history

When The Levee Breaks.

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Having written a paragraph I’m particularly proud of, I got lost in finding something to so that I could keep pace. I reached for one of my favorites, “When The Levee Breaks” done by Led Zeppelin.

Like most things I like, it has a history that I’ve drilled down into. This song just drives through emotion, plodding through the mud with purpose, with a steady rhythm regardless of what comes. It’s grounding. You’re in the ‘suck’, but you keep moving at a very primal level.

The history goes back to 1927.

The Great Mississippi flood of 1927 has a pretty thorough Wikipedia page. It was the most destructive river flood in the United States. Imagine 27,000 square miles in water up to 30 feet in depth. 500 dead, 630,000 people affected. Population density was lower then.

It’s a song born of, “well this sucks, but I’ll make it through”.

We “Others”

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‘Some Other Race’, or as I say, ‘Other’, is a growing demographic as I mentioned yesterday. Had I not been given as much resistance in discussion, I would have gone along thinking that

A Colorful History

The United States Constitution (Article I, Section 2) established representation in the U.S. House of Representatives was based on population determined by census. It’s a very interesting read – I encourage the reader to follow links I provide to get a feel for the broader picture. In writing this, I am writing specifically about the growing demographic that is of ‘Some Other Race’, or ‘Other’.

Of course, the census was quite different in 1790. The questions asked were:

  • Name of head of family
  • Number of free white males age 16 years and upwards, including head of family
  • Number of free white males under 16 years old
  • Number of free white females, including head of family
  • Number of all other free persons [free African-Americans]
  • Number of slaves

This basically slotted everyone into one of 3 categories: free whites, all other free persons and slaves. To date, while there are discussions about other races, the one that pulls all the oxygen out of the room is just the same from the outside looking in. There is reason for this, but with such a growing demographic as ‘Other’ has been, the choice to use ‘some other race’ is increasingly a larger minority made up of many types of people.

‘Free Whites’ was a part of the 1790 Nationality Act. Only white, male property owners could naturalize and acquire the status of citizens. Women, people who were not recognized as white and indentured servants could not. In so doing, a legal category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship” was created and racial restriction for citizenship was not completely eliminated until 1952. If you were not eligible for citizenship, you weren’t permitted to own property, be represented in court, have public employment and voting. At this time this affected a lot of Asians.

Mulatto was added in 1850, bringing the categories to 4, and it was all based on whites and blacks. By 2010, there were 63 possible race categories. Of related interest and reading is the ‘One Drop Rule‘, which culturally still seems to be used. We’ll get back to that.

From 2016, we have this:

“Something unusual has been taking­­­­­­ place with the United States Census: A minor category that has existed for more than 100 years is elbowing its way forward. “Some Other Race,” a category that first entered the form as simply “Other” in 1910, was the third-largest category after “White” and “Black” in 2010, alarming officials, who are concerned that if nothing is done ahead of the 2020 census, this non-categorizable category of people could become the second-largest racial group in the United States…”

“The Rise of the American ‘Others'”, Sowmiya Ashok, The Atlantic, August 27th, 2016

It’s awkward to say that ‘Other’ is a racial group, which presents the inherent bias in a system designed to track people by race – a cheap attempt at color coding humanity into things to manage. As Kermit the Frog might say, it’s not easy being green.

From 2018, we have:

…The United States census breaks our country into six general racial categories: White; Black; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; American Indian or Alaska Native; and Some Other Race. “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” is treated not as a race but as an ethnicity — a question asked separately. So someone may be White (Hispanic) or Black (Hispanic) but not simply Hispanic. As a result, many Hispanics check “White” or, increasingly, “Some Other Race.” This ill-defined category is what mixed-race Americans, like me — half Burmese, half Luxembourgian-Irish — often check. It might just as well be called “Generally Brown.” Today, the third-largest racial group in America is “Some Other Race” — and it is made up overwhelmingly of Hispanics…

“The Americans Our Government Won’t Count“, Alex Wagner, New York Times, March 30th, 2018.

It ends up that there may have been some padding in the statistics, too.

