And once again, Officers Malloy and Reed demonstrate their uncanny ability to know when to get out of Dodge. In this case, before the wife gets home!

Viva la popular culture!

I’ll describe these two worlds by informally looking at the example of fluoride in the diet of infants and children. Fluoride is added to drinking water in many American communities. Therefore, a baby that is fed on formula that is made with tap water gets a dose of Fluoride that is larger than otherwise likely. If the formula is mixed at home using special extra-fluoridated water (which is advertised as having a health benefit for the little ones) then an even larger amount of fluoride is added to the infant’s diet.

There is some evidence that too much fluoride cases a condition that affects primary teeth in a negative way. So some research has been done on this.

The conclusion of the scientific research is probably best described in a document provided by the American Dental Association, which indicates that you would not do harm to avoid giving fluoride to your infants prior to six months of age to avoid this condition, unless you are in an area where the water is not fluoridated. The current medical literature seems to indicate that other effects of fluoride are probably not anything to be concerned about.

But, there is another point of view. This other point of view claims that fluoridosis (the tooth condition of concern) is a very very bad thing to happen, that is occurs widely in children with fluoride in their diets, and, that fluoride in diets also causes brain damage, food intolerance, depression, other gut problems and autism. And more. In short, fluoride is a poison.

If you Google the right terms you will find mostly this second view. If you put the same search terms in Google Scholar, you get the other view, that fluoride may be a little bad in quantity for infants, but otherwise, it is not the end of the world and is mostly good.

The “fluoride is deadly” point of view emerges over time in a very straightforward process, which I’ll call the denialistic method. I call it that not because it necessarily leads to denailist conclusions, but because it is a method that was perfected by denialists (and conspiracy theorists).

Step 1: A winged monkey flies out of someone’s back side and screeches an idea. The idea may be plausible, it maybe insane. Doesn’t matter. It’s an unformed idea about something. So far, this is similar to (and sometimes identical to) the scientific methods, and in the scientific method it is called “observation.”

Step 2: Someone identifies a positive relationship that relates in some way to the winged-monkey idea. It does not have to be a valid or logical relationship. For instance, if the winged-monkey idea is that “Crohn’s disease causes autism,” then the positive relationship might simply be a study that finds that both Crohn’s disease and autism are increasing in incidence or reporting over recent decades. This would be instead of formulating and testing hypothesis, as in the scientific method.

Step 3: The winged-monkey idea is now formed into an accretive model, or glommed onto an existing accretive model, where it joins other winged-monkey ideas to be used as part of a Gish Gallop to convince anyone who is unsure of the the verity of the model, or to drown out and hopefully shut up anyone who has serious arguments against it.

It is interesting to see the same exact form of argument in denialist movements, race-based science, among creationists, and Kennedy conspiracy theorists. I used to get annoyed at the Kennedy conspiracy theorists. But they were all about 20 years older than me and are now mostly dead, so we don’t hear from them as much any more. But I now realize that if Kennedy conspiracies were still viable and vibrant, a lot of people who are otherwise involved in the modern white supremacist movements or antivax movements or other Bizarro World activities would instead be busy working on who shot the President in 1963, and maybe they would leave the rest of us alone.

Scientists, science communicators and skeptics need to understand where the Bizarro World ideas come from and how they develop. They really are not that different from science ideas. There are only a few real differences between the accumulation of information and development of theories in the rational world of science and in Bizarro World.

One difference is the accumulation of evidence. Both accumulate evidence, but in the real, scientific world, much of the evidence eventually gets thrown out, while in the Bizarro world it is never thrown out. Another difference is in what evidence is taken in to begin with. Another is in the placement of an immutable descriptive model or theory at the beginning of the process in Bizzaro World, as opposed to attempting to arrive at a descriptive theory at the end of a process as is done in science.

That there are races and that the “black” race is inferior, in a way that is genetic with virtually no environmental effects, is the immutable theory that starts the “research” process about race among the racist scientists in Bizarro World. That any given compound or chemical pushed on us by the government, such as fluoride placed in our water supply in order to contaminate our precious bodily fluids, causes any problem one may think of (or that may be suggested by the constant screeching of the winged monkeys) is part of the fluoride denialist theme song. Many of the science denialists put a literal interpretation of the Bible in front of any subsequent scientific investigation, such as related to evolution, or modern medicine.

