J.P. RUSHTON AND HBD RACIAL "EVOLUTIONARY' CLAIMS DEBUNKED
Africanist archaeology and ancient IQ: racial science and cultural evolution in the twenty-first century Scott MacEachern World Archaeology. (2006). Vol. 38(1): 72-92 Race, Racism and Archaeology ----
Abstract Over the last two decades, a number of psychometric researchers have claimed that very substantial differences in intelligence exist among modern human racial groups, as these groups are traditionally defined. According to these researchers, African populations suffer severe cognitive deficits when compared to other modern humans. Philippe Rushton, particularly, places these claimed mental deficits in an evolutionary context, advancing environmental explanations for such deficits and asserting that such cognitive differences existed prehistorically as well. Such substantial cognitive differences should be evident in human behavioural patterns, and thus in the archaeological record. Archaeological data can thus be used to test these claims about human evolutionary development and modern human cognitive difference. Examination of the archaeological record does not support the claims made by these researchers. This suggests that regional differences in IQ test score results should not be ascribed to variations in human evolutionary development.
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EXCERPT
Behaviour, selection and African environments
There are three basic elements in Rushton’s theorization of human difference. First, he amasses a large amount of material on physical, behavioural and social differences between the groups that form the popularly accepted triptych of human races: ‘Negroids’, ‘Caucasoids’ and ‘Mongoloids’ (Rushton 2000: 17–183; see also Rushton and Bogaert 1987: 265–8). The scope of these topics is very wide: it includes material on brain size, IQ (and related) test scores, dental development, speed of sexual maturation, age of first intercourse, life span, number of sexual fantasies, penis size, number of multiple births, permissive attitudes toward sex, aggressiveness, law-abidingness, ‘mental durability’, AIDS rates, cultural achievements and much more. Most striking, and most relevant for this paper, is Rushton’s (2000: 133–7; see also Rushton and Skuy 2000) acceptance of Richard Lynn’s (1991b, 2003; Lynn and Vanhanen 2002: 197–225) claim that the average IQ test score of African populations is approximately IQ¼70. In the psychiatric literature, this correlates to a state of borderline mental retardation (American Psychiatric Association 1994), implying that the great majority of African people living today suffer some degree of cognitive deficit, ranging from mild to very severe. Rushton ranks the three races on the basis of these assembled characteristics (Rushton 2000: 5, 119, 148, 152, 162, 166, 168, 171, 214).
He has stated on many occasions that this is a straightforward scientific description of humanity, but it is clear that any taxonomy describing Africans, for example, as less intelligent, more promiscuous, less altruistic, more aggressive, less law abiding, investing less effort in child-rearing and less culturally developed than Europeans or Asians – as Rushton’s taxonomy does – is also a ranking of fundamental human worth. Rushton’s accumulation of these data and the uses that he makes of them have been very stringently critiqued (see, for example, Brace 1996; Czernovsky 1995; Graves 2002b; Lieberman 2001; Peters 1995), and that critique need not be repeated here. However, it should be noted that the sources, characteristics and quality of his data are diverse, and often of extremely low reliability. Rushton’s use of late Victorian travel pornography (‘French Army Surgeon’ 1896) as a central reference on human sexual characteristics and behaviours is perhaps the most egregious use of poor-quality data, but it is very far from being the only one. His data on racial differences in intelligence test scores is taken from wildly disparate sources ranging over the last century (Rushton 2000: 38–9, 135–7), including sources using techniques that even advocates of IQ testing have dismissed as ‘primitive’ and unreliable (Jensen 1988). Many of his demographic data – on longevity and reproductive rates, for example – have been subject to large-scale fluctuations even within populations and in relatively short periods of time, making it unlikely that such comparative measures have any evolutionary underpinnings.
The second element in Rushton’s theorization of racial differentiation involves accounting for the biological basis of the data accumulated. He hypothesizes that the ‘Mongoloid’, ‘Caucasoid’ and ‘Negroid’ racial groups have been subjected to different natural selection pressures over evolutionary timescales, and that because of this these racial groups have evolved different life-history strategies. This hypothesis makes use of the r-/K-selection schema, developed by MacArthur and Wilson (1967) as a method of modeling density-dependent natural selection. The consequences of these different reproductive strategies are, according to Rushton, to be found in the data on physical, behavioural and social differences between races amassed in earlier sections of the book. In the formulation used by Rushton, r-selected species, adapted to unstable, rapidly fluctuating environments, evolve reproduction strategies with prolific production of offspring and relatively low parental investment in individual offspring, while K-selected species, adapted to more stable environments, produce relatively lower numbers of offspring but invest more care in each. Rushton (1987, 2000: 199–216; see also Rushton and Bogaert 1987) then claims that ‘Negroid’ populations, in particular, are more r-selected than are ‘Caucasoid’ populations, which are in turn more r-selected than ‘Mongoloid’ populations. In essence, Africans are held to invest bodily resources more heavily in sex and impulsiveness/aggression, while Europeans and Asians are supposed to invest such resources more heavily in intelligence, altruism and restraint. While Rushton does claim that ‘Negroids’ are only relatively r-selected, the data that he amasses give the impression of very substantial differences between these racial groups, an impression eagerly seized by racists around the world.
It might be objected that a concentration on ‘Negroid’ characteristics, vis-a`-vis those of the other major races, imputes an unfair racializing subtext to Rushton’s work, because he situates the three major races along an r- to K-selected continuum: ‘Negroids’ – ‘Caucasoids’ – ‘Mongoloids’. However, in practice (see below), ‘Caucasoids’ and ‘Mongoloids’ are lumped together as temperate-/cold-climate races against the tropically adapted ‘Negroids’ throughout this work (e.g. Rushton 2000: 199, 262). In other writings (Rushton and Horowitz 1999), Rushton speculates upon temperamental differences that might disadvantage ‘Orientals’ in scientific and cultural achievements vis-a`-vis ‘Whites’. In the theories of modern racial scientists, the higher IQ scores of ‘Mongoloids’ cannot be held to imply significant intellectual superiority over ‘Caucasoids’.
This element of Rushton’s work has also been strenuously critiqued (Anderson 1991; Graves 2002a, 2002b; Silverman 1990; Weizman et al. 1990). There are very serious doubts about the utility of the r-/K-selection model as an explanation for behavioural differences among and especially within animal species, especially when the concept is generalized far beyond its origins (Boyce 1984; Stearns 1992). There exist many cases in which the predictions of this theory do not hold (Graves 2002a: 66–7), and a number of characteristics of Rushton’s three racial groups – most notably body size – do not fit the model. The linkages between r-/K-selection and the characteristics that Rushton associates with those different forms of selection are quite unclear (Weizman et al. 1990: 4–5). Finally, Rushton has never satisfactorily established the environmental circumstances in which his different racial groups were exposed to these different selection pressures. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Rushton turned to an r-/K-selection model because of a fairly impressionistic resemblance between that model and his image of ‘racial’ variability, and that he then tuned the model to fit his assumptions.
It is at this point – when we begin to speak about the ancestors of modern humans as evolving populations in particular environments – that palaeoanthropology and archaeology become important to Rushton’s account. He claims that ‘Negroid’ populations differ from ‘Caucasoids’ and ‘Mongoloids’ because the former evolved only in tropical Africa, while the latter groups moved out of Africa into colder climates (Rushton 2000: 199, 217–33, 262–4). There are two components to this explanation: tropical African environments are less stable and less predictable than are temperate and cold environments (thus favouring r-selected strategies of prolific reproduction and low parental investment in offspring), and in addition temperate and cold climates posed cognitive demands upon ‘Caucasoid’ and ‘Mongoloid’ populations not experienced by those peoples living in balmier climes. It should be emphasized that only the first of these components involves r-/K-selection theory; the second derives in large part from speculations about the evolution of intelligence published by Richard Lynn (1987, 1991a). (Lynn (2003: 141), in fact, seems to be claiming that modern Africans are cognitively unchanged descendants of the hominids that occupied Africa 250,000 years ago.) This bipartite explanation is supplemented by archaeological data that Rushton claims support his thesis.
Less attention has been paid to this last component of Rushton’s model than to other elements of his work (but see Graves 2002a: 71–4; Lieberman 2001: 79), in part because there are so many other obvious targets for criticism in his work and in part because most of this critique has come from psychologists and biological anthropologists. It remains, however, central to Rushton’s accounting of difference between his three racial groups. He is concerned with producing an integrated explanation of the differences between those groups, and to do this using r-/K-selection theory he must account for the origins of these differences in an evolutionary context. This requires engagement with archaeological and palaeoanthropological data. There is also a long tradition of appeals to environmental differences in racialist descriptions of African peoples. In almost all such cases, Africans are held to be cognitively disadvantaged, either because African environments are so benevolent that they provide a reduced cognitive challenge to African populations (cf. Herder 1968: 297; Kant 1997 [1775]: 46), or because those environments are so hostile to humanity that they inhibit the intellectual development of those populations (cf. Cornelius de Pauw in Duchet 1969: 123). Rushton’s explanation uniquely combines elements of both of these models.
His approach shares another characteristic with many eighteenth-century accounts of human racial variation: it treats continental land-masses as undifferentiated geographical units, each characterized by a particular set of prevailing environmental conditions. Thus, African environments are collapsed to subtropical savannas, which are prone to unpredictable droughts and ‘devastating viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases’ (Rushton 2000: 231), while Europe and Asia are similarly characterized as cold (but predictable) arid tundra and glacial landscapes.We are never told why all African savannas are supposed to be prone to unpredictable droughts or the reason for believing that tropical and subtropical plant foods are going to be available year-round (Rushton 2000: 228). We are not told why dispersed tropical foragers should be prone to devastating diseases that are now associated with higher-density, agricultural lifeways (see, for example, Armelagos et al. 1991; Barnes 2005; Tishkoff et al. 2001). We are never told why Rushton believes that ‘Mongoloids’ evolved in Siberia (Rushton 2000: 229), rather than further south in Asia. We are never told why environmental predictability is characteristic of temperate and Arctic climates, while unpredictability reigns in Africa. (Apparently, the only sort of seasonality that Rushton recognizes is that between summers and winters; the equally predictable and often very challenging cycling between wet and dry seasons in many areas of Africa is unknown to him.) Examples could be multiplied. Rushton simply asserts that racial evolution took place as he says, without providing evidence.
His archaeological and historical evidence is a similar mishmash of unsubstantiated assertions and obsolete ideas. At various points, Rushton claims: that natural brush fires would have been unknown in Eurasia during glacial periods, and because of this human production of fire would have been more challenging there than in Africa; that clothing and shelter were unnecessary for prehistoric African populations; that Middle Stone Age Africans could ‘barely’ be considered big game hunters because they lacked bows and arrows; that the greater numbers of known Cro-Magnon sites in Europe indicate that those people were more successful than those same MSA Africans; that ‘Mongoloid’ populations entered the New World between 40,000 and 24,000 years ago (as part of a classic evolutionary just-so story that purports to explain the lower IQ test scores of Native American peoples); and that Africans and south-east Asians never developed agriculture (Rushton 2000: 224–33). He further (Rushton 2000: 142) makes use of John Baker’s (1974) racist and unsystematic list of twenty-one ‘criteria for civilization’ – which begins to evaluate cultural advance by scoring the amount of clothing that people wear and ends with criteria like ‘some appreciation of the fine arts’ – in order to dismiss African and American cultural achievements. Again, examples can be multiplied.
In the early 1990s, as today, exposure to an introductory university course in world prehistory would equip an undergraduate to dismiss such a farrago of elementary errors and distortions. Rushton’s account of human cultural development is one that systematically valorizes cultural developments in Europe and (to a lesser extent) Asia, while denigrating such developments by peoples of Africa, the Americas and Australia, with no serious attention paid to the quality of his data. His sources for these claims derive only to a minor degree from archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists, but come rather from Richard Lynn and Edward Miller, respectively a psychologist and an economist, who share his views on race and the racial inferiority of Africans. It would be more surprising to see such claims promulgated in what is supposed to be a legitimate study of human behaviour if they were not so common in other parts of the book as well.
Race, reason and reality Race, Evolution and Behavior makes use of an obsolescent, Eurocentric model of human cultural advance, one that assumes a ‘creative explosion’ particularly in Europe at approximately 35,000 years ago, simultaneous with the appearance of modern humans in that area and well before equivalent developments anywhere else on the globe (Rushton 2000: 225). There is no evidence that Rushton comprehends recent archaeological research in different areas of the world or the effects that differences in research intensity can have upon our understanding of cultural developments world-wide. However, his book has one very significant strength: the great claims made within it are testable archaeologically. Such testing does not merely involve disproving the archaeological claims to be found in his text. That is a trivial exercise, one that could be carried out with an up-to-date introductory textbook. Instead, we can use archaeological data – with which, after all, archaeologists claim to be able to speak authoritatively about the human past – in order to assemble an account of African history that can then be compared with the expectations generated by Rushton’s model.
One particular fact makes such testing possible: the magnitude of behavioural, intellectual and social differences claimed by Rushton to exist between the three racial groups is very great indeed. There is no great subtlety in the picture of human racial variation that he paints. This is probably most striking for IQ test scores, as noted above. If African IQ test scores indicate an average IQ¼70, as indeed they appear to (Lynn 1991b; Lynn and Vanhanen 2002), and if IQ test scores are an accurate reflection of the general intelligence of individuals and populations, then we would expect African populations to be characterized by various degrees of cognitive deficit, with borderline mental retardation compared to other human populations as the representative intellectual state on the continent. We would further expect that such significant inferiority in the average mental functioning of an entire continent’s population would have substantial social and cultural consequences, and that those consequences would be expressed in the material traces of the populations involved.
Rushton himself assumes that to be true. He frequently explains modern cases of poverty, conflict, social disruption and disease in Africa as the consequences of human evolutionary history on the continent, just as the late-twentieth century economic success of Japan and the Asian Tigers is supposed to be due to the evolutionary history of ‘Mongoloids’. Similarly high levels of difference are evident in the other measures he uses. Rushton makes use of r-/K-selection models that were, after all, originally developed to compare the reproductive strategies of different species, and his definition of ‘race’ appears to be more or less equivalent to ‘subspecies’ (Rushton 2000: 305). He is not especially forthcoming on what cultural characteristics we might expect of a population with an average IQ of 70. In an editorial, he notes that an IQ of 70 equates to a mental age of 11, and says that 11-years-olds can, with supervision, drive cars, work (as child labourers) in factories and (as child soldiers) go to war (Rushton 2004). However, presumably they cannot design those cars or factories, or plan the wars that they find themselves involved in. Gottfredson (2003) claims that people with IQ less than 100 are incapable of carrying out any sort of sophisticated managerial task, including acting as merchants or bureaucrats; this implies that such people capable of such tasks would be quite rare in African societies generally (comprising less than 3 per cent of the population) and essentially absent in some countries.
Some proponents of IQ tests, and of racial differences in intelligence, have noticed that the results of IQ testing in Africa (and in other areas of the world) actually pose a substantial challenge to the validity of those tests. The idea that the average intelligence of Africans is severely decreased relative to that of people in other parts of the world simply does not accord with the experience of people who have worked on or even visited that continent. It is as if Rushton, Lynn and their colleagues were claiming that all Africans were actually only four feet tall. If such a claim is made, and one is asked to choose between doubting the evidence of one’s own eyes in Africa and doubting the calibration of the ruler used in measurement, most people will doubt the ruler. The problem is even greater than this, in fact, because testing for some African countries gives average IQ scores of well under 70 (for example, Congo-Zaire¼65; Equatorial Guinea¼59; Ethiopia¼63; Sierra Leone¼64; Zimbabwe¼66) (Lynn and Vanhanen 2002: 202–4, 217, 225).
Psychometricians have proposed a number of ingenious explanations in order to get around this problem. Arthur Jensen (1998: 367–9), the dean of this research, claims that African-American individuals with low IQ scores tend to be more socially adept than Euroamericans with the same IQ scores (because retardation in the latter cases is more likely to derive from organic damage), so leading observers to overestimate the intellectual capabilities of the African-Americans in question. This has then been generalized to the African case: Africans are supposed to be cognitively disabled, but this fact is not apparent because of their social and verbal skills. This seems extremely unlikely: any substantial contact would presumably pierce that facade of verbal skill, and the fact that many such interactions take place in languages and cultural settings not native to one or both participants would seem to indicate that verbal/social skills cannot be determinative. In addition, this sort of post hoc explanation undercuts the relationship between IQ test scores and the general intelligence factor (g) that is supposed to be reflected in those scores: IQ test scores appear to mean something very different in terms of human functionality in Africa than in other parts of the world. In any case, consideration of archaeological data allows us to compare cultural achievements in Africa with other areas of the world, without the distortion supposedly inflicted by verbal/social skills and over evolutionarily significant time spans.
African history To a degree, it seems grotesque that one must, at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, marshal evidence for African potential for cultural progress through time. Rushton’s model of race, behaviour and intelligence is a profoundly archaic intellectual construct, one that has more affinities with Victorian assumptions of the inferiority of the lesser breeds than with anything more recent. At the same time, Africanist archaeology itself for a long time shared many of those assumptions, particularly expressed by an unwillingness to accept evidence for indigenous African cultural advance (see the articles in Robertshaw 1990). Thus, the roots of various kinds of sophisticated behaviour – agriculture, iron-working and state formation are the best known – had to be sought beyond the continent. Over the decades in which Rushton and his colleagues were refurbishing old theories of African intellectual and cultural inferiority, archaeologists working on the continent were developing very different models of the continent’s history. These models do not require that African culture history exactly mirror historical developments in other areas of the world in some unilinear evolutionary progression (Fuglestad 1992; Neale 1986; Stahl 2005b), but they do indicate that African history is entirely comparable to that of other regions and other continents in terms of the human capabilities that it evokes.
Rushton (2000: 217–34) notes the palaeoanthropological debates about modern human origins, and accepts some form of an ‘Out of Africa’ model in his book. Such a model provides him with a well-defined, simple origin narrative for modern humans, as well as a mechanism for moving them beyond Africa to the cognitive challenges of the non-African world. He does not consider the evolutionary advantages that might allow modern humans to expand beyond the African continent into areas in many cases already occupied by other hominids. He does not explore in any detail the relationship between biological and behavioural evolution in moderns, saying only that blade technology appeared in Africa at 100,000 BP (itself an erroneous claim) but hastily adding that Africans at that time were not much advanced beyond their forebears (Rushton 2000: 225). As noted above, he accepts that significant behavioural advances among modern humans occurred especially in Europe, and to a lesser extent in Asia, around 35,000 years ago. Archaeological research over the last two decades provides a very different picture.
The linkage between such developments and occupation of Europe has been systematically broken down, as evidence for advanced behaviours among humans has been found in earlier sites and in sites well beyond that continent. Many of these data have been derived from African contexts (see Brooks and McBrearty 2000; d’Errico et al. 2003; Henshilwood and Marean 2003; Marean and Assefa 2005). Thus, we have a series of sophisticated bone harpoon points, presumably used in composite weapons, at Katanda in Zaire and dating to more than 75,000 years ago (Brooks et al. 1995; Yellen 1998); evidence for symbolic behaviour and advanced tool production – engraved bone and ochre, perforated shell beads, worked bone tools – at Blombos Cave in South Africa at c. 75,000 BP (d’Errico et al. 2001, 2005; Henshilwood et al. 2001, 2002); advanced composite tool technologies, long distance acquisition of raw materials and probable symbolic behaviour in southern African Howieson’s Poort assemblages, dated to c. 75,000–65,000 BP (Ambrose 2002; Deacon and Wurz 1996; Wurz 1999); and bead production at Enkapune ya Muto in Kenya at c. 41,000 BP (Ambrose 1998). It is likely that much of this behaviour has significantly earlier roots; for a more extensive discussion, see Brooks and McBrearty (2000) and d’Errico et al. (2003). Even figurative art, a phenomenon very frequently associated with late Pleistocene archaeological occurrences in Europe, occurs at Apollo 11 cave in Namibia, where it is dated to 25,000–27,000 BP – that is, contemporary with early European rock art (Vogelsang 1998).
It would be wrong to assume that the appearance of technologically sophisticated artefacts is necessarily coterminous with the appearance of complex behavioural, symbolic or conceptual systems, in Africa or elsewhere (Wadley 2001). Such systems may not manifest themselves in persistent material culture (or in any realms of material culture at all), and the cultural meanings of particular technological systems will quite probably vary drastically across space and time. The definition and detection of behavioural modernity among hominids is an extremely complex topic (Henshilwood and Marean 2003), and not one that can be treated in detail in this paper. However, the examples above very strongly indicate that Africa played a central and continuing role in the appearance of such behavioural modernity, a role at least as important as that played by temperate Eurasia.
Africa’s role as the birthplace of humanity is widely accepted today, by the general public as well as by archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists. However, this acceptance is often accompanied by the assumption that the continent has been a cultural backwater in more recent times. Thus, even an avowedly non-racialist account of human history (Diamond 1998: 98–101, 186–7) finds it necessary to provide an explanation of African cultural lag, especially in agricultural development. Diamond provides a rather deterministic explanation of plant and animal domestication based to a large extent upon the geographical orientation of the different continents. An east-to-west Eurasian transect of approximately 8900 kilometres, between Brussels and Shanghai, is paralleled by a similar transect across the African Sudanian and Sahelian zones, between Dakar and Djibouti, of about 6600km. Diamond’s model locates the early success and continuing influence of Near Eastern domesticates in the ease with which they could spread across the long reach of Eurasia, but does not explain why similar success did not attend Sudanian-Sahelian agricultural systems. (It seems unlikely that a 2300km difference in east–west distances actually produced the different Holocene continental histories that Diamond thinks exist.) Diamond tends to underestimate the diversity and sophistication of African agricultural systems, despite a much deeper understanding of African history than that possessed by Philippe Rushton.
Discussions of domestication processes in Africa suffer from the fragmentary nature of archaeological data – especially in the tropical forests of Central Africa – but the earliest firm evidence for sub-Saharan African plant domesticates dates to just after 4000 BP in both Africa and India (Neumann 2003). This implies African domestication of millet, sorghum and cowpea during the fifth millennium BP. This is certainly later than was the case in many other areas of the world. On the other hand, the variety of indigenous African plant domesticates is very striking indeed, comparable to that from earlier centres of domestication in the Near East and probably exceeding the diversity of plant domesticates in East Asia and the Americas (Harlan et al. 1976), and there is no evidence that the inspiration in their development came from beyond the continent. This parallels the situation in New Guinea, another tropical area often assumed to be a cultural backwater but that now appears to be a centre of domestication in its region (Denham et al. 2004).
Economies based in large part upon animal domesticates, especially cattle and caprines, seem to be significantly older in the Sahara and sub-Saharan West and Central Africa, dating to the eighth millennium BP and afterward (Gifford-Gonzalez 2005: 200; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002), and there is accumulating evidence that Saharan populations played a significant role in cattle domestication in the early-/mid-Holocene (Bradley et al. 1996; Grigson 1991; MacHugh et al. 1997). A stable and eminently successful pastoralist adaptation, based upon animal domesticates, the exploitation of wild plant and animal resources and eventually domesticated cereals, and capable of supporting populations of significant size and complexity, can hardly be dismissed as unsophisticated. African experiences with domestication seem entirely comparable to those of other areas in the world – and rather innovative compared with, say, the agricultural record of Europe.
The ability independently to develop state-level societies was another capability traditionally denied to Africans by European authors, who tended to look for inspiration beyond that continent and especially in the Mediterranean Basin and western Asia (Delafosse 1912, I: 207; Desplagnes 1906: 544–6; Murdock 1959; Palmer 1936). Probably the most developed example of this attitude was Charles Seligman’s (1957: 10, 43) ‘Hamitic hypothesis’, which traced virtually every cultural advance in sub-Saharan Africa to light-skinned immigrants from the north and north east, or to later contacts with Semitic populations.
Again, research across the continent over the last three decades decisively disproves this point of view. The literature on this topic is expanding rapidly: there is, however, no doubt that complex polities in the Nile Valley (O’Connor 1993; Welsby 1998), in West Africa (Gronenborn 2001; Holl 1985; MacEachern 2005; McIntosh 1991, 1999; McIntosh and McIntosh 1984), in North-east Africa (Curtis 2004; Fattovich 2000; Munro-Hay 1993), in East and Central Africa (de Maret 1999; Kusimba 1999; Schoenbrun 1999; Sutton 1993) and in south-eastern Africa (Huffman 1996; Pikirayi 2000; Sinclair et al. 1993) were indeed African, developing according to their own internal logics. The social and political hierarchies, the external relations and the economic and trading systems of these states were entirely comparable with those of similar polities on other continents, and were frequently recognized as such by European visitors before corrosively racist views of Africans had time to develop (cf. Brooks 1993; Northrup 2002). They did not appear in isolation – indeed, neither did states in other parts of the world, including Europe – and, again, they were not mirror-images of states in those other regions (cf. McIntosh 1999). The culture history of the continent is one of change and development comparable to that of Europe and Asia, one where particular cultural systems – the development of external symbolic systems, agriculture or states, for example – occur in particular areas, which in turn affect neighbouring regions in different ways. This paper provides only an extremely cursory survey of those data, on a limited number of topics, but more broad-based examination (cf. Stahl 2005a) would provide the same results. Such results provide no basis for the differentiation of homogeneous continental blocs of humanity, still less for the ranking of those blocs one against the other.
Interpretations We are thus presented with a problem. The picture provided by African archaeological data is entirely incommensurate with claims by Rushton and his colleagues that African populations suffer severe cognitive deficits or other behavioural disadvantages when compared with human populations from Europe and Asia. There is no evidence in those data that Africans as a continental population suffer from the degree of mental retardation that would be indicated by an IQ of 70, or from any degree of mental retardation at all. Both of these data sets are internally consistent: IQ test scores for African populations do indeed yield an average IQ of roughly 70, while the archaeological (and historical) evidence indicates that Africans have the same cognitive and cultural abilities as people living in other regions of the world, over evolutionary time spans and today. How may we reconcile these results?
