Paleontology and race

Yesterday I came across a link to the work of Paleoartist Elisabeth Daynes.  She spends her time creating sculptures of early proto-humans.  Based on fossil evidence, anatomy knowledge, and some speculation these works are fantastic to be sure.  However I was immediately struck by how the earliest proto-humans are all characterized by dark skin, until we come to Homo-erectus and Homo-neanderthalensis.  The work is beautiful as you can see here.

Why is this a problem?  Well those of us who study race and colonizations know that thanks to a re-working of Darwinism black people were often characterized as more animal, more primitive and closer to early humans whom were assumed to have low IQs.  This belief justified a plethora of horrors including the trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved sub-Saharan Africans.

Without first-hand accounts of what proto-humans looked like, details like skin color, hair texture, and eye color are at best educated guesses.  The tendency to equate being less intelligent and less civilized thus less human with black skin color is, of course, a problem that exists today.  I am not saying that Daynes is a racist, but that her work might be relying on archetypes of what civilized, intelligent, humans should look like – i.e. they should have pale skin.  These patterns are entrenched in western culture and can even be found in non-western cultures which have been colonized or had pervasive contact with the west – such as India and South Western Asia where light skin is highly valued to the point where women will bleach their armpits.

The average viewer of a museum exhibit does not have extensive knowledge of colonialism, race, or even paleontology.  This is a problem.  This means that the ideas that blacks are less than whites seem to be shown through science as being valid accepted ideas.  A good account of this can be found in Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins (Museum Meanings) by Monique Scott.

As someone who exams museums and the representation of sub-Saharan African art this is disturbing.  I do not see how we can overcome the issues of race without seriously examining how black skin is represented in art, literature and even science.

 

Racial identity today and the portrayal of the Sambo in contemporary U.S. culture.

I came across a Reddit forum with Charles Ramsey today.  The man who had 15 minutes of media fame for rescuing the women from Ariel Castro, was taking questions as part of a book promotion of his story – Dead Giveaway.

I was impressed by his intelligence.  He does speak like someone who grew up in a poor black neighborhood (it is a dialect).  Many people find this amusing; some find it as evidence of stupidity.  But these same individuals probably cannot appreciate the revolutionary poetry of Tupac Shakur either. I personal see his use of language poetic – not degraded or ignorant.  And maybe that is because I am not the best writer or users of English myself, but happen to be well read, and well traveled.

Some may have trouble understanding the language, not every dialect of English is easy to comprehend.  Many people who watch British Television do not recognize all the words or miss the context of the jokes, so they do not laugh. And that is part of the critique I am making in my work that blacks get portrayed as certain character types in the media that are degrading.  It happened at the turn of the century in the U.S. and parts of Europe through newspapers. Minstrel shows and Vaudeville, advertising packages, cartoons, circus posters, and the World’s Fair in Chicago, which had exhibitions of “strange” black people from sub-Saharan Africa.

The Sambo is a character that was popular in all of this.  Sambo’s were stupid, mostly benevolent “niggers or negros” to coin the vernacular.  They were a source of comic relief and often engaged in over exaggerated gestures, coarse language on stage.  Read Lott’s “Love and Theft” for a description of Minstrel shows and a more detailed analysis of the Sambo’s, and other popular stereotype characters.  If you look at a piece by Aisha Harris on Slate. com titled The Troubling Viral Trend of the “Hilarious” Black Neighbor; she does a good job pointing to the characterization of black character portrayal in the media.

One thing that Mr. Ramsey said in answer to a question on reddit about the Alisha Harris article was.  “We’re having jolly good fun with this thing and the next black sumbitch that pops up, it’s going to be one more having fun. It’s good American fun. Donald Sterling is getting his ass barbequed for a conversation he’s having with this broad. How the fuck did that happen. You don’t know what his beef with Magic is you’re just making it a black and white thing. Let’s throw that racist shit up. Get out of here.”

From his Reddit posts, Ramsey seems like a caring guy who has seen some senseless violence and as been inspired to speak out about the sexual abuse of woman and children in the United States.  I for one, being a survivor of sexual assault as a child, wish that the media would focus on this and not on his diction, or criminal record.  He is a black man from a poor neighborhood if you know anything about the U.S. prison system today it should not be a shock. And perhaps that is his point in the above quote.  The Pew Research Center has an interesting piece on the prison system in case you want to become acquainted with the phenomenon.  Incarceration gap widens between whites and blacks.

Woman are subject to shocking levels of abuse no matter what color they are, and we need to talk about the problem more.  Of course, this is another example of the intersection of race/class/gender and how most of the attention is focused on race and racism and not class and gender violence which transcends racial boundaries. If you need to be convince look at the statistics the government records (which is bound to miss many actual cases, my abuse was never reported and I know I am not alone)

What is a melungeon?

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark-skinned Appalachian residents once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies. 

Now a new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy attempts to separate truth from oral tradition and wishful thinking. The study found the truth to be somewhat less exotic: Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.

