YES, THERE IS A HUMAN RACE. NO, THAT IS NOT A MICRO-AGGRESSION.
By Patricia Reed - January 14, 2024
Editor’s note: I have been “after” my wonderful friend of 3 years, Patricia “Patsy” Reed, to start her own Substack newsletter for obvious reasons, as you’ll see. To date, so far as I know, she has not done so. She regularly posts on Facebook as well as sending out email copies of her essays to a select group of friends of whom I proudly am a member of. I personally feel that what he has to say is no less valuable than some of the other people I follow: Matt Taibbi, Glen Greenwald, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, Bret Weinstein/Heather Heying (of the Darkhorse Podcast), Dr. Naomi Wolf, and so many other independent thinkers. Patsy’s perspective is similar to mine as it spans 7 decades. But her writing prowess far exceeds my own, prompting me to archive many of her essays on my own Substack. Her writing skills are positively superb as is her ability to think clearly and critically. I hope you’ll take the time to read through this poignant, yet hopeful essay as it exemplifies the feelings that so many of us thinkers share about our country and the things that it affords us. And why, it is so critically important for us to preserve the truth, fellowship, the founding principles, and innate human kindness. - Craig Bell - 1/14/2024
[Note from Patricia Reed: This essay is longer than usual-- be warned! I intended it as an “end of year, looking back” piece, but it morphed into a “beginning of year, looking forward” piece. It's also fitting that I share this just before Martin Luther King Day. For, in this essay, I defend the increasingly quaint concept of a “human race”.
On some American college campuses, the term “human race” is now classified as a “micro-aggression”! As someone with degrees in English and anthropology, I've long known that “human race” is in some sense a metaphorical application of the term “race”-- although the word “race” has no single, universally agreed-upon definition in any case.
I don't know what the current rationale is for shunning the term “human race”, and I don't actually care. The usage “human race” has a long and honorable history which cannot be erased by a faddish ideology. I can't help remembering a great line in one of the Jack Reacher novels, in which Reacher says, “I'm going to keep right on saying it, because it keeps right on being true!” Well said, my fictional friend....]
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At 79 years old. I've learned a few things along my journey(s)... from South Dakota to New York to Kenya to South Dakota again to Indiana to Nevada to South Dakota again to Michigan to South Dakota again... to live out an obscure, penurious old age. And I wouldn't have missed any of it for the world!
Looking back, I don't see a defining moment--but a couple of defining periods. One was 1966-69. The other is 2019-now.
I. 1966-69: THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
In “Streetcar of Desire”, Blanche DuBois famously remarked, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” This has been variously interpreted as charming insouciance, uncharming American hustle, or terminal naivete. It is certainly not a moral system. But can it point toward one? Looking back, I remember many incidents of remarkable kindness by strangers. Several of these occurred during a two-year Peace Corps stint in Kenya, East Africa, 1966-67.
In 1966, I incurred a severe case of malaria: Initially, my housemates and I opted to tough it out, since we were thirty miles by dirt road from the nearest hospital. But, after I'd been placed on the floor by housemates and wrapped in quilts in front of a roaring fire ... I continued to shake so hard all night, that my head was bouncing off the (concrete) floor. The next day, my housemates found transportation for me to the nearest real town!
I was diagnosed with malaria by a British doctor there, who wanted to admit me to the local hospital. Some Indian (from India) acquaintances who had hurried to Eldoret hospital the minute they heard I was there... shook their heads and said firmly, “You will stay at our home and come here daily for out-patient treatment.” So I spent leisurely days (don't remember how many) lounging around their lovely home, drinking tea, playing board games, walking in their garden. That kindness—and several strong doses of hydroxychloroquine-- saved my life.
Another day in Kenya: I had a bicycle accident wherein I totaled the bicycle while receiving a concussion plus minor abrasions. The concussion caused temporary loss of consciousness. When I regained that consciousness, I was lying on a grassy hillside. I opened my eyes-- I was staring into several pairs of black eyes anxiously staring right back into mine. When I began to speak, a cheer went up! At that, my recently opened eyes filled with tears.... How do you not love people who, when you do something stupid... are there for you, cheer and pray for you, help you to your feet, help wipe the mud off, and walk you home??
Fast-forward to spring 1969: I was driving down a highway on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. I was a Head Start social worker, headed to a distant classroom. I was accompanied by my assistant Ramona, a grandmother in late middle age who had... seen a lot! The snow from the past winter had mostly melted, so I zipped right along. We topped a hill and dropped into a small valley, sheltered by surrounding hills.
Water had pooled on the road and had then re-frozen, becoming “black ice”. I did not see it, did not slow down. When I began skidding, I did exactly the wrong thing: I hit the brakes hard (instead of gently pumping them). We shot off the highway, easily clearing the ditch as a sort of flying car (John McClane, eat your heart out!), and bounced across a pasture; finally, I managed to stop the car. Only then did I realize that there seemed to be nothing in front of the car any more. Like... nothing.
