True Colors
We white folks aren’t white. We’re pink, shading into beet red when we’re angry or drunk or both, tan when we’ve spent some time in the sun, gray when we’re dying, and olive drab when we’ve been dead for awhile. Only Vladimir Putin is really white, but he’s a vampire, not a human being (ask the Crimeans) who uses sun lotion with really good UV blockers whenever he has to go outdoors during the day. Donald Trump is orange, but he’s not a human being either (ask any woman he’s molested). People say his skin is that color because he spends too much time in his tanning bed, but I think he’s got pumpkin DNA: consider the fact that his head is as hollow as a jack o’ lantern.
Black folks aren’t black. The darkest one I ever met was from Congo, and his ebony skin was tinged with hickory. African-Americans, because their female ancestors were routinely raped by their pink masters during slavery, cover a wide spectrum of colors, from mahogany to amber. Native Americans don’t have red skins; Hispanics aren’t uniformly brown; Indians range from chestnut to umber; Japanese, Koreans and Chinese are ivory, as are Inuits; the people of Oceania are the color of cordovan leather; and old rockers like Elton John and Mick Jagger are an eerie shade of magenta.
These facts make absolutely no difference to most of us. Even today, we cling to forms of tribalism that haven’t changed since the Pleistocene Epoch. People who look like me, yay! People who don’t, boo! And when we invented religion, our xenophobia got even worse. My god’s bigger than your god, and if you won’t bow down and worship him, I’ll kill you.
Hence, people who believe in an angry old man who lives in the sky and smites everyone who mixes meat and dairy, hate people who believe in another angry old man who lives in another part of the sky, and smites those who drink alcohol and let women drive. People who worship hundreds of gods and goddesses detest people who follow the teachings of a guy who said that we’d all get along a lot better if we gave up our imaginary friends in the sky and concentrated on improving life on Earth. And there are people who believe that the most powerful god of them all came down here two thousand years ago and raped a woman. What’s even more unsettling about that faith is that the son she bore grew up to become a wandering guru teaching compassion and tolerance, but after he was killed for questioning authority, his angry followers forgot the peace ‘n’ love message, set up their own authoritarian religion, and spread the word that their slain leader was going to come back to life and get revenge by destroying the world.
My own faith is less bloody-minded. I’m a Pastafarian, belonging to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose fundamental tenet is Freedom Of Appetite. In the past,m we Pastafarians have been a genial lot, but I’m sorry to report that a schism developed recently between the Fettuccinians and the Linguinians, over the Al Dente controversy. Whether or not gastronomic war can be avoided depends on how the Parmigianinian Intervention shakes out.
Given the bone-headed idiocy of human beings, it’s no wonder that we cling to our racism. And even within races, prejudices involving skin color exist. The Han Chinese spend a lot of money each year on products that lighten their skin so that they won’t be suspected of being Mongolian or Manchurian barbarians, yet they sneer at people of European descent, because we’re too pale. With African-Americans, a reverse prejudice obtains: blacker is better, and those with lighter skins are put down for being “yellow.” However, in Louisiana and the French-speaking Caribbean islands, light-skinned Créole people generally occupy higher socio-economic positions than their darker cousins.
And so it goes. Today, with an openly racist pumpkinhead squatting in the White House, the peaceful Black Lives Matter movement is opposed by violent white supremacists waving the Confederate flag, and the Ku Klux Klan is opening new Klaverns all over the country. Conversely, hatred of Caucasian people is common among African-Americans, for good reason.
As an example of racial prejudice carried to an absurdly picky degree, consider this: in southern New Hampshire, where my pink wife and I have a vacation house, old-money WASPs whose ancestors arrived in the late 17th century don’t like the Finns, who settled here in the early 19th, and have since prospered, particularly in the construction trades. This WASPian animosity may be due to envy of the Finns’ economic success, or resentment of their clannishess, or simply because established tribes feel compelled to find something wrong with newcomers so they can hate them. In any case, some years ago a friend of ours held a birthday party for her two kids, and another mother pointed at a girl with blue eyes and yellow hair, saying, “She’s Finnish. You can always tell them: they’re blonder.” And she meant it to hurt.
However, there may be a solution to the color conflict. About 10,000 years ago, at the end of the most recent Ice Age, homo sapiens sapiens migrated via land bridges from Africa to Eurasia, where the species encountered homo sapiens neanderthalensis. The Neanderthals were physically different from the newcomers: more powerfully built, taller, possessed of heavy brow ridges and receding chins. But they had many of the same adaptive skills as h. sap. sap. They were tool users, though their tools were crude compared to those of early modern men. They supported themselves by hunting, and used fire to cook, or at least sear, the meat of the game they killed with their flint-tipped spears. They wandered in small family groups, took shelter in caves, and occasionally built freestanding yurts with rock walls and roofs made of animal skins and tree branches. There is evidence that they buried their dead with some ceremony. Though their crania sloped sharply back from their brows, indicating that their brains lacked frontal lobes, the overall capacity of their skulls was larger that that of their rivals. In particular, their cerebellums and occipital lobes were larger than ours. Those areas control physical coordination, body awareness, hearing, and vision, so they were agile, sharp-eyed, and sharp-eared. Since their noses were bridgeless, with wide nostrils, like those of the great apes, their sense of smell was keener than ours. It was once believed that due to the construction of their hard palates, they were incapable of complicated speech, but further research shows that they could form phonemes, add vowels to make words, and, presumably, talk in complete sentences. They had fully-developed cortex and neocortex structures, so their long-term memories must have been extensive. They could add to their stores of knowledge, and they may even have had lively imaginations. It cannot be said, then, that they were less intelligent than we are.
It has been suggested that because the Neanderthals had been living in Eurasia for many generations, and had adapted to the cold conditions, their skins were much paler than those of the African migrants. They might have had red, light brown, or even white-blond hair, like the Saami of Finland and northern Russia, and the Ainu of Hokkaido. They certainly knew more about survival in a frigid climate than the Africans. And because the smaller, less robust newcomers posed little threat to them, after an initial period of conflict (the Neanderthals may have been cannibals, which would explain our folk tales about ogres and giants – “Fee, fie, foe, fum! I smell the blood of a dark-skinned one!”), they assimilated them into their own population. Thousands of years of interbreeding ensued, until the physical differences between the two sub-species of homo sapiens had disappeared. Today, every person in the world has some Neanderthal DNA.
So I submit that mass miscegenation will end our current race wars. We must start interbreeding on a massive scale, until everyone is beige.