“…It is also no coincidence that the reforms the administration is resisting would have decreased the number of American “Whites.” Census research showed that when presented with the proposed changes, Hispanics identified as “Hispanic” alone at significantly higher rates than they did as “White (Hispanic)” or “Some Other Race (Hispanic).” The same was true for residents of Middle Eastern origin, who, when given a category of their own, mostly chose it over “White.”

This would have exposed the fact that the category of “Whites” has been artificially inflated, eroding its primacy at a time when whiteness — of the decidedly European strain — has gained new currency…”

The Americans Our Government Won’t Count“, Alex Wagner, New York Times, March 30th, 2018. (ibid).

The article goes on to say that to claim to be either Hispanic or Middle Eastern in the United States is a political act. I don’t know about that. I don’t know how many ‘Other’ are this and that or the other or something completely different. It’s completely different based on what someone is willing to identify as to a government, to offices, and to apply for grants at a financial aid office.

From 2021:

“…What was once the country’s third-largest racial category in 2000 and 2010 outpaced “Black” last year to become the second-largest after “White” — and a major data problem that could hinder progress towards racial equity over the next 10 years…”

“1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem“,
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR, September 30th, 2021.

That article goes on to give the history of ‘Other’ in the U.S. Census. First used in 1910, it was the job of census workers who assigned people to a race by observation, and were instructed to label those that they couldn’t recognize as ‘other’, and write down the race. One of the bureau’s 1910 census reports even included Hindus as a race: These would be East Indians, from India, in an era when Native Americans were still called ‘Indians’, the Columbus idiocy that would not die quietly.

In 1960, the bureau allowed U.S Residents to self-report their racial identities, and in 2000 the checkbox came along.1

…”For a long time, there was the sense that there wasn’t anything wrong with the question, but rather that Hispanics didn’t understand the question. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow,’ ” says Clara Rodriguez, a sociologist at Fordham University and author of Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States. “‘Some other race’ was something to be taken seriously, not to be dismissed as a misunderstanding on the part of the Hispanic population.”…

“1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem“,
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR, September 30th, 2021. (ibid)

I have no doubt that some people who identify themselves as ‘other’ are of Hispanic origin, but it’s hard to say that all of them are. In fact, there may be some, like me, who just think it’s an insulting question, but there would be many other individuals with their own reasoning. What’s the incentive for filling out a form and telling them what you identify as? This seems to be an application of the ‘One Drop Rule’, as previously mentioned.

Generally speaking, people like to belong. People announce their love to the government through marriage licenses, so announcing their tribe to the government makes about as much sense. Yet, the numbers of ‘Some Other Race’ have been consistently growing, and I have yet to be invited to an ‘Others’ meeting.

The one thing that connects ‘Others’ is the one thing that divides them: The U.S. Census and it’s use of race. It underlines how silly the system is, where people either can’t or won’t claim a race in the census. Humanity is a melting pot.

It is mildly disturbing that in it’s bid to be more granular, the U.S. Census Bureau is finding nationalities in ‘some other race’ respondents. A Brazilian could be any combination of heritages, but since I know Guyana a bit better and they are mentioned, the majority of the population of Guyana is of a mix of African descendants (from slavery) and Indian (Indentured Laborers), and so those reporting themselves as Guyanese could be either one, both, a mixture, indigenous, or even of majority European descent. During World War II, many people blended into South America in various nations.

The system is as cleanly cut as what race is – a social construct that was originally created to allow some to be ‘greater’ than others.

It begs the question of whether race is itself still a pertinent way to track people. It only benefits those that already have purchase or the capacity to purchase, not those who do not. It’s clearly an administrative nightmare, built on the politics of the moment. To what end?

It ends up that ‘Other’ is a pretty big data problem for a system built on counting how many of each race as well, something that potentially can skew a lot of other things.

A Thought On Democracy.

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By Saioa López, Lucy van Dorp and Garrett Hellenthal – López, S., van Dorp, L., & Hellenthal, G. (2015). Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate. Evolutionary Bioinformatics Online, 11(Suppl 2), 57–68. http://doi.org/10.4137/EBO.S33489 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844272/, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50508700

Those of us in democracies think that they’re the best way of doing things that we have found so far. We tend to think that democracy started off when it was first called democracy by the Greeks.