A number of possibilities present themselves. In the first place, one might claim that the most intelligent people in African societies (perhaps the 3 per cent of the population with IQ scores greater than 100, as indicated by Gottfredson (2003)) have acted as a tiny ‘cognitive elite’, themselves almost entirely responsible for African cultural advances. The existence of such an elite would lead to an overestimate of the cultural and behavioural similarities between Africa and other continental regions. This seems unlikely on a number of levels. It implies drastically different intellectual arrangements in African societies than in societies in other areas of the world, and there are no archaeological, ethnographic or other data indicating that such differences exist. It would also divorce IQ test scores from social and cultural consequences to an extent resisted by psychometricians on both theoretical and practical grounds. It should be noted that neither Rushton (2000) nor Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) accept this explanation, because they claim that there is a good correlation between IQ, behaviour and cultural indicators on both a continental and a national level.
In the second place, we must remember that the evidentiary basis for many of these IQ tests is extremely weak, and in some cases the data are presented quite selectively. Some of the tests, like the Army Beta administered in the 1920s to South Africans, are known to be severely culture-bound. Claims made by Lynn (1991b; Lynn and Vanhanen 2002) and Rushton (2000) about the intelligence of different groups of South Africans also ignore the very significant debates about mental testing in South Africa during the twentieth century (Dubow 1995: 197–245), and the fact that much of this debate involved the IQ test scores of (usually Afrikaans-speaking) ‘poor whites’. A sense of the quality of reporting of these tests comes from Lynn’s (1991b; see also Lynn and Vanhanen 2002: 219) description of tests administered by Owen (1989) on different ‘racial’ groups in South Africa as ‘[t]he best single study of the Negroid intelligence’. Owen himself (1989: 60, 62–8) indicated significant problems with these tests, many involving language difficulties experienced by the African test-takers, and did not assign IQ scores for the results. Similar kinds of problems, where authors’ cautions about test circumstances are ignored by Lynn and Vanhanen, exist in a number of the other African cases. At the same time, it is unlikely that straightforward bias could explain all of the test score results in question.
A third possibility also presents itself, one derived from another realm of debate about IQ test results. The African case is not the only circumstance in which unaccounted-for differences exist in IQ test scores across cultural boundaries. James Flynn (1984, 1987, 1998, 1999; see also Dickens and Flynn 2001) has documented a steady rise in IQ test scores from the late nineteenth century onward in countries where longitudinal data exist, an increase now widely known as the Flynn Effect. (Longitudinal data are unfortunately available almost exclusively from Western countries.) Depending upon the test, this rise varies from less than 10 points to as much as 20 points per generation, with the greatest increase in ‘culture-reduced’ tests like the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. This effect is both reliable and predictable: it also indicates significant gains in intelligence over a period too short for any evolutionary effects to come in to play. Explanations for the Flynn Effect vary and none appears completely satisfactory, but there seems little doubt that it is due to some combination of environmental and cultural factors at play in Western societies, factors that remain significant even on tests where cultural influences are supposed to be largely excluded.
Taken at face value, the Flynn Effect implies that the average North American adult living about a century ago would have had an IQ of approximately 75 in modern terms, a value closely comparable to that derived for twentieth-century African populations by Rushton, Lynn and their associates. Mid-nineteenth-century North Americans would have been even more deficient mentally. This is a nonsensical result, and is widely accepted as such; no North American believes that our great-grandparents were mentally deficient. As two enthusiasts for racial comparison in intelligence testing, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, said a decade ago in The Bell Curve:
"Whether one looks at the worlds of science, literature, politics, or the arts, one does not get the impression that the top of the IQ distribution is filled with more subtle, insightful or powerful intellects than it was in our grandparents’ day. . . . No one is suggesting, for example, that the IQ of the average American in 1776 was 30 or that it will be 150 a century from now.+ -(Herrnstein and Murray 1994: 308–9)
In this case, Herrnstein and Murray are absolutely right. Moreover, the evaluative criteria used by Herrnstein and Murray to judge this claim involve the examination of cultural accomplishment, as does the present paper. This is the only way to test such claims for societies before the invention of intelligence tests. The fact that similar nonsensical results concerning Africans are widely promulgated in the psychometric literature may indicate simple ignorance of African societies or a more pernicious readiness to place Africans below other human populations in a ranking of inherent human worth.
The Flynn Effect is a measure of IQ test performance across a substantial cultural divide, with biology held more or less constant. This divide exists in time: it looks from the early twenty-first century back toward the late nineteenth century. The IQ testing that has taken place in Africa since the 1920s has taken place across a comparable cultural divide, one from economically and politically dominant Western societies and test designers to African societies and individuals in almost all cases at significant economic, social, cultural and/or political disadvantage. In this case, the cultural divide exists both in time (because the tests have been administered since the 1920s) and in space. The parallels between time and race have been remarked upon by Flynn (1999: 14–15; see also Dickens and Flynn 2001). It may well be the case that depressed African IQ test score results are best explained by a combination of obvious test bias and the subtle and additive environmental differences that produce variation in even ‘culture-reduced’ tests like the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, in a geographic analogy to the Flynn Effect. The archaeological data would seem decisively to contradict the claim that these differences stem from reduced cognitive potentials in African populations.
Conclusions This paper presents the juxtaposition of two data sets, one archaeological and one behavioural and psychometric. It is now a commonplace in the comparative psychometric literature to claim that low IQ test scores among African populations indicate severely diminished average intelligence among those populations. Rushton (2000) places these claims in a behavioural and evolutionary context, one paralleled by similar explanations applied to poor and relatively powerless populations in other parts of the world and supplemented by data of other kinds. Rushton’s model posits quite major behavioural differences among the different continental populations, and especially between tropical African populations and the inhabitants of temperate and Arctic Eurasia. The magnitude of these differences is such that they should be detectable archaeologically, and indeed Rushton presents archaeological evidence that he believes bolsters his case. His archaeological interpretations are for the most part obsolete and/or erroneous.
However, Rushton is probably correct in claiming that such a magnitude of racial differences should be demonstrable archaeologically. Archaeological data provide an independent test of his hypothesis, one not subject to the obscuring effects associated with modern mental testing and interpretation. Examination of archaeological data on the culture history of African populations, and comparison of those data with data from other parts of the world, yields no evidence for the behavioural and cognitive disparities claimed by Rushton. African cultural history is entirely comparable with that of other regions of the world, not in terms of lockstep evolutionary schema but rather in the evident sophistication with which African populations have met the challenges of their physical and social environments through time. To interpret the conflict between these two data sets, it may be useful to examine possible confounding factors in the behavioural and psychometric data. The behavioural data are quite variable and often of poor quality, but it is striking to note that the field of intelligence testing is grappling with a phenomenon analogous to continental differences in IQ test scores – the Flynn Effect. In both cases, testing across cultural boundaries yields results that systematically disadvantage populations culturally removed from our own, results that on their face defy logic. It is now up to intelligence researchers to identify the confounding effects in their tests, and let archaeologists and other researchers get back to looking at the Africa that actually exists today, and existed in the past."
This article is published in World Archaeology yet in its section on Africa's technological advances it fails to mention technologocally advanced areas such as the Egypto-Kush culture complex, the independent iron smelting techniques, and indigenous African implement creation techniques.
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
^
Posted by the lioness (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova: Human "bio-diversity" HBD race "evolution" claims debunked]
I though biodiversity was good. Aren't Africans the most biologically diverse people on the planet?
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Steve Sailer debunked... Claim: African food production and agriculture practices cause polygamy, with corresponding results in Black American family structure, claim assorted biodiversity proponents. "Tropical agriculture" needed all these extra hands, and women provided most of the agricultural labor force, polygamy took hold in African culture, and is thus reflected in Black American culture with its high OOW rates today.
Assorted evidence put forward includes:
A--- The anthropologists Jack Goody and Ester Boserup on how continental differences in raising food affected family structure. Boserup noted in 1970:
"Africa is the region of female farming par excellence. In many African tribes, nearly all the tasks connected with food production continue to be left to women."
B--- and evidence by James Q. Wilson:{quote):
quote:
"In Europe, where animal-drawn plows were used to farm rich land, intensive agriculture made monogamy important… In these places, men did much of the agricultural work …
In much of Africa, by contrast, farming was done by hand held hoes used to work small plots of land that were often rather infertile. Women were widely used to do the hoeing and carry in the produce.
Many husbands found that they could use extra wives to wield even more hoes, and so marrying several women made sense economically… the conditions they describe may have had important consequences for the kinds of families that had to endure the travails of slavery in the Western Hemisphere."
Claims of "important consequences" for black Americans however are weak on several counts, as are claims for the absence of monogamy in Africa:
1- Heavy female participation in African agriculture on tough soils is documented, but is this the PRIMARY cause for polygamy? Many scholars point to other factors such as the high child mortality rate, and whether there was a surplus of females in the populations. Others add more reasons.
Books such as Demography: Analysis and Synthesis, (2005, Caselli et al,) see the chief causes of polygamy as sexual adn reproductive related rather than production/economic oriented. Polygamy they hold allows a man to maximize his offspring, or engage in sexual activity forbidden by certain cultures when a wife is pregnant or nursing a child.
They also note strong political considerations as reasons for polygamy- such as local elites consolidating power and exhibiting prestige over the less powerful. Polygamy also serves to cement alliances between tribes, clans and bloodlines.
In short, while extra female labor to farm may play a part, the main causes of polygamy in Africa may have comparatively little to do with "tropical farming practices." -------------------------------------------------------------------
2-- Furthermore women in both cold-climate Europe and Asia have long had heavy and burdensome involvement in agriculture, contradicting attempts to portray African women as some sort of unique beasts of burden.
European women have long had heavy involvement in European agriculture for centuries, including milking animals, spinning wool, brewing ale, or turning out en masse for the harvests. One study of 1400 England for example found them doing heavy labor, including weeding, mowing, carrying grain, breaking stone for road repair, and driving plough oxen. (M. Mate, Women in medieval English society). Likewise in Asia, Chinese or Korean women were valued and exploited for their ability to engage in the back-breaking work of rice cultivation which required stoop labor to tend crops by hand, even though the plow was in wide use. It all depends what time periods are looked at. In European or Asiatic grain agriculture seasonal cycles such as planting and harvest time saw plenty of female labor deployed. The growth of mechanization in other eras was to also have its effects.
Data from China, even in the modern era AFTER decades of progressive communist rule, still shows women as heavy agricultural beasts of burden, when men monopolizing less demanding agricultural operations.
quote: "where machinery was used it was monopolised by men, and that this frequently made nonsense of the supposed distinction between 'heavy' men's work and 'light' women's work. For example, in one instance, Wolf's assistant came across three people working the fields. One was a man whose task it was to turn the switch to a water pump on and off. As a technician, he earned 10.5 work-points a day. The other two were women in their thirties 'wh were rushing back and forth ditching and damming to keep the water moving evenly through the fields. although the evening was cool, they were sweating with the effort it took to move the heavy waterlogged earth onto the banks of the ditches. They were unskilled workers and earned 6.5 workpoints for their day's labor'. Other reports suggest that through the 1980s and 1990s, in villages in which agricukture continued to be collectively managed, divisions of labour and inequalities in remuneration, such as those cited by Wolf, persisted.. Observing the situation at the chicken farm, however, the researcher felt that the women's work was far from beibg lighter than the men's. Men were responsible for carrying bags of feed on their shoulders, and for using a crushing machine to break up the feed. Meanwhile, it was the women's task to mix the feed and give it to the chickens and collect the eggs. Each day each woman had to collect 1,680 eggs, a task which the researcher estimated woud involve them bending down some 280 times a day."
--Women's work in rural China: change and continuity in an era of reform. Tamara Jacka. 1997
In short, African women have never been the unique continental beasts of burden some make them out to be. -------------------------------------------------------------
3- The claim of "carryover" to Black Americans is dubious. IN fact Black Americans in some eras, have posted BETTER monogamy rates than US Whites, and LOWER rates of illegitimacy than supposed pace-setting Nordic European whites in both the 19th and 20th centuries.
If these "tropical" practices were the cause of US Black family instability, why did black folk for over 50 years after slavery post relatively low out-of-wedlock rates, and post higher marriage rates than whites?
For a period of 50 years, from 1890 to 1940, every US census showed that blacks had higher marriage rates and lower divorce rates than whites. As late as 1960 black illegitimacy stood at only 19%, LOWER than that of today's whites, and LOWER than that of urbanized northern European whites during the 19th century- like the white Irish (posting sometimes a 50% illegitimacy rate in certain US cities, or white Vienna (46%), or white Stockholm (49%). In ultra-white Sweden at the start of the 20th century barely half of Swedish women married and around one-sixth of children were born out of wedlock. (Burns and Scott 1994) --Ailsa Burns, Cath Scott. 1994. Mother-headed families and why they have increased. Routledge. P. 61-84
Fast forwarding to the 20th century, white Northern European patterns are unimpressive. By the year 2000, out of wedlock births had reached 53% of all births- a steep rise from a mere 10% illegitimacy rate in mid century. (A population history of the United States By Herbert S. Klein, Cambridge University Press. 2004. p. 216) Nor are supposedly more virtuous white people of other "Nordic" nations any better. In the early 1980s illegitimacy rates were on the order of 45% in Iceland and Sweden and 40% in Denmark. (Report on Immigrant populations and demographic development in the member states of the Council of Europe. Rinus Penninx, Council of Europe. 1984.) White Australia in the 1980s weighed in at (35%), twice as high as US black rates as late as 1965.
In short, when the historical data is examined, supposedly "more polygamous" blacks posted a better showing than whites on several counts.
4-- Assorted claims re "tropical patterns" fail to explain how non tropical Arabs, Jews and other "Middle Easterners practiced polygamy for millennia and how some still practice it today, and fail to explain how these peoples who strictly subordinated their women from exposure re agricultural work (such as the Muslim "purdah" practices) STILL engaged in widespread polygamy. If the heavy involvement of women in farm work is the cause, why do the Semitic Arabs, who try to keep their women in strict subordination, and who are not out in the fields like the African women, have widespread polygamy, even today in the 21st century? This should not be the case under assorted biodiversity "evolutionary" claims. -------------------------------------------------------------
5- Europe itself has hardly been a shining example of monogamy in action historically. Numerous European peoples practiced polygamy, or its close equivalent, practices suppressed by a religion itself derived from Semitic peoples who practiced polygamy. And ironically, under the new religion, Europeans themselves continued to practice polygamy.
In is known for example that the Emperor Justinian had to legislate against polygamy in his domains in 600AD, an action that should have been hardly necessary in supposed areas of Caucasoid monogamous bliss. And polygamous practices in all but name was for example is well documented in white Europe. Among the Celtic peoples for example: quote:
"In Ireland .. there were various forms of marriage. Ten classes were recognized in the law tract in marriage, of which only nine are explained. The first three are regular marriages.. The others are temporary unions. Comparing a thirteenth-century Welsh list to its eighth-century Irish counterpart, T.M. Charles-Edwards remarks that the "existence of the Welsh list suggests that in many respects the Welsh law of women resembled the Irish until the gradual progress of Christian ideas on marriage caused a fundamental transformation" However, Charles-Edwards continues, "even in the thirteenth century, this transformation was still very incomplete.."
"Marriage and divorce, especially within the several recognized temporary unions, were relatively simple matters, and divorce did not automatically reflect badly on either party.. And this ""ease with which marital union was concluded and the almost equal ease with which it was dissolved," continues RR Davies, goes a long way in explaining the "apparently cavalier attitude toward so-called illegitimate offspring." To complicate matters still further, there is substantial evidence to suggest that concubinage was legally recognized and that there may well have been arrangements which we would now term polygamy and polyandry." --C.W. Sullivan. 1996. The Mabinogi: a book of essays (Garland Medieval Casebooks) .
and
Polygamy was legal among the Celts, with multiple wives recognized. Brehon [Irish law- pre-English conquest 17th Century) law for example -quote- "stipulated that any injury sustained by a second wife in the first day of coming into the household of an established first wife was not a convictable offence."
and
"There were ten classifications of Celtic marriage, each a specific form of contract, including one that was marriage for "a year and a day." --Walking the maze: the enduring presence of Celtic spirit By Loren Cruden. 1998
6-- Africa has always had monogamy, long before the arrival of Europeans, and polygamy has been a clear part of European and Asian culture until very recent times. In the middle East, it is alive and well among Semitic peoples.
Polygamy was more common in Africa than in Europe, but monogamy also has a long history in Africa even before blacks were forcible transported to the US, and before any significant influence from Europe. Of the 31 captives of the famous Amistad slave ship for example, 15 were married, and only 1 was polygamous, and monogamy is common in various parts of Africa. See Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775. by Marvin L. Michael Kay, Lorin Lee Cary- pg 160.
Asia has had polygamy for a long time parallel with monogamy, along with things like multiple concubinage, practiced in China. And it was not until 1945 that polygamy was finally abolished in Japan. And people like Jews practiced polygamy for centuries as documented in the Bible and anthropological studies, and for Arabs and those who follow Islam, polygamy is permissible even today.
Indeed while monogamy has been more prevalent in Europe, polygamy has always been a part of European culture until very recent times. Indeed, one of the things Christianity did for Europe was to stamp out and discourage polygamy. Ironically, there is a long tradition of polygamy in white Christianity (see After polygamy was made a sin: the social history of Christian polygamy- By John Cairncross), and polygamy is documented as common in white Russia in various eras. Ironically Christianity itself, based on the religion of a Semitic people from the sub-tropical Middle East, not cold climate areas, was adopted in white Europe, providing the "rules of morality" that helped suppress polygamy (among other things) by Europeans in many regions as Cairncross notes.
7-- Several examples show the continuing influence of polygamy in European culture. One of the most powerful European religions, that of Mormonism, not only practiced polygamy until comparatively recent times, but in its heavenly paradise, polygamy will be practices and recognized. Ironically even Nordic Aryan leader Adolf Hitler at times also had a favorable opinion of polygamy.
Mormon leader Joseph Smith had numerous wives, one only 14 years old, and referred to "spiritual wifery" that would be "sealed" throughout eternity. Polygamyis part and parcel of the Mormon paradise.
quote: : "After death, while their husbands are creating and ruling over planets, the women have the questionable honor of bearing his "spirit children" for eternity. These spirit children descend to their father's planet to inhabit bodies as mortals, who are then ruled over by him. Mormon Doctrine states that these celestially married men and women will live eternally in the family unit and have spirit children, theus becoming Eternal fathers and Eternal Mothers." A man who has multiple wives can beget many more spirit children, making him much more powerful. Mormon men must beget as many children with as many wives as possible, for "their glory (in heaven) is in proportion to the number of their wives and children" (Snowden 11)."
--D. Kirkland. 2008. Mormons and Muslims: A Case of Matching Fingerprints
Other references: Charles W. Penrose, "Mormon" Doctrine Plain and Simple, or Leaves from the Tree of Life, 1897, Salt Lake City, p.66 ("In the case of a man marrying a wife in the everlasting covenant who dies while he continues in the flesh and marries another by the same divine law, each wife will come forth in her order and enter with him into his glory.");
Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, ed., Doctrines of Salvation, 1956, vol. 2, p. 67 (Smith, who was sealed to two different women, stated, "[M]y wives will be mine in the eternity.");
Harold B. Lee, Deseret News 1974 Church Almanac, p. 17 ("My lovely Joan was sent to me: So Joan joins Fern/That three might be, more fitted for eternity./'O Heavenly Father, my thanks to thee'.").
And a mere 70 or so years ago, "Aryan" Nazi German itself was encouraging polygamy. QUOTE:
"Although monogamy was the official marriage from of Nazi Germany, the society in effect, turned toward polygamy because Aryan males were encouraged to beget Aryan children with as many racially qualified women as possible- in and out of wedlock."
--Young-Bruehl (2002) The anatomy of prejudices).
According to The Fuherer in his own words"
"Let's remember that after the Thirty Years War polygamy was tolerated, so that it was thanks to the illegitimate child that the nations recovered its strength."
And lamenting those Rhine maidens that have never known man, the Fuherer further argues:
"As long as we have in Germany two and a half million women vowed to celibacy, we shall be forbidden to despise the child born out of wedlock." --L. Pine, 1999, Nazi family Policy
Curiously, according to one book, a number of white Mormons following their practice of prayers for dead and eternal marriage have "interceded in prayer" for Hitler and Eva Braun: --quote--
"Adding insult to injury, zealous Mormons also stood proxy for Adolf Hitler's and Eva Braun's baptisms and eternal marriage. If the prospect of meeting Hitler as a god in eternity rankles the sensitivities of most non-Mormons, imagine the impact of such an idea on a Jew." ( --LaTayne Scott. 2010. The Mormon Mirage: A Former Member Looks at the Mormon Church Today)
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Disclaimer: This page addresses and debunks certain racist, biased and/or anti-Semitic writings and scholars, and of necessity must repeat a number of their arguments, and discuss the methodology of said scholars and writers for proper rebuttal. These writers cloak their work in a veneer of scientific objectivity, hence a detailed examination is necessary. This discussion is not to be construed as "endorsement" of such scholars or their writings, in any way.>
THE PROBLEM:
"Well, here they are; and one could ask for no better illustration of the thesis that those on the left-hand side of the bell curve are much more in need of simple, clear rules of morality than are the cognitive elites who run their society. " -- Author John Derbyshire, 2000, on low IQ of the less virtuous.
So says conservative National review writer John Derbyshire. He is partially right, but conveniently, (and hypocritically) misses the OTHER side of the equation here. It is not only people on the left hand side of the Bell Curve that need simple, clear rules of morality, but those on his touted right hand side as well. This is one of the fundamental weaknesses of Derbyshire and his "bio-diversity" ilk - their worship of IQ, and their hypocritical calculus of virtue based on the almighty IQ.
THE DETAILED 10-PART EXAMINATION OF CLAIMS AND METHODS: The intent of this page is not to bash any ethnic group or individual, but to apply the methods of Derbyshire, JP Rushton, M. Levin, et al across the board, something he and others shirk doing. What happens when biased 'hereditarianism' and 'biodiversity' notions are applied CONSISTENTLY across the board, and put to the test? What happens to bold claims of virtue and goodness then? Let us ask:[/b]
1--What side of the Bell Curve has produced the most vicious violence in human history, such as the mass murders of the Holocaust?
You got it- supposedly more pure, more virtuous people on the "right" side of the Bell Curve. While making up only about one-third of the world's population, Europeans have perpetrated around 90% of the world's genocides. On a more routine violence tally, body count "parity" is not far behind as shown in the killing fields of Cambodia that "cleansed" about one-fourth of the country's population.Asiatics racked up a body count of 60 or so million murdered or starved by "the thought of Chairman Mao", as well as the older depredations of Ghengis Khan and his descendants in more ancient time. In the modern higher IQ era, cold climate Caucasoid "role model" Josef Stalin and followers posted an additional body count of 20 million or so, a shining example for all time by those allegedly possessing Derbyshire's "higher" sense of morality. In terms of the crime of genocide, assorted "biodiversity" and "racial reality" types attempt to avoid uncomfortable reality by claiming that genocide is not a crime. But in fact it is, and has been so recognized by almost every major Western nation and international law since 1948, under a conservative definition that specifically excludes mere political violence. It was European nations that established the definition. It is thus hilarious to see how European race proponents attempt to wriggle away from the bloody facts on the ground, perpetrated by Europeans, even allowing for the most conservative definition.
2--What side of the curve is leading the charge to redefine and destroy traditional marriage along homosexual lines? You got it- the supposedly more virtuous folk on the "right" side.
It took people on the left side- the despised Black and Hispanic "NAMs", to preserve traditional marriage in California, USA. Whites were willing to undermine it, and continue to do so nationwide. Derbyshire and other HBDers are always lecturing black folk on monogamy, conveniently skirting the fact that whites themselves are fast undermining and destroying monogamy.
A related claim advanced by biodiversity proponents is the absence of monogamy among Africans until "outside" influences like European colonialism brought it. But this is nonsense. Polygamy was more common in Africa than in Europe, but monogamy also has a long history in Africa even before Africans were forciblly transported to the US, and before any significant influence from Europe. Of the 31 captives of the famous Amistad slave ship for example, 15 were married, and only 1 was polygamous, and monogamy is common in various parts of Africa. See <i>Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775. by Marvin L. Michael Kay, Lorin Lee Cary- pg 160.</i> Some HBDers also tout "Middle easterners" and Asians as "role models" on this score but in fact, Asia has had polygamy for a long time parallel with monogamy, along with things like multiple concubinage, practiced in China. And it was not until 1945 that polygamy was finally abolished in Japan.
And people like Jews practiced polygamy for centuries as documented in the Bible and anthropological studies. For Arabs and those who follow Islam, polygamy is permissible even today. Indeed while monogamy has been more dominant in Europe, polygamy has always been around until very recent times. Indeed, one of the things Christianity did for Europe was to stamp out and discourage polygamy. Ironically, there is also a long tradition of polygamy in white Christianity (see <i>After polygamy was made a sin: the social history of Christian polygamy- By John Cairncross</i>), and polygamy is documented as common in white Russia in various eras. Ironically Christianity itself, based on the religion of a Semitic people from the sub-tropical Middle East, not cold climate areas, was adopted in white Europe, and thus provided the "rules of morality" that helped suppress polygamy (among other things) by Europeans in many regions as Cairncross notes. In the modern era, the revolving door divorce cycle of many modern whites closely approaches patterns of polygamy.
Another related claim is of an era of idyllic white virtue and goodness during the 1970s, a temporary time of paradise, before disreputable "minorities" moved in to spoil things. Alas this claim too, in its many variants, both hard and soft, is bogus. The supposed "idyllic serenity" may have existed in SOME white areas, but within that haze of supposed sweetness and light, white America was rapidly degenerating in the 1970s, a continuation of trends from the 1960s, long before any real "integration" of the suburbs by blacks. White America saw rising divorce rates, rising drug use, rising out of wedlock births, rising feminism, rising homosexuality, etc. All this is well documented by historians in books such as Bruce J. Schulman's 2002 "The seventies: the great shift in American culture, society.." Furthermore the driving forces behind such changes were whites themselves. Black "militancy" or crime for example has little to do with why rising numbers of whites decided to divorce in the 1970s for example, hastening the breakdown of white family structure, whatever the psychic satisfactions of using the black "Other" as a convenient scapegoat.
3--What side of the Bell Curve leads in abortions?