And that report, which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal, doesn’t sit comfortably with some people who claim Melungeon ancestry.

“There were a whole lot of people upset by this study,” lead researcher Roberta Estes said. “They just knew they were Portuguese, or Native American.”

Beginning in the early 1800s, or possibly before, the term Melungeon (meh-LUN’-jun) was applied as a slur to a group of about 40 families along the Tennessee-Virginia border. But it has since become a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of mysterious mixed-race ancestry.

Estes and her fellow researchers theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung from the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s, before slavery.

They conclude that as laws were put in place to penalize the mixing of races, the various family groups could only intermarry with each other, even migrating together from Virginia through the Carolinas before settling primarily in the mountains of East Tennessee.

The origin of the word Melungeon is unknown, but there is no doubt it was considered a slur by white residents in Appalachia who suspected the families of being mixed race.

“It’s sometimes embarrassing to see the lengths your ancestors went to hide their African heritage, but look at the consequences” said Wayne Winkler, past president of the Melungeon Heritage Association. “They suffered anyway because of the suspicion.”

The DNA study is ongoing as researchers continue to locate additional Melungeon descendants. – link to full story ….

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/24/melungeon-dna-study-origin_n_1544489.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

My family didn’t/doesn’t talk about this much, they moved from KY to WV and have some shame attached to being part Native and never mention Africa in conversations that I heard. My uncle suggested having native ancestry, but was always quickly silenced by my grandmother. Our last name is on the list – Mullins – my great, great (maybe a third great here) grandmother’s family is listed on the Dawes roll.  I have all the Melungeon physiological markers but have not had a DNA test.  The family was also most likely indentured servants, the earliest ancestor in the U.S. we have found was Temperance Mullins, who was in North Carolina in the 1700’s.  The family has always been poor and most immigrants from Ireland at this time and place were poor indentured servants/slaves that were brought over by wealthy English landowner.  

I had always been interested in oppression and found myself drawn to the plight of black people in the U.S. and around the world long before I understood myself to be a Melungeon.  As an abuse survivor, and ginger, I have always felt aware of how damaging our understanding of the other through visual appearance, and overlooked history can be.

better news today: thanks NFL team for stepping up

In Case, you haven’t heard yet The NFL drafted its first openly gay player today.  Who was also the first openly gay college player.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early-lead/wp/2014/05/10/michael-sam-decision-day-arrives-at-nfl-draft/

This is a remarkable story and gives hope that the bigots are losing the fight in the United States even if the laws and ignorant have not all caught up with what is increasingly a majority public opinion.  We have seen queer rights starting to take off again, as they did in the mid 1980’s when many of my close friends were first openly talking about their non-normative sexual preferences.

Everyone should read Foucault’s History of Sexuality to see how the repression of sexuality, of which the suppression and oppression of queer sexualities, plays a tragic role.  People have died, been killed by strangers, dragged behind pick up trucks, been burnt alive in nightclubs just because their sexual choices did not match Calvinistic puritanical ideals of sexuality which included that one should only have sex to procreate, sex is dirty, and masturbation is a sin worthy of eternal damnation in a fiery pit of hell for eternity.  I could go on about how very psychotic view is, given that we are embodied and sexual creatures by design.  Sex is necessary for the survival of the species, but that doesn’t mean sex that cannot lead to procreation is a sin against nature since we know that non-human animals have a very wide variety of non-reproductive as well as reproductive mating habits.  But I digress.

This young man is a pioneer in queer history,  but he is equally a pioneer in U.S. black history.  That he is black is not remarkable for anyone who plays in professional sports especially in the NFL or the NBA, but that he is an openly gay football player who is black is amazing from the perspective of someone who is focused in part on the intersections of race/class/gender.  This young man is providing an opportunity for conversations to be had about the problems within the black population regarding support for queer people.

It astounds me that blacks cannot see the similarities in oppressing people because of who they choose to sleep with or how they decide to have an orgasm and oppressing black people because of the colour of their skin, or hair texture, or facial features.  Black people have been killed by random strangers, drug behind picks up trucks, and burnt alive in public spaces and their homes merely because they have black skin, or too many African relatives (the one drop rule and issues of passing).  Maybe some people believe in capital punishment for some violent crimes,  but it seems that your sexual desires (unless it harms someone as in cases of rape or molestation or perhaps passing STD’s to unwitting strangers) should not be a death sentence.  Being black or queer does not determine your worth as a human, your intelligence, your ability to love or feel pain or make the right choices in life.

I suppose this seems like more hopeful news than talking about the Clipper scandal which only points out what black people always knew; there are some serious bigots out there who are racists.   My thoughts on that were echoed perfectly by the Daily Show with Jon Stuart.  Daily Show on the Clippers  Yes the incident makes visible evidence of new forms of slavery present in 2014, the prison system is yet another.  Maybe this will help people realize that contrary to what many of my white students seem to tell me, racism is a serious problem in the U.S. today.  Education is the key to opening minds and hearts.