Yet, if we look throughout human history, we see what democracy looks like.

However you believe humans showed up, be it by deity or evolution, the common thread is that humans started somewhere. From that somewhere, humans scattered all over.

We don’t talk about why because we don’t know why.

We could have fun speculating. Maybe there wasn’t enough food in an area. Maybe one group migrated away from another group because they couldn’t agree on which end of the spear to use when hunting, where the group that used the wrong end was erased by history because of their stupidity. Maybe they couldn’t agree on how many stones to throw at an adulterer. Who knows? The point is that a group made a decision to leave and voted with their feet.

There’s a reason we use this term.

This was democracy. If you didn’t like how things were going you could leave. You could wander off that way in the belief and/or hope that things would get better over there, and maybe it had something with the society where you were.

Humanity did this until it started running into each other again. Our technology advanced, and we could cover greater distances than our ancestors did, and we could do it faster.

Suddenly, there’s nowhere to go. We run into situations these days where nations that are democratic are often split close to 50/50 on decisions, and nobody can leave. No group can get together and form it’s own nation-state, really, because that would require every other nation-state to identify that it is a nation-state.

Nomadic humanity has nowhere to go. We don’t talk about this because there’s quite simply nowhere to go. We can’t go anywhere without bumping into other humans, and there’s always some reason that we can’t get along that magically seems to reinforce those borders where people who are dressed the same wearing rubber gloves. There is a ritual to crossing borders, a ritual which has become more and more complex because people find comfort within their boundaries.

You can get political asylum, but the people within the nation-state you’re going to have to agree that you need it.

We have people that have built walls around other people, then complain about how they behave within those walls even if they don’t agree with the way people do things within those walls. That never ends well unless the wall comes down.

What are these borders worth to us? I’m sure I don’t know. They’re worth it to some people.

For now…

Linguistic Oddities

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I was sitting having coffee with a few friends, and of course the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel, with lots of civilians getting caught in the crossfire, came up. I mentioned it’s a problem no one seemed to want to compromise on, citing UN Resolution 181, and mentioning truthfully that it’s such a mess that it doesn’t seem like anyone was as right as they wanted to be.

It’s a mess. I don’t know enough, I’m not invested enough, I can’t trust any news source because even the news seems polarized at this point. If you say one side is doing something wrong, people are quick to say you’re supporting the other side. I don’t support the killing or injuring of civilians, so I don’t neatly have a side to pick. It’s not as clean cut as Ukrainians defending their borders against Russia. Criticize Israel, suddenly you’re branded as anti-semitic and people with pitchforks and torches appear out of nowhere. Criticize Hamas, much the same happens. Geography matters in this regard, and since I’m not in the continental United States I do hear a lot more of the anti-American and thus anti-Israel rhetoric as well.

It’s safer to say nothing, really. To do nothing. Yet a history of that has pretty much gotten the world to where it is, and so it gets violent because we didn’t address things when we should have. That’s the story of the world.

It’s a mess, and this post isn’t about that mess but rather an interesting way a meaning has changed for at least some, arguably most, people in English. This is an academic exercise.

Someone brought up that the word ‘semitic’ actually was related to the semitic languages, and that it had become bastardized to mean ‘Jewish’. Since I’m pretty interested in words, I dug in. Here I am, over half a century spinning on the planet, learning that.

Semitic Languages.

Semitic languages are languages that derived from Afro-Asiatic languages, which to me demonstrated how ignorant I was on the topic because I’ve never traipsed through the history of language.

The major Semitic languages are:

  • Arabic,
  • Amharic (Spoken in Ethiopia)
  • Aramaic (Spoken in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Israel and Syria)
  • Hebrew,
  • Maltese and
  • Tigre (Spoken in Sudan)

There are, according to different places, dozens of Semitic languages. Aramaic, being the ‘Language of Jesus‘, surprised me with how widespread it’s usage still is. The world is very big and our thoughts on it almost always too small.

Therefore, it’s peculiar that we use it in the context of only one, Hebrew, these days, but apparently not everyone does otherwise I would not have been told about it. In learning this, I had to dig in.

