Class as a Metaphor for Race

I have just begun reading Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel. I didn’t know what it was about particularly only that several people have recommended it to me including my favorite graduate school professor. I thought it was a book about the players of western imperialism. It isn’t.

Diamond’s main argument is in contrast to the conclusion some have drawn that progress, by that I think he means technology and “civilization,” and in conjunction with that, wealth, has been duly distributed in the course of human history because some races (whites for the most part) are more capable or intelligent. Diamond believes that instead progress or lack of progress is determined not by the intellectual or physical makeup of race but by geographical differences in space, continental logistics (i.e. the landmass being north/south as opposed to east/west), and the availability of crops and livestock.

I am very, very late to the punch here as this book was published some time ago but so far, after reading the introduction and a chapter on Africa, I think it is articulate, astute and plausible. Yet, even haven read so little, I am bothered by a few gaps in the line of reasoning of this argument.

Don’t get me wrong, I fundamentally believe there is equal possibility of intelligence and capability in all human races and this is a rational assumption. I am sure there is a lot of truth to Diamond’s conjecture. However, I am not sure that we can assume that differences in the ways civilization is developed or not developed can be solely rooted in geography.

I should also mention that the difficulty in postulating theories within social science is that it’s hard to prove them with the evidence available, the evidence being generally archeological – bones, DNA studies, artifacts- but also perhaps including sociological/psychological research based in trial studies and interviews and written and oral history. A theory of social science really has to be strung together with all these elements and that is what Diamond has done. But it’s not like proving theories in physical science where you can have concrete mathematical equations and chemical reactions.

One particular metaphor came to mind when I was trying to figure out in my own mind reasons why I am not completely copasetic with Diamond’s argument. Within my own race, that is the WASP, but also including other groups of Europeans deemed white, we have further divisions within the class structure. I am white, but I am positioned within a certain class, middle class, defined mainly by my family of origin but also by my level of education and my function in society, namely that I am a white-collar worker.

Class has become a bit muddled of late, the last three or four decades I’d say. For instance, the benefits belonging to middle class in particular, the outcome of post-WWII wealth and abundance in the West and creation of public institutions among other things, are now widely available to members of all classes deemed “beneath” middle-class. Post-secondary education is possible to a person of any class as long as they have the grades and motivation. I suppose you could argue that class level in this case does limit the number of those enrolling in college; elementary and secondary education may have been unexceptional, leading to poor grades and test scores. But admittedly, this is America, and even with a GED, a person can enroll in community college. Furthermore, many people are able to climb up the class ladder without a four year college education and become white-collar and/or middle-class and upper-class. I have a friend with an AA degree in court reporting, whose roots are blue-collar, who makes more money than any woman I know with college degrees and is now solidly middle class. How many major league sportsmen, models, rock stars, actor can you think of that lack education yet make an infinitisimal amount of money?

Material goods see no class barriers and neither do the consumer loans that support some of the more expensive items like cars and homes. Often times, blue collar workers, the “working” class, have higher annual salaries than do white-collar workers. It is no longer outlandish to say that a unioned fork-lift operator can make as much a psychologist, training for that particular job costing exponentially less.

In defining differences between class in this country, we can’t so much look to education or wealth, but we can look to class culture and the values belonging to each class, or at least the stereotypes widely associated with each class. For example, I live in a neighborhood mixed in race and class. I would define my husband and I as middle class, in the fashion of the WASP: we have a neat and orderly lawn, i.e. no abandoned cars, tires or junk, that surrounds a home we have a mortgage on. We are quiet and keep to ourselves, no blasting music or boisterous family gatherings. We are reserved in the way we dress, no multiple gold chains and tattoos. (as an aside, there does exist an artist/bohemian subclass). We are college educated and our speech leans towards the grammatically correct, no “ain’t”, no substitution of the word anything with the word “nothin.’” We both work or have worked in white-collar fields. Our lesbian neighbors across the way are like us and I can determine that they also are WASPs and middle class by observing the way they dress, their cars, their lifestyle, their visitors.

