RACISM, STIGMA, AND RAW FEAR OF NOT SURVIVING

Racism has become far too chiaroscuro:  black and white. 

In the first place, few people are unmixed nowadays. 

In the second place, this whole race thing is polarized between only TWO races when -- assuming you accept the concept of races -- there are dozens, hundreds, of groups of people interacting, few of them purely anything biological or even cultural.

In the third place, much of what purports to be about race is really about an urban/rural split or maybe only an urban/urban split.  The issues of country people, the racisms of small towns, are not addressed, though they have much to do with economics.  So long as survival is about money, it will be about potential for getting it.  The one thing that makes it easy to get money is to already have money.  The stigma of have/have-not is gaining -- could potentially change the terms of what we’re now calling “race.”  Or even nation.

Tribes.

So in the fourth place, I’m beginning to wonder how much racism is a red-herring.  The real issues -- as always -- are things like education, jobs, marriage, social conformity, health, and even religion.  The real issue is survival in spite of competition for limited resources.

But the most dominant factor, the most dynamic factor, is stigma.  Stigma is deeply biological and erupts through culture volcanically, both the creeping lava kind and the explosive dust kind.  Stigma is a reflex that has in the past served survival, or it would not have survived itself.  Stigma is a domination reflex.  Grabbing the lesser beings by the back of the neck.

One counterweight is pity.  If we feel pity for the stigmatized -- whether lepers or babies born out of wedlock or minorities or the disabled -- then we will tolerate them, even make allowances for them, but if they show any signs of anger, resentment or -- worst -- POWER, all pity is gone and we try to eliminate them.  Uppity women and n. . .   (Don't even think it.)  This is a reflex, below conscious control.  But it teaches people already hampered that they are powerless and dependent.  This is called "demanding respect" even when your drunken father shouts it at you.

Separation of territory is a biological factor.  Groups form when they are separated by a river, a mountain range, or the languages they speak.  One form of separation is exclusion.  Push people onto reservations, into special schools, into ghettos, into menial nighttime jobs like cleaning, into junk housing on marginal land.  Worst: incarcerate them.  Even worse than worst: incarcerate them in a foreign country.  (Solitary confinement is the same thing.)  Know as little as possible about them.  If they come on your territory, drive them off.  Deport them.  Wall them out.  See them as animals, as machines, as zombies.  Contagious filth.

If you can’t exclude them, fort up.  Walled housing projects, red-lining, patrolled universities, controlled-access shopping malls.  Invitation only.  Lock the church doors.  If this makes people angry, say they are vandals, rioters, terrorists.  By then they probably are.  Or in small towns the strategy is to set up athletic competition so intense that rivalry becomes resentment, maybe active hatred.  If you lose the game, overturn the bus with them in it. (Romeo and Juliet relationships are against separation.  War dissolves internal separation in a common cause.)  

Disconcertingly, the world with connections to the former British Empire where same-sex relationships were stigmatized and even criminalized in order to keep lower classes from entering upper classes through the bedroom, has now discovered that gays were NOT separate.  Everywhere they are individuals among us in families, jobs and classes.  When we realize how many and how “normal” they are, the stigma weakens and the laws relax.  Now the gays themselves want gays to be normal -- at least conventional.  

Many people cannot tell “pity” from love, esp. men.  Most women cannot tell “awwww” cuteness from ownership.  These little problems of distinction combine in “compassion,” which makes demands on those able to provide protection, patronage, and other survival-based contributions that maintain separation.  That is, until the receiver of “compassion” begins to feel entitled and confronts, which is a form of connection, so that separation in terms of intimacy resorts to violence.  Separation in terms of welfare safety nets flips to withdrawal and punishment.  Blame.  You'd have a job if you'd accept oppression. 

These dynamics are part of producing and raising children, who ideally DO become separately empowered in spite of parental attempts at control and merging.  This is also biological.  If the crucial biological forces of stigma and compassion are allowed to overwhelm any cultural counterweights -- which sometimes become aligned with those raw biological drives and enflame them -- the result is war: gang war, territory invasion, terrorism, economic “pencil” death, and the general destruction of culture that the dystopic books, films, and theories vividly illustrate for us.

My experience with stigma and compassion has shaped my opinions.  When I came back to occupy this marginal old house so I could write on a very low income, I was interpreted as needy, weak, and pitiful and so people gave me food.  I only accepted it from people who were established long-term friends BECAUSE it marked me as weak and stigmatized.  On the other hand, people who believed I was a writer said they were in awe and meant it.  A few took me out to supper at the nicest place around.

I was respected by people who remembered Bob Scriver because he was famous.  (Though one old farm wife said, "He wasn't THAT famous.  He wasn't Charlie Russell."  In her eyes, that was failure.)  When I showed power by telling what I knew in books -- "an exposé of the Western art world", said the only honest reviewer -- I was re-stigmatized as a bitter old ex-wife.  

As an English teacher I was respected as a representative of propriety.  As an animal control officer I was stigmatized as a persecutor of animals.  As a friend of Blackfeet I was both stigmatized by locals and given status by romantic liberals.  As a former co-writer with Tim Barrus, I was stigmatized except by the other people who love his writing and vids.  I don’t align with the compassion people either, because Tim's work proves daily that even boys pushed out of the system are not powerless.  It is their brave work as observers and interpreters that aligns us.

A sharp issue (indeed, "cutting") arose when the clergyman next door to me refused to see me as his equal -- we both attended the U of Chicago Div School -- and insisted that I was a needy old woman who should be grateful for a gift jar of jam and could be freely dominated if my tree interfered with his desire for a suburban lawn (status).  We ended up in a stigma standoff.  All compassion blasted.  (Much laughter around town -- deserved, I admit.)  We are the same race.  He has more money since for much of his career he was a veteran’s hospital chaplain on salary.  He feels it is an achievement to have children, though his wife did all the work -- as usual.  Religious affiliation can be racial even when color is not involved.