The Modern Use of Semitic.

These days it seems the most popular use of the word semitic is in ‘anti-semitic’, used to say that something or someone is against Jews for some reason. I’m not, but I have met people who are so I know it’s a real thing.

The use of ‘anti-semitism’ first showed up with Willhelm Marr. Marr’s theories would be a part of the foundation of the genocide the world knew in the Nazi era based on pseudoscience. Marr later allegedly renounced anti-semitism according to Moshe Zimmerman, an Israeli historian.

Still, he introduced the pseudo-scientific racial component into that period. It’s pseudo-science because race is a social contruct and isn’t very scientific at all.

It boggles the mind that we’re still using an inaccurate phrase coined by someone who helped pave the way to the Holocaust, but there it is. We don’t like swastikas or reminders of that terrible part of human history, yet we retain one of it’s labels in it’s original form.

I’m not going to say that we should stop using it. That would be like trying to change the wind by blowing and flapping my hands in the opposite direction, but it shows how things persist even when they’re wrong.

In fact, one could argue that the modern use of the phrase ‘anti-semitic’ is ‘anti-semitic’ in both the modern context of the use of the word (loosely, ‘against Jews’) based on who coined the phrase in the first place, or even against everyone else who speaks a semitic language other than Hebrew and is being afforded no context.

Speaking for myself, from now on if people have a problem with Jews, I’ll use ‘anti-Jewish’, but I won’t wander around correcting people.

Putting that all into context, we have two linguistically Semitic people at war and only one side is considered Semitic, which seems odd too. I don’t have answers. I’m just boggled by humanity once again, using words that could be connecting people but instead using it in divisive ways.

We are such strange creatures.


The Line.

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I’ve written about all of this before, and yet it’s still something that amazes me if we imagine through history.

You’re born into an environment that’s artificial beyond the natural challenges. Nowadays, natural challenges are rare, it’s humans we mostly have to worry about, those creatures like ourselves. They are like ourselves, remember that.

A little over 2,000 years ago, you might have been born into the wonderful life of being a peon – the odds are much better for that than what many written stories and movies suggest. Statistically, less people on the planet.

The peon could run away somewhere else and disappear, or move to the top of the mountain to avoid people only to have them show up asking for advice. That might have been a nice option for the hardy individuals.

Nobility, too, was born into – like wealth is born into today.

So let’s go further back. Let’s say your parents were hanging out with the crew drawing pictures of deer in the caves, your mother did a swish of the tail just so and… 9 months later you show up. Childbirth wasn’t very easy then for mother or child. Suddenly, you’re in a tribe, including that whacky guy who keeps wandering around chewing on poppies. What’s for dinner? What the tribe gets.

What the tribe gets. So that’s pretty much changed, hasn’t it? How often do you hear of a group of people born into a group working together? I know, in a perfect world we might call that family, but in a family the goals aren’t always aligned – unless it’s Disney. Everyone has their own thing going on.

What else?

If you go back far enough, the focus was on ‘staying alive because our environment will kill us’.

Slowly, we pushed back on that environment. Thousands of years later, nobody’s worried about the environment hurting us. It’s the other way around, but we’re more worried about all the civilization stuff that comes with it – paying bills and other things have become more important to use as individuals than worrying about the environment killing us – and us killing the environment that will kill us.

When did that happen? When did we cross that line? I wonder.

Of Gordian Knots.

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I started watching ‘Ancient Empires‘ and in the very first episode found myself shaking my head when it came to the story of the Gordian Knot. I’m not a historian, I don’t play one on the Internet, but something about the observations about the mindset related to Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot in the city of Gordium.

The background they gave on Alexander was of a young man who grew up in the shadow of his father, was schooled in warfare, and who after his father was killed was proclaimed King and decided to use his authority to go ‘civilize’ the Persians. These were less politically correct times, now we ‘give people freedom’.

Anyway, he shows up in Gordium and looks at this knot. The legend was that whoever undid the knot would become the ruler of Asia, and I imagine Alexander understood well the nature of establishing his personal identity to everyone.

