggests, if you absolutely must insist on a race-based model of intelligence.

This is, of course, not what I believe to be true. It is just what I would have to believe were I to force my observations into traditional race-based biological thinking. The details as to why the traditional race-based biological thinking is wrong is a subject to cover at another time.

I will end with one simple observation. There are a lot of people having a conversation about whether or not the color of one’s skin can tell you that a person is likely to be smart or not…or more precisely, if we took 20 black-skinned people and put them in a room with 20 white-skinned people, the whites would on average be smarter than the blacks right there, in that room. If we went into that room and asked for everyone’s opinion on something, we might want to give the blacks’ opinion some consideration because everyone is entitled to their opinion, but we could also know that if this opinion was about anything complex or difficult to understand, and if there was a difference of opinion between the blacks and whites, the whites’ opinion would be more likely correct.

That is what this conversation is about, right?

What strikes me is this: I don’t see any black people signing on, reading through this conversation, and going, “Hey, WTF?” Perhaps this does not happen because this is a conversation among whites who pretty much have been having this conversation among whites their whole lives.

True humanity can only form on a foundation of real experience, and reality is diverse. I feel very badly for those who have not experienced that diversity.

That is probably true sometimes. But we have sequenced the entire human genome, so shouldn’t we know about all the genes? Well, yes and no. We may have a list of genes found in a sample of humans, but “The Human Genome” can consist of a single individual (though it does not) and miss variation between individuals, i.e., it may not be a record of all of the possible alleles (variants) of each gene. Also, beyond the scope of this discussion but worth mentioning, a “gene” is not a simple concept. Whether or not a gene is expressed, where, when, and exactly what product it produces is not entirely encoded in the gene itself, but rather, elsewhere in the genome, or not encoded at all, but rather, dependent on external, non-genetic factors. So that complicates things too. So, if there is a trait that you think must be genetic, but years of research have failed to find it, the existence of a human genome and the prior acquisition of a lot of genetic data does not necessarily mean that the genetic information that determines the trait in question is not there. You can continue to believe that the genetic code for the trait will eventually be found

Except when you can’t.

There are two separate ways in which people sort out which traits are assumed to be genetic from those that are assumed to be not genetic. Both are heuristic, one is valid, and one is not. Let’s start with the one that is valid.

Suppose, as before, there is a trait that is seemingly inherited in families in such a way that a genetic trait would be, in the time tested manner that with respect this trait “offspring resemble their parents” as Darwin noted. The next question you can ask is this: Is it biologically sensible that this trait is inherited genetically, or is there a better, obvious, non-genetic mode of inheritance? If the trait is a physical feature such as eye color, then we have a sensible biological explanation for the trait having to do with developmental process we know something about and a set of metabolic pathways that produce various molecules such as pigments. The idea that this trait is genetic is biologically sensible, so even if you can’t find any, or all, of the genetic determinants of this trait, you can figure they are out there somewhere. Suppose, though, that the trait is a behavioral one that we see people in real life learning. For example, what language a person speaks generally follows the same kind of inheritance pattern many clearly genetic traits follow. With respect to spoken language, most of the time, offspring resemble their parents. But, rather than there being a sensible biological explanation for this trait, there is a sensible cultural explanation for this trait, so we don’t even look for the genetic variants for “French” vs. “Mandarin” vs. “English.” We simply assume this is not genetic.

The second method, the incorrect one, is to work with an article of faith. Broadly speaking, and I oversimplify greatly here, there are two primary articles of faith that often inform people’s thinking, shaping their assumptions, about genetics. Both usually have to do with behavioral traits in humans, but this can apply to physical traits as well. One article of faith asserts that humans are born as a blank slate, and all of their behavioral characteristics, such as their personality, intelligence by one measure or another, and so on, are added by experience. The other is the inheritance assumption, that some or much of an individual’s personality, intelligence, etc is determined by genes. There is not necessarily a consistent logic behind either of these assumptions, though various schools of thinking will include, often, a logical framework. However, this method of coming to a conclusion about the genetics or lack thereof behind various traits relies on one important element regarding genetic systems: Ignorance. If you are a blank slatist, then the absence of a clear pathway from genes to behavior means that your hypothesis can’t be falsified. If you are a genetic determinist, then the lack of such a pathway can be attributed to ongoing ignorance about the genes. The former might then be expected to live in fear that a gene will be found for their favorite learned behavior, and the latter might be expected to to live in a state of hubris, firmly knowing and asserting a truth that is not yet known but someday will be.