ABORTION: Many HBDers would automatically point the finger at those perennial scapegoats - the black and brown "NAMs" but they carefully avoid the real story. The highest rates of abortion in the world are among white women in Russia, where 2 babies are killed for each live birth according to scholars Loveless and Holman (2006). The website below offers a similar dismal picture, showing that 60% or more of white Russian women have abortions. Derbyshire and his ilk are quick to trot out "genetic deficiency" explanations on this score where black folk are concerned, but hypocritically, start to hem and haw when their touted more virtuous whites post statistics even worse than blacks. You suddenly hear a mysterious silence then. They never consistently apply their own biased methods to whites, and say that white "genetic deficiencies" cause such outcomes. http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/may/06051003.html
4--What side of the Bell Curve leads in homosexuality, including its public celebration and embrace?[/b] The allegedly more virtuous, "right" side of the Bell Curve folk. Some studies (Rogers and Turner 1991) report higher rates of homosexual activity among whites than blacks. Remafedi, Resnic Blum and Harris (1992) also find same sex attraction some 3 times higher in Whites than Blacks. Yet another study confirms white leadership in homosexuality. A National AIDS Behavioral Survey study (NABS), reported by Binson et al (1995) shows that 9.1% of white men, 3.1% of Black men, 2.7 percent of Hispanic men, and 2.3 percent of Asian/other had had same-sex action. In essence whites were 3 times more likely than blacks to be engaging in homosexual acts. Indeed, the NABS study oversampled Black and Hispanic men but still showed higher rates of white activity. In another study based on vascular risk factors Krieger and Sidney (1997) reported white women and men were more likely to have had homosexual or bisexual contact than either black men or black women. In essence whites were twice as likely to be engaged in homosexual behavior than blacks. Here again, the supposedly more virtuous, mo betta "right" side of the Bell Curve produces dismal "leadership" on the moral front.
"Heriditarian" types often use IQ scores to disparage the morality of putative lesser breeds, but such IQ scores show correlation with homosexuality, according to some research. Indeed according to some studies, homosexuals post higher IQs than straights. (John P. De Cecco, Michael G. Shively (1984) Bisexual and homosexual identities: critical theoretical issues. Routledge). Alan Soble (1997) Sex, love, and friendship: studies of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex. Rodopi. pp. 77) lists several studies attesting to higher homosexual IQs, with most of the subjects in said studies being white. (See also James Weinrich, (1976). Human Reproductive Strategy. HARVARD UNIVERSITY DISSERTATION.[/img] p. 203-15). Since IQ is so important in so many ways, including evolution, according to Derbyshire and assorted HBDers, a cynic using their logic might well argue that homosexuality represents another, "higher" step in white evolution. As noted above, there is some evidence that whites have higher rates of homosexual behavior and attraction than blacks. Hence, using heriditarian logic, homosexuality and the attendant higher IQs might represent an "evolutionary" advance of white people.
Northern European "role models" show extensive homosexual activity stretching back to ancient times as scholars note. Cold-climate Eastern Europeans not far behind. QUOTE: "The fourth-century A.D. Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus described homosexual relationships between youth and adult warriors among the Taifali, a Germanic tribe related to the Goths.. Marcellinus became familiar with the Taifali when he was posted as a soldier in the region. Their youth, Marcellinus write, remained in these homosexual relationships until they became adults and had killed a boar or bear, a typical initiatory ordeal. Similar homosexual customs were described by the Roman historian Procopius in the sixth century A.D. among another German tribe, the Heruli.. homosexuality in the form of institutionalized pederasty of the sort described by Ammianis Marcellinus and Procopius is understood to have been the rule within the Germanic warrior societies. Remarkably similar societies of unmarried warriors existed in Norse and Celtic society. The members of the Norse warrior societies also dedicated themselves to their god, Odin, dressed likewise in skins of wolves or bears and were said to fight with the furor f one possessed of the spirits of those animals.. Like the Germanic peoples, Celtic society was ruled by a warrior aristocracy supported by a farming peasantry.. While references by classical writers to homosexual relationship between Celtic warriors and youth are not detailed enough to be able to establish an initiatory construct, the pederastic relations that they described would almost certainly have occurred within the fianna, the principal social venue of the Celtic warriors. Indeed, given the close similarity of Celtic and Germanic tribal customs, and the well documented esteem of the Celts for male homosexuality, it would have been odd if the Celts did not practice a similar type of initiatory homosexuality.
The ancient writers leave no doubt as to the Celtic warriors; enthusiasm for homosexuality in general. According to Aristotle, the Celts held homosexuality in high esteem and publicly honored homosexual relations. Diodorus writes that despite the charm of Celtic women, the Celtic men: "long instead for the embrace of one of their own sex, lying on animal skins and tumbling around with a lover on either side. It is particularly surprising that they attach no value to either dignity or decency, offering their bodies to each other without further ado. This was not regarded as at all harmful: on the contrary, if they were rejected in their approaches, they felt insulted." Celtic youth evidently shared the attitudes of their elders. The Greek writer Strabo, described the young Celts of Gaul as "shamelessly generous with their boyish charms."
"..The lack if sexual inhibitions that the Celtic warriors displayed towards each other amid such an atmosphere of masculine eroticism suggests that homosexuality was not limited to pederastic relations, and that love between comrades was also a part of Celtic warrior life. In fact, it is warriors, not youth, whom Diodorus describes as "offering their bodies to each other without further ado." Such a relationship between warrior peers even appears in an Irish Celtic saga of the late first millennium." [ENDQUOTE]> --Neill, James (2009). The origins and role of same-sex relations in human societies. Mcfarland: pp 120-131
------------------------------------------------
Data on other ancient 'Caucasoid' peoples, supposed Indo-European "role models," reveals a unified pattern of homosexual behavior.
In ancient Greece homosexuality played an important role. QUOTE: "While little is known of the sexual practices of the Kassites, Hyksos or Aryans, that is not the case with the Greeks. The extent of the prevalence and social importance of homosexual behavior among the ancient Greeks is so thoroughly documented that it is possible to get a clear picture not only of the character of homosexual relationships in Greeks society, but the important role homosexuality played in that society.. the fragmentary glimpses we have of homosexual behavior among the other Indo-European peoples can be recognized as revealing a unified pattern of sexual customs and beliefs that seems to have prevailed among all the Indo-European ancestors of modern Europeans." --Neill, James (2009). The origins and role of same-sex relations in human societies. Mcfarland:
Pedophilia and homosexuality was common among the Spartans. Wives and male lovers were shared between Spartan men. Pederasty or use of youth for homosexual purposes was well established among the Spartans, Greeks and Cretans.
[quotes from various scholars:] "..young boys between the ages of 6 and 16 were organized in 'packs' and 'herds' and placed under the supervision of young adult Spartans. This supervision was sometimes seen as surrogate fathering and one marker of its activity ".. was the instutionalization of pederasty. After the age of twelve, each Spartan teenager was expected to receive a young adult warrior as his lover.. Punishment for various infractions such as suffering silently under discipline was sometimes made on the youth's older lover, for having failed to educate his beloved properly."> --From: The Spartans: the world of the warrior-heroes of ancient Greece, from utopia to crisis and collapse Paul Cartledge, Overlook Press, 2003.pg 69-70
"Aspects of Spartan society conduced less to heterosexuality than to homosexuality. In his Laws, Plato wrote that homosexuality resulted from the (male) dining groups and from male nudity in gymnasia. Records of Sparta from the classical period seem to refer to homosexual boyfriends at least as often as to wives. particularly revealing, are some assertions by Xenophon on this subject." > --From: Sparta By Michael Whitby. 2002. Taylor and Francis: p. 93
"Sparta too institutionalized homosexual relations between mature men and adolescent boys, as well as between adult women and girls.. many aspects of Spartan homosexuality and marriage customs point to tribal origins. Participation was mandatory for all youth of good character. There were ordeals- a common feature of tribal initiation.. Even after marriage, men lived in men's houses, not with their wives. Wives and male lovers were shared with age-mates." > ---From: The construction of homosexuality. David F. Greenberg. University of Chicago Press. 1990. p.107 --------------------------
Both homosexuality and pedophilia were institutionalized among the Greeks per scholars: [quotes from various scholars:] FROM: Homosexuality in the ancient world - Page 80. Wayne R. Dynes, Stephen Donaldson - 1992 -
quotes from Dynes and Donaldson: "In short, I have no doubt that the evidence of Xenophon and Plutarch is sufficient to establish the important conclusion that pederasty in Sparta was institutionalised." In the "Politics of Spartan Pederasty" in Homosexuality in the ancient world, pg 23, various documentation from the Spartan era ranges from rock- cut graffiti, to bronze figurines of decidedly masculine "girls", to depictions of anal copulation on drinking cups, to terracotta votive masks depicting unbearded 'Youth' and bearded adult 'Warriors' found in the sanctuary at Orthia.".>
Some historian argue that Greek homosexual activity had ritual significance in the form of the semen, being an agent representing martial excellence or prowess, imparted to the receiving male in the process of sodomy. The venue of the gymnasium also played a part.
quotes from Dynes and Donaldson: "Next there is the point insisted upon by Plato's Athenian Laws (1.636b; cg. Theaer. 162b, 169ab), the role played by the gymnasia as hotbeds of homosexuality. The Spartans put a premium on gymnastic exercise, and if Thucydides (1.6.5) is to be believed, it was they who invented the customs of exercising stark naked and rubbing down with olive oil. In Sparta therefore the cult of the nude male body is likely to have been pushed to the extremes, as it is known to have been in other less gymnastic Greek cities.. None of these conditions favoring homosexuality is wholly peculiar to Spartan society, but their presence in combination suggests that the integration of institutionalised pederasty into the Agoge, whenever precisely it occurred, will at any rate, not have been awkward."> pg 27
Yet others argue that the ties created by pederasty extended to the networks of influence and governance. "Pederasty, in other words, could have acted at Spartan in the age of Xenophon, as it certainly did in fourth-century Crete, as a means of recruiting the political elite,"> ---------------
Young females were also used in Spartan society as part of homosexual relations. Quote: "Plutarch relates that in Sparta, the noble women loved the girls. Also the academic philosopher Hagnon states: "Among the Spartans it was customary (viz for adult women) to have intercourse with girls before their marriage, as one did with boys."> pg 292
Homosexuality was commonly recognized and accepted in Greece, and suggest a common pattern among Indo-European peoples. As one historian notes: "One of the intriguing features of the Greeks is their active interest in homosexuality... Yet the adherents of this solution [a ritual of initiation] have not attempted an explanation pf this puzzling phenomenon and they have ignored the existence of Indo-European (henceforth: I-E) parallels." pg 49
pg 50: "The bachelors had recourse to sodomy, a practice which was not reprobated but was actually a custom of the country- and a custom in the true sense, i.e., fully sanctioned by male society and universally practised.">
Some ancient Greek scholars held that the Persians learned homosexuality from the Greeks ".. we pass straight on to the Persians. Our sources are divided as to whether they practiced pederasty or not. The latter view will be the more probably one, since the Zoroastrian writings tome and again strongly forbade pederasty. It is perhaps indicative for this attitude that Agesilaos, although strongly in love with the son of high-ranking Persian, refrains from any physical contact. On the other hand, the son of Pharnabazus is enamoured of a Greek boy, and the recurrence of the prohibitions of pederasty suggests that the Persians did not succeed in stopping the practice. Such discrepancy between theory and practice could elucidate the remark of Herodotus that the Persians learned pederasty from the Greeks."> pg 282
Quotes from: Homosexuality in the ancient world - Page 80. Wayne R. Dynes, Stephen Donaldson-1992 -
Historian Charles Freeman's "The Greek Achievement" (1999) holds that homosexuality had an influential place in some Greek institutions. According to Freeman: [quote] ".. "The symposia provided the arena for much of this sexual activity. These were highly ritualized affairs whose origins lay in the banqueting halls of aristocratic warriors. The men were garlanded and reclined one or two to a couch around a central table.. there is little evidence that symposia were normally used to discuss politics. Rather the opposite; the longest conversation in Plato's Symposium is about the nature of homosexual love." > (Freeman: pg 299, pg 283-304)
Other writers find similar patterns: "Male homosexuality was also a prominent feature of Classical Athens. It was widely practiced and tolerated. Athenian law disenfranchised a citizen who had prostituted his body to another male, but nothing was done to males who engaged in homosexual love with male prostitutes or other adult males for love or pleasure. The law did not eliminated male prostitution but ensured that male prostitutes would be foreigners, not Athenian citizens." > -- Western Civilization: To 1500, Volume 1. Jackson J. Spielvogel. 2009. Cenage.
Note: ALL cultures have gay individuals and relationships, and some cultures worked out practical "live and let live" arrangements for them, yet some "hereditarian" and "Aryan" types applaud Nazi attempts to kill gays as a way of "purging" the race. They deny the existence of gays in ancient Europe, except as an anomaly brought about by corrupt "Semitic" influences. As the above examples show however, the actual truth is far different.
5--What side of the Bell Curve leads in high rates of child molestation? Yes- the supposedly "better folk" on the "right" hand side. Whites post higher rates of child molestation than other groups according to scholars Hattery and Smith 2007, depending on the baselines measured, and said white child molesters serve LESS time for their crimes than black crack cocaine offenders, according to some studies. QUOTE:
'Furthermore, our analysis suggests that child molesters, who are primarily white men, serve shorter average sentences than crack offenders who are primarily African American men. Child molesters serve an average of 6 years and only 43% of their full sentences, whereas the average inmate serving a sentence for possession of crack serves 11 years and 80% of his or her sentence." --(African American families, by Angela Hattery, Earl Smith, SAGE 2007. pp. 245) ---
and as one conservative police chief report states:
"Criminal profiling has a legitimate and successful history when applied to serial killers, rapists, hijackers, child molesters and arsonists. Ironically, some criminal profiles show a racial relationship between white males and serial killers, rapists, and child molesters." (-- Carl Milazzo (1999) Race Relations in Police Operations: A Legal and Ethical Perspective. International Assn. of Chiefs of Police) ---
The police chief profiling report mentions several offenses, but when broken out separately, a pattern emerges of whites as over-represented among child molesters. Kirk (1975) found that black offenders were more likely to pick out adult females for sexual assault at a rate three times more than white offenders (34% and 11% respectively), compared to white offenders who selected non-adults more. Kirk's finding is supported by West and Templer's 1994 study of incarcerated sex offenders, which found that a disproportionate number of child molesters were white, compared to negro offenders. (Kirk, S.A. (1975). The sex offenses of blacks and whites. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 4, 295-302) (West, J and Templer D. (1994). Child molestation, rape and ethnicity. Psychological Reports, 75, 1326) ------
The heavy white pattern varies by state. For example, a 1998 study in Florida was carried out on molesters over a 21 month period. Of these 88.4% were white, versus 7.9% black. Around 1998, Florida's populations stood at 78% white, and 14.6% black (Bureau of the Census 2000). Whites were thus overrepresented among the child molesters relative to general population, (88% molesters versus 78% general population) versus blacks who were underrepresented 7.9% versus 14.6%) on molestation offenses. -- Tingle, et al (1998) Childhood and Adolescent Characteristics of Pedophiles and Rapists.
An alternative point of comparison is to compare criminals to criminals - those actually in jail for crime - rather than non-offending persons in the general population. In the 1990s in Florida, whites made up less than 50% of the prison population.* Based on such patterns, whites are thus overrepresented as a proportion of those in jail. The same pattern repeats itself nationally. (*Data Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 1995 - State detail.) ----
"According to the Survey of Inmates of State Correctional Facilities by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, the following statistics have been recorded concerning the characteristics of offenders who violate and assault children.[/img]
* Those inmates who were convicted of committing violent acts against children were more likely to have been white, a percentage of nearly 70%, than any other race. * White inmates were nearly three times more likely to have victimized a child than black inmates." ------
Detailed data from Federal prison statistical reports also show the same pattern. Under the "Other sexual Assault" category, which is primarily child molestation, whites were six times more likely to go to state prison than Blacks and twice as likely to go to prison for such offenses than Hispanics. Under the category "Parole violators returned to State prison" whites were twice as likely to be returned to prison for the sexual offences than blacks. --Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics. National Corrections Reporting Program, 1994. NCRP9404 - New court commitments to State prison, 1994: Offense by sex, race and Hispanic origin NCRP9405. Parole violators returned to State prison, 1994: Offense, by sex, race, and Hispanic origin
And in 1994 the white prison population was less than 50%, (48,21% per the Federal Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics- 1990) and yet whites made up 77% of all child molesters in prison, almost 30 percent more than their representation in the general prison population. Whites are thus overrepresented as child molesters in proportion to their incarceration rate.
Numerous "HBD" statistics do comparisons to "the general population" - but why always make comparisons to a pool that includes innocent 86 year old grandmothers, pregnant 24-year olds, or 3-year old children? Another equally valid alternative comparison is to compare criminals to criminals- and run the statistics that way. We are talking crime- hence let's run comparisons among the criminal population as well. Hence the 1994 data, and some of the other data above for incarcerated persons shows some interesting patterns that are carefully dodged and avoided by assorted "biodiversity" types.
In summary, while child molestation occurs in all ethnicities, available data show that higher IQ folk display unimpressive moral "leadership" on this score.
Note: No ethnic group is exempt from the above but "biodiversity" proponents continually tout cold climate and or northern European peoples, cold climate eastern Europeans and Asiatics as sterling evolutionary role models, superior in virtue to lesser breeds. A close examination of the actual data yields a much less flattering reality.
6-- What side of the Bell Curve leads in divorce rates nationally? The right side again. Within the top 10 of countries with the highest divorce rates in the world, most are reportedly high IQ Western nations- such as the US, Russia, the UK, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Finland. Note the pattern, the bulk of the high divorce countries are the higher IQ ones. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_div_rat-people-divorc e-rate
7- What side of the Bell Curve lectures often others on sexual morality but their own conduct in such areas as out-of-wedlock births is rather unimpressive? Yes, the "right" side again, the conduct of which has hardly been "virtuous." It is a fact that for decades prior to the 1960s, black folk in the US posted higher marriage rates and lower divorce rates than whites. Furthermore white OOW rates are hardly sterling. Among the supposedly more virtuous northern Europeans for example, like the white Irish, the OOW rate in some decades of the 19th century exceeded 50% in heavily Irish areas of settlement in cities like NYC, even though the Irish made up less than 26% of the population at the time (Sowell 1981, 1983).
Supposedly virtuous white "Nordic" Europeans are no better. In the 1850s, in Sweden's biggest city, Stockholm, for example, the illegitimacy rate was close to 50%. As Burns and Scott (1994) show, by the mid 19th century when reliable cross-national figures are widely available, it was found than in illegitimacy, (Stockholm (with a 46% rate in the 1850s) was second only to Vienna (49%) among European capitals. Indeed this trend was a continuation since the early 1800s. Nor was this solely a pattern for mid century 1800s. In ultra-white Sweden at the start of the 20th century, barely half of Swedish women married and around one-sixth of children were born out of wedlock. Nor was this solely an urban Stockholm phenomenon. High illegitimacy rates and declining marriage rates were also found in rural areas as well (A companion to nineteenth-century Europe, 1789-1914, By Stefan Berger, Wiley 2006.) By contrast, as late as 1950 the US black illegitimacy rate stood at 17%, well below that of the touted white Swedish "role models" above, and for 50 years, black marriage rates were higher than that of US whites (Sowell 2004- Black Rednecks, White Liberals), and better than the Swedish pattern over several decades. The black illegitimacy rate in 1965 was STILL lower than the 28% posted by US whites in 2000.
Closer into the 20th century, white Nordic "role models" are no paragons of virtue: By the year 2000, out of wedlock births in Nordic Sweden had reached 53% of all births- a steep rise from a mere 10% illegitimacy rate in mid century. (A population history of the United States By Herbert S. Klein, Cambridge University Press. 2004. p. 216) Nor are supposedly more virtuous white people of other "Nordic" nations any better. In the early 1980s illegitimacy rates were on the order of 45% in Iceland and Sweden and 40% in Denmark. (Report on Immigrant populations and demographic development in the member states of the Council of Europe. Rinus Penninx, Council of Europe. 1984.)
8-- What side of the Bell Curve is much less than advertised re allegedly superior virtue when scrutiny is applied? The right side. Indeed some of the supposed paragons of Bell Curve goodness, northern Europeans, or cold climate eastern Europeans are much less than advertised in terms of reputed virtue and morality.
Let us begin by looking at white Southerners in the USA- and let's give assorted "biodiversity" proponents the benefit of the doubt by not using "liberal" scholars- let's stick with conservative ones. What happens when even conservative scholars like Thomas Sowell look at the data? We see that native white southerners historically are among the most backward and violent people in the American population. According to Sowell, in his 2005 Black Rednecks and White Liberals, what many see as pathologies of contemporary black culture actually derive from a dysfunctional historical white-southern “cracker” culture. "The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, a lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists. Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self- dramatization were also part of this redneck culture among people from regions of Britain where the civilization was the least developed.[i][25]"
Several scholars support Sowell’s observations. Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture (1988) is a thorough historical study of the values and behavioral patterns of white Southerners, and is backed by many other scholarly studies which have turned up very similar patterns even when they differed in some ways as to the causes. Scholar Hackett Fischer’s Albions Seed,(1989) for example, eschews the Celtic theory advanced by McWhiney, but shows many of the same cultural patterns for the whites, both in Britain and the American South.[26]
Nor can "evil papists" be blamed. Most whites who settled the south were Protestants. Now let's look at another northern European people- whom all are supposed to hail as paragons of cold-climate virtue - the white Irish. The Irish have long been marked by high levels of violence, substance abuse, promiscuity, anti- intellectualism, etc. In rural Ireland before mass immigration to America, for example, sexual morality was relatively conservative. However once the Irish peasantry hit the crowded, fetid slums and streets of big cities such as New York or Boston, this traditional rural conservatism began to break down, In New York for example, some decades of the 19th century show white Irish illegitimacy rates as high as 50% even though the Irish made up less than 26% of the city's population. Likewise in the 1850s around 50% of the people arrested daily were white Irish even though they made up less that 26% of the city's population. (Sowell 1981). Likewise the fallout of the Industrial Revolution in white Britain included horrific poverty, dismal slums and widespread violence as the rural peasantry migrated to the dismal venues of the city. As far as violence, one history notes: "The New York Draft Riot has gone down in history as one of the nation's bloodiest urban riots. Moreover, the behavior of the Irish during these fateful days and the racism they exhibited reinforced their reputation for violence."(Dolan, JP, The Irish Americans: A History. p. 49) On some measures of social propriety, the Irish were no paragons. One survey of prostitutes in the 1800s in heavily Irish NYC for example "revealed that 35 percent were Irish and 12 percent German." The Irish also posted higher rates of female-headed families than other ethnic groups in the same time period. (Binder, F, and Reimers D. (1996) All the Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City. Columbia University Press.)
Much is made of comparisons to blacks and assorted European immigrants, but as the example of the Irish shows, blacks are not some unique, basket case. They suffered and show the same patterns that often accompany rural people being urbanized. As anyone who has a basic knowledge of black history knows, WWII was to spark major changes and population movements in Black America. The MAJORITY of Blacks became an urban people, in contrast to the majority rural volk of previous decades. As becoming urbanized, blacks fell prey to a common pattern that often afflicts 'country' people who are squeezed into the crowded slums, violent streets and indifferent attitudes of cities - there is greater social dysfunction as the old rural community bonds begin to break down. It happened with whites from and in Ireland and Britain. It happened with Chinese in the over-packed slums of numerous Chinatowns. It happened with a host of other people in varying measures. But according to HBD "experts", black people are these unique basket cases as far as such problems go. Only they are permanently affected by such horrible dysfunctions, you see, because' they are black. Never mind the white people who have gone before, and who underwent the same pattern. They are exempt, and covered with a magical mantle of white goodness and virtue.
Another standard mantra among some HDB or "hereditarian" types is of vast job discrimination against the white Irish. But careful scholarship has shown that this is a myth. QUOTE:
"Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," purportedly by a maid looking for work. The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth. Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish--on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory."> -- Jensen, Richard. (2002) "No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization. Journal of Social History 36.2 p405-429.
Consider the words of one Irish Archbishop, John Hughes, as to alleged northern European "role models", but also note the circumstances: QUOTE:
[i]"Those who stay are predominantly the scattered debris of the Irish nation." Lost in a land where many didn't want them, violent, without skills, the Irish were in need of rescue. This was Hughes' flock, and he was prepared to be their rescuer. New York's Irish truly formed an underclass; every variety of social pathology flourished luxuriantly among them. Family life had disintegrated. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, an exiled Irish political radical, wrote in The Nation in 1850: "In Ireland every son was a boy and daughter a girl till he or she was married. They were considered subjects to their parents till they became parents themselves. In America boys are men at sixteen...if (the) family tie is snapped, our children become our opponents and sometimes our worst enemies." McGee saw that the lack of stable family relationships was fatally undermining the Irish community. The immigrants crowded into neighborhoods like Sweeney's Shambles in the city's fourth ward and Five Points in the sixth ward (called the "bloody sixth" for its violence), which Charles Dickens toured in the forties and pronounced "loathsome, drooping and decayed." In The New York Irish, Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher report that besides rampant alcoholism, addiction to opium and laudanum was epidemic in these neighborhoods in the 1840s and 1850s. Many Irish immigrants communicated in their own profanity-filled street slang called, "flash talk": a multi-day drinking spree was "going on a bender," "cracking a can" was robbing a house. Literate English practically disappeared from ordinary conversation. An estimated 50,000 Irish prostitutes, know in flash talk as "nymphs of the pave," worked the city in 1850 and Five Points alone had as many as 17 brothels. Illegitimacy reached stratospheric heights--and tens of thousands of abandoned Irish kids roamed, or prowled, the city's streets. Violent Irish gangs, with names like the Forty Thieves, the B'boys, the Roach Guards, and Chichesters, brought havoc to their neighborhoods. The gangs fought one another and the nativists but primarily they robbed houses and small businesses, and trafficked in stolen property. Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1840s and 1850s were Irish, so that police vans were dubbed, "paddy wagons" and episodes of mob violence in the streets were called "donnybrooks," after a town in Ireland. Death was everywhere. In 1854 one out of every 17 people in the sixth ward died. In Sweeney's Shambles the rate was one out of five in a 22 month period. The death rate among Irish families in New York in the 1850s was 21 percent, while among non-Irish it was 3 percent. Life expectancy for New York's Irish averaged under 40 years. Tuberculosis, which Bishop Hughes called the "natural death of the Irish immigrants," was the leading cause of death, along with drink and violence. Inflamed by this spectacle of social ruin, nativist sentiment grew and took a nastier, racist turn, no longer attacking primarily the superstition and priestcraft of the Catholic religion but rather the genetic inferiority of the Irish people. Gifted diarist and former mayor George Templeton Strong, for example, wrote that "the gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly their inferior in a moral sense." In the same vein, Harper's in 1851 describe the "Celtic physiognomy" as "simian-like, with protruding teeth and short upturned noses." Celebrated cartoonist Thomas Nast constantly depicted the Irish as closely related to apes, while Orson and Lorenzo Fowler's New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and James Redfield's Outline of a New System of Physiognomy gave such ideas the color of science. By 1850 the New York City lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island) was filled with Irish, most of them probably hallucinating alcoholics. Doctors of the day had a different view, speculating that insanity grew from degeneracy and violation of the moral law. Compounding the problem, according to Ralph Parsons, superintendent of the asylum, the Irish were people of exceptionally bad habits. They were, he said, of "a low order of intelligence, and very many of them have imperfectly developed brains. When such persons become insane, the prognosis if unfavorable." Hughes' solution for his flock's social ills was to re-spiritualize them. He wanted to bring about an inner, moral transformation in them, which he believed would solve their social problems in the end. He put the ultimate blame on their condition squarely on the historical oppression they had suffered at the hands of the English, which he said has caused them "to pass away from the faith of their ancestors," robbing them of the cultural heritage that should have guided their behavior. But that was in the past: now it was time for them to regain what they had lost. So he bought abandoned Protestant church buildings in Irish wards, formed parish churches, and sent in parish priests on a mission of urban evangelization aimed at giving the immigrants a faith-based system of values."