These different Bizzaro World groups have historical links even if the modern practitioners do not necessarily always realize it. Race-based science and fluoride-panicked science deniers have common ancestry with each other, and with the Bible thumpers, and may even share some connections today. Look no further than the John Birch Society to find many of these links. I’ll bet there are white supremacists living in cabins in the Rockies (or for that matter, the Catskills) who refuse to drink municipal water when they roll into town for supplies. Which is okay. The problem is when they leave their cabins and get real, important jobs …

There’s a long history, in “the West,” of race being defined as much by division of labor and property as anything else. Jews weren’t just separate from the majority population because of their religion, but also because they held money outside the church or the crown and because they didn’t hold property that could be easily confiscated. Hired labor on farms in the New World, whether they were French or Irish, became distinct races from those who owned the land. Native Americans didn’t share the manifest destiny of the race that wanted to own all that land. Being factory labor made Poles a different race than the owners. Migrant farmwork made Mexicans distinct. And, of course, there was slavery.

Slavery required more work to explain, because the difference was bigger than between haves and have-nots, but explained it was. Lectures, articles and the occasional book pounded away about all those stunning–fundamental–differences between “us” and “them.” Contrasting the recent and not remotely universal literacy of parts of Europe with its lack in Africa, ignoring the memory and linguistic requirements of oral histories. Focusing on clothing as a moral rather than climatic issue. Comparing polygamy unfavorably with monogamy, which never spoke of infidelity. Over all, talking about all the things those dark people didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t understand and accept as superior about an industrialized society they’d never seen.

Slavery went away, eventually, taking longer than it should have because so many people believed, as people do, the relentless drum pounding. But the economic situation changed very little, so the drums pounded on.

It’s useful to look at those who heard those drums before making an argument, parallel to the racist one, that the worth of these people is determined by what they believe. There is always the existence of the drums to be considered. They were created to make an unconscionably exploitative economic tactic palatable to people of basic decency. They beat to keep people from realizing that what was happening could happen to them, to stop the exercise of empathy that’s a requirement of human morality.

And the people who hear the drums are much closer to the exploitation than they realize, because the other purpose of the drums is to tell those who have nothing, “Well, at least you’re not them.” It isn’t stupidity that makes people in the lower classes believe racist propaganda, although they are often deprived of the education that would make the illusion harder to maintain. It’s that untenable proposition of losing the one thing they’ve been given. “At least….”

Nor are they wrong. Fixing class inequalities would go a very long way toward mitigating the effects of racism. It is probably the single most effective action that could be taken. In socialist states, it does go a long way. But it doesn’t go all the way, because the drumbeat isn’t all about class.

We don’t have slavery any longer, but collectively we do have these ingrained messages about the abilities of blacks. How could we not? The drums have never stopped, despite what those who are currently beating them would like us to believe. There was never a time when the only messages out there were those of equality. There was never a time when those who beat the drum were all out of power. Never.

As a consequence, those who set expectations for children being socialized, students being educated, workers being hired and trained and managed, still contain many people hearing those messages, whether they want to or not. So do police deciding what is criminal, lenders and landlords and insurance agents deciding what is risky, publishers and critics and audiences and neighbors deciding what is art and what is noise. So do the general press of people deciding what is “normal” and what is “odd” or just “different.”

Not all of them, no, but we come across enough people in a position to make a difference to our lives that it doesn’t have to be anywhere near all of them to have a large collective impact on people’s lives. Even if we greatly mitigate or disable the class system, there is real, worthwhile work to be done in fighting racism. We can look to our socialist neighbors and see the drum still being beaten, if perhaps a little more weakly. We have to take it apart.

But we may not be able to take the drum apart without addressing class. As I noted at the start, it was economic interests that built the drum. If you follow the race-IQ discussion, you’ll note that the entire edifice is calibrated to questions of work and class. As long as classism stands, the arguments of inherent ability will be plausible to far too many people, and the problem of blacks in poverty will be used to justify itself. Just as racism has always been used to justify poverty.

Racism and classism are not competing issues, except in the minds of those who demand we focus on only one. Historically and in the modern world, they are tied tightly together, and in order to fix one, we will likely have to fix both.

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 called Nigger Babies, and a kind of nut called nigger toes. I remember the day I realized what “nigger” 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 Nigger Babies. I asked what a nigger was, 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 Nigger Babies any more as a snack and we started calling nigger toes by their other name: Brazil nuts. We also stopped catching niggers by the toe and started catching tigers by the toe instead (while eeny-meeny-minie-moe-ing).

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 seatbelts 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.