I got out and peered around the fender. The front bumper was hanging over the edge of a ravine. There were shrubs and small trees at the bottom; a creek ran between. I got back in the car, and began to shake—as badly as I had when I had malaria. No cell phones in 1960s South Dakota, and we were not noticeable from the highway. I could not stop shaking.
Ramona calmly took out a cigarette and smoked it thoughtfully, then broke the long silence by asking politely, “Patsy, would you like me to back this baby up and drive us back to Mission?” I hugged her! She slipped behind the wheel, backed up expertly, and got us back to the highway. We never told anyone why we did not make it to the outlying Head Start center that day. Ramona said only, when asked, that “the car had developed some problems.” Which, strictly speaking... it had!
II. 2019-2023... THE CRUELTY OF FRIENDS (AND FAMILY)
In 2019, I was living in Houghton, Michigan, at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula-- a finger of land that points (no doubt accusingly) across Lake Superior to the Canadian shore on the other side. That part of Michigan is noted for epic snowfall totals each winter. It is also a delightful place wherein to dwell, which I did for twenty-plus years.
In October 2019, a neighbor told me about something called Event 201. I never learned how she knew about it in real time: she was from an outlying territory of the United States and had been prominent there; she had acquaintances worldwide. She was more than a little mysterious. I was skeptical about one claim which my friend had made: There would be a pandemic in 2020. Since I had read the minutes of Event 201 at her behest, I knew that the minutes did not explicitly make any such prediction. So how did she “know” that?
When a pandemic was indeed announced in early 2020, I was stunned. And worried. When I had read those minutes, I hadn't been able to help noticing that they were more about controlling people than about controlling the virus itself. That was medically unprecedented.... and troubling. When the priorities of Event 201 were religiously followed as 2020 unfolded, that was even more troubling.
It became clear fairly quickly that there was a whole lotta lyin' goin' on at high levels--about the virus, about the “vaccines”, about many things. I began paying even more attention to the very people I was being warned against—people like public-health whistleblower RFK Jr, Stanford's Dr Jay Bhattacharya, biologist Dr Bret Weinstein, Fox News' Tucker Carlson, and others. I reported my findings on Facebook; people began unfriending me. I was also facing local pressure to get vaccinated, and I was not complying. Friends and family alike started disowning me... one by one.
[Editor’s note: I too was skeptical of the “news” being reported and hence did not get the jab]
My closest living relative and I had always communicated freely, honestly and good-naturedly, despite growing differences. But by 2021, he had become a stranger. He would not engage in anything resembling a good-faith, mutual search for truth. When I would present a point in an attempted discussion, he would not address the point directly. Instead, he would either mechanically recite a “canned” talking point, often of marginal relevance... or he would launch an ad hominem attack on me (or my sources).
He called Tucker Carlson “Comrade Carlson” because Tucker opposed American intervention in Ukraine. This from someone who had opposed the Vietnam War. Had that made him a “Comrade”? He hadn't thought so at the time. Nor had I. Nor did I think questioning our Ukraine policy made Tucker (or myself) one now. Why the newfound need to score substantively non-existent cheap points? It was like his individual personality had finally been dissolved by the acid of his tribal loyalty.
It was happening everywhere: I encountered more and more people whose self-esteem, even whose feeling of existential safety, seemed inextricably linked with tribal membership. Thus the weird "In this house, we...." yard signs, often accompanied by the canceling of those whose ideological purity was inadequately verified. When being nasty to your next-door neighbor is considered a commendable form of virtue signaling, we have gone far astray!
When it became clear that my bro was broadcasting to our extended family that I was downright dangerous (in some undefined, unexplained way), I was heartbroken. In late 2021, we ceased communication. I now know that what happened to us was replicated millions of times across the country. What had happened across the land? As someone who holds an M.A. and was admitted to doctoral candidacy in anthropology, I was getting a strange feeling. I was convinced that what had happened to our country—what had almost broken our country... was nothing less than:
III. CIRCA 1970-2023... THE RETURN OF THE TRIBE
When I use the term “tribe”, I use it metaphorically as I do the term “race”. By “tribe” I mean a group identity that has an unbreakable hold on an individual. It could be an all-encompassing hold as it was in ages past, when the tribe –whose members were related by blood-- was the only game in town. The archetypal tribe gave you as a member almost total security, but in turn you must give the tribe your total allegiance. “Tribe” could also be, by extension, any group-identity which seems to be-- for logistical, social or psychological reasons-- one that is nearly impossible to walk away from, or even question.
