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Guns, Germs, Steel, and Skin

David Duke is a white nationalist, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who denies the Holocaust, and is a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  That ought to be enough to embarrass anyone to silence, but it isn't.  David Duke said, recently:

"We are losing our country. . . . We are being outnumbered and outvoted in our own country."

Obviously, David Duke (I am reluctant to call him, "Mister" Duke.  It sounds honorable.) is worried about the time when white people will not, alone, constitute a majority of American citizens, and American voters.  We white people, while still constituting almost half of the population, will be slightly outnumbered by the mix of black people, brown people, and indigo blue people who constitute America.  We will, in other words, while still having a white population that is proportionately larger than our numbers in the whole world, not be quite so disproportionately in charge.

There is no consensus about who is white and who is not.  Some statisticians count Mexicans as white, for instance, and those counts suggest that whites constitute about 15% of the world population.  Other ways of counting, equally non-precise, say that Europeans constitute only 7% of all humans.  In any case, whites are a small proportion of human beings in the world.  A lot of us are gathered in Europe and here, and we keep looking at each other as if we were everything worth being.

Jared Diamond wrote a book titled, "Guns, Germs, and Steel", that won a Pulitzer Prize that asserts that Europeans became powerful in the world, not because they were white, or christian, or blue-eyed, or anything other than a coming together of some circumstances, which included having guns, the effect of certain diseases, and having found themselves living on top of the makings of steel.  People who think like David Duke believe that just having a shortage of skin pigment makes us Princes of the Earth, God's favorite people, and the rightful rulers of anything we damned well want.

How is that for deluded arrogance?

Of course any nation that finds itself with a white majority will eventually discover that about 90% of the rest of the world has better sun-screen protection than we do.  And it is not just pigment that is spread everywhere.  So are the brains, and the art, the beauty and the bestiality, and the resources we all need.

What I do not understand is how it is possible to have any brains, at all, any information, at all, any eyesight, at all, and to think that white people are superior, or inferior, or anything, at all, other than part of what it is to be human.

Nobody gave Europe, or North America, to white people.  Skin color does not hold title to dirt and rocks and running water.

I am white, and I was just outvoted in my own country by mostly white people who selected a lamentable man to be our President.  That is what happens when people vote.  Some real Americans are white, and some are not.  It is not, or ought not, to be about skin color.  It ought to be about making America great.  Skin color is interesting, or not, but it won't make anything great except bigotry.  If it is all about skin color, it will not be great:  it will be ignorant, and savage, going to the people who have guns, germs, and steel.

That is how, as an example, all the gold in the Americas made Spain rich.  

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