Anyway, while they were taking this African American man who had not done anything wrong away in the Paddy Wagon, 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 Nigger,” 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 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. The frequency of my visits has fallen off to once every few years. 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 trash that I live among in my current neighborhood and the white trash 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.

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 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 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 hates it when I 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 like him.

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. 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.

(to be continued)

When I was young and impressionable, I accepted the invitation from the University of North Dakota to study psychology at their fine campus.  The Financial Aid office managed to find a $50.00 scholarship for me, based on the fact that one of my grandfathers had been injured (mustard gas) in World War I, the Great War.  I had saved up enough money from my part-time and summer jobs over the years to cover the remainder of tuition, room and board for the 1979–1981 school years.  I had grown up in a fairly liberal family during the 1970s and been raised to believe that racism is a bad thing.  Racism was a minor factor of life in my hometown. It was present enough for me to recognize it but not an everyday matter that I had to deal with, so I never expected the conflict I would run into at a respected university.

I lived in an all-male dorm on the west side of campus.  West Hall was a part of the West complex, and the complex included five halls with a common cafeteria and study center.  As a modern convenience, the school provided access to a keypunch machine for the Computer Science majors.  This doesn’t sound like much of a luxury these days, but since the computer center was a half-mile walk from the West Complex, it was very nice not to have to brave -30F weather just to make a few corrections that had halted a programming assignment.  Oh, yes. Some of you may not know what keypunch cards were.  Rather than explain them, you can read a Columbia University entry on them (love the DEC120s, too!).¹ It helps put a new perspective on the complaints you may have regarding your 4.5 GB PC, doesn’t it?

In this all-male dorm, I was surrounded by guys with a background similar to mine, in the sense that they were from small towns on the plains of the Upper Midwest. I could relate to them in many ways and on many things, but in two very large areas of my belief systems and my core values, there were differences.

They were conservative. I don’t mean Nixonian conservative. Nixon had flirted with socialism in ways that would terrify even Bernie Sanders. In the inflationary period of Nixon’s presidency, he and Congress instituted a 90-day wage and price freeze in order to slow down inflation. No one–no one would even consider such a flawed and intrusive monetary policy in today’s America. Not even in Canada would they attempt such a government intrusion in the market place. Nixon was a Republican, though, and still he did it.

No, my wingmates on the west wing of West Hall in West Complex on the west side of campus were far more conservative than the standard Republicans I had grown up with in Hallock.  My first roommate (and this only last a week), was a fan of “King Ronald,” the former California governor who was making his bid in 1979 to be the 1980 Republican candidate for president. Seriously, if anyone mocks liberals for seeing Obama as The Chosen One, please remind them of the adulation that conservatives ladled out to Ronald Reagan.  My wingmates were competing for the title of Most Libertarian Republican on Campus.

They liked Joe Clark, the contender for the Libertarian Party candidacy for presidency.  But Joe’s problem was that he was leading the Libertarian Party, and these guys didn’t have the patience to wait for the Libertarian Party to be a national presence.  They hated government.  At least the Federal Government.  The state government was being nice enough to subsidize their educations, so it couldn’t be all bad.  But since we had a Republican governor in North Dakota at the time, it was also close enough for them to count as not being bad.  The Federal Government was another thing altogether.  It needed to be shrunk.  “Government isn’t the solution to our problems, it is the problem.”

I was surrounded by posters of Republicans and Libertarians on the walls of most of the rooms in the wing.  It was a constant topic.  I wondered what happened to all of the liberals that I had hoped to pal around with in college.  I found a few, but they were far between. I was often the only one in arguments who would take the liberal view.  But I didn’t consider myself persecuted.  I was just outnumbered, and overall I could have friendly arguments with them. Sometimes they would say stupid things that made my blood boil.  It had to do with their racism, and it was a particularly nasty sort of racism.

The first time I noticed it was two days after I moved in.  Some of the guys were talking about politics and the topic of welfare came up.  One of them talked about all the “Cadillac Niggers on Welfare.”  I was dumbfounded.  It was flat out KKK-ish racism, not the hidden, subtle kind.  It was bold, it was in your face, it was “I hate niggers” racism.  There were only two blacks that they didn’t hate:  Alan Keyes and Milton Jones.

