1949, according to this blog

What I could find out about 1949 from this blog:

In the US:

Things generally looked like this:

and this:

But with longer skirts, more styled hair and less streamlined cars.

White people: Many separate ideals from actions, dishonour curiosity, bow easily to authority, value power and money more dearly than human relations and love.

Jim Crow is still in full swing. So is the Tuskegee Experiment – even though a cure for syphilis has been found and laws have been passed to prevent cruel Nazi experiments.

Stereotypes: coons, mammies, piccaninnies, black brutes, tragic mulattoes, Exceptional Negroes, eating watermelon, etc. Many Whites think people of colour have no inner life – that the stereotypes are true.

Levittown in suburban New York in 1948: 82,000 people, not a single one Black.

The Third Enlargement of Whiteness: The sons and daughters of Italian and Jewish immigrants are moving to White suburbia with government help. In time Whites will accept them as one of their own.

Puerto Ricans come to New York in large numbers, the beginning of a wave of Latino immigration that lasts to this day.

Angela Davis is five. She cannot go to the amusement park because she is Black.

Charles Murray is six.

Chloe Wofford, 18, goes to Howard University.

Lorraine Hansberry, 19, is at the University of Wisconsin. There she becomes interested in left-wing politics, theatre, Ibsen and Strindberg.

Miles Davis, 23, is a jazz musician in New York.

Marilyn Monroe, 23, poses naked for photographer Tom Kelley. Four years later the pictures will appear in the first issue of Playboy, making her famous.

Malcolm Little, 24, a petty thief, is in prison. There he becomes interested in Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Mendel. He reads late into the night, learning as much Black history as any professor.

Lena Horne, 32, a Black beauty, is one of the best paid Black performers. She will soon be blacklisted by Hollywood.

Billie Holiday, 34, sings for Decca Records. She is arrested for possession of narcotics (heroin).

Paul Robeson, 51, one of the best known Black men in the world, speaks out against racism. The US government and Hollywood will soon come down on him.

The US dollar is worth 42 grams of silver.

Books:

• Lillian Smith, “Killers of the Dream”
• The Green Book adds Alaska, Canada, Mexico and Bermuda to its listing of businesses that will serve Blacks.

Songs:

• Big Jay McNeeley, “Blue Jays: The Deacon’s Hop”
• Paul Williams: “Hucklebuck”
• Gene Autry, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”

New words:

• race hustlers

World population map, 1950. Countries scaled to their relative populations. Uses 2010 borders.

The rest of the world:

Doris Lessing comes to London to become a writer.

George Orwell’s “1984″ comes out: Newspeak, crimestop, “He who controls the past controls the future.”

Mao overthrows the KMT in China, raising the red flag of communism in Tiananmen Square. The KMT killed 10.1 million. Mao will kill 35.2 million. He completes the Chinese takeover of East Turkestan, ending Uighur independence.

Newly independent: Israel, India, Pakistan.

The British and French empires have lost much of Asia but still rule large parts of Africa. France holds onto Madagascar after a crackdown in 1947 using Senegalese soldiers that kills 80,000.

See also:

• A Lesson Before Dying – set in 1948

Is race biologically real?

Frequency of the B type blood allele in native populations of the world

Is race biologically real? Or is it just a social construct?

In 1912 most Western scientists would have said yes, race is real, a fact of nature. They took it for granted as “obvious”. But in 2012 most geneticists and biological anthropologists would have answered no.

What seems to have changed their minds:

1. The Holocaust made “race” seem like a dangerous idea now that white people were getting killed. Many scientists began to question it.
2. Advances in genetics made race seem arbitrary, subjective and, at best, skin deep. It did not match what genes did.
3. The rise of colour-blind racism in the US, which seeks to address the issue of race by – not seeing it!
4. Out of Africa – once it became clear that humans came from Africa, not Europe or North Eurasia, scientists did not trade their white supremacism for black supremacism. Instead it was: “Race does not matter!”

Richard Lewontin

The genetic argument against race, as I understand it:

1. Race is skin deep, at best: Any two humans are 99.9% genetically the same, according to the Human Genome Project. And even that 0.1% is mostly made up of individual differences. Only 6.3% of that 0.1% comes from differences between races (Lewontin, 1972). Deep down we are pretty much all the same. You cannot, for example, tell a person’s race by looking at their brain or their heart.
2. Not race but gene frequencies: Races have pretty much the same set of genes, just in different frequencies. And even those frequencies do not always fall along the lines of race. Skin colour changes as you go north to south. The frequency of blood type B changes as you go east to west.
3. Race is in the eye of the beholder: There is no clear, objective way to divide living humans into races that is based on biology. Are there three races? Six? Seven? How do you tell? And where do you draw the lines between them? And why?