Yet more commentary on reputed "role models"-- again applying the same methods of assorted "biodiversity proponents"..
"The woes of Ireland, or 'justice to Ireland,' is not the chapter we have to write at present. It is a deep matter, an abyssmal one, which no plummet of ours will sound. For the oppression has gone far farther than into the economics of Ireland; inwards to her very heart and soul. The Irish National character is degraded, disordered; till this recover itself, nothing is yet recovered. Immethodic, headlong, violent, mendecious: what can you make of the wretched Irishman? "A finer people never lived," as the Irish lady said to us; "only they have two faults, they do generally lie and steal: barring these"—! A people that knows not to speak the truth, and to act the truth, such people has departed from even the possibility of well-being. Such people works no longer on Nature and Reality; works now on Fantasm, Simulation, Nonentity; the result it arrives at is naturally not a thing but no-thing,—defect even of potatoes. Scarcity, futility, confusion, distraction must be perennial there. Such a people circulates not order but disorder, through every vein of it;—and the cure, if it is to be a cure, must begin at the heart: not in his condition only but in himself must the Patient be all changed. Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns. The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back; for wages that will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment; he lodges to his mind in any pighutch or doghutch, roosts in outhouses; and wears a suit of tatters, the getting off and on of which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar. The Saxon man if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work. He too may be ignorant; but he has not sunk from decent manhood to squalid apehood: he cannot continue there. American forests lie untilled across the ocean; the uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength but by the opposite of strength, drives out the Saxon native, takes possession in his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder. Whosoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not swimming but sunk. Let him sink; he is not the worst of men; not worse than this man. We have quarantines against pestilence; but there is no pestilence like that; and against it what quarantine is possible? It is lamentable to look upon." -- Thomas Carlyle, Chartism Chapter IV
Scholar Thomas Sowell (1981, 2004, 1983) notes that many problems identified with blacks in modern society are hardly unique in terms of American ethnic groups, nor in terms of a rural proletariat swept by disruption as it became urbanized. Heavy patterns of pathology are for example seen in the white peasant migrants to the dismal urban slums that sprung up during the Industrial Revolution in Britain and elsewhere. He maintains that US blacks only became a largely urban people after WWII, when the booming war economy accelerated a third great migration north, allowing millions of blacks to escape the harsh, oppressive conditions of the South. While southern cities also saw some migration, it was this massive wartime era move north that was much more significant, and the arrival of the rural black proletariat into difficult urban conditions broke down many of the social mores and community-generated controls, such as church influence, that had helped maintain its stability in the past. World War I also saw a spurt of urban migration in response to economic demand, but this urbanization was not completed for most blacks until the WWII era. A recent work by Ira Berlin (2010) entitled "The making of African America: the four great migrations" (Viking: 2010) confirms Sowell's data, showing that full, majority black urbanization was accomplished only after the WW II era, making blacks relatively recent mass entrants into urban economies that white ethnics had long since operated in. The black urban migrants faced massive discrimination but also social dislocation, with corresponding social problems.
Sowell (1981 - Ethnic America- see below) notes that social problems occurring after such migrations are nothing new with other white ethnic groups, who had the advantage of entering, acculturating and adjusting to the urban economy in toto several decades earlier than blacks. The black migrants faced race discrimination above and beyond other ethnic groups, but fundamentally experienced the same social pathologies others did in becoming urbanized. Difficulties with crime, schooling, substance abuse etc. are thus not uniquely "black" problems but are well represented in other urbanizing groups from peasant background. In Ethnic America (1981), for example, Sowell shows that white ethnic groups like the Irish were marked by many of the same patterns as blacks who migrated from rural backgrounds to the big urban centers, including high levels of violence and substance abuse. As regards out-of-wedlock births, the rate in some New York areas with heavy white Irish settlement was over 50%, comparable to what would develop in later black ghettos in the same city.[50] Sowell sums of some of these claims in his Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays (1981), warning against what he calls the fallacy of presentism:[51] "Those who cannot swallow pseudo-biology can turn to pseudo-history as the basis for classification. Unique cultural characteristics are now supposed to neatly divide the population. In this more modern version, the ghetto today is a unique social phenomenon.. American ghettos have always had crime, violence, overcrowding, filth, drunkenness, bad school teaching, and worse learning. Nor are blacks historically unique even in the degree of these things. Crime and violence were much worse in the nineteenth-century slums, which were almost all white. The murder rate in Boston in the middle of the nineteenth century was about three times what it was in the middle of the twentieth century. All the black riots of the 1960s put together did not kill half as many people as were killed in one white riot in 1863.. Squalor, dirt, disease? Historically, blacks are neither the first nor last in any of these categories. There were far more immigrants packed into the slums (per room or per square mile) than is the case with blacks today - not to mention the ten thousand to thirty thousand children with no home at all in the nineteenth-century New York...
Even in the area where many people get most emotional- educational and IQ test results- blacks are doing nothing that various European minorities did not do before them. As of about 1920, any number of European ethnic groups had I.Q.'s the same or lower than the I.Q.'s of blacks today. As recently as 1940, there were schools on the Lower East Side of New York with academic performances lower than those of schools in Harlem. Much of the paranoia that we talk ourselves into about race is a result of provincialism about our own time as compared to other periods in history."
NOTES: Sowell, T, 1981. Ethnic America Sowell T. 2005, Black Rednecks, White liberals Sowell T. 1983. The Economics and Politics of Race Sowell T. 2004. Affirmative Action around the world Berlin, I. 2010. The making of African America: the four great migrations
Northern European groups also show high rates of violence, criminality, substance abuse and welfare dependency as conservative scholar Thomas Sowell notes. [QUOTE:]
"Such living patterns reflected not only the poverty of the Irish but also their being used to squalid living conditions in mud huts in Ireland... Sewage piled up in backyard privies until the municipal authorities chose to collect it, or else it ran off in open trenches, fouling the air and providing breeding grounds for dangerous diseases. The importance of proper garbage disposal, to keep the neighborhood from being overrun with rats, was one of many similar facts of urban life that every rural group new to the city would have to learn over the years, beginning with the Irish, and continuing through many others until the present day. Cholera, which had been unknown before, swept through Boston in 1849, concentrated almost exclusively in Irish neighborhoods. In New York, cholera was also disproportionately observed in Irish wards. In various cities, both tuberculosis and fire swept regularly through the overcrowded tenements where the Irish lived, and there was a high rate of insanity among the Irish immigrants.. The incidence of tuberculosis in Boston varied closely with the proportion of the Irish living in a neighborhood.
Patterns of alcoholism and fighting brought over from Ireland persisted in the United States. Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1850s were Irish.. Police vans became known as 'Paddy wagons" because the prisoners in them were so often Irish. "The fighting Irish" was a phrase that covered everything from individual brawls to mass melees (known as "Donnybrooks" for a town in Ireland) to criminal gangs.. Irish neighborhoods were tough neighborhoods in cities around the country. The Irish Sixth Ward in New York was known as "the bloody ould Sixth." Another Irish Neighborhood in New York was known as "Hell's Kitchen," and another as 'San Juan Hill" because of the battles fought there. In Milwaukee, the Irish section was called the "Bloody Third".. Where the Irish workers built the Illinois Central Railroad, people spoke of "a murder a mile" as they laid track. The largest riot in American history was by predominantly Irish rioters in New York in 1863..
Even the proportion of the black population who were laborers and house servants in Boston in 1850 was much lower than among the Irish, and the free blacks in mid- century Boston were in general economically better off than the Irish. The Irish-women's work as domestic servants and washerwomen was usually more steadily available than that of Irishmen- a situation later to be repeated among blacks.
As in Ireland itself, the poverty and improvidence of the Irish immigrants to America often reduced them to living on charity when hard times came. In early nineteenth-century Ireland, even before the famine, it was common for whole families of the poor to go 'tramping about it for months, bragging from parish to parish.' Recourse to public charity was a well-established habit carried over to America. Expenditures for relief to the poor in Boston more than doubled from 1845 to 1855, during the heavy influx of the Irish, after such expenditures had been relatively stable for years. In New York City in the same era, about 60 percent of the people in almshouses had been born in Ireland. As late as 1906, there were more Irish than Italian paupers, beggars and inmates of almshouses, even though the Italians arrived a generation later and were generally poorer at the turn of the century. radically different attitudes toward accepting charity existed in Ireland and Italy, and these attitudes apparently had more effect than their respective objective economic conditions in America. There were similar cultural differences in attitudes toward the abandonment of wives and children. In the 1840s, 'it was almost automatically assumed than an orphan was Irish," and as late as 1914, about half the Irish families on Manhattan's west side were fatherless. No such pattern appeared among the Italians.
Although the Irish immigrants (like other immigrants) had a disproportionate representation of young people in the prime of life, the mortality rate shot up after their arrival. Boston's mortality rate in 1850 was double that of the rest of Massachusetts, even though there were relatively fewer aged people in Boston. The difference was due to the extremely high mortality rate in the Irish neighborhoods. Diseases that had become rare in America now flourished again. In 1849, cholera spread through Philadelphia to New York and to Boston- primarily in Irish neighborhoods. There had not been a smallpox epidemic in Boston since 1792, but after 1845, it became a recurring plague, again primarily among the Irish. The spread of the Irish into other neighborhoods, mean, among other things, the spread of these and other diseases. The residential flight of middle-class Americans from the Irish immigrants was by no means all irrationality...
Today's neighborhood changes have been dramatized by such expressions was 'white flight' but these patterns existed long before black-white neighborhood changes were the issue. When the nineteenth-century Irish immigrants flooded into New York and Boston, the native Americans fled. With the first appearance of an Irish family in a neighborhood, 'the exodus of non-Irish residents began. 'White flight' is a misleading term, not only because of its historical narrowness, but also because blacks too have fled when circumstances were reversed. Blacks fled a whole series of neighborhoods in nineteenth-century New York, 'pursued' by new Italian immigrants who moved in. The first blacks in Harlem were fleeing from the tough Irish neighborhoods in mid-Manhattan, and avoided going north of 145th Street for fear of encountering more Irish there." [ENDQUOTE]> --FROM: Sowell, T. (1981). Ethnic America
9- What side of the Bell Curve historically leads in the murder of children- infanticide? The supposedly more virtuous and moral right side, made up of 'Caucasoids' and Asiatics.
Scholarly works such as Milner 2000 (Milner, Larry S. (2000). Hardness of Heart / Hardness of Life: The Stain of Human Infanticide') and many others give many of the gory details of the activities of these allegedly virtuous "role models." Asian societies like China for example historically carried out massive amounts of sex selective infanticide. In "Caucasoid" India, female infanticide of newborn girls was systematic in many areas, including tossing children into the Ganges River as a sacrificial offering. Among supposedly more moral and virtuous Caucasoid Europeans, killing of children was common. In ancient Sardinia, three thousand bones of young children, with evidence of sacrificial rituals, have been found there. Among supposedly more virtuous Caucasoid stocks in Southwest Asia or the "Middle East", child sacrifices to their goddess Ishtar was routine, and among some Caucasoid tribes of what is now Greece, every 10th child was killed as sacrifice in difficult economic times. In Caucasoid Carthage, child sacrifice according to Milner, "reached its infamous zenith," with infants and young children burned in fire or roasted alive in hot bronze. One archeological excavations yielded 20,000 charred remains of young children (packed in urns). The Bible mentions such sacrifice among the Caucasoid Phoenicians at a site called Topeth. (Brown, Shelby (1991). Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in their Mediterranean Context.)
In "Caucasoid" Greece, the exposure of unwanted newborns was not uncommon, especially among the noble Spartans. In Caucasoid Rome, infanticide was common, despite laws on the books. Indeed Philo the Philosopher speaks out against it, noting the casual nature with which it was carried out by the Romans. Offenders were rarely prosecuted under Roman law, and said law allowed killing of Caucasoid newborns if they were visibly deformed. (Naphtali, Lewis, ed (1985). "Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 744". Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule). Indeed Rome was founded by near victims of infanticide- the legendary Romulus and Remus. Among the ancient Caucasoid Germanic tribes, the practice was not unknown, and unwanted children were liquidated in the forests. Archeological data shows the burnt bones of children, disposed of as child sacrifice in ancient Britain. (Boswell, John (1988). The Kindness of Strangers. NY: Vintage Books).
In "Caucasoid" Europe of the Middle Ages, one scholar (Langer 2000) notes that infanticide "was practiced on gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference". At the end of the 12th century, notes Richard Trexler, Roman women threw their newborns into the Tiber river in daylight. (Langer, William L. (1974). "Infanticide: a historical survey". History of Childhood Quarterly 1 (3): 353–366. -- Trexler, Richard (1973). "Infanticide in Florence: new sources and first results". History of Childhood quarterly 1: 99.)
In Caucasoid Russia child sacrifice was offered to the pagan god Perun, who was worshipped as the god of lightning and thunder, and in Kamchatka, children were tossed to dogs to be eaten alive. (Russia in the era of NEP: explorations in Soviet society and culture - Page 201. 1991. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, Richard Stites)
By contrast with the supposedly more virtuous and moral Caucasoids and Asiatics above, Africa has the lowest incidence of infanticide. As scholar Milner notes: QUOTE:
"Africa has been reported to have a lower incidence of infanticide than all of the other continents." --Milner, L.S. (2000). Hardness of Heart / Hardness of Life: the stain of infanticide. University Press. p. 160
Infanticide did occur in Africa but to a MUCH LOWER extent that allegedly more virtuous cold Caucasoid or Asiatic “role models.” Ancient Egypt, which was fundamentally populated by peoples with tropical limb proportions from south of the Sahara, is no exception (Zakrewski 2007, Keita 1992, 2005, 2008, Raxter and Ruff 2008 et al). In Egyptian households, at all social levels, children of both sexes were valued and there is no evidence of infanticide.[14] The religion of the Ancient Egyptians forbade infanticide and during the Greco-Roman period they rescued abandoned babies from manure heaps, a common method of infanticide by Greeks or Romans, and were allowed to either adopt them as foundlings or raise them as slaves, often giving them names such as "copro -" to memorialise their rescue.[15] Strabo considered it a peculiarity of the Egyptians that every child must be reared.[16] Diodorus indicates infanticide was a punishable offence.[17] Notes: 14- "Egypt and the Egyptians", Emily Teeter, p. 97, Cambridge University Press, 1999, 15- "Eroticism and Infanticide at Ashkelon", Lawrence E. Stager, Biblical Archaeology Review, July/Aug 1991 16- "Folkways: A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals", W Sumner, p. 318, Cosmo 2007, 17- "Life in Ancient Egypt", Adolf Erman, Trans H. M. Tirard, p. 141, pub 1894, repub Kessinger 2003, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------
10- Which side of the Bell Curve leads in producing child pornography? The supposedly more virtuous cold climate peoples of northern and eastern Europe, with Asiatics not far behind. A 2010 UN study found that 85% of all child pornography is produced in cold climate regions of Europe. This confirms older analyses by US Customs which found the bulk of child pornography originating in Europe, with Germany being one of the prominent leaders. Studies in the 2000s point to an increasing growth trend of more explicit child pornography. [QUOTE]: "Amateur pornography produced in Mexico, Philippines and Brazil has been detected but clearly these sources do not predominate... 90% of the commercial child pornography comes from "Eastern Bloc" countries in Europe, and that as a location, Eastern Europe appears to be key to be the organization of the trade." > -- Globalization of Crime: A Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment . United Nations Office on Drus and Crime, Geneva: 2010
One US study in the 1980s found that [quote] "According to the US Customs Service, "the traditional source countries are; Sweden, Dennmark and the Netherlands. France, Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines are considered new sources." and "85% of all imported child pornography seized by Customs originated in The Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. Acccording to INTERPOL, Germany was the major producer, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom were the major distribution centers, and the United States was the largest market. " -- Dept of the Treasury, US Customs Service, Child Pornography and Protection Unit, 1984: In The sexual exploitation of children (1999) Seth L. Goldstein. CRC Press
A new more disturbing growth in child pornography fueled by eastern Europeans: - [QUOTE] "the emergence of more explicit child pornography from Eastern Europe, access to which involves payment, seem to represent a new and disturbing growth in cmmerical exploitation of the market for child pornography." > --Child pornography: an Internet crime. By Maxwell Taylor, Ethel Quayle. Pyshcology Press, 2003
Note: No ethnic group is exempt from evil, but "biodiversity" proponents continually tout cold climate and or northern European peoples, cold climate eastern Europeans, and cold-climate Asiatics as sterling evolutionary role models, superior in virtue to lesser breeds. A close examination of the actual data yields a much less flattering reality. ============================================= ================================
In sum, HBD, "biodiversity" and "hereditarian" types like to lecture others about the supposedly more virtuous folk on the right hand side of the Bell Curve, but in fact, said allegedly more virtuous peoples are themselves leaders, and extreme practitioners in many of the most degrading examples of human corruption, filth, dissolution, and violence.
===================================
NOW LET'S MOVE FARTHER BACK INTO THE MISTS OF TIME WHEN SUPPOSEDLY, SUPERIOR CAUCASOID VIRTUE "EVOLVED" DUE TO VARIOUS ALLEGED "CHALLENGES." AS WE SHALL SEE, SUCH CLAIMS ARE MOSTLY RUBBISH.
Another plank of 'biodiversity' proponents' is that cold-climate peoples lived in 'harsh' environments and this developed higher IQs and superior morality. Alas, an examination of their evidence reveals that the alleged cold-climate environmental "deprivation" of ancient cold-adapted Europeans is dubious. If anything the environment was often favorable, with reliable and predictable food and material resources. Despite this however cold-climate Europeans never pioneered plant or animal domestication even though the species to do this were in place, along with the favorable East-West climatic axis they enjoyed. Indeed, a long tradition of certain scholarship, continuing even today, suggests that some cold-adapted peoples were passive, reaching cultural and even genetic dead-ends. Quote 1- alleged "harsh" ancient European environment is bogus- conditions were actually favorable in many respects: "About 35,000 years ago, modern human populations apparently entered Western Europe for the first time and found what one pre-historian has described as 'a virtual Garden of Eden.' Southwest France and northern Spain formed a rich environmental mosaic that supported a profusion of animal and plant life. The diversity of animal life is reflected in carvings and cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic Period, spanning from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago. at various times, mammoth, rhinoceros, bison, wild horses, wild oxen, red deer, reindeer, ibex and many other species abounded... the Upper Paleolithic people of Western Europe probably enjoyed a greater degree of social-complexity than is projected by the simplistic hunter-gatherer model. "They had a rich diversity of resources, and a high degree of stability and predictability of these resources year to year." -- Lewin, Roger (1988). In the Age of Mankind. Smithsonian. pp. 196-199
Quote 2- Famous Lascaux area of pre-historic France shows a favorable environment, not much different from other hunting areas on other continents, with plenty of climate variability, contradicting claims of alleged "harsh" venues. "The physical world inhabited by the painters and engravers of Lascaux was unlike anything known today.. Sea levels plummeted more than 300 feet; dry land connected not only North America and Asia but Britain and continental Europe. Southern Europe was cold, dry and covered with rich grasslands. In regions with some topographical re;lief, like southwest France and northern Spain, vegetation was more varied; sheltered and exposed localities created different micro-climates. Paleolithic animal life in this area was abundant, much more like the plains of modern Africa than anything seen in Europe today. Herds of horses, bison, and aurochs roamed the grasslands, along with reindeer and ibex in the hills...
To judge from discoveries of pollen and seed at some sites, and from engravings at others, peoples of Lascaux and their contemporaries ate blueberries, raspberries, acorns, hazelnuts, and other tubers, nuts, berries and grasses.
The last Ice Age was by no means a period of unrelieved cold, millennium after millennium. Temperatures fluctuated, sometimes coming close to today's balmy interglacial climes, and the animal and plant communities fluctuated in concert with them. Warmer climes brought woodland and forest where only open grassland had existed previously. At the same time, the horses and bison- animals of the plains, were replaced with red deer, wild boar and other confines of a forest habitat.. " -- Lewin, Roger (1988). In the Age of Mankind. Smithsonian. pp. 144
Quote 3- Long before the coming of the Neolithic revolution from the Near East via the Natufians and others, ancient cold-adapted Europeans had more than enough opportunity to pioneer plant and animal domestication. Wild species of the cow, horse, pig and goat were all well known. Wild ancestors of important crops- such as wheat-like spelt variants, and chick peas were also in place. What then took the alleged cold-adapted "pace-setters" so long to advance human civilization?
".. as critics of the climate theory point out, the world has gone through many climate fluctuations in the 100,000 years since modern humans occupied the Old World. Opportunities for cultivation and animal husbandry surely existed earlier than the Neolithic. Yet no evidence has emerged that any plant or animal domestication occurred before this time. More specifically, no potential climatic trigger can be identified in many of those cases in which development of domestication can be documented sufficiently to reveal information about local climatic conditions." -- Lewin, Roger (1988). In the Age of Mankind. Smithsonian. pp. 193
Quote 4- Even colder northern climes show a rich resource base and substantial material life. Such resources, particularly the water-based ones of the ocean, river and lake, were relatively stable and predictable, providing plenty of food - hardly the picture of alleged cold-climate peoples "deprivation" in "unforgiving" glacial environments, as alleged by JP Rushton, Michael Levin, Satoshi Kanazawa et al.. Nor did the supposed "evolutionary" evidence of high IQ shine forth. A long tradition of scholarship so the cold climate types of northern Europe or cold eastern Europe as dead-enders.
"Similarities appear in societies in which there are rich maritime or lakeside resources from the far north to the Mediterranean. In the far northern latitudes, where for four months of the year the sun does not set, the icy cold but resource-rich northern sea was the focus of settlements with pit houses, with people using elaborate seagoing vessels in their specialised focus on marine foods, probably associated with seal hunting (Bjerck 1995, Bjerck, this volume). Further south, other structured settlements echo the theme of marine or lakeside focus. At Tagerup in Sweden, large houses were constructed in a 'village; at the confluence of two rivers with permanent structures such as jetties and moorings for boats.. coastal and lakeside regions also provide evocative glimpses of societies for whom the sea and water played an important economic and symbolic role. We see richly symbolic pendants of amber and animal teeth, wooden artefacts such as bows, decorated paddles, canoes, and leisters in evidence from submerged sites in the Baltic.. Riverine resources also appear to have been particularly influential in the development of settlements such as Lepenski Vir and Vlasac in the Iron Gates... we see an apparently 'sacred' site at Lepenski Vir, comprising homes with plaster floors, carved figurines, and neonates interred under the floors." [pg 8]
"The Iron gates contain some of the largest concentration of Mesolithic burials in Europe. Burials have been recorded from at least eleven sites, and four of these, Lepenski Vir, Padina, Schela Cladovei and Vlasac each contained very large numbers of graves." [pg 241]
"Even Grahame Clark, excavator of Star Carr and pioneer and champion of Mesolithic studies in Britain, was forced to concede with evident reluctance in 1952 that the archaeological evidence for the coastal Mesolithic peoples of Northwest Europe hardly contradicted the notion of 'a low level of culture' (Clark 1952:63).. Extrapolating the origins of social complexity to certain contexts in Mesolithic Europe marked a powerful departure from ideas of small, marginalised groups apparently 'going nowhere'.. 'Complexity' was built on dense, productive, coastal resources that were available all year." [pg 4]
"Young (2000b:1) concluded that the discipline was still 'waiting for the great leap forwards'. A long-standing story of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers so immersed in their environments and nature, both ecologically and ideologically as to be almost socially inert seems to retain a strong hold on our imaginations." [pg 5]> -- G. N. Bailey (2008) Mesolithic Europe. Cambridge University Press. pp 8, 241, 4, 5 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------
Cold climate evolution put to the test- the Neanderthals whose DNA shows up in today's Europeans
Neanderthals occurred primarily in Europe and show distinct cold-adapted body proportions. Some of their DNA markers appear in modern Europeans according to a recent 2010 study (Richard E. Green et al (2010). "A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome". Science 328 (5979): 710–722. ) Neanderthals, with clear markers to today's Europeans, are thus a test case for alleged cold climate superiority. But in fact, these early cold-climate Europeans are a genetic dead end, with static technology, and brains that while as big as that of modern humans from Africa, lack essential processing capabilities.
Furthermore the Neanderthals failed to make the leap to more advanced technology beyond the stone age Mousterian package, and failed to innovate plant and animal domestication despite having numerous ancestors of sheep, goats, cows, pigs and horses available to them, as well as wild grain variants that could be used. As noted above, Europe in a colder earlier time possessed environments with a number of rich resources, and variable microclimates. The Neanderthals prospered there. So why couldn't this cold climate European race, which [/img]has DNA links appearing in modern Europeans, show the alleged IQ superiority touted for its homeland, either via brain makeup or technological/cultural achievement?
Quote 5: Neanderthal brains, which should have been superior due to alleged "activation" by the "challenges" of cold climate life, lag behind. They ended up a static dead-end, with genes reflected in modern Europeans but nevertheless failed to make crucial advances.