Milton Jones was a running back with the UND Fighting Sioux football team.  He was a Canadian and had befriended one of the two football players on our wing.  Rick Nechaperenko was a very nice guy and not a racist.  He was also a big guy and muscular.  He took his athleticism seriously when he was training and during games, but outside in the real world he was far more easygoing.  He had made his hatred of racism very clear when he was a freshman (two years before I came to campus).  He wasn’t afraid to bring his black friends up to our wing to visit, and Milton was among them.  My cowardly racist friends hid their racism around Rick and Milton.  If any of them said anything racist around Rick, he would glower at them and they would change the subject, chagrined.

Milton, being a football player, was someone they could idolize.  They fell all over him when he came to the wing to visit Rick.  They offered him beer and cigarettes, talked about sex, whatever they could do to get Milton to like them.  Perhaps, in their small towns in North Dakota, they had never actually met any blacks.  They just knew that they saw enough negative media portrayals of minorities to be justified in their hatred. Mouse, the one who had been my roommate for all of a week, talked fondly of David Duke.  Duke was the former Grand Wizard of the KKK in Metairie, Louisiana, who had formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People.  Later, he ran for governor of Louisiana and was defeated by a former convict, Edwin Edwards.  But Mouse loved him some David Duke. Almost as much as he loved “King Ronald.”

Their conservatism and their racism went very hand in hand.  The minorities were ruining America and sucking away all of their hard-earned money.  They really paid no attention when I showed them data that there were far more whites on welfare than blacks. Their other exception, as mentioned above, to their hatred of blacks was Alan Keyes.  We know Alan Keyes now as a “birther” for whom the Republican Party was not conservative enough and who has joined the Constitution Party.

The sign that illustrates how deep their racism ran said this, and I must paraphrase because this was thirty years ago:

“Alan Keyes wants to end abortion and believes in a laissez-faire economy.  Alan Keyes is an ATYPICAL NIGGER!”

Even in praising him, they couldn’t stay away from the word.  The sign was on Kenley Jones’ bulletin board.  Kenley, I hope you have woken up to the evils of racism.  I am calling you out in case you Google yourself, because I think racists should be called out.  Correct me if you have changed.

In 1979, I was an eyewitness to a rebirth of the brand of conservatism that has blindsided so many liberals since Barack Obama became a serious contender for the presidency.  Not all those who oppose Obama from the right are racist, and if anyone accuses me of saying so, I will just point back to this paragraph and say “Just shut up and learn to read.”   But Greg Laden is accurate about the racism behind a large part of the Anti-Obamism that is so much a part of our current political landscape.  There are links, and I met them and drank beer with the generation of conservatives that are now in power.

How did I deal with it?  I was an accommodationist.  See how well that has turned out.

1. When I first started with ADP, several of our clients were spending about $1,500 per DEC 101.  They have no functionality other than to provide a video interface to the mainframe.  They were monochrome.  Think how much our generation has seen in the advances for human interface to computers. Yesterday I purchased an HP Pavilion 503W for $75.

Nor would this country ever be ready for any non-white or non-male president until we actually went ahead and elected one–ready or not–and then made the necessary adjustments. And that could have been what would have happened with the historic election of Barack Obama.

Except it didn’t.

Join me, if you will, in a moment of utter, deep cynicism. That would mean you thinking, for just a moment, exactly like I think every second of the day. This will be painful for you, unless you are already where I am. In my world, I see almost every nationally elected Republican, almost every one of the teabaggers at the town hall meetings, and almost every one of the strutting libertarians with their strap-ons (because they don’t have real ones) as a racist. I also see half the liberals that I know as racists. I see almost every white person who lives in the suburbs and who has a job and an income with benefits as a racist. I probably think you are a racist. You may think I’m over doing it, you may think I’m being unfair, you may think I’ve oversimplified, and you may think I’ve got it wrong.

I have oversimplified, but I’m not overdoing it, I’m not being unfair, and I don’t have it wrong. It is you that has it wrong and that is the problem. Standing by and letting what we are seeing happening on the national stage and doing nothing about it is plain and pure complicity.

I’m thinking about the response to health care reform. The most active of them all, the teabaggers and the Republicans in office, each and every one, are reacting not to anything about health care, but rather to the fact that our president is a black man, and they are reacting to little else. Proposals that the Republicans have made themselves over the last decade are being touted as attempts to kill grandma or take away our freedoms or introduce socialism. There is nothing rational in what the teabaggers and Republicans are saying. Not. One. Thing.

Does any of this mean that we have prematurely elected our first black president? No, of course not. That is all to be expected. That would all be part of the transformation our country will go through to make the election of non-white-male presidents (in some combination) plausible rather than jaw-dropping remarkable.