The US, just so you know, is kind of strange:

1. Most of its people come from the extreme ends of the Old World (China, Siberia, western Europe, West Africa).
2. Racial segregation keeps them separated into “races” (castes) long after they arrive. If Blacks and Whites were to mix freely, for example, you would not be able to tell them apart after a hundred years.

Some geneticists think race is real:

Neil Risch, c. 2005

Neil Risch in 2002, for example, took DNA samples from 3,636 people in the US and Taiwan. His computer program looked for certain genetic markers and, on its own, divided the sample into four clusters. When he compared the clusters to how people self-identified, he found this:

• Cluster A: 99.63% Caucasian,
• Cluster B: 99.65% East Asian,
• Cluster C: 100.00% African American,
• Cluster D: 97.62% Hispanic.

I find that hard to believe, particularly Cluster D.

Risch says there are five races worldwide: Caucasian, African, East Asian, Pacific Islander and Native American. Some people are a mix between these. Ethiopians and African Americans, for example, are part Caucasian, part African.

See also:

• Cavalli-Sforza on race and racism
• Race as a social construct
• race realism
  • HBD
• colour-blind racism
• Anti-black racism as a guide to science
• The map of white people – a good example of how race is not strictly biological

Notes towards a glossary for the fifth century

Ptolemy’s world map (c. AD 150) – the world as Augustine would have known it

If St Augustine, who lived 1,600 years ago, were to read my last post (put into Latin and Roman numerals, of course), what would he have trouble understanding?

At the very least he would get stuck on the following terms, here explained in terms that he did know. I put them in chronological order (year of first known use in parentheses):

1892 (525) – most numbers over 500 that have no units are years, counted from the birth of Christ. So, for example, “1892″ means the 1,892nd year after the birth of Christ. Not used till 525.

sergeant (c. 1200) – army rank for someone who leads, say, four to nine soldiers.

America (1507) – one of the main parts of the world, like Africa, Europe or Asia. It is west of Europe and Africa, across the ocean.

Hindu (by 1670) – someone from India, especially a follower of its main religion.

white person (by 1680) - someone who seems to be pure European by blood.

race (1774) – one of three to seven breeds of mankind as determined by physical differences in skin colour, hair, eyes, nose and shape of the head.

United States or US (1777) – a country in America, west across the ocean from Gaul, Spain and Mauretania.

American (1777) – of or from the US, even though the US is just one part of America!

Sikh (1781) – a follower of the religion of Nanak Shah in India.

Congress (1787) – the part of the US government that makes laws.

New York (1788) – an eastern state (province) of the US.

Supreme Court (1789) – the nine judges who are the last word on the meaning of laws in the US.

Caucasian (1795) – the race of mankind whose homeland stretches from Spain to India, from Egypt to Germany. Not all Caucasians are “white”.

PhD (1805) – a piece of paper from a university (a high seat of learning) stating that a person is among the most learned in his field.

Aryan (1819) – an ancient people whose language spread to northern India, Scythia, Persia and Europe, giving rise to most of the languages found in those places, such as Latin and Greek.

scientist (1834) – someone who studies natural science.

racial differences (1846) – physical differences between races, like skin colour.

California (1850) – a western state (province) of the US.

Emerson, Thoreau and Walt Whitman (1855) – famous US writers.

University of California, Berkeley (1868) – one of the highest seats of learning in California.

early 1900s (1886) – the period in history from 1900 to 1950.

shut off immigration (1901) – stop the flow of people coming into a country to live.

British-ruled India (1915) – Britain once had a sea empire that ruled a fourth of the world. India was a big part of it. The US was a colony of that empire.

United States v Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) – the name of the case heard by the Supreme Court in the year 1923 where it decided that people born in India could not become US citizens because they were not white.

Immigration and Naturalization Service (1933) – the part of the US government that controlled people entering the country. In 1920 it was called the Bureau of Immigration.

Sources: “The Works of St Augustine” (2012) edited by Philip Schaff, Online Etymology Dictionary (2014), Google books Ngram Viewer (2014), Ptolemy’s world map (c. 150).

See also:

• The last post
• Augustine
• words
  • New words from 1983 to 2012 - where I got the idea for this post
  • Anachronistic words in Spielberg’s “Lincoln”
  • Could Shakespeare read our English?
• Europe is a continent
• The map of white people
• Ptolemy

Bhagat Singh Thind

Bhagat Singh Thind (1892-1967), an Indian American spiritual teacher and writer, was denied US citizenship in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). The Supreme Court ruled, 9 to 0, that while Thind was arguably Caucasian, he was not white.

The laws of the time allowed the foreign-born to become citizens only if they were “free white persons”, “aliens of African nativity” or “persons of African descent.”