My impression is that over time there are fewer and fewer pure genetic determinists out there, and few and fewer blank slatists. I think the reasons for that shift have little to do with increasing knowledge, and more to do with changes in how one plays the academic game of argument, but that is discussion for another time. There is a danger in that shift, though. In the absence of any useful research results, if blank slatists start to admit that there could be some sort of genetics behind behavior, and determinists start to admit that experience and learning can also play a role, then we are converging on an increasingly simplified view of what is really a very complicated process. We should be gaining more complex, nuanced, and better informed views of how behavior arises, not simpler ones. Probably.

Over the last few decades, there have been a few important changes in how we should view human behavior over generational time and variation in those behaviors within and across categories (gender, ethnicity, geography, etc.). In short, certain behavioral traits have shown, synchronically (lacking the perspective of change over time) patterns that look genetic. For example, some families seem to be extra smart. Some have suggested that some “races” are smarter than others (at another time we can discuss why there really are no races, but let’s use “race” here as a potentially valid sampling strategy, which it can be even if the underlying races are fictions). We also see assertions of behavioral differences between the primary sexes (male vs female).

These observations are really statements about variance. Two groups are different, but vary within. There is overlap in the trait (i.e., IQ) but the means vary. We can statistically test the validity of the asserted differences in means by examining the variance in each sample and seeing if the mean of one sample fall within the predicted range of the central tendency of the others. In other words, asserting that there is a statistical difference between two groups is a process that involves understanding the variance of the underlying population(s) and samples. So, the questions can all be reframed in this manner:

Is the variation we see in trait X across certain groups best explained by underlying corresponding variation in the genetic system, or by the variation found in some other cause?

People fight vigorously over the underlying cause of IQ differences between groups. Some say it is primarily genetic, some say it is primarily not genetic, but rather, related somehow to what has become known as “lived experience.” Over the last couple of decades, there have been many attempts to explain observed variation in IQ using socioeconomic status, diet, education, issues having to do with test making or testing procedures. All of these factors have been shown to explain differences between groups to a modest to large degree in several studies. In other words, if you want to explain variation in IQ using non-genetic explanations, you can have some real success.

The genetic explanation of variation in IQ has had success in one main area which is irrelevant. This is the fact that genetically determined developmental differences between people that affect function that are generally classified as disorders predict large IQ differences. But this set of effects is not related to the question being asked.

The strongest evidence for a genetic underpinning of IQ is probably the large scale racial model solidified years ago by J. Philippe Rushton. He demonstrated that there is a grouping of brain sizes by race, with Asians having the largest brains, Caucasians the second larges, and Blacks the smallest (these race terms are his). He then showed that these brain sizes correlated with IQ difference. The modern psychometric literature assumes a racial difference in IQs, and asserts that this difference is real, but does to by citing sources that then site sources that ultimately cite Rushton. Rushtons all the way down, as it were.

The problem with this is that Rushton’s analysis was bogus. The brain sizes were taken from such sources at hat sizes for army conscripts classified by race, with the hat sizes used to estimate brain size. The Black (African) brain got smaller because Rushton subtracted a factor from that estimate of brain size, using an archaic thick skulled African fossil to assume that Africans have very very thick skulls. Correspondingly, the Asians were assumed to have thin skulls, and thus, got larger brains. The IQ data is similarly adulterated. In one part of the study, Rushton needed an “African” (native) IQ value, so he used the results of a test administered by racist anthropologists commissioned by the Apartheid government of South Africa to prove the inferiority of Blacks. And so on. The bottom turtle in this edifice is a fake.

The range of variation across “racial” groups (or other groups) in modern IQ data is very small compared to the change in IQ measured or estimated over decades of time through the 20th century within a single large and diverse population (Americans). If IQ is genetically determined and a stable feature of behavior, then there has been more evolution of these genes over less than 100 years of time in the US than we see across any two groups of modern humans. That is impossible. Again, IQ does not behave nicely as a genetic trait.

The discovery of a gene or set of genes that would underly IQ has not happened. In some recent studies, IQ is assumed to be very complex and the result of many different genes, and there is some statistical evidence for this. But, there is a big problem there too. Any trait can be linked to a set of genetic variants if the set of genes is large enough. That is a statistical effect and it is not really a link. More like a party trick, or a con game. (In fact this method is a con you may have heard of. I send 10,000 people an email predicting that a certain stock will go up, another 10,000 people an email predicting it will go down. One or the other happens. I then send 5,000 of the people who got the “correct” prediction another prediction, and 5,000 of them the opposite prediction. Now, 2,500 people have gotten two correct predictions from me. I keep doing that until I’ve got several dozen people convinced I am a stock market genius, and I take their money.)