The problem is not that the crazy right wing is upset and screaming at us from the back of the room telling us to shut up. The problem is that the rest of the country, or at least a significant number of individuals, especially in elected office and in the media, are not calling this what it is. Yes, there have been hints, here and there, of racist undertones and overtones, but the spade is not being called a spade. As it were.

And the reason is disgusting. The reason that the mainstream press and numerous elected officials are not identifying the town hall teabaggers and the anti-health care Republicans as racists is because the ground has been prepared to make sure that when someone does call someone else out on racism in the mainstream public square, that act…the act of identifying racism…is considered just as bad as the racism itself. It is called “playing the race card.” The whole “Oh, now you’re going to play the race card, aren’t you!” gambit was developed, prepared, and inculcated into society over the last 15 years (really, 14 years…since the OJ Simpson trial), so now racism has a place at the table. Where it does not belong.

Over the last 24 hours (as I write this on Monday) the public option part of health care reform has been taken off the table. I can hope, tell myself, guess, fantasize, that this is just a strategy, and that the public option will be back. I can figure that this is just to give some time for the famous Obama grassroots organizing to get up to speed, and that the public option will be in the health care bill and will be voted into place. But I doubt it. I strongly suspect that the golden opportunity, which comes around very 12 to 20 years, has been lost once more.

I will die before there is a good health care system. My daughter will reach middle age or even old age before there is a good health care system.

Fuck you all. That includes you, Barack.

This message has been brought to you by the five largest health care corporations in America, who finished this day of trading on Wall Street between one and two points up, on a day when overall trading was down over 200 points.

In 1980, the legal age to drink in Minnesota was 19, and I was 19.  My friend–we’ll call him Mark to avoid confusion–was 17.  He and I had been very good friends together in high school, even though he went to a different school, we knew each other through our involvement in a Christian youth group.

Mark always looked older than he was.  He had long hair and a beard even when he was 14.  He looked like a damn hippie, according to my dad, which filled Mark with a bit of pride since that was the “look” he was going for.  We really did quite a few things together, but being observant and good Christian kids, we never did anything illegal or immoral, and that is the story I am sticking with regarding any activities in which we may have engaged prior to me achieving the age of majority.

I left Hallock High School when I was 18 to go to school at Mount Saint Benedict’s Academy in Crookston.  (MSB was the school with a Nature Trail.)  I lost touch with Mark and didn’t see him for most of my senior year, but during the summer, I was back at home in Hallock and working for the Kittson County Highway Department on the signs crew.  Mark and his family had moved to a different farm. Although not much further away, it was far enough that he wasn’t on my daily radar.  We had grown a bit apart during the year, and both he and I had started moving away from the good behavior phases of our Christian Walk.  What I mean is that he and I had both become “partiers.”

One Friday in July, he called me up after we hadn’t talked for more than a month and asked if I would like to go to Newfolden and a street dance/town fair.  He had a new girlfriend, and he wanted me to meet her. We could party with her and her friends.  I thought it sounded like a good idea.  Newfolden is only about 40 miles from Hallock, but I had never met anybody from there and I thought it would be a good opportunity to make new friends (and possibly get laid).

On that Friday, I drove over to Mark’s new place and sat down to have a beer with him and his mom.  We caught up a bit, smoked a couple of cigarettes, had a beer and just enjoyed ourselves on a beautiful summer evening in northern Minnesota.  Then we made our plans for the evening.  The first stop would be to Lake Bronson, where I was to buy a case of cheap beer, then a drive down to Newfolden.  Then, while waiting for Mark’s girlfriend to finish up some family thing she was doing (apparently an event Mark was not invited to), we would drive around Newfolden to get the word about where the after-dance party would be.

At the Lake Bronson Municipal Liquor Store, I bought the beer, proud to show my license to the clerk and prove to her that I was old enough. I set the license down on the counter and paid for the beer.  I left the store and put the beer in the back seat.  It occurred to me that the beer wasn’t going to stay cold and that I should have bought a cooler, but then assumed that wherever the party was there was likely to be a cooler and some ice.  It was gonna be okay.

When we arrived in Newfolden, there were a bunch of people milling around, kids our age but nobody that Mark really knew, so we weren’t gong to ask them where the party was going to be.  We both realized that after the beer that we had drunk at his mother’s place, we needed to go to the bathroom, so we looked for an open restaurant or gas station or someplace that would have a privy for visitors to their fine city.