Personally, I wouldn’t have gone with ‘Great’, I would have gone with ‘Awesome’ because of the alliteration – but that makes the point. I’m looking at it as I am now, not as it was then.

So as they tell it in the documentary, he ‘looked at the problem in a new way’ and ‘solved the problem in an unexpected way’.

First of all, I’m pretty sure that there were people who just didn’t try. It’s pretty hard to be the ruler of Asia while you’re tending your goats. Next, this culture of not trying was likely enforced by some that wouldn’t allow people to try because the world was like that then. It’s like that now too, but we won’t get into that.

Lastly, there’s this King who has an invading army going through Persia and he has chosen a path to employ his will on areas he’s conquering – the sword.

So is it really that surprising that Alexander took a look at the knot, said, “screw this” and pulled his sword out and took at least one whack at it? He wasn’t solving an impossible problem with some ingenious solution – he was solving a problem in a manner he was comfortable with, that he clearly reached for in his problem-solving toolbox.

When someone just cuts through a knot with a sword at the head of an invading army, no one is going to say, “Umm – hey, wait, you were supposed to untie it” either. Maybe someone did, and maybe their body is in an unmarked grave somewhere. We don’t really know.

We tend to romanticize history. We like a good story. Because of that, we sometimes miss a good point. In this case, use what you have on hand and that you’re comfortable with to solve a problem and do it as quickly as possible so that you can move on to the next problem.

Creative? Nope. He just used what was handy, and had the audacity to do it in a way that maybe others thought of but could not do because of social standing, or because they decided they had enough trouble dealing with their herd and family and didn’t feel the need to impose their will on the world.

Alexander the OK, though, doesn’t really have that ring to it, does it? No. To warrant that title, people rationalize all sorts of things about him that may not be true.

If I’m staring at a knot to be undone and happen to have a sword in my belt, I think I’d take a whack at it myself. Wouldn’t you? I bet you’ve done it in your lifetime without even thinking of the Gordian Knot.

Seas of Humanity

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_JMB6699LoIf I had been born a few hundred years ago, I would likely have been on a ship staring out into the horizon, my body rolling to the waves, heading to places not on known maps if only to get away from all that traps us.

Some people are comfortable in what society dictated before we were born, where it is all well defined by those who came before, a world which worked for those that defined it and their descendants. So much of our world works that way, and as humanity grows older the clay of systems becomes brick, hardened, inflexible, immobile.

A child born today will find in adulthood that they pay taxes that were agreed upon by others long ago, that they may worship in a religion that while they may be faithful is an accident of geography, that they have more or less opportunity due to a socioeconomic status that they had nothing to do with. Even our bodies conspire against us in this way, subject to genetics that some deny even as they breed animals. Few, if any, break out of these shells, and as time goes by it becomes harder and harder to break out of them.

In fact, simply traveling without permission from authorities we didn’t create across borders we didn’t draw to see things in other places is illegal, something I myself was born into, but which I have watched become more and more harsh. The nomadic roots of our human past find themselves in shrinking containers and, when the container cracks under the pressure, someone dutifully comes along and mends the cracks with gold to make the container that much more attractive to those outside, but less bearable for those within.

We live lives where we dig coal, and for those few of us fortunate, we dig coal in ways that we enjoy, and at points when we look up from our task and dare to look to the horizon, someone or something cracks the whip to keep our noses down. And so we go, nose to the coal grindstone of ‘life’, in the hope that the light at the end of the tunnel will draw nearer as someone long ago promised.

A lifetime of slaving at something or the other, or many things, to be rewarded later when we are old. The 50 year old in the convertible corvette, what’s left of his hair blowing in the wind, the tired and empty joke of decades ago.

Nature reclaimsI’ve been left in this life rediscovering elder things, repurposing that which came before, exploring the abandoned as if it were new only because it was new to me, sharing it with others who found it new for themselves. Photographing things, writing about things, and watching parts of a past we romanticize only because it is abandoned, maybe because inside we feel abandoned by the gilded cages we live in – some more gilded than others.

I do not know. I do feel.