I'll attempt an admittedly sweeping oversimplification of history here. Every human has ancestors whose lives were defined by tribes. Blood lineages-- and the next step “up”, tribes built upon blood relationships—were the social organization for all our ancestral hunters and gatherers over many millennia. When some tribes started settling down to practice labor-intensive agriculture, tribal bonds slowly loosened. In the agrarian and herding societies that populated the Middle East during Old Testament times, for example, we can see the tensions that emerged as such societies underwent growing pains and collided with neighbors.
Gradually, agrarian village societies morphed into nation-states and eventually empires. The crosses which eventually became the symbol of one of the world's leading religions, were the sadistic invention of a famous empire-- the Roman one. In their perverted way, those crosses outlined against the sky along many a roadway in outliers of the Roman Empire, were a brilliant strategy: Any imperial subject passing by, would be forcibly reminded of the slow, agonizing, humiliating death they would suffer if they tried the patience of the Empire once too often.
After the fall of that once-mighty (and once-meritorious) empire, the world underwent a centuries-long reboot to agrarian societies. Much of human society became organized as fiefdoms under war-lords whose vassals grew their lords' crops and tended their lords' livestock. The lords fought with one another periodically, using those same vassals as cannon fodder. As society slowly recovered, new ways of people-sorting took forms like cities, shires, counties, provinces, nations, artisans' guilds, and even church parishes. Eventually, the kingdom and the nation-state became dominant; some nations coalesced into empires.
The empire was back!
But even empires had rival empires, as well as disaffected subjects. Kings and emperors fought one another; sometimes, a ruler would be dethroned by disaffected subjects. The Europeans who settled North America were mostly (religious) refugees from the British Empire. Eventually, their scattered colonies decided to form a union, and to decouple that union-- by force if needed-- from its parent empire. Long story short: They succeeded.
They also created something brand new: a nation-state based not on blood ties—or even on shared history—but on principles deemed applicable to any human beings willing to live by them. The men who threshed out those principles.... had studied different forms of government all over the world -- ancient Greece, British common law, the Iroquois Federation of North America, and others. They believed they could distill the very best ideas from all of human history.
Perhaps it was all an impossible dream-- many people indeed believe that it was. They say that it was too abstract, too non-organic to achieve longevity... that's what some (not all) political/cultural conservatives say. Be that as it may, that dream of universal humanity moving onward and upward together, became known as The Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment and Christianity are often presented as uneasy allies at best. Indeed, there are unavoidable areas of tension between the two strongest currents of Western thought. But it's also the case that what had made Christianity so revolutionary, was its shift from group-focused concepts of morality... to individual-focused concepts. The woman at the well. The good Samaritan. The good thief on the cross. Etcetera. It's not a huge stretch to see Enlightenment universalism as perhaps the ultimate elaboration on that theme: It's not what group you claim, or what group claims you. It's what you actually do.
Today, the “smartest” people rebel against Christianity, of course: Serious Christianity is incompatible with tyranny. So Christianity has to go. Ironically, political radicals once delighted in using the Enlightenment as a club with which to beat Christians. But now... even the Enlightenment is uncool! Too white. Too testosterone-soaked. Too everything. It's gotta go as well.
Our bright young neofascists/neotribalists of the 21st century scornfully claim that those high-sounding Enlightenment principles were never followed anyway. But these postmoderns do not advocate wallowing in organic ties of blood and soil like those awful conservatives. No, the postmoderns have an ideology that rejects both the call of blood, and the call of universalist principles. This new dogma pretends to stand outside/above history, judging that history by the plight of whoever is deemed most oppressed by that history. (Related: Ben Shapiro’s intersectionality video)
Thus, actual history is reduced to an endless repeating cycle of revolts: same game, different players. Since this dogma offers no over-arching moral framework by which things could even theoretically be thrashed out without warfare.... “Oppression Studies” and its offspring are recipes for frequent bloodshed. Besides making life generally unpleasant... frequent warfare makes genuine science impossible. Which slows technological progress to a crawl at best.
Yet that ideology—with interchangeable labels like “postmodernism” and “social justice” and “progressivism”—reigns supreme amongst our “best” people. Some of its opponents like RFK Jr call it neofascism. It could as well be called neotribalism: It has the worst features of the real tribes of early human history (like de facto totalitarianism and sometimes-vicious othering), with none of their redeeming virtues (like stoic courage and staying grounded).
Because it refuses to embrace universalist moral principles, postmodernism in effect endorses thinly disguised tribalisms pretending to serve a higher morality... but a strange morality which refuses to define itself with user-friendly rules... only with vague, distant, even inchoate goals. Can we clamber out of this slimy bog?