So if I apply this example as a metaphor to race and how race is connected to wealth and progress, i.e., then I have to conclude that a race that is considered to be less sophisticated (white trash), less articulate, less aware and dependent on social decorum and rules, is not excluded from abundance. Therefore, if they are prohibited from acquiring the means by which to accrue wealth, it is not because they are not able. It is due to means out of their control, like climate and location. This is pretty much in line with Jared Diamond’s theory about race and wealth differentials.

However, this does not speak to what we define in human beings as intelligence and intellectual capacity and we are certainly not considering definitions of success and the influence of how we perceive the development of civilization. This is another can of worms entirely. For while my friend the court reporter is wealthier than me, I am more intellectual, and arguably, smarter. I require more in terms of intellectual stimulation in a job and in terms of what I do in my free time. I grasp concepts and ideas more readily than she does. So if we further apply my class metaphor, we could say that one race have the capacity to be wealthier than another race, but they may not be smarter. Their capacity for technology may not be as great.

Crazy is the new normal

I just don't know how poetic I can be about this, but it's just seems that as of late - i.e. the past few years - crazy, or for that matter underage and pregnant, among celebrities is tenderly overlooked, smoothed out onto the palate of reality like peanut butter on toast.

Michael Jackon. I am very sorry to see anyone die prematurely, make no mistake. But honestly, the guy was freak-kay. Who looks like that, the monstrous white flesh, the carved away face. Yet, millions of fans mourn and I guess they've found his so-called killer (Does the fact that he was a full blown drug addict mean anything to anyone? I guess from now on, we can blame the dealer, very conveinent, maybe I should start smoking crack). He may never have molested children but it seems more than coincidential that he was tried twice for this crime.

The truth was that Jackson had ceased to be a functioning rational adult a long time ago, or may actually never have acheived that. For one reason or the other, he was mentally messed up, addicted, crazy. But instead of pulling for tough love and being honest about his behavior, the world at large, the masses, the media, refuse to see him in that light, refuse to hold him accountable.

There are others: Britney Spears, Whitney Houston - all but forgiven for crazy, Liz Taylor, and the most henious of course is OJ Simpson. He's in jail now, so that's good, I guess.

I think we can blame to some extent the whole celebrity culture; we put them on pedastals, draining them of talent and privacy, pumping them with adoration and cash which their acutely narcissitic personalities subsist on. On some basic level they themselves are banal, and they know it, but the clothes, shoes, glitter, bling, clout disguise this.

It's tragic really. Our country was created out of a desperate need to throw of the cloak of monarchy and its oppression and disregard for individual rights, the ideas of enlightment a triumph over medieval monotony. Yet, over two hundred years after the Declaration of Independence is written, we find that the body of banality rejected so long ago is recreated in the form of celebrity. Maybe human beings need that vehicle of metaphor, that is celebrity.

The Reitterative Flesh

My husband, the scientist, does not believe in reincarnation, you know, the believe that our souls inhabit other bodies before and after (or either/or) our existances in our present mortal forms. I can't say I believe in it per say, can't say I don't either, but I have always thought the idea intriging and have imagined what my own past lives might have been like even if it is all total fancy which it probably is.

I need to pause and say this: My husband, the non-believer, does vehemently defend the existance of Bigfoot or Saskwatch, Chupacabra and the Lockness Monster. But mostly Bigfoot. I do not dare interupt him when he's watching a show on the History channel or Discovery about the lastest cryptozoological findings on the man-ape.

The belief in and study of reincarnation is ages old. The Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, and other variations thereof - including Scientologists and Theosophists - all support the notion of reincarnation. So do a whole heck of a lot of New Age thinking type of folk. While the belief in reincarnation spreads wide, other world religions reject the idea. You might, if you look hard enough, interpret small portions of Islamic or Christain scripture of making mere refrences to such a concept. But for the most part, they are absent of such thought. However, extra-Talmudic Kabbalists and some orthodox Jews support the notion of reincarnation, calling it the gilgul. Some Islamic Sufi groups claim to find reference for reincarnation in the Quran.

From the movie, Kundun

I have friends that support a belief in reincarnation. They are not alone. Movies have been made (Dead Again with Kenneth Branagh, Birth with Nicole Kidman), songs written, books published, centered around the concept of reincarnation. Some people believe whole heartedly, while others flirt with the idea, fun but nothing to take seriously. Herman Hesse, 20th century German writer, said that reincarnation was "a mode of expression for stability in the midst of flux." I guess I rather side with him on this, besides being he is one of my favorite writers, it makes sense. Maybe it puts people at ease to consider reicarnation. After all, who doesn't want a second chance at life. Who doesn't want to have answers to the questions they have about themselves, their situation in life and of birth, their relationships and relations. And ultimately, we all retain questions about our own existence and experience that cannot be concretely explained. Why? Why? Why?

I read the book Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss. Weiss is a disguished psychiatrist who is now a popular writer and speaker on the subject of reicarnation. In his books, he details pyschotherapy sessions, mostly involving hypnosis, in which patients describe past lives. In Many Lives, Many Masters, he discusses the initial experience he has with a female patient that spurred his deep conviction that past lives are real. This patient named Catherine had reoccuring nightmares and anxiety attacks. Through hypnosis, after describing all her childhood experiences that she could remember to age three, she began recounting memories that occured before her birth; in other words, her other lives. The book, and its stories, are compelling.

Weiss isn't the only so-called social scientist to research and elucidate on reincarnation. Professor Ian Stephenson, author of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, spent decades researching subjects, documenting children's memories that corresponded with the actual details of the lives of persons already deceased.

What do I believe? Like I said I don't not believe in reincarnation, but I don't exactly believe in it. For now, I think it's fun. Given I have an active and colorful imagination, it's hard for me to give my ideas of what my past lives might have been much credence. I have imagined myself - these ideas derived mostly from dreams I've had - to have been a nomad boy in the Sinai Peninsula, a wife and mother in India with a sari and bangles, a banker in Colonial New York City, a captain in the British Navy. It's all good fun.

I did have a thought though. What if reincarnation wasn't reincarnation at all? Here's a theory: Our DNA carries memories, is imprinted with memories of our forefathers. Some of the life experience of others, others from possibly very long ago, are still caught somewhere in our genetic material. My decendents for the past few centuries were all Western and Central Europeans. But it's likely my decendents are decendents from elsewhere - the Middle East, the Asian Steppe, who knows - given transcontinental migration over the ages. Maybe some of the memories of human beings that came before me are immemorial, destined to wind themselves into my flesh by way of those tiny strands that make up my genetic substance.

Dispossession

I can't think of a clever title for this topic. Yet, I can say, my writing on this topic is prompted by the fact that I just finished the book "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert, a wildly popular book which I imagine is read heavily by women. Women my age probably (that's 26, if you have forgotten or thought it was older). Well, Gilbert spends a year traveling to Italy, India and then Bali after a painful, bitter divorce. In Italy she takes language classes and eats a lot, in India she goes to an Ashram, and in Bali she spends time with a medicine man and has an affair with a Brazilian expatriate.

The book's somewhat interesting but Gilbert comes off, in my eyes, as a flake. In fact, she pisses me off a bit because what she and the majority of us first-world liberal types usually do - albeit I've tried to be a little more conscientious - is blah blah blah about meditation and enlightenment and yoga, our connection to god and how we need to follow the example of those wonderfully devout Hindus and Zen Buddhists and all that. Meanwhile, all the meanwhile, forgotting that this line of thinking is a privilege of our origin of wealth, that it is a product of wealth, and that in India, China, Nepal, Burma, the "enlightened" Buddha/Upanishads led crowd subscribe to cruel caste systems, and often their people are deluged by poverty and violence, a direct result of our 20th century colonization and 21st century globalization that inform this system.


I am a believer, by all means, but the dispossession and displacement of self, of individual, group and national selves, simply relinquishes ownership in what is simultaneously beautiful and flawed: our skin, our culture, our past, our values, our religious and spiritual traditions. This is not to say we can not swim in other waters, so to speak, or even adopt them. But, be true.