"Neanderthals had brain sizes comparable to modern humans, but their brain cases were elongated and not globular as in Homo sapiens[1,2]. It has, therefore, been suggested that modern humans and Neanderthals reached large brain sizes along different evolutionary pathways [2]. Here, we assess when during development these adult differences emerge. This is critical for understanding whether differences in the pattern of brain development might underlie potential cognitive differences between these two closely related groups. Previous comparisons of Neanderthal and modern human cranial development have shown that many morphological characteristics separating these two groups are already established at the time of birth [3,4,5], and that the subsequent developmental patterns of the face are similar, though not identical [6]. Here, we show that a globularization phase seen in the neurocranial development of modern humans after birth is absent from Neanderthals." -- Gunz et al (2010) . Brain development after birth differs between Neanderthals and modern human. Current Biology: 20, 21.
Other Notes -- Tattersall I, Schwartz JH (June 1999). "Hominids and hybrids: the place of Neanderthals in human evolution". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96 (13): 7117–9. ---------------------
r/k Selection theory- more virtuous, high IQ cold climate people (the "K" selected), became so due to alleged "novel challenges" of cold environments, or due to mental adjustments due to "novel, unpredictable" environments. Sounds fascinating, but if r/k selection theory is right in its prediction of behavioral changes caused by "more novel" or "unpredictable" challenges, then it also points to increasing moral corruption and filth by the "k-selected".
In terms of human history and culture child pornography and molestation are certainly outside the norm. They occur in every culture but they are not the norm. However, if r/k Selection Theory is applied, the alleged virtue of whites and Asiatics is called into question. Both groups lead the world in the consumption and production of child pornography or child molestation. Likewise, few tropical nations embrace the marriage of homosexuals on a par with heterosexual relations. Such a par is certainly "novel" in human history. However, here again, r/k Selection Theory may point to a pattern of deviancy being now embraced as normal- it is the white Western nations for the most part that embrace homosexual marriage. Mass killing of children for convenience is also relatively novel in human history. Here again, white women lead all others proportionately (as detailed above), with Asiatics weighing in on the "volume" factor. Examples could go on and on. Proponents of a racial r/k Selection Theory typically spin it to show "approved" groups in a virtuous light, but in fact their same theory predicts continual increases in white "k-selected" moral corruption and filth surpassing anything known in supposedly more "predictable" warm-climate environments.
As noted above, this article is not intended to bash any particular group. All human groups suffer from dark deeds and evil works. This page repudiates racism in all forms, and racist supremacists in whatever form or color. However there is a well financed academic industry, and a widespread parallel population on the Internet that continues to propagate the dubious one-sided picture of virtuous and moral 'Eurasians,' versus lesser breeds. This article seeks to redress the balance. The above examples are only the tip of a grim iceberg for those with allegedly more virtuous, cold climate behavior, or culture. It is also a typical pattern that those who continually tout the gospel of virtuous whites or East Asians against supposedly less virtuous "darker breeds" invite hard scrutiny of their claims on the merits (not simply politically rhetorical replies). Such scrutiny in a large number of cases, using the same empirical data of the white or Asian anointed, reveals not only a much less flattering reality but the embrace of and leadership of the allegedly more 'virtuous' in extremes of human filth, violence and folly. It is a warning that all human groups have sinned, and the ugly facts confer little credit to the self-anointed.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ All the issues of customary practices and mores aside which are cultural issues (though I agree with that as well), I agree that the whole concept of Africans being evolutionarily primitive and less intelligent to be just as old and outdated as it is erroneous and silly.
As we all know, all human populations are of the same species and biological 'races' or subspecies of humans don't exist. There has been nothing definitive to suggest certain populations inherently possess more intelligence or the genes for advanced cognition than others. The very genes for higher thinking in humans were wrought in the very cradle of humanity itself-- Africa. And since Africans possess the greatest genetic diversity, it is even sillier to generalize all African populations let alone individuals as having the same cognitive abilities.
Doctrine 1. PHYSICAL CALIBRATION DOCTRINE: In which white anthropologists treat people as racial specimens, measuring "cephalic indices" and attempting to prove superiority of the "white" brain. Ugly racist terminology: "prognathism," "platyrhiny," "steatopygous," "sub-Egyptian." Mug-shot lineups of "the Veddan female," "Arapaho male, "Negroid type," "Mongoloid specimen" characterize this approach. Out of favor in the mid-20th-century, it has enjoyed a revisionist comeback with sociobiology and works claiming racial differentials in intelligence, such as "The Bell Curve."
Doctrine 2. STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT DOCTRINE: The assumption that "primitive" cultures represent lower "stages" in historical evolution, and have yet to attain advanced forms of culture. One English scholar referred to "the child-races of Africa." Usually, social hierarchy, militarization and industrialization are taken as prime measures of "advanced" civilization. In the 19th century, scholars openly used the terms "savage," "barbarian," "civilized." Though these offensive words have (mostly) been dropped, the underlying assumptions are still quite influential. (For a good discussion of how the insistence on talking about "tribes" distorts African history, see http://www.africaaction.org/bp/ethall.htm. )
The "primitive child-like races" of Africa and the "low IQ Negro" are root bases of white supremacist belief that Euronuts cling to with their very lives. It's unfortunate but even the notion of the "low IQ Negro" has made a comeback in the form of genetic studies by amateur scientists who wrongly manipulate or distort data to support their racist assertions, even though geneticists have yet to unlock the very genes for high intelligence. Trust me, I've had more than my fair share of reading such crappy studies from amateur 'experts' from the more legitimate PubMed, let alone the idiotic 'Biodiversity' forum. And let's not forget the great co-discoverer of DNA and founding fathers of modern molecular genetics Dr. James Watson and the mess he spewed 5 years ago, likely out of senile frustration.
I still say an excellent source in refuting this nonsense is this book:
Posted by Masonic Rebel (Member # 9549) on :
The Bell Curve is nothing to more then a money making scam written by a man with low intelligence
The only book that's even more lame is mary lefkowitz not out of Africa
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Good reference Djehuti. Can't remember seeing those doctrines laid out so clearly. Great ref also Gould book. I will have to check it out.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Gould's book was first presented in this forum over a decade ago by Rasol and was repeatedly advertised by him, Explorer, others, and myself every time the 'Bell Curve' argument was brought up which was every now and then.
By the way, I meant to say that the 'STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT DOCTRINE' was racist Eurocentric doctrine # 3. You can read the whole list of doctrines in Max Dashu's webpage Racism, History, and Lies.
Posted by Troll Patrol (Member # 18264) on :
quote:Originally posted by Masonic Rebel: The Bell Curve is nothing to more then a money making scam written by a man with low intelligence
The only book that's even more lame is mary lefkowitz not out of Africa
It was on the bestsellers list for a long time. Which explains a lot about the mental state.
Posted by the lioness (Member # 17353) on :
Diversity proponents have replaced race with the evolutionary theory that people are either tropically adapted or cold adapted and that some people have "brute" Neaderthal DNA and others don't.
Posted by Troll Patrol (Member # 18264) on :
pg 65, Frank Yurco, Black Athena Revisited Edited by Mary R. Lefkowitz, Guy MacLean Rogers
^^Indeed lioness. So where do the Wiki "citations" get the so called claim that: "modern Egyptians are 90% the same as AE and that inflow from Turks, Greeks and other groups only changed the genetic composition of Egyptians by 10%."
^^Yurco says nothing about any 90% Egyptians at all and DNA. This is a perfect Exhibit of the bogus Wikipedia claims being pushed with doctored "scholarship" and "references"..
Originally posted by Oshun: Browsin through Wikipedia and its sayin Yurco said somewhere between pages 62-100 that DNA studies prove modern Egyptians are 90% the same as AE and that inflow from Turks, Greeks and other groups only changed the genetic composition of Egyptians by 10%. Is there any literature on this? Wikipedia cites Black Athena revisited so I cant really tell if he said it or not.. Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
quote:Originally posted by Troll Patrol: Dr. Michael Hammer
GOod stuff Patrol. Keita shows up during the last 2 minutes of the presentation and gives his comments. One interesting thing is that Hammer suggests a "multi-regional model" not covering the globe but within Africa itself, with a large number of variants interbreeding and also differentiating to produce a mixed package that migrated out. Would be interesting to hear more about this concept.
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Dental studies show little consistent evidence of any mass influx from "Eurasia" into Egypt or Nubia
"Using this material, an analysis of the dental morphology of ancient Egyptian and Nubian populations (Badarian, Merotic, X-Group and Christian) indicates that the Nile corridor showed considerable biological continuity through space and time and that there is little evidence for mass movements of intrusive peoples into the area as is sometimes argued." -- Dental Anthropology of Early Egypt and Nubia. D.L. Greene, Journal of Human Evolution Vol. 1, Issue 3. Abstract
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
"BIODIVERSITY", "HBD" AND "HERIDITARIAN" DEBUNKING ROUNDUP ---------------------------------------------------------------------
@Djehuti, I had to read The Mismeasure of Man for my Human Variation class and I really enjoyed the book. It's exceptionally written and I love Gould's approach to tackling the views of 18th and 19th century naturalists.
Are there any other books that you recommend?
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Well one other book that I can think of when it comes to matters of human 'biodiversity' is this:
I haven't been able to finish it, but it is a very excellent insight into the biases and preconceived notions many bio-anthropologists have when it comes to excavating human remains and searching for human origins even in Africa. It's this book as well as the veterans in this forum that have made me very vigilant when it comes to studies of ancient or old human remains by white Western anthropologists and to scrutinize their work thoroughly. In fact, I'm at the moment doing a personal research project on African expansions and emigrations that occurred after the initial OOA emigration and the cultures they started in Southwest Asia as well as in the Mediterranean basin and southern Europe. It's amazing how early anthropologists were able to get away with white-washing these peoples by labeling them as "Mediterranean Caucasoids".
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Great Gould book- read it this week. Also will check out the book above. Keep up the good work. How will your book incorporate the Natufians if I might ask?
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Hypocritical "biodiversity" types talk about "merit," but the record shows that numerous alleged white "role models" secured their positions not by "merit" and skill, but by political intimidation, corruption and manipulation, feeding heavily from the taxpayer purse. Decades of such manipulation and corruption enabled them to lock out other Americans while they inched up the occupational ladder.
"In the city's building trades such as plumbers and the masons, Irish-dominated unions adopted nepotistic membership requirements that kept out new arrivals... Similarly the Irish used their political connections to entrench themselves in both skilled and unskilled city government jobs for policemen, firefighters, rapid transit workers and school teachers, even before these workers had their unions recognized."
"nepotistic membership requirements that kept out new arrivals... Similarly the Irish used their political connections to entrench themselves in both skilled and unskilled city government jobs for policemen, firefighters, rapid transit workers and school teachers, even before these workers had their unions recognized."
"The work taken by Irish men differed from that of Irish women in some respects, however. Irish men were heavily tied up with the political machine. They could secure employment in municipal services, with the machine a powerful intermediary. This is not to say that Irish women had no connection with the machines in their search for bread. Some Irish women, usually American-born daughters of Irish immigrants were able to teach school through the help of the machine, and as the city expanded its educational services, these women benefited... But for men, connections to politicians, the ability to trade a vote for a job, helped them secure employment on large-scale construction projects, a labor sector that supported many New York Irish families. When in 1865 the New York State Supreme Court building was being constructed, Irish men made up the vast majority of those drawing a paycheck. Other heavily Irish male occupations also depended on the machine and on the governmental process.
As early as 1855 Irish men were the largest group of the cartmen of New York, including those that specialized in doing city work on sanitation, landfill road projects and the like. To be a private cartman one required a license; to work for the municipal government in particular one needed good connections. Even before the massive influx of the feminine Irish in 1843, the Democrat-dominated Common Council gave a large number of market licenses to Irish men, much to the chagrin of native American entrepreneurs." --FROM: Bayor and Meagher 1996, The New York Irish, 96-97
"As a consequence, the public sector employed a full one-third of first, second and third-generation Irish Americans in 1930 compared with just 6 percent in 1900. This patronage helped produce a heavy concentration of Irish in jobs on the fire and police departments and in municipally owned subways, streetcars, waterworks and port facilities. Many of the city's Irish middle class worked on the public payroll, especially in the public schools, and thousands of others labored in construction jobs tied to city expenditures. For second-generation Irish-American women, jobs as schoolteachers were the most sought-after career. Such patronage policies would help to bind the Irish working class and much of the middle class Tammany Hall for another generation." --Bayor and Meagher 1996. The New York Irish, p. 313
White groups like the Irish became more "acceptably white" in America by adopting American racism. The Irish were among the most vicious opponents of abolition of slavery for blacks in the 19th century
"Within the discourse of Irish-British relations, colonized Irish Catholics were de facto cast as an inferior race. Yet when Irish entered the black/white discourse of the United States, they could occupy a more ambiguous position in the social hierarchy. Irish Catholics were both despised by Protestant patricians and privileged over African slaves and freed men. Yet, many Irish were able to gain certain power and improve their lot via westward migration, involvement with urban politics (taking advantage of the 1827 amendment of universal white male suffrage), and entry into the burgeoning commercial culture of the American state. In the face of mainstream antipathy, positive Irish American identity was being forged within the preexisting discourse of pro-Protestant white and anti-black Americanism. The classic means for Irish Catholics to defuse longstanding Anglo-American and European-Protestant hatred towards them was to symbolically displace such low valuation placed on them onto an even lower group."
Like other rural groups entering the urban economies, some white groups had huge adjustment problems and a slow rise from poverty. This does not stop hypocritical "biodiversity" types from trying to paint minorities such as blacks as some sort of special case of under-achievers, when in fact, not only had most blacks pulled themselves above the poverty line by the early 1960s but they did this even though blacks faced even worse conditions due to racial discrimination. QUOTE:
"The economic adjustment of the Irish to the realities of New York life did not proceed smoothly or evenly. Poverty remained a grinding and long ordeal. Irish laborers in every enterprise found themselves at the mercy of the vagaries of the economy, with its constant cycles of boom and bust. They suffered low wages, erratic employment, and the constant influx of newer immigrants, who were also willing to accept almost any wage. Indeed, by 1880 the Irish economic situation had not improved substantially. As of that year 20 percent of all the Irish still found themselves in the category of 'laborer,' as opposed to 4 percent of native-born Americans."
"".. New York's Irish did not greet the abolitionist movement with enthusiasm, did not celebrate the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, or participate in other efforts on behalf of free blacks."
"Whether or not the Irish were suffering more or less than other impoverished new arrivals, it is certainly true that their plight often led to institutionalization where they could be counted. Natives of Ireland accounted for 53.9 percent of New York City's foreign-born population in 1855, but at the city's Bellevue Hospital, 85% of all patients of foreign birth had been born in Ireland.. [Most physicians of the time held that] Abnormallity in the population might be traced to.. the immigration of those already on the road to degeneracy, an inherited predisposition to mental illness, or external elements- and endless list that included alcohol, sexual excesses, improper nutrition, grief, or anxiety. Irish immigrants appeared to have the highest rates of illness in general, and the highest rates of insanity, according to published data of the era.. In New York, three-fourths of the admissions to the city lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island from 1849 to 1859 were immigrants, two-thirds of these were Irish... Both Irish men and women were reported as being particularly susceptible to schizophrenia and alcohol-related syndromes.... "
".. life was not easy for the rural Irish struggling to adjust to urban America. Statistics on Irish housing find them living in New York's most overcrowded neighborhoods. Figures on income put them more often among the city's paupers than anyone else. Arrest records put them either among the criminals or victims of the police in regard to police brutality and false arrests. Legions of destitute Irish women and men on the one hand offended New Yorkers' sense of civility, but on the other hand became objects of Catholic charity.. The Irish entered lunatic asylums, charity hospitals, prisons, and almshouse more than any other group. They had the city's highest rates of typhus, typhoid fever, cholera, and all the other diseases that accompany hunger, poverty and congestion... --Bayor and Meagher 1996. --The New York Irish pp. 98-112
Another standard mantra among some HDB or "hereditarian" types is of vast job discrimination against the white Irish. But careful scholarship has shown that this is a myth. QUOTE:
"Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," purportedly by a maid looking for work. The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth.
Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish--on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory." -- Jensen, Richard. (2002) "No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization. Journal of Social History 36.2 p405-429.
Irish Archbishop, John Hughes, worked hard to clean upcorruption, violence and dissolution of northern European "role models" - not always successfully.. QUOTE:
[i]"Those who stay are predominantly the scattered debris of the Irish nation." Lost in a land where many didn't want them, violent, without skills, the Irish were in need of rescue. This was Hughes' flock, and he was prepared to ne theirNew York's Irish truly formed an underclass; every variety of social pathology flourished luxuriantly among them. Family life had disintegrated. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, an exiled Irish political radical, wrote in The Nation in 1850: "In Ireland every son was a boy and daughter a girl till he or she was married. They were considered subjects to their parents till they became parents themselves. In America boys are men at sixteen...if (the) family tie is snapped, our children become our opponents and sometimes our worst enemies." McGee saw that the lack of stable family relationships was fatally undermining the Irish community. The immigrants crowded into neighborhoods like Sweeney's Shambles in the city's fourth ward and Five Points in the sixth ward (called the "bloody sixth" for its violence), which Charles Dickens toured in the forties and pronounced "loathsome, drooping and decayed." In The New York Irish, Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher report that besides rampant alcoholism, addiction to opium and laudanum was epidemic in these neighborhoods in the 1840s and 1850s.
Many Irish immigrants communicated in their own profanity-filled street slang called, "flash talk": a multi-day drinking spree was "going on a bender," "cracking a can" was robbing a house. Literate English practically disappeared from ordinary conversation. An estimated 50,000 Irish prostitutes, know in flash talk as "nymphs of the pave," worked the city in 1850 and Five Points alone had as many as 17 brothels. Illegitimacy reached stratospheric heights--and tens of thousands of abandoned Irish kids roamed, or prowled, the city's streets. Violent Irish gangs, with names like the Forty Thieves, the B'boys, the Roach Guards, and Chichesters, brought havoc to their neighborhoods. The gangs fought one another and the nativists but primarily they robbed houses and small businesses, and trafficked in stolen property. Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1840s and 1850s were Irish, so that police vans were dubbed, "paddy wagons" and episodes of mob violence in the streets were called "donnybrooks," after a town in Ireland. Death was everywhere. In 1854 one out of every 17 people in the sixth ward died. In Sweeney's Shambles the rate was one out of five in a 22 month period. The death rate among Irish families in New York in the 1850s was 21 percent, while among non-Irish it was 3 percent. Life expectancy for New York's Irish averaged under 40 years. Tuberculosis, which Bishop Hughes called the "natural death of the Irish immigrants," was the leading cause of death, along with drink and violence.
Inflamed by this spectacle of social ruin, nativist sentiment grew and took a nastier, racist turn, no longer attacking primarily the superstition and priestcraft of the Catholic religion but rather the genetic inferiority of the Irish people. Gifted diarist and former mayor George Templeton Strong, for example, wrote that "the gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly their inferior in a moral sense." In the same vein, Harper's in 1851 describe the "Celtic physiognomy" as "simian-like, with protruding teeth and short upturned noses." Celebrated cartoonist Thomas Nast constantly depicted the Irish as closely related to apes, while Orson and Lorenzo Fowler's New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and James Redfield's Outline of a New System of Physiognomy gave such ideas the color of science.
By 1850 the New York City lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island) was filled with Irish, most of them probably hallucinating alcoholics. Doctors of the day had a different view, speculating that insanity grew from degeneracy and violation of the moral law. Compounding the problem, according to Ralph Parsons, superintendent of the asylum, the Irish were people of exceptionally bad habits. They were, he said, of "a low order of intelligence, and very many of them have imperfectly developed brains. When such persons become insane, the prognosis if unfavorable." Hughes' solution for his flock's social ills was to re-spiritualize them. He wanted to bring about an inner, moral transformation in them, which he believed would solve their social problems in the end. He put the ultimate blame on their condition squarely on the historical oppression they had suffered at the hands of the English, which he said has caused them "to pass away from the faith of their ancestors," robbing them of the cultural heritage that should have guided their behavior. But that was in the past: now it was time for them to regain what they had lost. So he bought abandoned Protestant church buildings in Irish wards, formed parish churches, and sent in parish priests on a mission of urban evangelization aimed at giving the immigrants a faith-based system of values." [ENDQUOTE]
Commentary from on famous European on European "role models"-- again applying the same methods of assorted "biodiversity proponents"..
"The woes of Ireland, or 'justice to Ireland,' is not the chapter we have to write at present. It is a deep matter, an abyssmal one, which no plummet of ours will sound. For the oppression has gone far farther than into the economics of Ireland; inwards to her very heart and soul. The Irish National character is degraded, disordered; till this recover itself, nothing is yet recovered. Immethodic, headlong, violent, mendecious: what can you make of the wretched Irishman? "A finer people never lived," as the Irish lady said to us; "only they have two faults, they do generally lie and steal: barring these"—! A people that knows not to speak the truth, and to act the truth, such people has departed from even the possibility of well-being.
Such people works no longer on Nature and Reality; works now on Fantasm, Simulation, Nonentity; the result it arrives at is naturally not a thing but no-thing,—defect even of potatoes. Scarcity, futility, confusion, distraction must be perennial there. Such a people circulates not order but disorder, through every vein of it;—and the cure, if it is to be a cure, must begin at the heart: not in his condition only but in himself must the Patient be all changed.
Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns. The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back; for wages that will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment; he lodges to his mind in any pighutch or doghutch, roosts in outhouses; and wears a suit of tatters, the getting off and on of which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar. The Saxon man if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work. He too may be ignorant; but he has not sunk from decent manhood to squalid apehood: he cannot continue there. American forests lie untilled across the ocean; the uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength but by the opposite of strength, drives out the Saxon native, takes possession in his room.
There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder. Whosoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not swimming but sunk. Let him sink; he is not the worst of men; not worse than this man. We have quarantines against pestilence; but there is no pestilence like that; and against it what quarantine is possible? It is lamentable to look upon." -- Thomas Carlyle, Chartism Chapter IV
Scholar Thomas Sowell (1981, 2004, 1983) notes that many problems identified with blacks in modern society are hardly unique in terms of American ethnic groups, nor in terms of a rural proletariat swept by disruption as it became urbanized.
Heavy patterns of pathology are for example seen in the white peasant migrants to the dismal urban slums that sprung up during the Industrial Revolution in Britain and elsewhere. He maintains that US blacks only became a largely urban people after WWII, when the booming war economy accelerated a third great migration north, allowing millions of blacks to escape the harsh, oppressive conditions of the South. While southern cities also saw some migration, it was this massive wartime era move north that was much more significant, and the arrival of the rural black proletariat into difficult urban conditions broke down many of the social mores and community-generated controls, such as church influence, that had helped maintain its stability in the past. World War I also saw a spurt of urban migration in response to economic demand, but this urbanization was not completed for most blacks until the WWII era.
The work of Ira Berlin (2010) entitled "The making of African America: the four great migrations" (Viking: 2010) confirms Sowell's data, showing that full, majority black urbanization was accomplished only after the WW II era, making blacks relatively recent mass entrants into urban economies that white ethnics had long since operated in. The black urban migrants faced massive discrimination but also social dislocation, with corresponding social problems. Sowell (1981 - Ethnic America- see below) notes that social problems occurring after such migrations are nothing new with other white ethnic groups, who had the advantage of entering, acculturating and adjusting to the urban economy in toto several decades earlier than blacks. The black migrants faced race discrimination above and beyond other ethnic groups, but fundamentally experienced the same social pathologies others did in becoming urbanized. Difficulties with crime, schooling, substance abuse etc. are thus not uniquely "black" problems but are well represented in other urbanizing groups from peasant background. In Ethnic America (1981), for example, Sowell shows that white ethnic groups like the Irish were marked by many of the same patterns as blacks who migrated from rural backgrounds to the big urban centers, including high levels of violence and substance abuse. As regards out-of-wedlock births, the rate in some New York areas with heavy white Irish settlement was over 50%, comparable to what would develop in later black ghettos in the same city.[50]
Sowell sums of some of these claims in his Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays (1981), warning against what he calls the fallacy of presentism:[51]
"Those who cannot swallow pseudo-biology can turn to pseudo-history as the basis for classification. Unique cultural characteristics are now supposed to neatly divide the population. In this more modern version, the ghetto today is a unique social phenomenon.. American ghettos have always had crime, violence, overcrowding, filth, drunkenness, bad school teaching, and worse learning. Nor are blacks historically unique even in the degree of these things. Crime and violence were much worse in the nineteenth-century slums, which were almost all white. The murder rate in Boston in the middle of the nineteenth century was about three times what it was in the middle of the twentieth century. All the black riots of the 1960s put together did not kill half as many people as were killed in one white riot in 1863.. Squalor, dirt, disease? Historically, blacks are neither the first nor last in any of these categories. There were far more immigrants packed into the slums (per room or per square mile) than is the case with blacks today - not to mention the ten thousand to thirty thousand children with no home at all in the nineteenth-century New York... Even in the area where many people get most emotional- educational and IQ test results- blacks are doing nothing that various European minorities did not do before them. As of about 1920, any number of European ethnic groups had I.Q.'s the same or lower than the I.Q.'s of blacks today. As recently as 1940, there were schools on the Lower East Side of New York with academic performances lower than those of schools in Harlem. Much of the paranoia that we talk ourselves into about race is a result of provincialism about our own time as compared to other periods in history."
NOTES: Sowell, T, 1981. Ethnic America Sowell T. 2005, Black Rednecks, White liberals Sowell T. 1983. The Economics and Politics of Race Sowell T. 2004. Affirmative Action around the world Berlin, I. 2010. The making of African America: the four great migrations
Northern European groups also show high rates of violence, criminality, substance abuse and welfare dependency as conservative scholar Thomas Sowell notes. [QUOTE:]
"Such living patterns reflected not only the poverty of the Irish but also their being used to squalid living conditions in mud huts in Ireland... Sewage piled up in backyard privies until the municipal authorities chose to collect it, or else it ran off in open trenches, fouling the air and providing breeding grounds for dangerous diseases. The importance of proper garbage disposal, to keep the neighborhood from being overrun with rats, was one of many similar facts of urban life that every rural group new to the city would have to learn over the years, beginning with the Irish, and continuing through many others until the present day. Cholera, which had been unknown before, swept through Boston in 1849, concentrated almost exclusively in Irish neighborhoods. In New York, cholera was also disproportionately observed in Irish wards. In various cities, both tuberculosis and fire swept regularly through the overcrowded tenements where the Irish lived, and there was a high rate of insanity among the Irish immigrants..