We may have to nurture two revolutions simultaneously: a revolution of daily habits and practices-- favoring kindness toward strangers, not as members of favored groups, not even as victim groups-- especially not as victim groups--but rather as members of the human race. This entails a revolution of mental attitude away from obsessions with this or that group... toward individuals as representative of humanity writ large—in all of its frequent fails and all of its sometime splendor. For some of us, that ol' Enlightenment still strikes many a sympathetic chord... we'll not give it up easily.
IV. 2024- ?.... RETURN OF THE HUMAN RACE?
In Shakespeare's “The Merchant of Venice” (circa 1600 A.D.), Jewish money-lender Shylock asked his interlocutors, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” In eight one-syllable words, Shylock destroyed racism and tribalism. So that battle was won a long time ago... or so we thought. Who'da thought tribalism would rear its ugly head again?! Especially in the civilization that had produced Shakespeare?
In 1776 AD, Thomas Jefferson slew the beast again : “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Thirty-six words.
In 1963 AD, Martin Luther King also killed the beast-- also brilliantly: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Thirty-five words.
Interestingly, King in that same speech drew a direct line from Jefferson's words to his own:
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note: a promise that all men-- yes, black men as well as white men-- would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. America has defaulted on this promissory note. America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds'. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.... So we have come to cash this check --”
Thus, King made a clear connection between America's founding documents, and the civil-rights campaign of which he was the spokesman. He could not have made the connection more clear. He saw it, his followers saw it, and in due course, everyday people saw it. In succeeding years, most racist practices were discontinued. The “perfect” society has not yet been attained, but the poor and the weary from all over the world—of all colors-- continue to pour over our borders, which would not be the case were America outstandingly racist. We elected a black President twice, though black people are less than 20 percent of the population. Solid progress was certainly made.
Yet today America has false prophets who say that a color-blind society is impossible. That assertion is-- in and of itself-- racism by any logical criterion. Making race the central concept in the way human beings deal with another forever and ever... if that is not racism, what is? It's time to reconnect with both the Christian and the Enlightenment roots of our country. If they sometimes clash, let them fight it out openly. But they are by no means condemned to fight all the time.
To that end, I continue to like the good old-fashioned term “human race”. I'm in good company: Famed biologist (and atheist) Richard Dawkins once remarked that sex is binary, and race is a spectrum—the exact reverse of what the “best” universities now teach both implicitly and explicitly. Dawkins was scheduled to receive a Humanist of the Year award a few weeks after he happened to make that remark... but after his apostasy, the presentation was literally canceled. We disagree with Dawkins on tons of things, but in this instance, we have nothing but praise for his courage (and his accuracy!)
Standing mercilessly against the human race is the DEI industrial complex... the transgender LBGTQ+ complex... the “war on disinformation” complex... the “climate change” complex... all toxins that first poisoned academia, then leaked out and poisoned the rest of society. Other petri dishes of toxic culture not fit for human beings are the CIA / security complex and the “globalist” cartels --WEF, WHO, & EU.
Their claims cannot withstand logical analysis. In fact, each can be demolished in about five minutes. Thus their proponents are furiously erecting a huge infrastructure of inescapable censorship: a vast echo chamber in which some views are hugely magnified and endlessly echoed, while others are completely silenced. These people know they can't win by out-reasoning their opponents: They can only win by smothering their opponents under a huge, shapeless, silent Pillow of Death: It kills free discussion, science, ultimately civilization. (Preferably with a minimum of fuss....)
The Pillow of Death's proponents don't call it that. They have nice names: Content moderation. Data curating. Fact checking. Minimizing harm. Eschewing conspiracy theories. “Decolonizing” and “updating” library shelves and databases. Fighting “hate speech”. Fighting “thought-crime” and “wrongthink”. Combating “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Especially Russian disinformation. (For some reason, it's always Russian disinformation. Never Chinese or Iranian or Gatesian. Just Russian.)
As usual, the Bible said it first and best, as in this haunting passage from Ephesians ch 6: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.....................
Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.”
Right on, brother. Right on, sister....
We can do this.
It's time to welcome ourselves back into the human race!
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[Closing note from Patricia Reed: I've developed an apparent fetish for "footnoting" essays with music videos. This video is dedicated to the late Ralph and Keva Havercroft of Fort Pierre, South Dakota.]
(He Ain't Heavy-- Neil Diamond)
Editor’s Note: If you think for one moment, after reading Patsy’s essay, that our country’s devolution into tribalism wasn’t orchestrated by nefarious concerns and if you believe that entire societies cannot be manipulated, I invite you to watch as G. Edward Griffin talks with former Soviet KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov in the following 1984 interview. Hopefully, what you’ll begin to realize is that an entire society can (and has) been manipulated into factions or “tribes” which, as Mr. Besmenov asserts, are used for nefarious purposes. This link will automatically take you to 1 hour and 7 minutes into the video. If you want to learn more about this fascinating man, I encourage you to watch the entire interview: