White Superiority? Not.

I recently posted an essay (July 4), just below about how the Founding Fathers thought they had found a natural basis for government: natural selection leads to democracy. This was a flawed idea, but an advance over all previous European thought about government.

Americans often  make the erroneous, and dangerous, assumption that America became strong because of the cultural, maybe even biological, superiority of immigrant white Europeans over Native Americans. The Europeans beat the Natives, and that is why America is mostly white, or the descendants of slaves or later immigrants, rather than mostly Native Americans.

But it is clear that there is no inherent cultural or biological superiority of Europeans. The reason that European immigrants (mostly from England, France, and Spain) beat the Natives was because the Europeans had guns, and used them to slaughter literally countless Natives. The Europeans also brought diseases.

The evidence for this is, in part, that an earlier European invasion of North America failed as miserably as the 1492 invasion succeeded. I refer to the Viking invasion.

Vikings invaded many places in Europe, and conquered those places, before eventually blending in. In stark contrast, the Vikings who invaded North America had only a foothold (Vinland, in what is now Newfoundland) and soon departed without leaving any descendants. Unlike later invaders, the Vikings had only spears, swords, and other weapons that were not too different from those that the Natives possessed. That is, they were more equally matched with their intended victims. Under these conditions, the Natives easily expelled the Vikings. Why did this happen?

It happened because the Vikings were small and sick. Against the strong, healthy Natives, they didn’t stand a chance.

As I was writing chapter 1 of my forthcoming Forgotten Landscapes (due out in 2025 from Rowman and Littlefield), I found that the evidence of Viking weakness and Native strength was mostly indirect. Direct evidence is hard to come by. I thought it would be easy to prove, from skeletal remains, that Natives were taller than Vikings. Frequently, a less well-nourished population has shorter people. But there is little skeletal evidence for this. It is undeniably true that some Native tribes, with an average height of five feet eight inches, had the tallest people in the world before European contact, based on skeletal remains. But the Vikings were almost as tall. Late medieval Europeans averaged five feet five inches tall. The difference is due mostly to nutrition and disease.

But, to me, the indirect evidence is convincing. Native American tribes had less poverty, therefore better nutrition. They also had better health. They had almost no plagues of disease. For example, they did not have the low-level ergotism, which created constant sickness among poor Europeans, resulting from a fungal toxin in rye bread

There is also the anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal it may be, but it is still a valid test of the hypothesis that Vikings were small and weak. When Richard Fleischer directed the 1958 movie The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, he wanted to model the Viking ship after an actual archaeological specimen. The actors who played the warrior roles, however, could not fit into the ship. The set designers had to rebuild the ship, leaving more leg room for the actors. The actors were men of ordinary modern build, resulting from ordinary modern nutrition and exercise.

The Viking invasion, without guns and plagues, failed. The later European invasion, with guns and germs, succeeded. Clearly the Europeans were not superior to Native Americans, except for the guns and germs.

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Our Continuing Shame of Racism: A View from 1964

 The days are counting down here in Tulsa for the hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which started on May 31, 1921. For many years, is event, in which white Tulsans burned to the ground the prosperous Greenwood district, in which black people created thriving businesses. It has been difficult to get very many facts about what happened, even a total count of how many were killed (mostly? all?) black, of what kinds of atrocities may or may not have been carried out. Newspaper accounts from the time vanished from microfilms, and a police box of photographs has vanished. You can, and I plan to, read more about it in Scott Ellsworth’s The Groundbreaking.

The commission that has planned the commemoration used to include Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, but when he signed the bill that effectively outlawed teaching the history of racism in Oklahoma, the rest of the commission removed him from membership. Stitt attempted no defense of his actions.

The oppression of blacks (and even more so of other minorities) in America has tarnished our international reputation, even now that the president who at least went along with it is out of office. Every time there is a new police shooting of an unarmed black man by a white officer, especially when no action is taken, as recently in North Carolina, the world thinks more and more of us as a land of racial oppression. This is something that even Joe Biden cannot change, and the world knows it.

My point in this essay is that this has been going on for a long time. In 1964, Jorgen Bisch visited China, in the heyday of its Maoist oppression, and wrote an article about what he saw for National Geographic (published November 1964). One of the things that he saw, and that alarmed him, was “communist propaganda.” Schoolchildren had written essays about how white Americans oppressed blacks. The author saw some of those essays posted on a wall, and took a photo of them.

