Oh yes. Another of my political or sociological posts! I know I do not post very often, mostly because I do not read as many articles as I used to. Mainly, this is because I am going in a new direction in my life. I have moved to a more serious interest in culinary as a career instead of anthropology, but I can of course, still work on both. Right now, my love of cooking and others have taken the lead. But, on to the politics and the wonderful discussion.

I have been watching the new series, Lie to Me on Fox every week. Well, my DVR records it whenever it is on. Regardless, I watch it at some point, and I am currently watching this weeks episode when a wonderful subject and comment were just raised. The new face of racism: overt prejudice has moved to unconscious discrimination. How true is this! That is exactly what is going on in today's world. Some people say (I mean lay people), and it is even reinforced in anthropology, that races do not exist. This is entirely true from a genetics and anthropological view. Human variation is clinal, meaning that there are no distinct groups of people based on whatever you are looking at, furthermore, those clinal variations do not overlap. For instance, percentages of the ABO blood groups in a population do not correlate to skin color which also do not correlate with facial prognatism, the language someone speaks, or mitochondrial lineage. There is of course the issue of genetic isolation, which can genetically distinguish a group, but it does not make them a different race. We are all humans of the same caliber, breed, whatever you wish to use to describe the concept in any incarnation. The N and M mtDNA supergroups are by no means different in some way that marks them as races.

The issue at hand, though, is that racism is still and will likely remain for some time a social construct that is overtly frowned up by the majority of Americans (an assumption) which then leads to another form of racism, i.e. the new face of racism. We as Americans no longer, in the majority, express our racism so overtly. We do not join the KKK or Neo-Nazi groups, and it is not acceptable to call someone a [sic] nigger, kike, or even a cracker (although this still happens to some degree). I utilized the sic notation as a sort of disclaimer as those words except [sic] cracker offend me greatly. That in itself requires more explanation which we will get to in a second. Now in America, unconscious discrimination is rampant instead of the overt racism: a Caucasian American will get the job over an African American with the same resume, or even your unjustified disgust for an Arab American. Really, why do Americans have problems with Arabs or Muslims? It is completely unjustified to lump all Arab Americans or all Muslims into a race of people who go around bombing people in the name of religion. That is not what Islam or Arabian descent is about in the slightest. Those people that perform these acts are fundamentalist and non-mainstream groups. It would be the same thing to lump all Christians into the scheme of the Westboro Baptist Church, the famous [sic] fag-haters, or all Jews into the fundamentalist Jewish groups. It simply is not right. Do I do the same thing, you are damned right, and I am ashamed of it. As an anthropologist, no NO, as a citizen of the world, as a HUMAN, this behavior is unacceptable.

Now let us get to the [sic] cracker thing. Why does this word not offend me? Because I did not know the true meaning of the word until recently. You think of a cracker and a Caucasian and you think "white" or "pale" and you may have also heard people call WASPs white bread or something similar. That, unfortunately, is not the true nature of [sic] cracker. In actuality, it means a whip-cracker, a slave driver, a master of slaves, a.k.a. a horrible time in our past. For my own misunderstanding, the word does not offend me when I hear it, because I am conditioned to not be offended to it; it means a saltine, right? As time goes on, and the true meaning sinks in.......it will offend me. I bid you good night, salut, and all of that good stuff. Meditate upon these words.

Jason