Generally speaking, many behavioral traits have been explained, in part and sometimes in large part, by factors that are not genetic, while at the same time, the hunt for the presumed underlying genes have come up empty. There was great optimism up through the 1990s that genetic underpinning of human behavior … genetic variation corresponding to behavioral variation … would be found. But even as early as 1993 this was being questioned. Here is a sidebar, reproduced in full, from a Scientific American article by John Horgan summarizing the work up to that time:

Behavioral Genetics: A lack of progress report (1993)

CRIME: Family, twin and adoption studies have suggested a heritability of 0 to more than 50 percent for predisposition to crime. … In the 1960s researchers reported an association between an extra Y chromosome and vio-lent crime in males. Follow-up studies found that association to be spurious. MANIC DEPRESSION: Twin and family studies indicate heritability of 60 to 80 percent for susceptibility to manic depression. In 1987 two groups reported locating different genes linked to manic depression, one in Amish families and the other in Israeli families. Both reports have been retracted. SCHIZOPHRENIA: Twin studies show heritability of 40 to 90 percent. In 1988 a group reported finding a gene linked to schizophrenia in British and Icelandic families. Other studies documented no linkage, and the initial claim has now been retracted. ALCOHOLISM: Twin and adoption studies suggest heritability ranging from 0 to 60 percent. In 1990 a group claimed to link a gene—one that produces a receptor for the neurotransmitter dopamine—with alcoholism. A recent re-view of the evidence concluded it does not support a link. INTELLIGENCE: Twin and adoption studies show a heritability of performance on intelligence tests of 20 to 80 percent. One group recently unveiled preliminary evidence for genetic markers for high intelligence (an IQ of 130 or higher). The study is unpublished. HOMOSEXUALITY: In 1991 a researcher cited anatomic differences be-tween the brains of heterosexual and homosexual males. Two recent twinstudies have found a heritability of roughly 50 percent for predisposition to male or female homosexuality. These reports have been disputed. Another group claims to have preliminary evidence fo genes linked to male homosexualty. The data have not been published.

This is from a study by Jay Joseph on the “Classical Twin Method in the Social and Behavioral Sciences”

The classical twin method assesses differences in behavioral trait resemblance between reared-together monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twin pairs. Twin method proponents argue that the greater behavioral trait resemblance of the former supports an important role for genetic factors in causing the trait. Many critics, on the other hand, argue that non-genetic factors plausibly explain these results…. In 2012, a team of researchers in political science using behavioral genetic methods performed a study based on twin data in an attempt to test the critics’ position, and concluded in favor of the validity of the twin method and its underlying monozygotic–dizygotic “equal environment assumption.” The author argues that this conclusion is not supported, because the investigators (1) framed their study in a way that guaranteed validation of the twin method, (2) put forward untenable redefinitions of the equal environment assumption, (3) used inadequate methods to assess twin environmental similarity and political ideology, (4) reached several conclusions that argue against the twin method’s validity, (5) overlooked previous evidence showing that monozygotic twin pairs experience strong levels of identify confusion and attachment, (6) mistakenly counted environmental effects on twins’ behavioral resemblance as genetic effects, and (7) conflated the potential yet differing roles of biological and genetic influences on twin resemblance. The author concludes that the study failed to support the equal environment assumption, and that genetic interpretations of twin method data in political science and the behavioral science fields should be rejected outright.

With respect to psychiatric disorders, from the same author:

The psychiatric genetics ?eld is currently undergoing a crisis due to the decades-long failure to uncover the genes believed to cause the major psychiatric disorders. Since 2009, leading researchers have explained these negative results on the basis of the ‘‘missing heritability’’ argument, which holds that more effective research methods must be developed to uncover presumed missing genes. According to the author, problems with the missing heritability argument include genetic determinist beliefs, a reliance on twin research, the use of heritability estimates, and the failure to seriously consider the possibility that presumed genes do not exist. The author concludes that decades of negative results support a ?nding that genes for the major psychiatric disorders do not appear to exist, and that research attention should be directed away from attempts to uncover ‘‘missing heritability’’ and toward environmental factors and a reassessment of previous genetic interpretations of psychiatric family, twin, and adoption studies.

And from researcher Tim Crow:

A substantial body of research literature, identified by nine out of ten papers on genetics in the recent ISI research front on schizophrenia, claims to have established associations between aspects of the disease and sequence variation in specific candidate genes. These candidatures have proven unreplicated in large sibling pair linkage surveys and a targeted association study. Even if the case for an association be regarded as a lucky guess (assuming one gene in 30 000 was guessed right) the large linkage and association studies provide no evidence of sequence variation relating to psychosis at any of these gene loci. Thus this body of work must be regarded as an indicator of the extent to which the ‘eye of faith’ is able to discern meaning in complex data when none is present.

I could go on. There have been further criticisms of the twin studies, for example. The most interesting, potentially, of these studies was on twins reared apart, more or less separated at birth. Commonalities among such individuals would be strong evidence for a genetic underpinning, because these individuals were raised in completely different environments so there would be no chance of a learned or cultural component other than a general background effect of having been raised n the same planet, or in the same country. Right? Well, no. Twins separated at birth were mostly twins that were not all that separated. After all, where do researchers actually find twins truly and distantly separated at birth, especially in the days when people seeking birth parents had hardly become a thing yet? Many of these twins, probably the vast majority, were separated only in the sense that they were raised by different members of the same family, or separately by divorced parents. Many were raised in the same neighborhood or often, the same house. My brother and I are not twins, but we were “raised apart” by the criteria of the twin studies because my family was distributed among the rooms of a two family residence, so technically he and I had bedrooms at different addresses.

In sum, it is easier to find sociological, cultural, or environmental explanations for variation in human abilities, intelligence, or personality traits. The seeming inheritance by family of some of these traits may well be a combination of something genetic and something experiential or cultural, but when looking for the actual underlying causes, genetics has repeatedly come up wanting while environmental explanations do a good job of addressing a fairly large part of the variation we see. Models of race based differences are so poorly done, and are often highly politically motivated, that they should never be trusted. That scientific ship sailed a long time ago.

Maybe the blank slate theory isn’t so bad after all. It does not imply that just anything can happen when making a human being out of a sperm and an egg. After all, it is a blank slate and not a blank whatever. But it is probably not true that some people’s lived experiences are written on slate, while others on white boards, and still others on smart boards, even if there are some people who I’m sure assume that they were.

Selected references:

Horgan, John. 1992. Eugenics Revisited. Scientific American. June.
Joseph, J. (2011). The Crumbling Pillars of Behavioral Genetics. GeneWatch, 24 (6),4–7. Web page
Joseph, J. (2012). The “Missing Heritability” of Psychiatric Disorders: Elusive Genes or Non-Existent Genes? Applied Developmental Science, 16(2), 65–83. doi:10.1080/10888691.2012.667343
Joseph, J. (2013). The Use of the Classical Twin Method in the Social and Behavioral Sciences : The Fallacy Continues, 34(1), 1–40.
Lewontin, R. Human Diversity. 2000, Scientific American Library.
Marks, J. (2008) Race: Past, Present, and Future. In: Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, edited by B. Koenig, S. Lee, and S. Richardson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 21–38. PDF
Marks, J. (2008) Race across the physical-cultural divide in American anthropology. In: A New History of Anthropology, edited by H. Kuklick. New York: Blackwell, pp. 242–258. PDF
Tizard, B. (1974). IQ and Race. Nature, 247, (5349), 316.

Other posts of interest:

• How to get rid of spiders in your house
• Why is your poop green?
• How many cells are there in the human body?
• Is there really a plot hole in Harry Potter Goblet of Fire?
• How long is a human generation?
• Is blog ever really blue?
• How to not get caught plagiarizing
• The origin of the domestic chicken
• What are the three necessary and sufficient conditions of Natural Selection?
• How do I get rid of foot fungus?
• Which is better, Tap Water or Bottled Water?
• Has Global Warming stopped?

Also of interest: In Search of Sungudogo: A novel of adventure and mystery, which is also an alternative history of the Skeptics Movement.

Let’s look just at the brain part of this problem.

There are between 50 and 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and every one is connected to a minimum of one other neuron to produce about 100 trillion connections. So when we are thinking about how the brain is wired up, we have to explain how so many connections can be specified to make the brain work.

There are thousands of genes that seem to be expressed mainly or exclusively in the brain … perhaps as many as 10,000 (or about half the genes that are active in the human genome) … but this vast difference between number of connection and number of genes is true to nearly the same extent for all mammal brains. A human brain has way more connections (and much more “higher cognitive function”) than a mouse brain, but with about the same number of genes, There may be some unique added genes in the human, but the number of additional brain circuits required to add human language and cognitive function to a mouse can not be explained by there being more genes, unless individual genes do not do much in the way of detail.

All human populations over long(ish) evolutionary time are subjected to similar selective pressures to have a smaller brain. Large brains in humans kill mothers and children in birth. Death in childbirth is, in fact, higher for humans in a “natural state” than other mammals. The large brain is being selected against to a significant degree, or at least, it is safe to assume this.

However, large brains persist. There is some literature suggesting that some “races” have smaller brains than others. As far as I know these assertions are very suspicious, and while brain size varies across different samples, there is no reliable data suggesting that there are major population level differences in human brain size. All of the proposed differences that I have studied involve very poor data and very inappropriate manipulation of the data to make it look like there are significant population differences in brain size.

So, humans have whopping big brains, we should not have such large brains from the perspective of natural selection unless they are conferring some advantage to offset childbirth related mortality, and the number of neurons and connections, and overall complexity of human brains may be affected by genetics, but it is not possible for these connections to be specified in any level of detail by genes. Indeed, only rough patterns could be stipulated by genetic programming, and in comparing the anatomy of normal human brains, we do not see differences between populations.

As an aside: There certainly are genetic abnormalities that cause abnormalities in human brains, but just as a gene that cause a person to be born without legs is not assumed to have alleles that affect running abilities, a gene that if “broken” causes a “broken” brain can not be assumed to be a gene with allelic variation that affects day to day normal brain function. Genes don’t work that way, bodies don’t work that way.

So we are left with the question: How does your brain get to the point where it functions? You may not realize this, but there is an ancillary question as well: How come highly smart human-like brains seem to not evolve very often on this planet?

The way mammalian brains form is generally the same: Genes specify, using signaling chemicals, overall positioning of proliferating neurons, which then over-reproduce and over-connect. So, all individuals start out with brains with many extra neurons and many extra connections. This infantile mammalian brain is so over-produced in terms of cells and connections that it can’t function well. It is also short on insulating fats that normally cover the axons (the parts that connect neurons to other neurons).

Then over time connections break and neurons die. This process mainly depends on input. So, neural connections that are not used die. Neural connections can thus, during development, be formed in response to the environment, where the environment includes other parts of the brain, the body the brain is in, and the surrounding physical environment the body lives in.

And, in the case of humans and presumably to varying degrees some other mammals, the brain is shaped (sculpted, really) by the culture in which it grows.

This process of shaping the brain based on the culture within which exists is a Darwinian process a the neural (not genetic) level because neurons have different chances of survival depending on this environment. The degree to which this is an externally caused cultural process is well exemplified by the way reading and writing capacities form in the brain. We have brain regions specific to these functions, which could not have evolved and can not be specified by genes, which differ between individuals in how well they function (how “reading able” someone is) based on their experience, and the kind of language being read or written sometimes even determines which region of the brain is shaped for this function. Some languages use mainly temporal regions and other languages use mainly occipital regions. A person who can read and write in both kinds of languages can lose, due to brain damage such as a stroke, the capacity to read or write one of the languages with the other left intact because of this physical separation.

Culture is not only required to create a functioning human brain, but culture can create all different kinds of brains. There are probably limits as to how different brains can be, based on cultural differences, but finely tuned tests can be constructed to measure some of these differences. In my view, Western Middle Class Intelligence Tests are one such measure. It is said that such tests have been redesigned to remove all biases, but the same people who make that claim have also made other claims about human brains that show that they have little concept of how brains develop or how they may differ from environmental causes.

Another potential cause of difference in brains that is also environmental is dietary. It is probably true that almost everyone’s brain is challenged by shortages of energy, oxygen, and key nutrients at various stages of growth and development because the brain is so demanding. But individuals who have had more such challenges may well end up with a brain lacking adequate myelination in some areas, or damaged glial functioning or some other problem that can impair brain function.

Home environment, linguistic environment, diet, and other environmental factors probably sum to having a much greater effect on brain development (and thus on various tests of brain function) than genetic factors. Or at least, in the absence of overwhelming evidence (or even modest evidence, for that matter) to the contrary, environmental causes of variation in the brain, which is an environmentally shaped organ, can safely be assumed to be paramount based on everything we know about brain development and function.

The best book I know of to explore this issue is not too current but is still quite good. Supporting evidence for everything given in this post will be found in this source: The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by Terry Deacon.

The idea is to blame single mothers for crime. They, being single mothers, would do a lousy job of raising their offspring, who would then grow up and be criminals. There is a racist undertone to this, with a twist. There are those who would like to blame non-white people for all the crime, and this is a version of that. The same racist “science” that underscores the link between melanin in one’s skin and criminal behavior also purports that there is a link between melanin in one’s skin and all the things that lead to single motherhood, from promiscuity to a tendency to not follow social rules to, amazingly, a shorter gestation period which would, I assume, allow single mothers to produce more offspring than might otherwise be possible.

Anyway, there are those who remember the link being made, and here is what the data for violent crime in the US looked like at the time:

Nice relationship there. All else being equal one would want to look at these two variables and see if there is anything to the argument. We KNOW the two variables are related, because otherwise, why would anyone put them on the same graph!@!?? And, once they are on that graph they are perfectly correlated. One small thing that would need to work out is the fact that the criminals are probably not infants, but I’m sure that the time lag thing is just a detail.