In one of the essays, a white Uncle Sam is walking away from a black man. In another, a black American is holding up a red flag of liberation from racist oppression. Look at this photo, because I very much doubt you will see it anywhere else.

At that time, white Americans really were oppressing and sometimes killing blacks, and worse was to come. This bad image of Uncle Sam was justified. Resentment toward America was justified.

We recognize, of course, that the Chinese government was far worse, not just toward its own citizens who appeared to even slightly differ from Chairman Mao’s views, but also in the way it treated its own minority groups—to the extent that you may not have even known that there were minority ethnicities in China. Even the normally meek Joe Biden has called China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority “genocide.”

I believe we are not as bad as the communists were and are. But it sure doesn’t help much when we project to the world the racist hatred that we do have. Our right-wing extremism plays right into the propaganda machines of our competitors and potential enemies.

And we use Christianity to justify it. I recently went to a fundamentalist church meeting in Durant, Oklahoma, where the speaker proclaimed that the new requirements to teach about racism were satanic. He meant this literally. His evidence was that the watchwords for the fight against racism were Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity—the first letters of which spell DIE. This shit is so extreme that you can’t make it up. The speaker digressed from his theme only long enough to proclaim that Biden stole 41 million votes (I did not make this number up) from Trump.

This is a blog about science and evolution. This essay, like many others, reinforces the theme that there is no biological or evolutionary justification for racism.

Armed protests are planned for the Race Massacre commemoration. What could possibly go wrong? As a white-presenting Tulsa resident, I’m getting a little nervous.

Fourth of July, Celebrating What? Part two.

As I posted previously, the Fourth of July is a celebration of white supremacy.

The “self-evident truths” about “unalienable rights” applied only to white men, later to white women, and never completely to people with darker skin. Non-white people have very little to celebrate.

I have reached the conclusion, slowly over the years, that the white races have been the primary source of evil in the world. In many places around the world, lighter-skinned people have conquered and enslaved darker-skinned people. This was even true in India, where lighter-skinned people invading from the north conquered darker-skinned southern people and created a caste system to keep the dark people suppressed. The genetic signature—a Y chromosome from lighter races—proves that, in many parts of the world, light-skinned men dominated and inseminated dark women, as described in David Reich’s masterful book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.

We all know that each and every human being is both good and evil at the same time, and that every race, however defined, has both good and bad people. But I have now concluded that the people of the world should make the preliminary assumption that white people are evil. That is, this is what we should assume in the absence of further evidence; the null hypothesis should be that white people are evil. What this means is that white people carry a burden of guilt for being the primary oppressors in human history. It is therefore the responsibility of every white person to present evidence for public examination that they are actively dedicating their lives to making the world a better place. It is not good enough for white people to simply not be bad. White people should have to prove themselves good, or otherwise should be assumed to be evil. The burden of proof is therefore on white people to prove themselves to be good.

For many or most white people, this should be pretty easy to do. Just post on your social media outlets the evidence that you are a good person who loves people of other races. But if you remain silent, the dark majority of the world will assume that you are one of the oppressors.

For dark people, the world should make the preliminary assumption that they are good. This is the null hypothesis, to be accepted in the absence of further evidence. Of course, many of them are not, and the evidence for it comes from criminal records, financial or other scandals, etc.

Therefore, I proclaim to you what we must do. White people must present evidence that they are actively performing acts of goodness, while for dark people, all you have to do is not be evil.

Every person is still responsible for their own goodness or evil. If you are religious, you would say that God judges each of us individually, regardless of race. But the standards of evidence are different. White people have to work to counteract our history of evil; dark people just have to not make it worse.

What about those of us of mixed ancestry? I celebrate my Cherokee ancestry, but I look white. I am ashamed of my white ancestry, but what can I do? I must err on the side of love: I will make myself obviously good, so as to stand out from the history of evil created by my white ancestors. Maybe I don’t have to try as hard as a pure white man, but I still need to work hard. If you are half-white, you might have it easier, but you still have work to do.

When you have a world full of white people and almost-white people trying to make the world better, and dark people just not being evil, that sounds like a much better world than the one we live in right now.

And with all of this, I don’t have time to go around shooting off fireworks and driving a big pickup truck around with a Confederate flag waving from it. Okay, my fellow whites and almost-whites: get busy, and post on social media about the good things you are doing. Maybe you are already doing them. Well, let your neighbors, especially your dark neighbors, know you care about them. This will lead us to the next essay.

This essay has appeared in a blog about evolution primarily because, from an evolutionary viewpoint, human races do not actually exist.