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Spit and Blood and Bones

universityofcalifornia.edu

Let us suppose, just to test a hypothesis,
that a community of people, farmers mostly,
and the people around them who made their living
buying and selling farm goods, and providing coffee shops,
decided that the farm labor shortage could be solved
by buying slaves from Africa, or somewhere.
The slaves might be expensive, but the labor would be cheap.

That's what they did, in this hypothetical example.

Getting slaves with dark skins was helpful.
It made the slaves easy to identify.
It made it easy to think that people with dark skin
were somehow not . . . not quite as "advanced" as others;
not quite as human, you could say.

Mari and I have been having fun recently
deciding to order gene tests from one of the companies
that promise to show our genetic heritage.
We have decided that we will order from different firms
to see what kind of information can be derived
from what we assume are similar ethnic heritages.

Personally, I have been hoping to discover
that I am part Neanderthal or Denisovan.
Mostly, I want to tell all my siblings that I have found
the secret to what makes us such a great family.

You know, we recent Europeans are superior
to our genetic ancestors; much smarter, better looking,
and that we have invented vastly superior gods,
just like us.

I think I should like to have scientific evidence
that I am partly what we have learned to scorn:
a Neanderthal.

We had a Civil War that threatened to split this country
into slave-owning and slave-ending, and just barely
held the Union together, ending slavery.  Overtly.
Not attitudinally.  We continued to think that
people who looked different were . . . oh, admit it! . . . inferior.
Dangerous.  Not the kind one would like to marry,
or be related to.  Worse, even, than finding a Neanderthal relative.

We like to pretend that all that shit is behind us.
We have left simple-minded White superiority behind us, and
replaced it with more sophisticated White superiority.
You don't have to own slaves to believe you are a superior form
of human being:  a noble, White, Christian, cocktail drinker.

I strongly suspect that our DNA tests will document
that every single human being on earth descended
from ancestral human origins in Africa; that our African ancestors
walked and waded and sailed to places all over the earth.
I have no doubt that some of my relatives, far back--and a few
still walking around--have evidence for a blooming bush
of barely human ancestors.  After all, we are all related;
all from Africa originally, all tempted to think that
our own particular reflections in the mirror show the image of god.

I don't know whether Neanderthals had yet invented gods.
They did put flowers into some of their graves,
and I have no doubt that the power of a raging river
and the fright of a thunderbolt sky scared them.
I am quite sure they invented ghosties and ghoulies
and three-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night,
and that when they did get around to inventing gods
that the gods just happened to look pretty much like them.

Our fear of people who look different is understandable.
Not even genetic test results will erase our unease
that the humans who did not look like us, dress and eat
and speak and walk like us, were quite likely to be dangerous,
even if, strictly speaking, they were our cousins.

So our heads get all screwed up.  We invent stories--"reasons"
we prefer to call them--for the superiority of our own kind of human beings.
Instead of just affirming what we know to be true--that we are prejudiced--
we become creative in finding ways to think of ourselves
as the flowers of god's creation, even when we know that we weren't created:
we came a long, winding way, to gradually become what we variably are.

I am hoping for a nugget or two of evidence,
in my own spit and blood and bones,
to show me the way we have come.

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