Anyway, now, time has passed since that correlation seemed to be explanatory of high crime rates. Has anything changed since then? Let’s look at the data, updated:

Well, now that we see the whole data set, one might wonder why single motherhood rate was not correlated to crime rate prior to 1970. Maybe that’s the time lag thing. It turns out, in fact, that of the 50 years shown on this graph, the correlation seems to work for only about half the time.

Single mothers, you are off the hook. FOR NOW!

If you want to watch it, the best experience is to watch the whole 2+ minutes.

Several issues back, Richardson and Freeman invited Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy* to talk about voting suppression.

“On this episode of Now & Then, “Voting Rights: The Big Picture,” Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman talk about the history of voter suppression with Carol Anderson, professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of One Person No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. The trio discuss the concept of the “consent of the governed” during the founding period, the emergence of Jim Crow laws after the Civil War, and the evolution of voting suppression efforts in the modern era. How have politicians justified restrictive voting policies? How do these policies damage American democracy? And what strategies might protect the franchise today? ”

The podcast is here.

One of the great features of Now & Then is that the hosts spend a lot of time running up to the body of the work laying down foundations and drawing in context. Very Maddowesque. But for this reason the podcast can have a slow start. In this episode, it takes a while for Carol Anderson to get the mic and start her thing, but once she does you will be blow away, even if you thought you knew stuff about voter suppression (and voting rights, not the same thing).

Watch:

I have no comments on this, it is obvious how wrong this is. But, I have some memes based on the reaction of one of those present.

By the way if you look at the video, and watch the woman to our right (the one with the non-curly hair) you will see one of the best aborted face-palms ever.

See also:

Everyone also knows that when Right Wing Goons, Contaminants, and Bloody Insurrectionists talk about CRT they are not actually talking about the law school class. They are using CRT to refer to things that are actually being taught in KL-12 schools, that they don’t want taught there.

This is not to say that the goons and miscreants who are running for school board to stop CRT really have much of a clue of what they are doing. They don’t. If they wanted to change standards of curriculum, the LAST THING THEY WOULD DO is to run for the School Board, because in most places, school board members are allowed NOWHERE NEAR STANDARDS. So, yes, they are anti-education morons.

But still, there are things that they know(ish) are being taught in our schools that they don’t want taught. I believe that by examining those things, we can gain an understanding of where the anti-CRT activists are coming from, what it is they don’t want our children to be exposed to.

The following items are culled from the next gen Minnesota Social Studies Standards, not yet finished, not yet adopted, but reflective of the cutting edge of Social Studies curriculum.

• Connections between choices and consequences in the past and today
• Explain democratic values and principles that guide governments, societies, and communities, and analyze the tensions within the
  United States constitutional government.
• Evaluate the unique status, relationships and governing structures of Indigenous nations and the United States.
• Analyze how scarcity and artificial shortages force individuals, organizations, communities and governments to make choices and incur
  opportunity costs, and how their decisions affect economic equity and efficiency.
• Describe places and regions, explaining how they are influenced by power structures.
• Explain sense of place through ways of knowing (culture) and ways of being (identity) from different perspectives, centering Indigenous
  voices.
• Evaluate dominant and non-dominant narratives about change and continuity over time, taking into account historical context, i.e., a)
  how and why individuals and communities created those narratives; and b) why some narratives have been marginalized while others
  have not.
• Evaluate dominant and non-dominant narratives about change and continuity over time, taking into account historical context, i.e., a)
  how and why individuals and communities created those narratives; and b) why some narratives have been marginalized while others
  have not.
• Investigate a variety of historical sources and evidence by: a) identifying primary and secondary sources; b) considering what
  perspectives and narratives are absent from the available sources; and c) interpreting the historical context, intended audience,
  purpose, or author’s point of view of these sources.
• Integrate evidence from multiple historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument and/or compelling narrative about the
  past.
• Use historical methods and sources, inclusive of ethnic and Indigenous studies methods and sources, to understand and reflect upon the
  roots of contemporary social systems and environmental systems of oppressions and apply lessons from the past to eliminate injustice
  and work toward an equitable future.
• Develop an understanding of the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, geography, ethnicity, gender etc.
  Apply these understandings to one’s own social identities other groups living in Minnesota, especially those whose stories and histories
  have been marginalized, erased or ignored.
• Describe how individuals and communities have fought for freedom and liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power
  locally and globally; identify strategies or times that have resulted in lasting change; and organize with others to engage in activities that
  could further the human rights and dignity of all.