Thind, like many Indian Americans in the early 1900s, was a Sikh who came to California from Punjab in north-western India. Most came as farmers, but he came as a student. He arrived in the US in 1913 to study at the University of California, Berkeley, getting a PhD. In 1918 he served in the US Army during the First World War, rising to the rank of Acting Sergeant. He was honourably discharged. The Army said his character was “excellent”.

In 1920 he became a US citizen, like many Indian Americans before him. But then the government’s Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) challenged his right to become a citizen. It said he was not white.

It went all the way to the Supreme Court: United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind.

Thind argued that according to science he was Caucasian, Aryan even, and therefore white. People in the US, even the Supreme Court, used “Caucasian” and “white” interchangeably.

The Court said it did not matter if he was Caucasian: the law only uses the word “white”. And since the law was written according to the understanding of the common man, not scientists, “white” was whatever most people thought it was. And it certainly did not mean people from India, not even high-caste Hindus:

[Their] racial difference … is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation.

Furthermore, since Congress in 1917 shut off immigration from the Asiatic Barred Zone, to which India belonged, it is unlikely it would want any such Asiatics becoming citizens.

Thind lost his citizenship. So did other Indians. Because of the Alien Land Law in California, they could no longer own land in their own name. Many lost their farms. American women could not marry them without losing their citizenship, while Indian women could not be brought to the US. Half of Indian Americans left the country. Many of the rest sank into poverty.

People born in India were not allowed to become US citizens till 1946, when Congress passed the Luce-Celler Act. Thind, though, became a citizen in 1936! He did that by going to New York where authorities either disagreed with the ruling or did not know about it (there were few Indians in New York then).

Thind married a white woman and had two children. He gave lectures and wrote books about his spiritual teachings. To help Americans understand them he used the works of Emerson, Thoreau and Walt Whitman, who were familiar with Indian spirituality by way of translations made by Christian missionaries in British-ruled India.

 

See also:

• Read the Supreme Court decisiom online
• Caucasian
• The term “America”
• perpetual foreigner stereotype
• The map of white people
• Nina Davuluri – the first Indian American to become Miss America
• Wade Michael Page – the Sikh Temple shooter

12 Years a Slave

“12 Years a Slave” (2013) is a film based on the 1853 book of the same name by Solomon Northup, a free Black American man sold into slavery in the South. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup and Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey. Alfre Woodard appears, briefly, as great as ever. Steve McQueen directs.

It won three Oscars:

1. Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o),
2. Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley) and
3. Best Picture, the first black-made film to win that award.

I have already done a post on Solomon Northup, based on the book, so this post will be about the film only.

The last 20 minutes of the film, from the soap scene to when Northup is reunited with his family, is one of the best things I have seen in years:

• Lupita Nyong’o was amazing. She has the power to make you feel what her character feels. A great new talent.
• The moment Northup discovers he is free was better in the book, but McQueen made up for it with the farewell scene between Northup and Patsey and the way he had Northup ride away.

Wow. Amazing.

The rest of the film, though, was not so good. It is arguably the best film on slavery since “Roots” (1977). It makes “Django Unchained” (2012) look like a joke. But that is not saying much.

While Northup’s books presents an unsparing, historically accurate picture of slavery, McQueen presents a sanitized picture.

McQueen’s slaves have furniture, like it was no big deal. They get off work before sundown. They get meal breaks. There are no worms in their food. They do not talk about freedom, try to run away or plot against their masters. Even evil masters are handsome and charming and only go overboard because of mean wives, too much drink or backward moral notions. Poor things!

In the book Northup runs away twice. In the film he never makes a serious attempt – despite what the movie poster would lead you to believe.

Eliza (Adepero Oduye), a slave woman whose cries endlessly over her children who have been sold away, one of them to become a sex slave, is seen as – annoying! We never find out that she died of a broken heart.

We do not know about Uncle Abram – till he falls over dead in the fields. All his lines in the book are cut out.

Most Black characters are just sort of there and say nothing, like they were animals, though on occasion they sing. Only 15% of the dialogue is between Black characters.

If you want to know what slavery was like, read the book. The film is next to worthless for that. John Ridley, by the way, helped to write “Red Tails” (2012), also sanitized.

On the other hand, the film was good at showing the casual dehumanization of Blacks, like they were things, not people. It also makes you wonder how White people could practise slavery for hundreds of years and not have their culture seriously warped by it.

See also:

• Solomon Northup
• Django Unchained
• Red Tails
• Precious
• American slavery
• The most gorgeous black men in the world – Chiwetel Ejiofor is #3

 

Bobby Brown: Girlfriend

Remarks:

My favourite Bobby Brown song. Man, does this remind me of the 1980s! It went to number one on the American R&B charts at the end of 1986.