The incidence of tuberculosis in Boston varied closely with the proportion of the Irish living in a neighborhood. Patterns of alcoholism and fighting brought over from Ireland persisted in the United States. Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1850s were Irish.. Police vans became known as 'Paddy wagons" because the prisoners in them were so often Irish. "The fighting Irish" was a phrase that covered everything from individual brawls to mass melees (known as "Donnybrooks" for a town in Ireland) to criminal gangs.. Irish neighborhoods were tough neighborhoods in cities around the country. The Irish Sixth Ward in New York was known as "the bloody ould Sixth." Another Irish Neighborhood in New York was known as "Hell's Kitchen," and another as 'San Juan Hill" because of the battles fought there. In Milwaukee, the Irish section was called the "Bloody Third".. Where the Irish workers built the Illinois Central Railroad, people spoke of "a murder a mile" as they laid track. The largest riot in American history was by predominantly Irish rioters in New York in 1863..
Even the proportion of the black population who were laborers and house servants in Boston in 1850 was much lower than among the Irish, and the free blacks in mid- century Boston were in general economically better off than the Irish. The Irish-women's work as domestic servants and washerwomen was usually more steadily available than that of Irishmen- a situation later to be repeated among blacks. As in Ireland itself, the poverty and improvidence of the Irish immigrants to America often reduced them to living on charity when hard times came. In early nineteenth-century Ireland, even before the famine, it was common for whole families of the poor to go 'tramping about it for months, bragging from parish to parish.' Recourse to public charity was a well-established habit carried over to America. Expenditures for relief to the poor in Boston more than doubled from 1845 to 1855, during the heavy influx of the Irish, after such expenditures had been relatively stable for years. In New York City in the same era, about 60 percent of the people in almshouses had been born in Ireland. As late as 1906, there were more Irish than Italian paupers, beggars and inmates of almshouses, even though the Italians arrived a generation later and were generally poorer at the turn of the century. radically different attitudes toward accepting charity existed in Ireland and Italy, and these attitudes apparently had more effect than their respective objective economic conditions in America. There were similar cultural differences in attitudes toward the abandonment of wives and children. In the 1840s, 'it was almost automatically assumed than an orphan was Irish," and as late as 1914, about half the Irish families on Manhattan's west side were fatherless. No such pattern appeared among the Italians.
Although the Irish immigrants (like other immigrants) had a disproportionate representation of young people in the prime of life, the mortality rate shot up after their arrival. Boston's mortality rate in 1850 was double that of the rest of Massachusetts, even though there were relatively fewer aged people in Boston. The difference was due to the extremely high mortality rate in the Irish neighborhoods. Diseases that had become rare in America now flourished again. In 1849, cholera spread through Philadelphia to New York and to Boston- primarily in Irish neighborhoods. There had not been a smallpox epidemic in Boston since 1792, but after 1845, it became a recurring plague, again primarily among the Irish. The spread of the Irish into other neighborhoods, mean, among other things, the spread of these and other diseases. The residential flight of middle-class Americans from the Irish immigrants was by no means all irrationality...
Today's neighborhood changes have been dramatized by such expressions was 'white flight' but these patterns existed long before black-white neighborhood changes were the issue. When the nineteenth-century Irish immigrants flooded into New York and Boston, the native Americans fled. With the first appearance of an Irish family in a neighborhood, 'the exodus of non-Irish residents began. 'White flight' is a misleading term, not only because of its historical narrowness, but also because blacks too have fled when circumstances were reversed. Blacks fled a whole series of neighborhoods in nineteenth-century New York, 'pursued' by new Italian immigrants who moved in. The first blacks in Harlem were fleeing from the tough Irish neighborhoods in mid-Manhattan, and avoided going north of 145th Street for fear of encountering more Irish there." [ENDQUOTE]>
7 reasons libertarian types, certin conservatives and assorted racists are wrong about their advocacy of rolling back the Civil RIghts Act of 1964 or their claim that the Act is/was "Unneeded."
1) Private business have NEVER HAD the right to unfettered choice of who they served throughout much of US History. Government has always regulated said businesses, asserting larger public purposes over private business rights. Civil Rights for blacks is one such vitally important public purpose, going back over a century. This is nothing unusual or "liberal."
In fact it often makes excellent sense to curb the actions of private business owners. During the conquest of the West, government quite rightly and smartly, forbade unfettered sales of firearms to Indian tribes. It was just plain common sense to NOT have your troops faced with modern repeating rifles wielded by the hard-fighting Indian warriors. Most people with common sense have no problems at all with such "unjust" restrictions against private businesses. Private owners of liquor stores or bars for example do not have the unfettered right to sell liquor to whom they want. They cannot sell to minors for example in most states, again, for excellent reasons of public health and safety. Owners of private gun shops cannot sell to any and sundry who walk thru the door. They do not sell to juvenile "gangstas" nor in most states can they sell to confirmed convicted violent felons. Today's vendors of pornography could boost sales to a vast and ready market among teenage males if they had the liberty, but are forbidden from openly selling their wares to these customers.
In short, government has always regulated whom private business owners can serve in the name of greater public purpose. There never has been any unfettered "right" of private business owners to transact with whom they want, independent of higher public purposes in regulating whom they serve. Civil rights for blacks has a clearly documented, centuries old public purpose going back close to the founding of the United States. This is quite unlike such recent frivolity by mostly whites invoking Title II "civil rights" protection for marching in "gay" parades. It is this ever expanding frivolity that is a key problem, not the fundamental reasons noted above.
2. Simple private discrimination against blacks in public accommodations was not the minor occurrence some make it out to be. In fact it had wide ranging international implications including damaging America's foreign policy. Many intelligent whites realized the negative effect Jim Crow had on America's standing in the world, particularly as the Soviets scored effective propaganda points against the United States on the race issue that undermined American credibility to talk about "democracy" overseas, and gave the Soviets tactical advantages on the international front.
Indeed during the Cold War the Soviet Union scored huge propaganda points by mocking American democracy as hypocritical, putting the US claim to "freedom", "democracy" and "justice" continually on the defensive internationally. Nor were the Soviets the only foreign power to highlight American hypocrisy. As Michael Klarman notes in his analysis of the Brown decision, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan counterattacked criticism of their human rights records by pointing to the oppression and lynching of blacks in the US. (Michael J. Klarman (1994). Brown, Racial Change, and the Civil Rights Movement. Virginia Law Review, Vol. 80, No. 1, Twentieth-Century Constitutional History pp. 7-150) The Soviet challenge was much sharper. There is an entire book on it, called "Cold War Civil Rights" by Mary Dudziak (http://mdudziak.com/cwcr.aspx), and how removing the embarrassment of segregation became a matter of US security and foreign policy strategy. In addition, private discrimination was often accompanied by violence against blacks, violence that the Soviets took careful note of, as well as how American governments, at various levels, often passed over said violence, or actively collaborated in it.
The Soviets also noted how various American jurisdictions moved to impose ludicrous and humiliating restrictions on blacks - such as forbidding them to share phone booths, water fountains, or even pet cemeteries with whites (presumably the dogs would object), and the powerlessness or lack of desire of federal authorities to address these abuses. Soviet propaganda in fact forged a powerful weapon that called into question the integrity of the entire American federal system, relying not on mere unsubstantiated rhetoric, but on actual, concrete, specific examples involving blacks in the USA. Such examples were also excellent foils to parry American criticisms of communist rule. Criticism of the thuggish rule of the commissars could be parried with counter-criticism of the rule of thuggish Jim Crow regimes and their helpers and/or racist compatriots in the north. These and other things like voting rights were the bread and butter of the skewering Soviet thrusts against American claims to democratic virtue.
By 1960, America statesmen could see the damaging effect that the inefficient and repugnant elements of segregation had on the country's international standing, and Cold War strategies, and they moved to correct this. As early as the Truman administration, the federal government was citing the Cold War imperative in its legal briefs to the US Supreme Court in support of anti-discrimination and desegregation cases. And in the late 1940s, the US government was repeatedly embarrassed internationally by petitions from groups like the NAACP's 1947 offering calling for "redress of human rights violations in the American South" (Klarman 1994). Malcolm X planned a similar petition and campaign drawing on the Third World and Non-Aligned movement shortly before his assassination. Klarman notes that even conservative Dwight Eisenhower invoked the need to counter damaging Soviet propaganda attacks as justification for sending troops to enforce desegregation at Little Rock, Arkansas. Eisenhower moved to reap maximum propaganda value for his decision by having what should have been a mere internal American matter translated into 43 languages for broadcasting around the world via the Voice of America.
Nor was this besmirching of US democracy merely confined to well-worn Kremlin propaganda organs. Concrete incidents of diplomatic embarrassment continually dogged the US in the 1960s, as the diplomats of Third World nations were repeatedly subjected to the indignities of public and private discrimination and disrespect. Indeed, in 1957, US President Eisenhower himself felt compelled to invite a minister of newly independent Ghana to 'breakfast at the White House to make amends for the refusal of a Howard Johnson restaurant in Delaware to serve him.' Nor was Eisenhower the only president of the "free world" to be embarrassed by segregation in the US. The Kennedy Administration, was likewise hit with numerous incidents involving African diplomatic officials. President Kennedy himself made a personal appeal to Maryland civic leaders to cease and desist from segregation in motels, hotels and restaurants to bring an end to such incidents. The US State Department even called on realtors in Washington D.C., to lighten up on their discriminatory practices in the nation's capital, which was creating ugly diplomatic situations when bemused non-white foreign diplomats and officials tried to do normal business in the erstwhile "leader of the Free World." Secretary of State Dean Rusk was to write: "the biggest single burden that we carry on our backs in our foreign relations in the 1960's is the problem of racial discrimination here at home." (Klarman 1994)
Assorted hereditarians and libertarians like Dinesh D'souza miss this history in their disparagement of the public accommodation provisions of the Civil Rights Act. It was not merely that millions of blacks were "inconvenienced," but the very reputation of the United States suffered tangible damage, at the very time a credible reputation and narrative was needed in dealing with a ruthless Cold War adversary. Civil Rights for African-Americans thus had much more at stake than abstractions about "unjust" restrictions on private transactors. In the face of serious international implications, civil rights legislation was an important response. It could also be said that said legislation was not solely out of the oft expressed "concern" for blacks proffered by self-congratulatory whites, but was also concerned with white America saving face overseas.
3. Contrary to the claims of certain conservatives and libertarians alleging how "liberals of the 1960s" "imposed" oppression on white people by banning private discrimination in public accommodations, restrictions on such discrimination by governments via courts, and restrictions based on the legislation of various states outside the South were ongoing decades BEFORE the Civil Rights act of 1964. The claim of unfettered freedom that was suddenly destroyed in the 1960s is a myth.
As early as 1875, the 1875 Civil Rights Act attempted to ban private discrimination in public accommodations. Later years were to see more success in banning state imposed discrimination in such accommodations via the Interstate Commerce Act. Such court action was not something conjured up by "liberal judges" in the 1960s. The 1875 act was a legislative action not a judicial one. As for the courts, as early as 1941, the Supreme Court held that such discrimination in which a colored man who had paid a first class fare for an interstate journey was compelled to leave that car and ride in a second class car was essentially unjust, and violated the Interstate Commerce Act. Similar rulings followed in 1946, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. It is also a fact that protesters who "sat in" and were arrested even before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in some cases, had this federal statutory or constitutional grounds for their actions.
This is one of the reasons why people like Attorney General Robert Kennedy could not simply dismiss rights activists as obscure nobodies in two-bit southern towns. Their complaints triggered legal processes that HAD to be dealt with at some level, particularly when coupled with (a) the fact of a growing urban (and voting) black population after WWII, and (b) as the Soviets scored powerful propaganda points against American democracy on the world stage. Such complaints were in fact, the subject of numerous legal actions and precedents PRIOR to 1964. Protesters at bus stations prior to 1964 for example repeatedly had their local convictions voided by federal courts based in the Interstate Commerce Act that prohibited racial discrimination in interstate travel. In other cases courts voided trespass convictions because the "trespass" had been defined by local segregationist ordinance in defiance of federal precedents and laws established decades earlier. In many cases, the disciplined, well-behaved civil rights protesters won such favor from the federal courts, not simply because of the legal letter, but because their careful conduct demonstrated to judges that numerous local charges brought by Jim Crow authorities of "breaching the peace" were in fact bogus.
Furthermore, even before the CRA of 1964, numerous INDIVIDUAL STATES OUTSIDE THE SOUTH had their own laws against discriminatory local ordinances, without and before any official federal pressure or intervention. As early as 1873 for example, the NY legislature passed a law mandating equality in public transportation accommodations. The same pattern carried over to other Non discriminatory regulations. In 1953, over a decade before the Civil Rights Act, at least 12 northern states had enacted fair employment legislation (Klarman 1994). In short, there was ample federal precedent for restricting discrimination in various public accommodations long BEFORE the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and ample precedent among individual states (New York for example) of INDIVIDUAL STATE action against such discrimination. While Courts held that private discrimination in public accommodations was still legal, the people spoke in favor of the CRA via legislative action, with more Republicans voting for it than Dems. The CRA cleared the ground finally by banning private discrimination in one uniform swoop. For this, it already had decades of case law and legislation behind it. This reality is contrary to the fantasy claims or some libertarians and conservatives about "liberals" who somehow manufactured these "oppressions" against white people out of thin air in the 1960s.
There are some who complain that the CRA laid the groundwork for more federal intervention in state affairs. True enough, but the trigger for that intervention was the racist practices that had humiliated blacks for decades. It is there the ultimate responsibility lies, downplayed as this might be by complainers. Furthermore federal intervention was a problem long BEFORE the CRA, as in the white-led and dominated liberal New Deal. That arguably set the wheels in motion more significantly than the CRA. The New Deal by the way was marked by much discrimination against blacks in its programs.
4) Because of segregation in dozens of different states, in thousands of different jurisdictions, a massive legal tangle of civil rights complaints, lawsuits and other unnecessary costs burdened both the business and legal system, crying out for clarity. The Civil Rights Act provided such long overdue clarity and clear legal standards achieved by legislative activity.
It is a fact that discriminatory action sparked legal action, not only from blacks seeking equal accommodation, but from non-Jim Crow businesses who wanted to trade freely with blacks. Jim Crow made it ILLEGAL for a white to do many things- from renting property, to serving customers in ways that could boost sales and enhance profits. The Montgomery Bus Company, of the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott actually originally tried to STOP racist local officials from imposing segregation. It failed as the dead hand of government once again hindered free markets (Sowell 2004).
Segregation, so often embraced by some "hereditarian" and HBDers as "good" and "necessary" was not only a foreign policy liability, but also a hindrance to the much touted free markets, causing lost business and increased costs. Just the cost of duplicating and maintaining separate facilities - sometimes in the most absurd ways (like segregated water fountains or phone booths) - was hugely inefficient for the overall economy in numerous ways, even without explicit mandates requiring businesses to discriminate. One famous example is seen in the landmark 1899 Plessy vs Ferguson decision, that consigned blacks to dismal second-class Jim Crow status for over half a century. Ironically, the Louisiana street car company, (the East Louisiana Railroad) OPPOSED the imposition of race segregation on streetcars by the good white rulers of New Orleans, Louisiana. They opposed it not out of love for blacks, but the sheer inefficiency segregation caused on their operations, such as the need to procure additional cars for "colored" customers. In fact, the white corporation actually helped finance Plessy's lawsuit against the state, and even posted bail after the Negro was dragged off the streetcar and cast into jail. As is well known, Plessy's appeal to the US Supreme court failed, and the "separate but equal" doctrine became the law of the land. "Colored" facilities, or white behavior applied towards blacks, were seldom 'equal' or even moderately close, even within the confines of the doctrine itself. As conservative writer Ron Christie notes: the Supreme Court decision "institutionalized a uniquely American brand of corruption and hypocrisy." (Christie, 2010: 'Acting White", p. 42-51).
Jim Crow also created huge legal costs after the 1950s, because it sparked lawsuits, boycotts and other activity. This meant that continual discrimination, whether it was by interstate bus transport companies, railroads, big retail chains or 2-bit merchants was potentially a legal action - even if never pursued- ranging from administrative complaints to government agencies, to lawsuits. These were sometimes supplemented by private action like boycotts, sit-ins or picketing. The tangle of different discriminatory state and local laws, customs and practices, creating a legal and administrative morass, at varying levels of intensity in numerous venues.
The Civil Rights Act created much needed consistency, clarity and uniformity, and removed one of the biggest items of headache and irritation- that of both government mandated discrimination imposed on businesses, and that of legal or extra-legal actions brought against discriminating private merchants.
5. The anti-discrimination provisions of the Act benefited both whites and blacks and was good for business. Whites were now free to step up the sales of goods and services previously 'forbidden' by law. Blacks likewise were freer to pursue their free market choices. The common sense of both blacks and whites rejected esoteric racial hair-splitting, or "purist" freedom of association theories when there was business to be done and profits to be made. And it required no pious "changes of the heart" from white people.
In short Title II was good for free markets. It had a multiplier effect in boosting other private market transactions to blacks by whites, without requiring any "changes of the heart" on the part of whites. Racists were still free to disparage blacks, and could form private clubs keeping out blacks around the clock, but they also had much more precedent and liberty to engage in a wider number of transactions with blacks. Title II set the tone for this new era. Since everyone was doing it, and had the cover of law now to do it, it made attempts at "noble" segregationist resistance (and violence) painfully irrelevant. The tone set by Title II provided cover for whites who simply wanted to make a little money. It is no accident that Title II is the section of the Civil Rights Act that was implemented most quickly and with relatively little fuss, compared to other sections such as school desegregation (Kennedy 2000).
Certain libertarians and assorted "hereditarian" claim to support "free markets" but sing a different tune when blacks seek to exercise their "free market" rights. They often lament the mandated equality in public accommodations, sniffing that those discriminated against should simply move on somewhere else. But in like manner, the same principle applies under the CRA to private businesses who want to continue to discriminate. They need no longer serve the general public as mandated by the CRA. All they have to do is simply convert to a clearly defined private membership, just as many social clubs do, and then they can discriminate to their hearts desire.
Title II did not require any "heart changes" as claimed by various opponents who piously lament the inability of government to effect such inward changes. Heart changes are indeed a difficult matter but they are also irrelevant. For example, a white clerk renting a hotel room to a black could now point to the spirit and letter of the law as cover in weathering criticism from other whites who objected. The clerk doesn't have to "like" black people. Blacks and whites transacting freely in the lunch counter market could care less about the other's "heart" or "feelings". What was/is relevant was the cash exchanged and the quantity and quality of food and service provided in return. "Feelings" are besides the point.
6. The Act provided indirect protection for blacks pursuing their right to make free market transactions with willing whites from the private violence of whites who objected. Essentially it set the tone, and served notice that free-wheeling white violence would no longer be easy, or costless.
Another result of the new Title II tone was to make the private violence often used in enforcing private discrimination (physically forcing blacks into the "colored" locations or areas for example) both unnecessary and fraught with legal hassles and penalties. It is a fact that private discrimination in both the south and the north was often accompanied by private violence, violence that was often passed over by the legal authorities. Just ask blacks who engaged in a mutually satisfying free market transaction with a white to buy property in certain areas. In numerous cases pious white talk about "free markets" seemingly amounted to hypocrisy, more along the lines of "free markets for me, but not for thee."
In 1957 in Levittown NY, for example, a mob of 400 screaming whites issuing death threats and throwing rocks confronted a black man, a WWII veteran and his 2 small children and wife. The black veteran's "crime" was exercising his free market right to buy property where he desired, from another agreeable transactor- a white seller. In this case, the transaction was perfectly legal, without the racial restrictive covenants imposed elsewhere forbidding blacks from buying property in various areas, but this did not prevent the white mob from dispensing with "law and order" and seeking to stop the man from his free market transaction. In Detroit alone, prior to the 1970s there are almost 250 incidents of white violence and intimidation, including constant harassment and widespread property destruction against blacks who sought to own or rent property in white areas. In Chicago, houses of black families were burned down. Such activity supplemented restrictive covenants, and private voluntary "neighborhood improvement" associations whose "improvement" agenda focused on preventing blacks from exercising their "free market" privileges.
This scene was repeated in numerous venues across America, including numerous areas outside the South where indeed white government often collaborated to cover up the violence of whites opposed to blacks exercising their free market choices. Such collaboration did not always have to be at the state/local level. At one time the federal mortgage agency refused to insure homes for blacks outside of certain 'reserved' areas, but had no problem insuring the homes of whites wherever they wanted to live. By outlawing discrimination by those selling goods and services based on race, the Act removed some of the incentive for white violence. Whites had no legal excuse to use violence in discriminating based on race. By also providing standing to sue by aggrieved parties, the Act "encouraged" state and local authorities to crack down on white violence or at least not actively collaborate.
When combined with stepped up enforcement by federal authorities (itself fostered by the legal standing conferred by the Act), it helped create a more stable, law-abiding environment for blacks to engage in "free market" commerce. Thus one finds southern law enforcement increasingly intervening to prevent racially motivated white mob or individual violence against blacks. But to the true libertarian believer such enforcement, or even common decency, may be considered "unjust."
Assorted conservatives and libertarians often lament that federal intervention in race protections is something dreamed up in recent decades by "liberals." In fact, such intervention goes back over a century and at times operated in favor of southern slavery. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act for example provided for the appointment of a federal commissioner in every county of the nation to enforce it, and authorized federal marshals and, federal troops if necessary, to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves. The law created exclusive federal power to enforce the Fugitive Slave Clause and placed the prestige of the national government behind the rendition of fugitive slaves.” (Kennedy 2000). When federal intervention and power was operating in their favor, white southerners and their apologists had no problem with it.
7. Of all the CRA provisions, Title II banning private discrimination has actually been one of the easiest implemented compared to others like Title VII. Implementation overall, outside a minority of rural die-hard areas was relatively smooth, and really caused no big fuss in white America. It is curious that certain libertarians, hereditarians, HBDers and others are lamenting this particular provision, which white America long ago quickly shrugged over and accepted. The fact that some white people are still lamenting that a black man two tables down is able to eat his hamburger in peace speaks volumes about their motivation and thinking today in the 21st century.
As conservative black scholar Randall Kennedy (a frequent critic of race mongering, lack of black lower class effort etc) notes:
"Although Title II was probably the most talked about section of the Civil Rights Act, the section about which emotions ran highest, the section over which the most blood was spilled, it quickly faded in significance. It became, to paraphrase Hugh Davis Graham, a welcome casualty of success. As James W. Button (1998, 183) put it, Title II "clearly broadened and deepened the federal commitment to ending segregation in public accommodations. Compliance with the law in the South was relatively prompt and extensive, although acceptance in rural, Old South areas tended to be 'minimal and grudging.'"
The relative success of Title II is reflected to a large extent in the comparative simplicity, uniformity, and continuity of the case law built upon it. There arose no effective, concerted campaign of resistance like that which opposed the desegregation of public schooling, thereby prompting the courts and Congress to create new devices and doctrines for enforcement."
end of 7 reasons ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------
DISTORT DE-NEWSA'S (Dinesh D'souza's) "END OF RACISM"
Some charge hypocrisy on the part of libertarians who benefit from the Civil Rights Act yet call for its repeal, and the naivete (or cynicism) of libertarians in glossing over the tendency for unfettered private discriminators to reinforce their biases using both market-hindering collusion and public power.
A number of libertarians and conservatives accuse assorted black leaders of hypocrisy- noting that SOME leaders call for color-blindness before the law, while simultaneously calling for color conscious race quotas. This is a telling criticism. But the charge of hypocrisy also crops up when some libertarians or conservatives call for a rollback of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is easy to speak breezily about "unneeded" legislation when you never had to live under constant harassment and stigma for over a century. Being white, like Ron Paul, or a late-coming immigrant to American shores (like 1978 arrivee Dinesh D'souza - himself a self-proclaimed conservative and libertarian) - said breezy speakers are free to posture and profit by a environment favorable to them. D'souza for example, arriving in 1978, was/is the beneficiary of over a century of civil rights struggle. In various works, such as "The End of Racism," he advances the notion that blacks make "too much" of race, and that Title II Civil Rights Legislation was "unnecessary." On page 544 of the book, he specifically calls for re-appeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, finds discrimination in renting an apartment or hiring for a job acceptable, and would confine civil rights protections and enforcement only to governmental activity. QUOTE: "Yet individuals and companies would be allowed to discriminate in private transactions such as renting an apartment or hiring for a job. Am I calling for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Actually, yes." (The End of Racism, pg 544)
While D'souza on some counts makes cogent criticisms of liberalism in his tome, his airy dismissal of civil rights legislation is seen as hypocritical by some observers, and relatively easy for him to do. He is able to play a double game- reaping the benefits while decrying the vehicle. The bitter work of removing barriers was already done when D'souza arrived on US soil. He is/was free to board any public transportation and take any properly available seat, free to buy property in the neighborhood of his choice, free to check into any hotel, free to eat at any restaurant, free to send his kids to local schools (D'souza arrived after legal battles forced an end to school segregation in Arizona for example and was thus free to attend the school of his choice), and free to marry and take around his white wife, and free to enjoy all of the above with her, without official harassment or criminal charge due to race, or being denied the above benefits or continually harassed or insulted by private transactors because of his race. It is doubtful for example if he had to undergo the indignity of being turned away, frozen out, or denied service when he honeymooned with his wife, or took her to a restaurant, or tried to buy their first house. Reaping the protection of the very law he dismisses, he has the privilege of never having to worry.
D'Souza also glosses over the fact that private discrimination, such as in jobs, housing or public accommodations, (which he finds OK), absent some check based on clear, long documented essential public purposes, often lays the basis for, and/or intensifies public, government sanctioned discrimination.