Those are the topics the anti-CRT people don’t want our children to know about or explore.

Those are the topics that would cause in the next generation a more widespread rejection of white supremacy.

The anti-CRT candidates and their supporters, being white supremacists, don’t want these things brought up in our system of education.  They have different ideas of how we should bring up our youth.

You are probably thinking, “First World problem,” right? Well, it wasn’t because at the time I was living in the actual co-called “Third World.*”

Home, for me at the time, was one of the most remote non-polar research sites ever. “Going to the store” meant driving across nearly impassible roads for a day, a ride that would cause enough damage to the old Land Rover to require some $500 of repair on average. Then a few days in a sort of city (Isiro, Zaire) where I would spend considerable effort assembling the food and other supplies for a stint as long as I could manage, hopefully 4 to 6 weeks. Basically, as much as the old Land Rover could hold. Then, the trip back. So, going to the store was a week out of my research time, costly, and dangerous (because of the roads).

I had taken a shower the morning of my return to the field, at my friend Bwana Ndgege’s house, and left the shampoo in the bathroom. Yes, devastating.

What I did not know at the time was this. Later that very morning, Bwana Nndege saw the bottle of shampoo in the bathroom. He picked it up and walked out in front of his house, which was located in a part of the city where one might see people waking around on their daily business, but not too many people. Shortly, he saw a man walking down the street, and hailed him over. Bwana Ndege did not know this man.

“Say, do you happen to know the researchers that live in Ngodingodi, a research village down the road past Wamba, on the Mambasa road?”

“There is still a road there?” the man asked.

“Truth be told, not really a road any more, but they go town there with their land rover. The blue one with the different color doors. Know it?”

“No, not really, never heard of any of this,” the man answered.

So, Bwana Ndege handed him the shampoo, and said, “Well, anyway, could you pass this on to someone who might? They left it here this morning.”

“OK, no problem,” the man said, taking the shampoo.

Now, I should mention, that the good people of the Eastern Congo are averse to crime, and are honest. There are, of course, criminals there just like anywhere else, but such is not your average Zairois. At the same time, a bottle of shampoo is a commodity people save up for, feel lucky to have, and desire. Handing this man the bottle of shampoo with only the vaguest instructions or prospects like this would be similar to finding a random person on the street of an American city and handing them a short stack of loose ten dollar bills and asking them to pass it on to someone who might pass it on to someone etc. with the hope that it gets to a city 500 miles away, and to a particular vague address. It just would not work.

So what happened next?

About three weeks after I returned, sans shampoo, I was up in the hilltop research camp working on some notes, when I smelled something different. I asked one of the local people who worked there what that might be. She sniffed the air, and said, “Maybe the nomads?”

There is a local tribe called the Bahama (or Wahama, or just Hama) who rarely pass through with their small herds of cattle. Cattle don’t live in this forest, and can’t survive the parasites, but a couple/few times a year, a Hama man will pass through with a couple dozen head. Probably, some circumstance in his life and business makes passing through a zone where some of his cattle will get sick better than going some other route. One can imagine.

Anyway, she was right. The smell was the cattle coming down the road. We stood on the top of the hill and watched as a couple of dozen long horned Sanga cattle passed by, followed by a few straggling calves and a Hama man driving them. He glanced up the hill and saw me, which caused him to sprint up the path and issue a greeting.

“No news,” I replied. I asked our local employee to get the water bottle and cup, assuming he wanted a fresh drink. Which he did.

As he appreciatively downed the liquid, he asked me, “Is this Ngodigodi? The place where you white people work?”

“Yes, it is,” I replied, bemused that he would know that, since our presence was semi-secretive, in order to avoid drawing attention to our neighborhood, which would in turn potentially mess up the folks who lived around us.

That’s when he pulled out the bottle of shampoo and handed it to me. “Some guy up the road a ways told me to give this to you.”

In sum: First world problem and third world solution.

The thing is, this was not an unusual event. It was normal.

Well, it was a somewhat extreme and amusing, story-generating version of normal. Normal is more like I go to a guy’s store and say I want to exchange money, and he says he can’t but he knows someone who can, and it turns out that is also the guy I’m hoping to get a rebuilt fuel injector from, and he is the sibling of a person who is offering bags of ground cassava for pretty cheap, but they all live in different places but are visiting relatives, and somebody needs a ride across town. Three people, actually, with stops along the way. So, after three hours of driving around with people and stuff, three hours of meeting and greeting, counting out giant piles of near worthless local currency, goods and services being exchanged, a couple cups of tea and a chupa of beer or two, and at the end of the day, I end up completing an important bank transaction in the land without banks, my truck will get fixed, and we can eat for a month, all stuff I would have done in the US in less than 45 minutes, but here, it is a series of social events bound together with a ToDo list, and a full day’s activity.