Apparently, by nine-o’clock at night, all of the gas stations and restaurants in Newfolden were closed.  This was weird, and also weird that in planning for a street dance, the organizers had not considered that people might actually have to go the bathroom.  I wonder now whether they had decided that in such a small town, people would just go to their houses to pee if they needed to.  It was completely unprofessional, in my opinion.

We didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.  We just knew two things:

1. Since Mark was still under age, it probably wasn’t a good idea to be cruising Newfolden with beer in the back seat.  The cops didn’t know me or my car, and they would probably try to find some reason to stop us.  I didn’t need a ticket for “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
2. We both really needed to go to the bathroom.

In rural parts of the world, using the great outdoors for the bathroom is not strange, nor is it even looked down on.  It’s common practice out in the country if not right in town.  So, we did what we had always done and what our parents, cousins, uncles, family, friends and bosses had always done.  We drove outside of town for a mile and found a country road to drive down until we found a small stand of woods with some trees we could hide behind while we pee.  I don’t interpret this as public urination, and I don’t think my Grampa would have either.  We seriously doubted that a small town cop would even look askance at it.

We also needed to take care of item 1 on our list.  I really didn’t want to have a local cop or deputy pull us over and find the beer in the back seat.  I had no interest in having to call Dad to tell him I was in jail in Warren.  So we moved the beer from the back seat to the trunk, got back in the car and drove back to town.

There was a new problem to deal with. Waiting at the end of the farm road, blocking our access to the highway, was a police car.  The lights weren’t on, so we weren’t sure if he was waiting for us or not. We were not going to be able to avoid scrutiny.  As we approached the road he hit his siren button and his lights button and so I knew we were going to be “interviewed.”  I stopped the car and politely waited for him to approach us.  In the meantime I was reaching for my wallet to show him my driver’s license.  I looked over at Mark and mouthed the words “Fourth Amendment.”   He knew what this meant.  Don’t say anything incriminatory.

The cop approached the window as I was opening my wallet.  Sure enough, he asked for my license and everything would have been smooth had I not left the fucking license at the Municipal store in Lake Bronson.  I had laid it on the counter, but I had not picked it up and put it back in my wallet as I left the store.  I had a sinking feeling that this was not going to go well.

One thing in my favor was that if they smelled beer on my breath and asked me to blow into a breathalyzer, it had been more than an hour since my last beer and I would blow less than a “.01.”  It’s the old rule of thumb that it takes the body ab0ut an hour to clear an ounce of alcohol from the blood.  Mark would have also had sufficient time.  We had no empty beer cans in the car.  That was another plus.  Mark was underage, though, and there was beer in the trunk.  Even though they would not have had any proof that I was going to share my beer with Mark, I think they could have made a case for “probable cause” if they wanted to raise a stink about it.

I couldn’t produce my license for the cop and told him I thought I might have left the license at the gas station where I’d bought cigarettes.  He asked me to step out of my car and into his so he could call the dispatcher and check to make sure that I had a valid license.  I had memorized the number and so I told him what it was, to make his job a little easier.  So, I followed him to his car and he got on his radio and called the Marshall County Sheriff dispatcher so she could run the number to get verification.

He asked me what we were doing back there and I told him that we had gone back there to go to the bathroom.  He knew there was more to the story, and he was fishing to get me to tell him more.  But I wasn’t going to be stupid that night in a strange town.  If it was my own town, it would have been a simple matter of the cop confiscating the beer and telling me to take Mark home.  In a strange town, I didn’t know what they were likely to do.  I didn’t want to take the chance that they would haul me to Warren and the Marshall County jail so that they could find something to charge me with.  I wasn’t about to enable them if that’s what they wanted.

He got all friendly with me and we talked about Hallock, and he told me how he used to party there every once in a while when he was in high school.  He was trying to get my guard down, playing “good cop.”  Every once in a while he would ask me what was in the trunk, and I told him that I had some tools, a jack and a spare.  I didn’t see any reason to tell him about the beer.  He asked if he could search it, and I said, “No.”   I said, “No,” every time he asked.

He then tried a different tactic, trying to intimidate me into letting him look in the trunk.  “I know the guy that owns this land.  He would probably file a trespassing charge if I called him and let him know you were on his property.”  It didn’t work. I just smiled at him and said, “No, I am not going to open the trunk unless you get a warrant.”

The dispatcher radioed back that my license was valid, and she confirmed my birth date.