As the US Supreme Court noted in the Richmond school cases (a Virginia jurisdiction) - housing segregation, including restrictive covenants, "steering" by real estate agents, and biased "redlining" loan decisions by bankers, sometimes created and reinforced both de jure and de facto school segregation and vice versa. White voters acting through their federal state and local government functionaries at times resolutely backed this state of affairs, reinforcing private discrimination with the power of the state. Aside from practices by private transactors, Virginia's "Massive Resistance" campaign in the 1960s is one very visible example of this- from massive bureaucratic requirements designed to block and discourage black children from enrolling in schools close to their homes, to mass school closures. Other, more subtle measures included zoning changes as a pretext designed to keep out targeted groups. Some of this resistance was enacted against a number of dubious "black body count" desegregation measures imposed by courts, measures that also destroyed some thriving black schools, and displaced experienced black coaches, teachers and administrators (Sowell 2004, 1984). However the key point is the tendency of private discriminators to seek public power and sanction, and private discrimination that was reinforced by public assent and law was in place long before the civil rights era, not only openly, but also operating behind the scenes to deleterious effect upon targeted minorities.
Certain 'libertarian' formulas of privileged private discrimination ignore this pattern of public sector reinforcement or sanction of private biases. Discriminatory private transactors are voters and politicians as well, with numerous incentives to "rig the system" - to protect, consolidate and expand their private biases using public power, whether openly or under the guise of seemingly neutral activity. This basic pattern of human nature, left unchecked, would at times, promote or support the very public discrimination libertarians claim to oppose. In short, libertarians would foster or exempt the very private discrimination wielded by majorities, that too often translates into public discrimination via organs of the state. Privately wielded discrimination by white majorities or special interests have time and time again have set up a long chain of self-perpetuating consolidation and reinforcement via public-sector levers of power- including sweetheart contracts, preferential "white only" hiring, and state licensing boards or cumbersome bureaucratic regulations that had the "happy" effect of reducing the presence of targeted minorities, and thus protecting the positions and incomes of favored white incumbents. The clear-eyed conservative writer, Walter Williams, is an exception to certain libertarian naivete on this score, detailing such reinforcing effects in his classic The State Against Blacks. (1980).
Some libertarians sometimes advance a naive notion of competition as essential savior - that competition between discriminators would eliminate harmful effects. In some instances, competition will indeed reduce harmful effects, but non-competitive collusion and collaboration between discriminators need not be 100% effective to produce deleterious effects on targeted minorities. Collusion between realtors, landlords and bankers for example (supplemented by private white violence in some cases), was never and could never be 100% effective in keeping ALL blacks out, but it was effective in enough areas to foster many segregated neighborhoods, over and above, or in parallel with the influence of other factors. This in turn set up perpetuation through public sector levers- sometimes open, and sometimes veiled like zoning controls, or onerous "school choice" plans that were actually designed to discourage "choice" where targeted minorities were involved. Likewise anti-black collusion between white unions was never and could never be 100% effective in all the skilled trades everywhere, but it was effective enough in locking blacks out of numerous skilled occupations, including some that blacks had performed effectively in for decades, before the triumph of said white collusion.
Sowell (1983 - The Economics and Politics of Race) correctly notes that on some counts, competition has yielded better results than government fiat in terms of racial progress economically, and that generally free market processes are superior to governmental action in terms of empirical results showing economic gains by minorities. This is accurate, but contrary to the evangelical claims of some libertarians, Sowell also notes that competition is no panacea. It just, at times, yields better results empirically in comparison to non-competitive alternatives, and as a result, has often undermined racist discrimination. He never claims however that competition would have, or will conclusively solve all problems of racial discrimination in the marketplace, or society as a whole. Thus competition in apartheid South Africa undermined racist "job reservation" and quota systems imposed to benefit whites, but at the end of the day, such systems still ensured that huge flows of income that would have gone to blacks under free market conditions did not happen, and that whites would continue to reap substantial benefit from a system rigged in almost all respects in their favor.
Furthermore private discriminators also have historically banded together to restrict trade and restrict free markets on a private basis where race is involved. In the racial marketplace, private transactors have moved repeatedly to block free markets when blacks were involved. Unions are a common example- freezing blacks out of numerous occupations by threats, force or cleverly written contracts that essentially eliminated black participation in many trades in various local markets. Walter Williams' "The State Against Blacks"- 1981, illustrates the action of such white monopolists over local labor markets. Leagues, associations, or cartels of private white entrepreneurs continue the same tradition. The Washington Real Estate Board Code of Ethics in 1948 for example had this blunt policy: "No property in a white section should ever be sold, rented, advertised or offered to colored people." Note, that this Board of private realtors was not coerced into establishing this policy by the government. In fact, as shown above, none less that a US President appealed to realtors in the early 1960s to remove their discriminatory practices which had become an embarrassing Cold War issue internationally. Thus key trade brokers that had a dominant middleman role in the housing market, collaborated together to restrict free market access for blacks, using not only custom, but before they were struck down, legally enforceable race restrictive covenants. Some libertarians claim to support free markets with one hand, yet on the other lament court action voiding racially discriminatory contracts that hinder free market processes. Were such covenants 100% effective? Of course not, but they created a legally hazardous, "black market" (pardon the pun) environment deterring the free market transactions said libertarians claim to love so much, Such inconsistencies - Free markets for me, but not for thee - might well summarize the philosophy of libertarians like D'souza.
It is also ironic that D'souza and his white wife Dixie would have been denied the common courtesies and opportunities they enjoy today under his green light for discrimination. D'souza and Dixie spent many years living comfortably in the aforementioned Virginia, a state that not only in the past banned such marriages as his to whites, but attempted to enlist private vendors to circumvent civil rights laws (leasing of its park system to a private entity for example - who would be free to discriminate against Negroes, being one of D'souza's all-important PRIVATE transactors), but in the past, had also imprisoned and/or exiled people for interracial marriages. It was only until "unneeded" civil rights laws and court decisions were applied to that very state, and various other holdovers, that interracial couples could live in peace, and not be arrested and jailed in the middle of the night like Mildred Loving and her husband Richard of Loving case landmark fame. Presumably, D'souza would have no problem if he and Dixie were denied housing in the area of their choice by Realtors or private sellers, or had their children shunted to a "colored" school as part of the indirect or de facto fallout of that private discrimination, or were locked out of their booked honeymoon suite by privately employed hotel owners or clerks. D'souza presumaby would only object to dreaded PUBLIC -sector action, like a midnight invasion by government police rousting he and Dixie out of bed in search of interracial "criminals."
But then again, neither D'Souza nor Dixie were ever put to the test as so many interracial couples were prior to the era of supposedly "unneeded" legislation. To paraphrase James Baldwin, life is good in America, when you or your ancestors have never had to pay racism's and/or Jim Crow's "price of the ticket."
White southerners have a long history of a culture of violence
Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence. by Raymond D Gastil . American Sociological Review (1971) Volume: 36, Issue: 3, Publisher: American Sociological Association, Pages: 412-427
QUOTE: "The homicide rate in the United States has been very high relative to the rest of the modernized world for as far back as evidence is available. It has long been known that in the United States there is a wide variation in the rates of different races and between North and South. Both qualitative historical evidence and multiple regressions indicate that the degree of "Southerness" in the culture of the population of the states accounts for more of the variation in homicide rates than do other factors such as income, education, percent urban, or age. It is suggested that high homicide rates in the United States today are related primarily to the persistence of Southern cultural traditions developed before the Civil War and subsequently spreading over much of the country."
Extensive research data shows that white southern culture has been very violent historically in the United States with patterns of deadly violence accepted by and practiced by the culture going back well before the Civil War, and even before settlement in the United States. The violence of white "role models" is a clearly documented phenomenon by several credible white scholars. It was from this violent milleu, that Black America sprang.
QUOTE:
"None of the explanatory factors discussed in Levitt (2004) and Levitt and Miles (2006) -higher number of police, rising prison population, legalized abortion and receding crack epidemics- seems to apply more obviously to the Northern part of the country rather than the South. Yet, the Southern homicide specificity is essentially a white offender phenomenon: over the period 1980-2007 white offender rates in the Deep South have been 2.8 what they have been in Northern states. Black offender rates are ‘only’ 1.4 times higher, a difference that is no longer significant since the end of the 1980s. Besides, the analysis by Levitt (2004) and Levitt and Miles (2006) is focused on explaining the sharp decline of homicide rates in the 1990s, a decline which, again, was much sharper for black offender rates than for white offender rates: black offender rates declined 1.32 times more than white offender rates (source of data: UCR).
More quotes: "According to the culture of honor hypothesis, the high prevalence of homicides in the US South originates from the settlement of the region by herders from the fringes of Britain. This paper confirms that Scot or Scots-Irish settlements are associated with higher homicide today, but only in the South. The effect is strongest among whites and more pronounced where herding was more prevalent and institutional quality weaker. Results indicate that other white settlers adopted the Scots-Irish culture."
"The average murder rate per 100,000 people between 2000 and 2007 in the Deep South of the United States was 8.55, nearly twice as high as in the rest of the country.1 The respective roles of economic and cultural factors in explaining such a high prevalence of homicide-related violence in the South are still the object of much debate. It has been acknowledged that the South’s high murder rate cannot be explained by traditional socio-economic or institutional determinants of crime (Cohen and Nisbett 1994, 1996). The inelasticity of homicide rates to income levels has been interpreted as a limitation of cost-benefit analysis of criminal behavior2 (Levitt and Miles 2006). More recent economic analyses of crime appear similarly unsuitable to explain the determinants of white offender homicide rates.3 Some authors have suggested instead that the high Southern homicide rate is a product of cultural values condoning the use of lethal violence."
--GrosJEan, P. 2011. NBER paper. Univ of San Fran. "A History of Violence: The “Culture of Honor” as a Determinant of Homicide in the US South."
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White murdress - southern girl Casey Anthony. Some research data suggests that the southern culture of homicide and violence applies to white females as well as males.
The white culture of violence appears to extend to white females as well according to some authors. The degree of white southern culture in a place may explain more about its prevalence of murder and violence than some other socioeconomic factors such as income, age etc, said scholars hold. QUOTE:
"Prior research has documented a higher rate of violent crime within the South relative to other U.S. regions. Some scholars argue that higher rates of violence in the South are due to the lasting effect of the unique culture of the Scots-Irish immigrants that came into the U.S. in the mid-1700's. Though there is a large body of literature examining the link between culture and violence in the South, an implicit assumption of this line of study is that the cultural effect occurs largely within the white male population in rural Southern areas. No study, to our knowledge, has extended this thesis to females. We address this omission in prior analyses y empirically testing the Southern Culture of Violence thesis using female arrest rates. Drawing on county level ancestry data from the 2000 Census and UCR Supplementary Homicide Report data, we estimate a series of negative binomial regression models. A conclusion and discussion of the results follow.
Over the past two decades scholars have devoted a great deal of effort to understanding the role of culture in rates of homicide in the Southern region of the U.S. (Ellison 1991; Huff-Corzine, Corzine, and Moore 1986; Lofton and Hill 1974; Messner 1983a). Historically, the South has always exhibited higher rates of violence since the late 1700’s (Gastil 1971; Hackney 1969). When seeking to explain this enduring regional difference, many scholars attribute high rates of violence to the lingering effects of a unique culture that the Scots-Irish immigrants brought with them when they migrated to the Southern United States (McWhiney 1988; Sowell 2005; Webb 2005).
Scholars arguing for the Southern culture of violence believe that the high violence rates in the South are due to a culture of violence that is maintaining itself in the South through the socialization process (Gastil 1971; Hackney 1969; Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967). Researchers have garnered substantial evidence that the degree of ‘Southernness’ in the culture is a more powerful predictor of rates of homicide and violence than socioeconomic factors, such as educations, age, or economic status (Gastil 1971).
What we do know from prior studies is that the strongest predictor of female homicide rates is region indicating that Southern female homicide rates are substantially higher than those in the non-South (DeWees and Parker 2003)."
ENDQUOTE:
-- Berthelot, E and Blanchard T, and Brown T. (2008) SCOTS-IRISH WOMEN AND THE SOUTHERN CULTURE OF VIOLENCE:'.. SOUTHERN RURAL SOCIOLOGY, 23(2), 2008, pp. 157-170
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Aryan invasions of India debunked
The Aryan Invasion Theory is False - Genetic Evidence
No trace of “demographic disruption” in the North-West of the subcontinent between 4500 and 800 BCE; this negates the possibility of any massive intrusion, by so-called Indo-Aryans or other populations, during that period.
Deep late Pleistocene genetic link between contemporary Europeans and Indians, provided by the mtDNA haplogroup U, which encompasses roughly a fifth of mtDNA lineages of both populations. Our estimate for this split [between Europeans and Indians] is close to the suggested time for the peopling of Asia and the first expansion of anatomically modern humans in Eurasia and likely pre-dates their spread to Europe.”
Haplogroup U, being common to North Indian and “Caucasoid” populations, was found in tribes of eastern India such as the Lodhas and Santals, which would not be the case if it had been introduced through Indo-Aryans. Such is also the case of the haplogroup M, another marker frequently mentioned in the early literature as evidence of an invasion: in reality, haplogroup M occurs with a high frequency, averaging about 60%, across most Indian population groups, irrespective of geographical location of habitat. Tribal populations have higher frequencies of haplogroup M than caste populations.”
- U.S. anthropologists Kenneth Kennedy, John Lukacs and Brian Hemphill.
Migrations into India “did occur, but rarely from western Eurasian populations.” There are low frequencies of the western Eurasian mtDNA types in both southern and northern India. Thus, the ‘caucasoid’ features of south Asians may best be considered ‘pre-caucasoid’ — that is, part of a diverse north or north-east African gene pool that yielded separate origins for western Eurasian and southern Asian populations over 50,000 years ago.
- U.S. biological anthropologist Todd R. Disotell.
There is a fundamental unity of mtDNA lineages in India, in spite of the extensive cultural and linguistic diversity, pointing to a relatively small founding group of females in India. Most of the mtDNA diversity observed in Indian populations is between individuals within populations; there is no significant structuring of haplotype diversity by socio-religious affiliation, geographical location of habitat or linguistic affiliation.
- Scientists Susanta Roychoudhury and thirteen others studying 644 samples of mtDNA from ten Indian ethnic groups.
mtDNA haplogroup “M” common to India (with a frequency of 60%), Central and Eastern Asia (40% on average), and even to American Indians; however, this frequency drops to 0.6% in Europe, which is “inconsistent with the ‘general Caucasoidness’ of Indians.” This shows, once again, that “the Indian maternal gene pool has come largely through an autochthonous history since the Late Pleistocene.” U haplogroup frequency 13% in India, almost 14% in North-West Africa, and 24% from Europe to Anatolia. “Indian and western Eurasian haplogroup U varieties differ profoundly; the split has occurred about as early as the split between the Indian and eastern Asian haplogroup M varieties. The data show that both M and U exhibited an expansion phase some 50,000 years ago, which should have happened after the corresponding splits.” In other words, there is a genetic connection between India and Europe, but a far more ancient one than was thought.
If one were to extend methodology used to suggest an Aryan invasion based on Y-Dna statistics to populations of Eastern and Southern India, one would be led to an exactly opposite result: “the straightforward suggestion would be that both Neolithic (agriculture) and Indo-European languages arose in India and from there, spread to Europe.” The authors do not defend this thesis, but simply guard against “misleading interpretations” based on limited samples and faulty methodology.
The Chenchu tribe is genetically close to several castes, there is a “lack of clear distinction between Indian castes and tribes.
- Twenty authors headed by Kivisild - Archaeogenetics of Europe - 2000.
“Language families present today in India, such as Indo-European, Dravidic and Austro-Asiatic, are all much younger than the majority of indigenous mtDNA lineages found among their present-day speakers at high frequencies. It would make it highly speculative to infer, from the extant mtDNA pools of their speakers, whether one of the linguistically defined groups in India should be considered more ‘autochthonous’ than any other in respect of its presence in the subcontinent.”
- Mait Metspalu and fifteen co-authors analyzing 796 Indian and 436 Iranian mtDNAs. 2001.
Geneticist Toomas Kivisild led a study (2003) in which comparisons of the diversity of R1a1 (R-M17) haplogroup in Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, Central Asian, Czech and Estonian populations. The study showed that the diversity of R1a1 in India, Pakistan, and Iran, is higher than in Czechs (40%), and Estonians[12].
Kivisild came to the conclusion that "southern and western Asia might be the source of this haplogroup": "Haplogroup R1a, previously associated with the putative Indo-Aryan invasion, was found at its highest frequency in Punjab but also at a relatively high frequency (26%) in the Chenchu tribe. This finding, together with the higher R1a-associated short tandem repeat diversity in India and Iran compared with Europe and central Asia, suggests that southern and western Asia might be the source of this haplogroup".[12]
“Given the geographic spread and STR diversities of sister clades R1 and R2, the latter of which is restricted to India, Pakistan, Iran, and southern central Asia, it is possible that southern and western Asia were the source for R1 and R1a differentiation.”
- Kivilsid - 2003
Based on 728 samples covering 36 Indian populations, it announced in its very title how its findings revealed a “Minor Genetic Influence of Central Asian Pastoralists,” i.e. of the Indo-Aryans, and stated its general agreement with the previous study. For instance, the authors rejected the identification of some Y-DNA genetic markers with an “Indo-European expansion,” an identification they called “convenient but incorrect ... overly simplistic.” To them, the subcontinent’s genetic landscape was formed much earlier than the dates proposed for an Indo-Aryan immigration: “The influence of Central Asia on the pre-existing gene pool was minor. ... There is no evidence whatsoever to conclude that Central Asia has been necessarily the recent donor and not the receptor of the R1a lineages.”
“Dravidian” authorship of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization rejected indirectly, since it noted, “Our data are also more consistent with a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus....” They found, in conclusion, “overwhelming support for an Indian origin of Dravidian speakers.”
The frequencies of R2 seems to mirror the frequencies of R1a (i.e. both lineages are strong and weak in the same social and linguistic subgroups). This may indicate that both R1a and R2 moved into India at roughly the same time or co-habited, although more research is needed. R2 is very rare in Europe.
Sanghamitra Sengupta, L. Cavalli-Sforza, Partha P. Majumder, and P. A. Underhill. - 2006.
“The sharing of some Y-chromosomal haplogroups between Indian and Central Asian populations is most parsimoniously explained by a deep, common ancestry between the two regions, with diffusion of some Indian-specific lineages northward.”
“The Y-chromosomal data consistently suggest a largely South Asian origin for Indian caste communities and therefore argue against any major influx, from regions north and west of India, of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo-Aryan language family.”
“Southern castes and tribals are very similar to each other in their Y-chromosomal haplogroup compositions.” As a result, “it was not possible to confirm any of the purported differentiations between the caste and tribal pools,” a conclusion that directly clashes with the Aryan invasion theory which purports that male European Aryans chased tribal adivasis and aboriginals down south.
Sanghamitra Sahoo, T. Kivisild and V. K. Kashyap. - 2006.
When Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, he first reached South-West Asia around 75,000 BP, and from here, went on to other parts of the world. In simple terms, except for Africans, all humans have ancestors in the North-West of the Indian peninsula. In particular, one migration started around 50,000 BP towards the Middle East and Western Europe: “indeed, nearly all Europeans — and by extension, many Americans — can trace their ancestors to only four mtDNA lines, which appeared between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago and originated from South Asia.”
-Lluís Quintana-Murci,Vincent Macaulay,Stephen Oppenheimer,Michael Petraglia,and their associates
“For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17(Y-DNA Haplogroup R1a, associated with the male Aryan invasion theory) and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe.”
-Stephen Oppenheimer
A (2009) study headed by geneticist Swarkar Sharma, collated information for 2809 Indians (681 Brahmins, and 2128 tribals and schedule castes). The results showed "no consistent pattern of the exclusive presence and distribution of Y-haplogroups to distinguish the higher-most caste, Brahmins, from the lower-most ones, schedule castes and tribals". Brahmins from West Bengal showed the highest frequency (72.22%) of Y-haplogroups R1a1* hinting that it may have been a founder lineage for this caste group. The authors found it significant that the Saharia tribe of Madhya Pradesh had not only 28.07% R1a1, but also 22.8% R1a*, out of 57 people, with such a high percentage of R1a* never having been found before. Based on STR variance the estimated age of R1a* in India was 18,478 years, and for R1a1 it was 13,768 years.
In its conclusions the study proposed "the autochthonous origin and tribal links of Indian Brahmins" as well as "the origin of R1a1* ... in the Indian subcontinent".
S. Sharma, argued for an Indian origin of R1a1 lineage among Brahmins, by pointing out the highest incidence of R1a*, ancestral clade to R1a1, among Kashmiri Pandits (Brahmins) and Saharias, an Indian tribe. - Sharma et al 2009
"This paper rewrites history... there is no north-south divide." "There is no truth to the Aryan-Dravidian theory as they came hundreds or thousands of years after the ancestral north and south Indians had settled in India."
The study analysed 500,000 genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 diverse groups from 13 states. All the individuals were from six-language families and traditionally upper and lower castes and tribal groups. "The genetics proves that castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of the Indian society."
"Impossible to distinguish between castes and tribes since their genetics proved they were not systematically different." The present-day Indian population is a mix of ancient north and south bearing the genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations - the Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and the Ancestral South Indian (ASI).
"The initial settlement took place 65,000 years ago in the Andamans and in ancient south India around the same time, which led to population growth in this part,'' said Thangarajan. He added, "At a later stage, 40,000 years ago, the ancient north Indians emerged which in turn led to rise in numbers here. But at some point of time, the ancient north and the ancient south mixed, giving birth to a different set of population. And that is the population which exists now and there is a genetic relationship between the population within India."
The study also helps understand why the incidence of genetic diseases among Indians is different from the rest of the world. Singh said that 70% of Indians were burdened with genetic disorders and the study could help answer why certain conditions restricted themselves to one population. For instance, breast cancer among Parsi women, motor neuron diseases among residents of Tirupati and Chittoor, or sickle cell anaemia among certain tribes in central India and the North-East can now be understood better, said researchers.
The researchers, who are now keen on exploring whether Eurasians descended from ANI, find in their study that ANIs are related to western Eurasians, while the ASIs do not share any similarity with any other population across the world. Thangaraj and Singh at a press conference.
"Reconstructing Indian Population History" - David Reich, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Nick Patterson, Alkes L. Price & Lalji Singh - 2009
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
"All the human types found in Kenya from the Paleolithic to the end of the Neolithic, are perfectly distinguishable as Negroes. Dr. Leakey, who has studied nearly all of them, knows this. He knows that all the skeletons that have fallen into his hands have Negritic proportions in the full sense of the word. He also is aware that the obervation by Boule and Vallois on the "floor of the nasal fossae" is applicable to all the skulls that he has studied. One can understand why anthropologists are silent on these determining points." - CA DIop. African Origin of Civilization. 1974. p 274
"Anthropologists have invented the ingenious, convenient, fictional notion of the "true Negro," which allows them to consider, if need be, all the real Negroes on earth as fake Negroes, more or less approaching a kind of Platonic archetype, without ever attaining it. Thus, African history is full of "Negroids," Hamites, semi-Hamites, Nilo-Hamitics, Ethiopoids, Sabaeans, even Caucasoids! Yet, if one stuck strictly to scientific data and archeological facts, the prototype of the White race would be sought in vain throughout the earliest years of present-day humanity. The Negro has been there from the beginning; for millennia he was the only one in existence. Nevertheless, on the threshold of the historical epoch, the "scholar" turns his back on him, raises questions about his genesis, and even speculates "objectively" about his tardy appearance..."
"If the African anthropologist made of point of examining European races 'under the magnifying glass,' he would be able to multiply them ad infinitum by grouping physiognomies into races and sub-races as artifically as his European counterpart does with regard to Africa. He would in turn, succeed in dissolving collective European reality into a fog of insignificant facts." --CA DIop, African Origin of Civilization. p 238
Diop on limb proportions "...the proportions of the limbs... are concerned with the size of the individuals and the proportions of their long bones. These are not presented in their real state on the plates. Their respective proportions therefore rest on hazardous opinions."
"..Male and female skin colors were probably not uniform among the entire population of Egypt, with pigmentation being darker in the south [closer to sub-saharan Africans] and lighter in the north [closer to Mediterranean Near Easterners] A woman from the south would probably have had darker skin than a man from the North. Thus, the colorations used for skin tones in the art must have been schematic [or symbolic] rather than realistic..." -- Egyptologist, Gay Robins
"In the majority of cases, the woman's skin is coloured a light yellowish-brown, while the man's is painted a much darker reddish-brown (figs. 36, 37). This could be an artistic device to symbolise what we have seen from other evidene: the tendency for women to be occupied indoors and men o of doors... The use of two contrasting colours in relation to gender is obviously a convention, and whole it may in part be based on reality, the situaton with regards to skin colour in life is likely to have been far more complex."
--Gay Robbins 1998. Women in Egypt. p 180-181
Posted by Anglo_Pyramidologist (Member # 18853) on :
Graves (2002, p. 5) writes:
"The majority of geneticists, evolutionary biologists and anthro-pologists agree that there are no biological races in the human species."
Cohen (2002, p. 211) asserts:
"Almost all anthropologists agree that races in the popular sense do not exist and never have existed."
However these assertions are incorrect.
A survey of the views of anthropologists carried out in 1985 found that the existence of races was accepted by 59 % of biological and physical anthropologists and about one third of cultural anthropologists. Further surveys into the 90's produced similar figures. (Lieberman and Reynolds, 1996).
The reality of race is widely accepted by most scientists and the rest of society.
More recently, a survey of Polish anthropologists carried out in 2001 found that 75 percent agreed with the proposition "There are biological races within the species Homo sapiens" (Kaszycka and Strzalko, 2003).
Posted by Anglo_Pyramidologist (Member # 18853) on :
The bogus word games of race deniers...
Cavalli-Sforza (1994, p. 19) states:
''[...]the concept of race has failed to gain any acceptance''
However, Cavilli-Sforza notes that: "we can identify 'clusters' of populations."
These clusters turn out to be the same as the races of anthropology and later in Cavilli-Sforza's own book we find him using racial terminology (for example p. 167).
NOTE: It therefore appears 'cluster' is a euphemism for races, used by race deniers...