Yesterday morning my wife stopped at her usual coffee shop to pick up the coffee she ordered in advance on line. The barista’s kid was sick so he was not there, and the shop was closed. But the person working at the adjoining business said, “yeah, he’s out, but I’ll tell him you get a free coffee tomorrow.” Then this morning, she stopped by and a third person who also did not work there said, “are you the person who gets the free crafted press? Here, saving it for you” and so on. A series of trust-based events to fix a supply chain problem, a supply chain problem that is an amateur version of the Big Giant Supply Chain Problem that every human being who lives anywhere that is not the First World experiences daily with all things, where it is simply the way it is, all the time.

A supply chain problem in the US could be called a First World problem, but really, it is something a little different. It is the thin but heretofore persistent veneer of the First World sloughing off in a spot or two, revealing the fundamental Third World nature of human society and economics, underneath it all. The great First World accomplishment is re-organizing the Third World reality so things run more smoothly and everything takes less time. The benefit is that a term like “supply chain problem” is a bemusing neologism rather than a daily descriptor for most Americans. The cost is the dehumanization of the system.

There is a third point. This is all Trump’s fault. And the Republicans. By ripping apart as many systems as they could, and by encouraging rather than fighting the Covid pandemic, they damaged or broke all the things that matter to most of the people, while leaving the rich intact. We are now more like Zaire/Congo than we ever were. (Like our postal system, on the verge of collapse. Many countries don’t even have a postal system. They just have this guy who happens to be walking down the street, or a muzungu with a working vehicle who happens to be going across town…) The Republican goal is to turn the US into a sea of Third World humanity with the supply chain ever broken, with a small wealthy and somewhat larger and less wealthy ex-patriot-esque community living behind walls in some serious priv. That is what Republicans always wanted, that is what they are finally getting.

The world where that story of shampoo happened unraveled, several times, in the intervening period between then and now. Hundreds of thousands have died violent deaths there, or worse, and there was even a systematic holocaust. A region about a third of the United States with a population of about a fifth of the United States has been living in economic strife and social upheaval because that top-heavy post colonial system eventually blows up. We will have that here as well, if the Third Worlding planned by Bannon, Trump, McConnell and the other Republicans is fully realized.

We could be rescued, of course, by a fascist superhero of some kind. Yes, this is Hitler’s playbook being applied. It is a very plausible scenario. Fear creates a movement, spiritual and physical terror, propaganda. Or, as they say in Mein Kampf, “Angst schafft Bewegung, spirituellen und physischen Terror, Propaganda.” Hitler’s program worked because Germany of the time was a broken society with a broken economy and a balkanized government. The White Supremacist program wouldn’t work well in an America that wasn’t beaten and damaged. Lucky for the Republicans, this handy dandy disease came along just in time to put us on the mat and hold us down long enough to create the beginnings of a Third World society, in which a movement could grow, spiritual and physical terror could be applied, and propaganda deployed. MAGA, insurrection, CRT/Replacement Theory.

Perhaps it is time to start stocking up on shampoo.

Note: The term “Third World” is considered inappropriate to refer to countries previously referred to as “Third World.” Untwist your shorts, I did not use that term to mean that in this essay. Thank you very much, re-read if necessary.

There might be some other problems too.

If you are anti-CRT being taught in K-12 schools, you are a moron, because it isn’t. If you are one of the emerging gaggle of goons who now insist that “liberals are denying CRT being taught in schools” then you are a moronic paranoid eejit.

Maybe you don’t really know much about CRT and realize that, but you have been groomed an organized by a right wing think tank to use CRT as a scare tactic to raise money and run a campaign. The Trump Criminals have a word for when you are being used by someone else, a word I don’t like to use but if fits; You are a cuck. At least you might be less of a moron in this case.

If, however, you understand that CRT is a buzzword for curriculum that honestly addresses history, talks about things like slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and the systemic racism that exists in so many area of our society, then maybe you are a person who does not want the finger pointed at you. Maybe you make the argument that you don’t want kids to feel bad about their past, but that is bullshit. What you really don’t want is for your kids to come home and look at you, listen to what you say, realize what you do, figure out how you think, and realize their daddy is a Nazi.

Kind of a sensitive subject, I know, but if you are working to get CRT out of our schools, you are not a good person. In the old days (ten years ago) you would know to sit down and shut up. Please consider doing that now.

Anti CRT? That makes you a racist, and more specifically, a white supremacist. Not a good look.