Two things need to be noted here.  First, interbreeding is common place, it 
is the terms on which it takes place that are important.  (An Indian 
journalist who specializes in the 'Pariahs' [untouchables] told me that the 
two things about untouchables that are not untouchable are sex and money.) 
Thus, Cro Magnon and Neanderthal interbreeding might have taken a number of 
forms.  We will have to know more to evaluate the meaning of the process.

Second, some religious traditions (I will not be more specific than that) 
contain traditions of martyrdom.  One might even call it human sacrifice. 
Once emancipation took away the individual cash value of black people from 
whites both as individuals and as a collectivity, lynching seems to have 
started in earnest.  Why did community after community, chiefly in the South 
but certainly not exclusively there, go through these public rituals of 
human disgrace, mutilation, and murder?  Why didn't the Christian churches 
unify in opposition to this particular form of brutality?  Why has the 
practice not completely died out now while we pass through what some 
historians have called "the Fourth Great Awakening?"

Just asking.

Harold S. Forsythe
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stephan A. Schwartz" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2007 6:30 PM
Subject: Re: The Law & Lynching


Joanne --

Racism is too universal, across time, culture, and geography to be
only a learned trait.  Reinforced by culture, and self-perpetuating
to be sure, but not only that.  There are deeper factors in play. I
know very few psychologists, and only a few anthropologists who even
think in these terms — the enduring effects of multiple-hominoid
competition. Yet I think the case can be made that this must be
considered a powerful force. If national character can be formed on a
scale of hundreds of years, imagine the effects of a scale covering
centuries of millennia.  If, to the contrary, you know of such a
literature  I would be very interested in having you steer me in that
direction.

My point is that there is a leverage point, a default setting, as it
were, to fear and hate the other, whether the other is Irish,
Chinese, Catholic, African or whatever. There are many reasons
Africans were enslaved, not least their genetic resistance to
malaria, but that is just a particular cultural manifestation of a
deeper impulse.  Just as the fear of African sexuality, at its
deepest point, was the harmonic of the fear Cro Magnon and
Neanderthal felt about cross-breeding. Yet, during the 10,000 years
of competitive habitation, it did happen. [See  Erik Trinkaus's, of
Washington University, paper  in Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, 15 Jan2007.] Individual choice always trumps impulse.
Isn't that great, and reassuring to know? Which is why, regardless of
political arguments, I am proud of the fact that America in my life
time has changed for the better.  No one seems to mention it but if
not an absolute majority, at least a sizeable minority of the iconic
figures in our culture today are of African descent: Colin Powell,
Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Wood, Michael Jordan, Condelezza Rice, and on
and on.  Perhaps because I have so many criticisms of our current
culture, I particularly value the things that are working.

-- Stephan



On 30 Jun 2007, at 17:48, qvarizona wrote

> An interesting subject, Stephan, and while I agree that fear is at  the 
> root of some of today's racism --after all, it's what the  psychologists 
> have been telling us for years-- I'm not so sure it  had much of a part in 
> the racism practiced against  blacks in the  south or Jews in NYC and 
> Irish in Boston,  or for that matter, the  relatively small amount  of 
> racism displayed when I was growing up  in the central (inner-city) 
> district of Seattle during and shortly  after WW II.
>
> I also agree with most psychologists and anthropologists who   suggest 
> that any fear seen in racism is a learned trait, and not   hard-wired into 
> our physiology.
>
> Joanne
>
>
> "Stephan A. Schwartz" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Fear of the 
> other, which is what racism is at its core, appears to be
> hard wired into our physiology, and I think this is a very important
> consideration that unfortunately almost always goes unmentioned in
> discussions such as this one.  Although it can be overcome, and has
> been as the improvement in race relations in the U.S. makes clear,
> this is volitional — an act of will. The aggregate of thousands upons
> thousands of individual choices collectively expressing cultural/
> social will.  The revulsion we feel today about slave owning is
> something that only those multiple individual choices made possible.
>
> It helps me, and perhaps it will help others on this list, to realize
> that for approximately 200,000 years or, roughly, 40 times longer
> that the historical record there were multiple hominoid species
> (humans, their fossil ancestors, and the great apes  all belong to
> the superfamily Hominoidea) in competition on the earth, the best
> known of which were the Neanderthals and Cro Magnons, although the
> evidence suggests there were other "archaic" hominoids in competition
> as well.  They collectively roamed through the Middle Paleolithic
> together until around 35,000 B.P., when Homo Sapien -- us -- finally
> emerged. Fearing the other, for those many millennia obviously had
> evolutionary survival implications.  Those who made fast decisions on
> the basis of appearance tended to survive, and their gene pool
> continued.  Those who didn't died, as did their genetic line. I take
> considerable comfort in the fact that in my lifetime alone the
> dominant American view on race and gender has radically changed, and
> that this change has been for the better.
>
> -- Stephan
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
>  Get your own web address.
>  Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business.