Lyrics:

I remember the very first time
You the picture of love in my heart
You and me, girl, holding hands
Please be my lady, won’t you understand 
(I need a girlfriend) I need a girlfriend
And I need her right now
Loving, kissing, holding you tight
Never letting go

(I need a girlfriend) I need a girlfriend
And I need her right now

Can I call you, would that be all right
Maybe Friday or Saturday night
Girl, I think of you all the time
‘Cause it’s you that I need, girl, and you’re always on my mind

(I need a girlfriend)
And I need you right now
Loving, kissing. holding you tight
Never letting go

(I need a girlfriend) I need a girlfriend
And I need you right now
Loving, kissing, holding you tight
And keeping you warm, oh, yeah

I need a girl
Who feels like I do
Could it be you
So please help me yeah, yeah

(Girlfriend)
Gotta have your love, oh, baby
Loving, kissing, holding you tight
Never letting go

(I need a girlfriend) I need a girlfriend
And I need you right now, no
Loving, kissing, holding you tight
And keeping you warm, baby

Someone just like you
I…oh, girl

It’s you that I want, girl, and I need you right now
I really need you so, yeah, baby
It’s you that I want, girl, and I want you right now
I really need you so, I need you, baby

I just want to love you and kiss you and hold you so tight
Whoa, baby, yeah, can I do that to you, sweetheart
I just wanna love you and kiss you and hold you so tight
Whoa, baby, no…you know what I mean, girl

(I need a girlfriend)
(I need a girlfriend)
(I need a girlfriend)
(I need a girlfriend)
I need a girlfriend, would you be my girl
This is Bobby talking
(I need a girlfriend)
La-la-la-la-la-la-la, woo
(I need a girlfriend)
La-la-la-la-la-la-la
(I need a girlfriend)
I…
(I need a girlfriend)
La-la-la-la-la-la-la
(I need a girlfriend)
I said la-la-la-la-la-la-la
(I need a girlfriend)
Oh, girl, you know what I
(I need a girlfriend)
You know what I need now
So it’s up to you to give me what I need
(I need a girlfriend)
And I do need a girlfriend
So, um, let’s take some time and let’s take it slow
(I need a girlfriend)
But surely we should be together
(I need a girlfriend)
You gotta answer me some time today, baby
‘Cause I can’t wait no more
I love you

The map of white people

The map of white people was not on the Internet, so I made one. Conversely, it is a map of people of colour.

The map (click on it to enlarge) uses four colours:

• dark blue: 75% to 100% white
• medium blue: 50% to 75% white
• light blue: 25% to 50% white
• grey: 0% to 25% white

So:

• majority POC: grey and light blue
• majority white: medium and dark blue
• multiracial: light and medium blue

But who is white? For this map two kinds of people are:

1. Those who self-identify as white, like in a census.
2. Those who belong to an ethnic group that is historically Christian or Jewish, with roots in West Eurasia.

That means white Hispanics, Armenians and Lebanese Christians are in, most Africans and Muslims, even Albanians, are out.

In the case of self-identification, note that someone who is considered white in one country might not be considered white in another.

I tried different definitions. This one is clean, easy to use and a good, general approximation.

Notes on each region:

North America: While the rest of the map is based on data from 2006 to 2011, Mexico is based on the last census that asked about race: in 1921! For the US, Hispanics who identify as white are counted as white. Doing otherwise led to paradoxes outside the US. Notice that Canada is not as lily-white as many imagine.

South America: Argentina, the pope’s home country, is extremely white. Its most “diverse” province, Chubut, is close to 90% white.

Most whites in South America, like in North America, live outside the tropics, which run from Havana to Rio. Worldwide most whites live in the temperate zone, 23.5 to 66.5 degrees from the equator:

Europe, North Africa and West Asia: Albania and Kosovo are mostly Muslim so they do not count as white, even though they are in Europe. I did not use “Europe” or “European” in my definition of white because then I would have to define Europe too! Not a battle I wanted or needed to fight.

Siberia: The people in the dark blue region are mainly ethnic Russians. Russia and Kazakhstan keep very good records on ethnicity.

The rest of Africa: The surprise here is South Africa. I thought at least the Cape would be light blue. Whites are less than 25% in every single province. The way they complained you would think they were like a third of the country. It is galling to see this.

The rest of Asia: The dark blue at the top is the tail end of Russia.

Oceania: The North Island of New Zealand is more multiracial than Australia, mostly because of the Maori.

Because Australia, Siberia, Canada and Argentina are large but thinly settled, the map makes it seem like there are more white people than there are.

To correct that, let’s scale each region according to its total population and put the map back together:

Notice that whites are not the main part of the world, but only a sixth of it.

Sources: Mainly the English and Russian Wikipedias (2014), the census of Argentina (2010) and New Zealand (2006) and the graphic that inspired this post (2011).

See also:

• Maori
• Black Canada: a brief history
• Peters projection
• demographically weighted history
• Geographical terms:
  • Europe
  • Middle East
• guns, germs and steel