There is little rationality we find in such feelings in systems that tell us even how to feel – if we’re a bit too different, if you rebel just a bit too much against the system, we are either criminal or someone with some form of mental or emotional disorder, rarely both, and based on… things we find we are unable to control a few steps beyond the facade.

Any port in a stormWith all of this mind, I close my eyes at time and escape into the view of a bay with my gear packed, thinking of a world where I can sail away from what is established and able to push into the unknown, where the laws of nature outweigh the rules of the land, where it is unsafe and where one’s worth is gauged not by artificial structures but instead whether or not you are a good person in a storm.

And I open my eyes and find myself sailing through the artificial structures of society, dancing on the waves of what people have been taught to think and believe and how to think and believe, and realize I am sailing across the most dangerous waters we could create on maps that shift even as we cross latitudes and longitudes, having lost members of the steadfast crew as we moved to the horizon of humanity, and I find some comfort in that.

Peering Into The Past: Speyside, Tobago

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Speyside Estate, TobagoI stood there, reading a sign about who once owned Speyside Estate in Tobago, the smaller island of Trinidad and Tobago. It told me who owned it since 1773, how many slaves they had, and even how much compensation was received for the slaves upon Emancipation.

Context is an important thing – I was standing there, reading this, as people of African descent were keeping the area clean – Tobagonians employed, not slaves, but there was an unsettling feeling that I had just gone back in time. The cars didn’t belong.

It isn’t hard to imagine that the descendants of the slaves were now making a living keeping the area clean – pristine, in fact.  It’s hard to imagine that less than 100 years ago, slaves maintained this Estate. It’s an uncomfortable reminder, one I’d argue is necessary.

It’s necessary to feel that discomfort, I think, as an outsider looking in – a witness across the timeline of Tobago. It’s that discomfort, I expect, that causes people to react in different ways, even going so far as to attempt to misappropriate a history not their own by attempting to speak for those who have their own voice.

I cannot presume to know anything but that discomfort I initially felt as I read that sign and was surrounded by quiet people who gave me a wide berth, letting the outsider look upon their ancestors’ history. I can write as neither someone who owned nor was a slave, I am of different heritages, seafaring and indentured mixed in my blood.

My decision was to not to take pictures with them there, because there was no way I could find to capture that deep feeling I felt when I looked around. It’s all too easy to misinterpret. Some might have called it ‘art’.

At the time, in the moment, I saw it as a disservice to those around me.

I was the one that didn’t belong.

This was their history, this was a history that they maintained, this was something that through the centuries was maintained for reasons beyond me, but left for me to stand there and contemplate.

And it was beautiful. In fact, not having visited Tobago in 32 years, the pristine cleanliness of Tobago struck me, but here at this Estate there was a different sparkle, a tie to a time when things changed in 1833, where the numbers of owned people was noteworthy enough to keep in a ledger to later be reported on a green sign in front of me.

It was a shorthand for an embarassing aspect of humans and our capacity to treat others so… inhumanely.

History and NatureThe black and white history of the bricks was being replaced with the living color maintained by these Tobagonians. They had left here a lens through which to see their history, their culture, in the crumbling bricks of a retired watermill and it’s surrounds.

These scars of our histories are something some wish to remove. I do not hold an opinion on such things when it relates to history not my own, but what I will say is that I have a fondness for scars, I see a beauty in them not for the harshness of the wound but for the healing afterward.

It takes more strength to heal than to wound, and we need to remember what caused the scars to recognize the paths some have had to travel to be who they are, to be who they will be.

That discomfort was a gift.

The History Rhythm.

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Dance!The cliché, “History repeats itself”, is a dull echo of a George Santayana quote and is in itself, timeless – but it has a rhythm of usage throughout history, I’m sure.

I’m sure of this because the study of history is simply the study of mankind dancing to it’s own rhythm.

It’s apparently a really great beat to dance to, so mankind dances.

A culture repeats things, and all around the world, cultures repeated things. As the world began to change, bureaucracies were formed – largely to govern – but bureaucracies were to keep things from changing quickly1. And so they did, and so they do, and so they will. They govern the rhythm of a society, the rhythm the society dances too.

Maybe if we got better DJs we’d have better choreography.

1 Gleick, James Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon Books, 1999.