In the meantime, another cop had come along and was interviewing Mark while Mark was sitting in my car.  Mark told them the truth, that he was underage and that he had had a little bit of his mom’s beer at her house before we came down to Newfolden.  And that is all that he told the other cop.

The one who had been interviewing me got out of his car while telling me to wait in the front seat.  The two cops consulted with each other and decided that pushing us to open the trunk would be a waste of time, so they decided to let us go.  When I got back to my car, I asked Mark how it had gone and he told me that the other cop had tried to push him on the contents of the trunk, too, and had tried the “trespassing” gambit.  It didn’t work on him, either.

We pretty much decided to get out of Newfolden, because we didn’t want to get caught at a party by the local cops that same night.  They already suspected us, and it wouldn’t take much for them to decide to put us in our place if we were drinking with minors.  I also wanted to get back to Lake Bronson and pick up my license from the liquor store.

Since both Mark and I are white, and since the cops were white, this went down much easier than it might have.  We respectfully held our ground on our Fourth Amendment rights, and the cops respected those rights and decided that they had other things to do.  I wondered how it would have worked if either one of us had been Indians, or even black.  In northwestern Minnesota, racial profiling works a bit differently than it does in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Since the region is close to homogeneously white, meaning there are few blacks, there is little opportunity for the cops to bring their authority unnecessarily to bear on black kids.  So, race being less of an issue, they had to profile somebody and out-of-towners were sufficiently “other” to be targets for interviews.  After talking to me for a bit, the cop decided that I wasn’t “other” enough to hassle further.

Mark and I were able to laugh off the incident and after I dropped himself off at his Mom’s house I headed home and watched TV.  I saved the beer in my trunk for another day.  I had held my ground on the Fourth Amendment right to be secure in my person and I had won, and I am thankful for the Bill of Rights.  You see, we don’t have the right to break the law, but we do have the right to deny authorities too much intrusion.

Even if there had been nothing in the trunk, I wouldn’t have consented to a search without a warrant.  I would have still asked the cop to get a warrant before opening my trunk, even if I had “nothing to hide.”  It’s a reminder to cops that even though their badges give them some authority, it doesn’t give them all authority.  I recognize that, being white, I have a little extra leeway in asserting my rights.

Henry Louis Gates isn’t given the same leeway by the Cambridge Police Department. I tell my story in response to one of the comments at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. (Ed Brayton is DuWayne’s brother, and DuWayne is one of our valued Quiche Moraine commenters.)  Here is the comment that disturbed me, and reveals the mindset that allows the government to get away with intrusions on our privacy as initiated by the Cheney Administration.  Dismayingly enough, Obama has been slow to dismantle what Cheney put into place.  Here’s the comment:

It is all about time and place. Would you stop a firetruck on the way to a fire because you don’t like how they are driving? If your in court and you think the judge isn’t following the law do you interrupt him and cuss him out? In either case do you claim that their objection to your interference is a violation of your right to free speech? How stupid are people going to be?

When dealing with police you save you objections and observations until the situation is under control. Once under control you may voice your complaints as long as the way you do so doesn’t cross the line in language used into assault or in volume into disturbing the peace.

Failure to follow these guidelines tends to get you arrested and held until you cool down. Get over it. This is part of being a citizen and an adult. There are times and places for protest and rants.

In Gates’ case, there was no probable cause for the cop to follow him into the house.  Gates’ hadn’t consented and was rightly upset at this intrusion.  From this point on, the cop was guilty of violating Gates’ rights to be secure in his person.  How he handled it is immaterial to Crowley carrying out his duties.  Gates had reason to distrust a cop in Cambridge because there is some history there, as Dr. Laden has pointed out.

I am of the strong opinion that the police need to obey the Constitution when carrying out their duties.  The Fourth Amendment is a shield that we need to wear, even when we have done nothing wrong.  If cops have trouble complying with it, they need better training, not knee-jerk defenses from their union.  Crowley acted stupidly, and President Obama was correct in his assessment.  He didn’t say that Crowley was stupid, he said that Crowley acted stupidly.  Anyone who has trouble with this distinction is either purposely twisting this for political reasons, or has difficulty in discerning the difference between attacking an action and attacking a person.

If I, in my position as a person of privilege because of my race, hold to the Fourth Amendment when the issue comes up, then people who don’t have my advantage because of their race will benefit. It takes away one defense for bad cops.  Remember the Fourth Amendment.  The cops have enough authority at their disposal to fight crime.  We don’t need to give them all authority.