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
"The fact that all eight informative DNA regions falsify replacement and imply interbreeding is strong evidence that no split occurred between African and Eurasian populations, and that they were not isolates. The only evidence for any split or fragmentation event in human evolutionary history within this time frame is the one detected with mtDNA involving the colonization of the Americas (Templeton 1997, 1998a). However, this colonization was the outcome of either multiple colonization events or movements by large numbers of peoples (Templeton 1998a), resulting in extensive sharing of genetic polymorphisms of New World with Old World human populations. Moreover, the genetic isolation between the Old and New Worlds was brief (to an evolutionary biologist) and no longer exists. Other than this temporary fragmentation event, the major human populations have been interconnected by gene flow (recurrent at least on a tie scale on the order of tens of thousands of years or less) during at least the last six hundred thousand years, with 95 percent statistical confidence (Templeton 2002). Hence, the haplotype analyses of geographic associations strongly reject the existence of multiple evolutionary lineages of humans, reject the idea that Eurasians split from Africans one hundred thousand years ago, and reject the idea that "pure races" existed in the past. Thus, the idea that "races" existed among humans has no biological validity under the evolutionary lineage definition of subspecies." {ENDQUOTE} -- Alan H. Goodman, Deborah Heath, M. Susan Lindee. 2003. Genetic nature/culture: anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide. p. 247-248
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Anglo_PrimeIdiot: The bogus word games of race deniers...
Cavalli-Sforza (1994, p. 19) states:
''[...]the concept of race has failed to gain any acceptance''
However, Cavilli-Sforza notes that: "we can identify 'clusters' of populations."
These clusters turn out to be the same as the races of anthropology and later in Cavilli-Sforza's own book we find him using racial terminology (for example p. 167).
NOTE: It therefore appears 'cluster' is a euphemism for races, used by race deniers...
LOL If "cluster" is the same as 'race', then I guess southeast Europeans who carry E1b1b and thus cluster with [BLACK] Sub-Saharans of East Africa must be the same 'race', or southwest Europeans who carry E1b1a and Benin sickle cell and thus cluster with sub-Saharan West Africans must also be the same 'race'.
And like that Anglo-Idiotic logic is ruined.
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
On the web, extensive neo-Nazi spam and Wikipedia “stealth” inserts claim that Cro-Magnons are pure “Caucasian” ancestors of today’s Europeans. Hard data however debunks this on 6 counts, and shows a diverse Cro-Magnon population.
1-- Detailed modern cranial studies show Cro-magnon crania clustering AWAY from today’s Europeans. Brace 2005 testedthe “Cro-magnid” claim and found it “folklore.” QUOTE: "When canonical variates are plotted, neither sample ties in with Cro-Magnon as was once suggested. .. If this analysis shows nothing else, it demonstrates that the oft-repeated European feeling that the Cro-Magnons are “us” (46) is more a product of anthropological folklore than the result of the metric data available from the skeletal remains..." --CL. Brace 2005. The Questionable contribution of the Neolithic to European craniofacial form
2–Africans possessing the highest phenotypical diversity on earth, producing variants covering most features. Several Cro-Magnon specimens are described as ‘negroid.’ QUOTE:
“Both methods for estimating regional diversity show sub-Saharan Africato have the highest levels of phenotypic variation consistent with many genetic studies.“ [-- Relethford, John "Global Analysis of Regional Differences in Craniometric Diversity .” Hum Bio v73, n5, -629-636])
---------------------- Three scholars (Arthur Keith, M Boule and HV Valloid found ‘negroid’Cro-Magnon features: QUOTE: "The ancient Grimaldi woman and boy are of the mixed or negroid type." --(Arthur Keith. Ancient Types of Man. p. 60)
3- Several Upper Paleolithic European specimens show high cural indices in limb proportions- more akin to dark-skinned tropical Africans than today’s Europeans, who show lower cural indices. QUOTE: "As with all the other limb/trunk indices, the recent Europeans evince lower indices, reflective of shorter tibiae, and the recent sub-Saharan Africans have higher indices, reflective of their long tibiae... The Dolno Vestonice and Pavlov humans.. have body proportions similar to those of other Gravettian specimens. Specifically, they are characterized by high bracial and cural indices, indicative of distal limb segment elongation.." --Trinkaus and Svoboda. 2005. Early Modern Human Evolution in Central Europe]
– AND--
-Body proportions of early European H. sapiens fossils suggest a tropical adaptation and support an African origin (Holliday & Trinkaus, 1991; Ruff, 1994; Pearson, 1997, 2000; Holliday, 1997, 1998, 2000).” -–McBrearty and Brooks 2000. The Revolution that Wasn’t. Jrn Hu Evo 39, 453-563
4-- Traits like narrow noses occur naturally in African environments: ".. low mean nasal indices (high, narrow noses) tend to [also] be found in arid regions, such as the desert areas of east Africa.. -- Mays. S. (2010). The Archaeology of Human Bones. Pg 100-101
5-- Several Upper Paleolithic European types- Predmost (Czech), Combo Capelle (France) Grimaldi (Italy) and Teviec (France) show a variant of “African” affinities like prognathism. Some scholars hold this to be an ‘Eastern Cro-Magnon’ variant: QUOTE:
------ "others like Predomost and to a lesser degree Grimaldi and Teviec, are more prognathic like Skhul 5." --Marta Mirazón Lahr. 2005. The Evolution of Modern Human Diversity: A Study of Cranial Variation
and
---------- ".. on whose basis, many specialists define the eastern Cro-Magnon variant in the Upper Paleolithic population of western Europe." --S. De Laet (1994). History of Humanity, UNESCO
6– DNA provides clear evidence of tropical African types migrating to Paleolithic era Europe, contradicting claims of “Caucasoid” evolution in situ. Tropical limb evidence confirms DNA. The African tropical types may have interbred with local Neanderthals, but in any event would have adapted to the colder conditions of Europe over time. QUOTE:
"Early modern Europeans reflect both their predominant African early modern human ancestry and a substantial degree of admixture between those early modern humans and the indigenous Neandertals. Given the tens of millennia since then and the limitations inherent in ancient DNA, this process is largely invisible in the molecular record. It is readily apparent in the paleontological record.“ --E. Trinkhaus (2004) European early modern humans and the fate of the Neandertals. PNAS 2007 vol. 104 no. 18 7367-7372
and
"The so-called Old Man [Cro-Magnon 1] became the original model for what was once termed the Cro-Magnon or Upper Paleolithic "race" of Europe.. there's no such valid biological category, and Cro-Magnon 1 is not typical of Upper Paleolithic western Europeans- and not even all that similar to the other two make skulls found at the site. Most of the genetic evidence, as well as the newest fossil evidence from Africa argue against continuous local evolution producing modern groups directly from any Eurasian pre-modern population.. there's no longer much debate that a large genetic contribution from migrating early modern Africans infuenced other groups throughout the Old World.“ --B. Lewis et al. 2008. Understanding Humans: Introduction to Physical Anthropology and Archaeology. p 297
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Advanced cognitive, technological and behavioral patterns derive from Africa. Dubbed the "Human Revolution" by some researchers, the lead up to they expansion of humans from Africa to other parts of the world, circa 60-40kya. Other scholars argue for a more gradual continuum of advances deeply rooted in Africa that spread worldwide. In either scenario, whether relatively rapid advance or gradual accumulation, the cognitive, technological and behavioral advances took place within Africa.
QUOTE: "Recent research has provided increasing support for the origins of anatomically and genetically "modern" human populations in Africa between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago, followed by a major dispersal of these populations to both Asia and Europe sometime after ca. 65,000 before present (B.P.). However, the central question of why it took these populations {approx}100,000 years to disperse from Africa to other regions of the world has never been clearly resolved. It is suggested here that the answer may lie partly in the results of recent DNA studies of present-day African populations, combined with a spate of new archaeological discoveries in Africa. Studies of both the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mismatch patterns in modern African populations and related mtDNA lineage-analysis patterns point to a major demographic expansion centered broadly within the time range from 80,000 to 60,000 B.P., probably deriving from a small geographical region of Africa.
Recent archaeological discoveries in southern and eastern Africa suggest that, at approximately the same time, there was a major increase in the complexity of the technological, economic, social, and cognitive behavior of certain African groups, which could have led to a major demographic expansion of these groups in competition with other, adjacent groups. It is suggested that this complex of behavioral changes (possibly triggered by the rapid environmental changes around the transition from oxygen isotope stage 5 to stage 4) could have led not only to the expansion of the L2 and L3 mitochondrial lineages over the whole of Africa but also to the ensuing dispersal of these modern populations over most regions of Asia, Australasia, and Europe, and their replacement (with or without interbreeding) of the preceding "archaic" populations in these regions." ---Mellars, Paul (2006) Why did modern human populations disperse from Africa ca. 60,000 years ago? A new model. PNAS, 2006, 103(25), pp. 9381-9386
Advanced cognitive, artistic and behavioral patterns and technology like more refined tools are found in Africa long before similar patterns arose in Europe. The migration of tropical African types to Europe in the Cro-Magnon era brought these cognitive, cultural and behavioral advances to Neanderthal Europe.
"A more gradual "revolution" position is now held [by Paul Mellars].. a period of accelerated change in Africa between about 60,000 and 80,000 years ago, as shown by the following developments recorded in South African cave sites: new and better- techniques for producing long thin flakes of stone blades; specialized tools called end scrapers and burins, which were probably used for working skins and bones, the [production of tiny stone segments that must have mounted on handles of wood or bone to make composite tools, complexly shaped stone tools such as 'leaf points', relatively complex bone tools; marine shells perforated to make necklaces or bracelets, red ochre (natural iron oxide) engraved with geometric designs suggesting early artwork,; greater permanence and differentiated occupation areas in caves; new subsistence practices such as the exploitation of marine fish as well as shellfish; and perhaps intentional burning of undergrowth to encourage the growth of underground plant resources such as tubers. Mellars suggests that a neurological switch to modernity in the brain alongside rapid Climatic fluctuations, could have been the driving forces behind this period of heightened cultural innovations.."
"The most impressive site for early evidence of symbolism however, is Blombos Cave in South Africa, with a record stretching well beyond 70,000 years ago.. The stone tools in these levels include Still Bay points, beautifully shaped thin lanceolate spear points, flaked on both sides. They also show the earliest application of a refined stone tool-making technique known as pressure flaking, some 55,000 years before its best-known manifestation in the Soultrean industry of EUrope. Slabs of red ochre were excavated from various levels, including the deepest ones, with wavy, fan or mesh-shaped patterns carefully engraved on them.. Hundreds [beads made from seashells] have now been excavated from Blombos, and most show signs of piercing, with many holes also displaying signs of wear.. The shells have a natural shiny luster, but the color seems to have been modified by rubbing with hematite in some cases and by heating to darken the shells in other cases, so they may have been strung in different-colored patterns.. " --Chris Stringer (2012) Lone Survivors: How we came to be the only human on earth 150-155
Some archaeologists criticize notions of a "human revolution" suddenly occurring after humans exited Africa for Asia and Europe. Instead they argue, the supposed "revolutionary" changes in cognition, symbol manipulation, advanced technology, trade etc were ALREADY occurring WITHIN Africa, long before any migration out. There is no need for a 'eureka moment' of 'progress' upon leaving Africa. 'Progress' was already well underway and long in place within Africa. QUOTE:
"This is because by focusing on changes that occurred at the Middle Paleolithic/Upper Paleolithic or Middle Stone Age/Later Stone Age transitions (in Europe and Africa, respectively), there is a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African Middle Stone Age record that preceded the time of the supposed revolution by at least 100,000 years. In their view, [McBrearty and Brooks 2000] 'modern' features such as advanced technologies, increased geographic range, specialized hunting, fishing and shell-fishing, long distance trade, and the symbolic use of pigments had already developed in a broad range of Middle Stone Age industries right across Africa, between 100,000 and 250,000 years ago. This suggested to them that an early assembly of the package of modern human behaviors occurred in Africa, followed by much later export to the rest of the world. Thus the origin of our species, both behaviorally and morphologically, was linked to early developments in Middle Stone Age technology, and not to changes that occurred much later.. 'this quest for this 'eureka moment' reveals a great deal about the needs, desired and aspirations of archaeologists, but obscures rather than illuminates events in the past.." --Chris Stringer (2012) Lone Survivors: How we came to be the only human on earth 128-29
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Indeed, such a notion of "human revolution" in cognition occurring only among those humans who left Africa is very telling-- that is of the mentality of those scholars who espouse such! This goes to show racism and anti-African sentiments even within academia are very much alive and well. Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
^^One consolation- one of the leading proponents of the "revolution" centers it in Africa.
blombos ochre processing tech
The bogus "generalized Caucasoids" model. This involves defining away Africoid affinities or features as "generalized" but at the same time ot treating "European" features the same way. The double standard only runs one way- if a feature has African affinities- airbrush it away as "generalized" but otherwise call it "Caucasoid" or equivalent. This double-standard howevert is contradicted by Africa's diversity, and clear tropical body/limb proportion affinities of its migrating peoples
For example, Jantz and Ousley 2003 assert that: "Upper Paleolithic crania are, for the most part, larger and more generalized versions of recent Europeans." (AJPA 121(2))
But their wording gives the game away. They achieve a "match" with "recent Europeans" because features deemed to have African affinities are defined away as "generalized." The African irritant thus eliminated, they can then go on to cluster all else with Europe. Two central points undermine this method:
-----------CRANIA Africa has the most diversity in crania in the world. It has almost any skull variation on earth. This diversity DECREASES the farther one goes from Africa. As one of the world's foremost palentologists Chris Stringer notes:
[i]"Africa today has the greatest internal genetic variation of any inhabited continent and its skull shapes show the highest variation. This is usually attributed to its greater size, larger ancient populations and deepest timelines for humanity." ----Chris Stringer (2012) Lone Survivors: How we came to be the only human on earth p260
-----------TROPICAL LIMB/BODY ADAPTATIONS "Erik Trinkhaus noted that the Cro-Magnons who livd in much the same environments as Neanderthals were more like recent African populations in body shape than Neanderthals. And the same thing now seems to apply to the earliest modern skeleton we have from the north of Ice Age China." ----Chris Stringer (2012) Lone Survivors: How we came to be the only human on earth p105
Qafzeh/Skhul remains cluster more with tropical Africans and show similarities to Cro-Magnons. They are not identical, nor are they direct parents, but they show certain affinities- Cro-Magnons themselves also showing tropical affinities.
i]"The Qafzeh/Skhul sample is fundamentally modern, and in fact very similar to Cro-Magons.." --Geoffrey A. Clark, Catherine M. Willermet. 1997. Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research. p111
"Results indicate that the Qafzeh-Skhul hominids have African-like, or tropically adapted, proportions, while those from Amud, Kebara, Tabun, and Shanidar (Iraq) have more European-like, or cold-adapted, proportions. This suggests that there were in fact two distinct Western Asian populations and that the Qafzeh-Skhul hominids were likely African in origin - a result consistent with the "Replacement" model of modern human origins.
.. Thus, the discovery of tropically adapted hominids in the region would therefore likely indicate population dispersal from the TROPICS, and the most logical geographic source for such an influx is Africa. In this regard, Trinkaus (1981, 1984, 1995) and Ruff (1994) have argued that the high brachial and crural indices, narrow biiliac breadths, and small relative femoral head sizes of the Qafzeh-Skhul hominids suggest an influx of African genes associated with the emergence of modern humans in the region." ---Trenton Holliday (2000) Evolution at the Crossroads: Modern Human Emergence in Western Asia. American Anthropologist. New Series, Vol. 102, No. 1, 54-68
In summary, Cro-Magnons were tropically adapted migrants to Europe that resembled tropical Africans. They were never IDENTICAL to tropical Africans for they adapted over time to colder European environments. However several specimens still show evidence of African links. Africa in addition has the highest phenotypic diversity in the world. For example, skull shapes on African fossils for example are the most diverse. They cover most known variants in skull shape on earth- thru the ages. Everything else is a more limited subset of this diversity. Its worth repeating:
"Africa today has the greatest internal genetic variation of any inhabited continent and its skull shapes show the highest variation. This is usually attributed to its greater size, larger ancient populations and deepest timelines for humanity." ----Chris Stringer (2012) Lone Survivors: How we came to be the only human on earth p260
When in comes to Cro-Magnons's Eurocentric writers play a hypocritical double game, defining away African features as "generalized" but not doing the same when it comes to their favorite "European" fossils. Thus a dark-skinned, broad nosed, prognathous fossil with tropical limb proportions becomes "generalized[/img] features" but a narrow nose (common in Africa by the way) conveniently becomes "European". Can we all say hypocrisy?
Blombos- Africa: oldest pigment production operation on earth. Advanced cognitive, behavioral, technological and social features were already in place and ongoing before any migration out of Africa.
Assorted Multi-regionalists like Michael Wolpoff deny such diversity, but that denial is hollow in the face of substantial evidence of the Out OF Africa model. Four prominent multi-regionalists along with Wolpoff claimed in 1994 for example- QUOTE:
"The evolutionary patterns of three different regions show that the earliest "modern" humans are not Africans and do not have the complex of features that characterize the Africans of that time or any other... There is no evidence of specific admixture with Africans at any time, let alone replacement by them.. " END WOLPOFF et all quote.
But, Wolpoff et al are comprehensively refuted by fossil and DNA evidence of the Out OF Africa model: Respected paleontologist Chris Stringer notes: (continued)
"This model gave Africa no special place in our evolution and claimed specific connections in individual features between Homo erectus fossils more than a million years old in each region and humans in the same regions today.. these particular views have been pretty comprehensively shown to be false." ----Chris Stringer (2012) Lone Survivors: How we came to be the only human on earth p267human on earth p267
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Proponents of a "fast track" human "revolution" in cognition, organization and technology locate the "revolution" as beginning in, and being sustained from Africa, not other parts of the globe. Other scholars argue for a more gradual evolution of the traits that brought about advances in Africa where anatomically modern humans first appeared, and their expansion to Europe and Asia circa 50kya. Whatever scenario is followed, it makes little difference. The "revo", gradual or "fast track", began in Africa and was sustained from thence. - QUOTE:
"..distance and small population size probably limited gene flow, and the composite fossil and archeological records indicate that the African lineage spread to replace or swamp the others beginning roughly 50 ky ago. It is thus reasonable to supply the lineages with biological species labels: Homo sapiens in Africa, H. neanderthalensis in Europe, and H. erectus in the Far East. The European lineage is the best documented,73 and it is marked by the progressive accumulation of Neanderthal features, culminating in the classic Neanderthals by 130 ky ago. During the long interval when the Neanderthals were evolving, from at least 500 to 130 ky ago, Europe was generally much cooler than it has been historically, and some conspicuous Neanderthal distinctions, including massive trunks and short limbs, were probably physiological adaptations to cold. Other key distinctions— including, for example, the strong forward projection of the face along the midline, the unique configuration of the mastoid region and the occipital, and some peculiarities of the postcranium— may owe more to gene drift in populations that periodically crashed when climate became especially cold.
The pertinent African fossil record is much less complete, but it contains no specimens that anticipate the Neanderthals, and it shows that anatomically near-modern people were widespread in Africa by 130 ky ago,74 when only Neanderthals inhabited Europe. The Far Eastern record is the most sketchy,75 and it may actually comprise two distinct evolutionary trajectories: one in southeastern Asia that suggests continuity within Indonesian Homo erectus from before 500 ky ago until perhaps 50 ky ago,76 and a second in China that may indicate evolution from classic H. erectus before 500 ky ago to populations that by 100 ky ago, retained few distinctive H. erectus features and that approached H. sapiens in braincase size and form.77 The relevant archeology suggests that even as Europeans and Africans progressively diverged in morphology after 500 ky ago, they remained fundamentally similar in behavior.
Thus, both Europeans and Africans produced Acheulean artifacts before 250 ky ago, and they made very similar kinds of non-Acheulean artifacts afterwards. From a strictly artifactual perspective, a conspicuous difference between Africa and Europe arose only after 40 ky ago, and it then occurred in the absence of a morphological contrast, for the artifact makers on both continents were now H. sapiens of African origin. Archeological divergence was followed on each continent by a significant acceleration in artifactual (cultural) differentiation through time and space. This surely signals the existence of the historically familiar modern human ability to innovate. If as I suggest, the development of this ability depended on a biological (neural) change in Africa 50–40 ky ago, then the name H. sapiens should probably be restricted to fully modern humans after this time, and their preceding near-modern African ancestors should be assigned to another species, for which the name H. helmei is available.78
The more fundamental point, however, is that the sudden origin of the modern capacity for culture in Africa 50–40 ky ago could help explain both how and why fully modern Africans were then able to expand at the expense of their nonmodern Eurasian contemporaries... The issue is complicated by the realization that Middle Paleolithic people in Europe were Neanderthals, whereas MSA people in Africa more closely resembled living people. contexts.
Using this criterion, the most plausible evidence for modern human behavior before 50 ky ago comes from the Katanda sites in the Democratic Republic of the Congo121–124 and from Blombos Cave in South Africa.125–128 At Katanda, electron spin-resonance dates on hippopotamus teeth and luminescence dates on covering sands bracket mammal and fish bones, stone artifacts that could be either MSA or LSA, eight whole or partial barbed bone points, and four additional formal bone artifacts between 150 and 90 ky ago. At Blombos Cave, luminescence dates on enclosing sands suggest that mammal and fish bones, classic MSA stone artifacts, three whole or fragmentary polished bone points, and 17 less formal bone artifacts accumulated around 100 ky ago.129 At both Katanda and Blombos Cave, the most striking discoveries are the formal bone artifacts..
.. credible claims for art or other modern human behavioral markers before 50 ky ago must involve relatively large numbers of highly patterned objects from deeply stratified, sealed contexts would antedate other known examples, from LSA/Upper Paleolithic sites, by 50 to 40 ky. If the stratigraphic associations and age estimates at both sites are accepted, they could imply that modern human behavioral traits and modern morphology arose in Africa together, at or before 100 ky ago..."
--Richard Klein 1999. Archeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology. 9(1) 17-36
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Don't forget the world's oldest known calculator, the Ishango bone.
It's dated to over 20,000 years old and was discovered in the area between the Congo and Uganda.
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Indeed good ref. Yes that should be added into the base.
"Ishango Bone. At one end of the bone is a piece of quartz for writing, and the bone has a series of notches carved in groups on three rows running the length of the bone. The markings on two of these rows each add to 60. The first row is consistent with a number system based on 10, since the notches are grouped as 20 + 1, 20 - 1, 10 + 1, and 10 - 1, while the second row contains the prime numbers between 10 and 20.. A third seems to show a method for multiplying by 2 that was used in later times by the Egyptians. Additional markings suggest that the bone was also uses as a lunar phase counter.
Lebombo bone: One of the oldest mathematical artifacts known, a small piece of the fibula of a baboon, found near Border Cave in Lebombo Mountains between South Africa and Swaziland... dated about 35,000 B.V., the Lebombo bone is marked with 29 clearly defined notches. This suggests it may have been used as a lunar phase counter, in which case African women may have been the first mathematicians, because keeping track of menstrual cycles requires a lunar calendar. Certainly, the Lebombo bone resembles calendar sticks still used by Bushmen in Namibia..." -- David Darling. 2004. The Universal Book of Mathematics: From Abracadabra to Zeno's Paradoxes
"The oldest known mathematical artifact, dating from 35,000 B.C.E., predates even the Neolithic Revolution. The Lebombo bone is a tally stick of notches cut into a baboon's leg, used to keep track of some quantity- possibly a debt, as tally sticks were used in later civilizations. A baboon leg was also used to make the Ishango bone, from around 20,000 B.C.E., with a piece of quartz affixed to the end (possibly for making engravings on other bones.) The notches on the Ishango bone are systematically grouped together in such a way that they are thought to represent something other than simple counting... the numbers they represent, if each group is treated separately. There are a number of prime numbers on the bone for instances, and two of the columns add up to 60.."
About 1,000 years older than Stonehenge, one of the world's oldest archaeoastronomical devices is a circle of stones on the Nabta Playa basin in what is now the Nubian desert, which like the Sahara, had not yet desertified. Sometime in the 5th millennium B.C.E. the Nabta Playa People- who seem to have had a more sophisticated civilization, with deep wells and planned village layouts, than their Nile Valley neighbors elsewhere in Egypt- built a ring of stones around large megaliths. It seems to have been a calendar used to determine the summer solstice each year, and recent research indicates the stones may align with stars such as Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri, and Orion's Belt. The megaliths at the Namoratunga site in Kenya, built around 300 B.C.E., are aligned with seven star systems: Triangulum, the Pleiades, Bellatrix, Aldebaran, central Orion, Saiph, and Sirius. The movement of those constellations around the ring of basalt pillars corresponds to a 354-day calendar used by the Namoratunga people." --Andrea Stanton et al (eds) 2012. Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa: An Encyclopedia
Ps - do you have anything more on the Namoratunga people and their calendar?
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ No sorry. All I know about the Namoratunga culture is that they are the oldest megalithic culture using astronomy in Africa south of the Sahara. There is still speculation as to what linguistic group they are tied to. Some say Afrisian while others think Nilo-Saharan. I am willing to go with latter since their cultural advancements seem to predate the former.
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
Science 19 May 1978: Vol. 200 no. 4343 pp. 766-768 DOI: 10.1126/science.200.4343.766
Reports
Namoratunga: The First Archeoastronomical Evidence in Sub-Saharan Africa
B. M. LYNCH1, L. H. ROBBINS1
Abstract
Namoratunga, a megalithic site in northwestern Kenya, has an alignment of 19 basalt pillars that are nonrandomly oriented toward certain stars and constellations. The same stars and constellations are used by modern eastern Cushitic peoples to calculate an accurate calendar. The fact that Namoratunga dates to about 300 B.C. suggests that a prehistoric calendar based on detailed astronomical knowledge was in use in eastern Africa.
Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
NOTES ON ANCIENT EGYPTIAN AGRICULTURE
African Farmers did not have the "easy time" some claim. They did not sit around and merely wait for the Nile to rise, throw some seeds and retire to drink beer until harvest. It was hard work. The land had to be tilled and divided into basins- (decrue or basin agriculture, a technique often seen in other parts of Africa). Canals, levees and dams had to be dug, constructed and maintained to capture the flood waters in the basins. Spillways and siphon canals had to be made and maintained to siphon off excess water as the flood receded. And the whole system had to be calibrated carefully, including water levels and seasonal indicators such as the positioning of various astronomical data to ensure a smooth planting season. Failure to be prepared, could mean hunger or starvation.
Note scholar Trigger below says that the mere silt of the Nile was not the key to farming. Nile silt yielded a small level of nutrients. What kept Egyptian fields in business was fallow periods, crop rotation, and the manure of tens of thousands of farm animals, managed for just that purpose, among others. Oh and on top of all this, there were quite a few building projects going on.. There was no "easy time" to be had in the agriculture of the ancient Nile Valley..
![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)