Then, the writer totally surprised me by noting (I paraphrase) that “unlike the Pygmies, who live in these forests and are of perfectly proportioned shape and appearance, these subhuman creatures were rather grotesque.”

The traveler was a college-educated westerner with a late-Victorian attitude about Africans. The idea that all Africans are at least a little subhuman would have been a starting point for him. Throwing in a tribe here and there with especially cannibalistic or otherwise uncouth tendencies would be typical. Running into a group of individuals that looked to him almost like a separate species would be notable, and he did in fact make note of it, but this would be something he would take in stride.

Reading this made me wonder about two totally different and to some extent opposed lines of thought. On one hand, I thought, “How can people think such things are real…this guy was obviously seeing something he expected to see. Why? How does that work?” On the other hand, I thought, “What if his observations were essentially accurate, aside from the racial judgments he made. What if he really did encounter a bunch of people with bow legs and funny-looking bodies?”

Then, in the next paragraph of this monologue, a possible answer came. Shortly after the above mentioned description, the traveler mentions that one of these strange heathens, with the bow legs and the disproportioned body, traveled with him as a servant for a while. Then, at the end of that leg of the trip, after serving quite well for being such a subhuman and all, the traveler wanted to leave this misshapen wretch with some sort of extra payment for services. A tip. But the wretch had withdrawn to the forest never to be seen again (by the traveller), apparently uninterested in recompense.

Bingo.

Or at least, maybe bingo. I have an experience that may in fact match that of this ca. 1900-vintage traveler. Actually, a few such experiences. But as a post- (way post!) Victorian anthropologist, I have a slightly different take on the situation.

When I lived in the Ituri Forest, I often lived with the Pygmies for stretches of time. There were two modalities of living with them. In one mode, I would throw myself on their mercy and more or less live exactly as they lived, staying in the same kind of hut they lived in and doing whatever they did, or at least watching them do whatever they were doing, and trying to stay out of the way at the same time as observing and learning things about their lifeway. In the other modality, I stayed in a small dome tent (a cloth version of their hut) and was a bit more involved with the logistics of camp life, because during at least some of that time (several weeks over the course of many many months), it was more like they were living with me. I would hire a small number of Pygmy men, and maybe have one villager with us as well, and another anthropologist, and we’d be doing something like digging an archaeological site, measuring trees, counting monkeys, or whatever.

During some of these forays, especially in the first modality when it was only me (no other anthropologist) travelling with them, and I was living in their lifeway, more or less, I was assigned a wife. Sort of. This happened a couple of times, with different groups, and different individuals. In each case the person whom I eventually came to understand was serving the role of Mrs. Gregoiri (one of my Efe names was Gregoiri, which I admit is not too original) was a man with pretty severe polio.

These were men who could not carry out many of the activities in which the men normally engaged with respect to hunting and other forest activities. Even moving from camp to camp might be a challenge to someone whose legs were very shortened and deformed and who had, essentially, a kind of polio-induced dwarfism. For the most part, these men had outstanding manual skills. They could shoot an arrow as well as any (or better) and were outstanding at making things that the other men also made, but that the polio-afflicted men would make with utmost skill. What they lacked was stamina in the field.

Their condition meant that they would be unlikely to marry. It meant that they would be in camp with the women anywhere from now and then to almost always as the men went off to hunt. It meant that their social and economic gender was unique. And it meant that when someone had to be assigned to keep the big pasty white guy who was always tripping on tree roots and poking himself with sticks from harming himself, well, this person was the obvious choice.

I remembered, rather poignantly in fact, on reading the aforementioned traveler’s notice that the strange deformed subhuman left without any special recompense, that this is what happened to me as well. It was a bit of a privilege to hang out with the visitor, as would be the case in most cultures, and the visitor seemed to overlook the person’s affliction, which is something that many visitors may not have done.

The polio that came through the Ituri Forest of Zaire must have come through at roughly the same time because all the men who had it were about the same age…my age, actually. This population of forest dwelling people must have been very susceptible to it. And the Pygmies were notable for either refusing or just being bad at accepting long-term treatment or hospital stays, so even if there was some help available for them in those days, it may have ended up rather ineffective. Many must have died.

I need not mention that I never saw a subhuman deformed race. I did see some men who were being very good to me, keeping me from getting killed by the snakes, the elements, by getting poked to death or falling off a cliff into quicksand, or whatever one may think of as the dangers of the African Jungle. And they didn’t want any special pay for it.

Those marriages were short lived. But they were good marriages.