In the interest of self-preservation, there are people in this village whom I actively avoid.  I move on quickly, try not to “see” them.  They are too curious, too eager to find a weakness to exploit, if only by gossip.  There are other situations -- church, school -- that I avoid because I am socialized to a world so different from here that we can’t read each other’s signals.  I was asked to judge a speech contest when I first returned, and discovered that I’d given the highest ratings to those the other judges gave the lowest ratings.  I valued personality, creativity, uniqueness.  They wanted conformity.

Of course, identifying with the rez towns -- Browning and Heart Butte -- does me no good in Valier and it IS color-racial.  In the larger world, I have a hard time not stigmatizing many people in my former denomination and profession.  They seem like a different privileged race, perpetual children so confident of their entitlement that they are inadvertently cruel, greedy, and stigmatizing of any difference.  

It surprises me that they complain they are powerless, since they are not, though their power is a little atrophied and they turn it on each other, like the recent attack on her own seminary by a social activist used to attacking "bad" people.  They won't award her a diploma though she has completed her course work.  She is SHOCKED.  Of course, it means she won't have to candidate for a pulpit and do that daily drudgery or that weekly sermon.  

But she's not used to being gripped by the back of the neck, nor did she realize she would be stigmatized. The world cares about her predicament about as much as they care about the rez kid thrown out of the local high school for being a pain in the butt.  Not only do the two kinds of ostracized students not care about each other, each thinks he or she is unique, just trying to survive.  Neither knows the other exists.  Would it help if they did?

WHAT SCIENCE CAN TELL US ABOUT THE SACRED

Commonly it is assumed that the sacred is impossible to perceive by science because it is unaccountable, mystical and magical.  Of course, there have always been those who thrill to math and find meaning in formulas.  I want to take an idiosyncratic path through all this.  I am as interested in “show” as “tell.”

Begin with the eukaryote, the tiny one-celled creature with a nucleus that can “have sex,” that is, share genomes with another one-celled creature.  No longer dependent on budding, thus producing clones, the little critter has laid a pseudopod on creation.  In the beginning was the Code.  (A Word is only a Code.)  

The one-celled creature could only respond.  (That’s an actor’s word.)  It could go towards things that were good for it, and avoid things that were bad for it, including any molecules dissolved in the fluid in which the creature floated and motivated.  (This became our sense of smell.)  There were no organs, so substances were taken in or thrown out by pushing them through the wall of the cell.  (The image in my mind is always a medieval housewife emptying a chamberpot out the window!)

Over the millennia, things got more complicated but it still all came down to intake and outflow.  Complexification demands more clever “engineering.” This was emergent structure -- there were no engineers, not even one great big engineer in the sky.  So -- notochords, tubing for carrying concentrations of fluid with special ingredients like oxygen, and little pumps to drive it.  (Do you know an angleworm has nine hearts?)

Sensation became routed, matrixes developed to specialize, and a laparoscopic head-end developed at the top of the notochord.   “Mesenchymal cells migrate from the primitive knot to form a midline cellular cord known as the notochordal process.” [DO look it up!  http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=notochordal+process&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8]   Something very parallel happens as a persona develops.  We say in acting,  “What is the SPINE of this person?” meaning motives, yearnings, aim in life, the coherent spear of intention.  But the action is always back at the boundary, the skin that separates the creature from the milieu, that prevents it from dissolving.  Every sense evolves from that skin, but now the tip of the spear, the brain -- originally only a knob at the top of the spine -- is the guide sorting out the two actions:  go forward/ingest, retreat/avoid.

On top of the neural tube things form:  diencephalon, proencephalon. telecephalon.  It’s all just fancy talk to most of us.  But the point is, as it gets more complicated, the creature takes in more information from outside the skin and therefore must do more sorting and classifying, and therefore can allow more measured and subtle responses -- maybe just a tightened lip, a tilted eyebrow, a clenched butt muscle.  Now we’re performing our anatomy.  Our persona is our performed body as we take in sensation and release “response.”  In a good actor, one sees the taking in, the quick-sorting, and the decision to act. We call that “inevitability.”  Authentic.  The differences in the way we sort information and act on it, we call “personality.”

One creature can see these things happening in another creature.  Your dog sees what you’re thinking.  (Your cat sees, but figures what does it have to do with her?)  Even a fly or ant can try to avoid your swatting hand.  Some humans are better at it than others.  Some humans signal more than they think, often mixed signals -- hands saying one thing, feet saying another.  

I once stood just outside a shark’s aquarium (hoping the glass was at least six inches thick) about two feet away from the shark’s eye.  It did not see me.  It did not care.  It did not know i was there.  Sharks sense only things in the water with them, possibly through subtle electrical charges or dispersed molecules of blood.  The starring night sky as seen from a dark place can seem as inscrutable and uncaring as that shark.  Or you can be that shark, cruising, always cruising the stars in case of something meaningful -- meaning edible.

“Meaningful” to a human is more than food.  Meaningful is what supports survival as individuals and as species.  We ingest ideas/ideals and excrete the ones that don’t work.  Mostly we take huge amounts of information in through our senses, sort and discard much before the real import of the pattern gets up through the brain stem, the reptile brain, the limbic system, the cerebrum and eventually to the frontal forebrain where our clearest and most intense humanity is focused, the little camera at the tip of the fiber-optic.  But it happens in a flash.

If something is strong and clear enough to make it to that level, maybe with the help of arts or scientific ideas or just another human creature, then it may be intense enough to be “Sacred.”  It shakes and shudders us, fills us with light, paradox, epiphany.    When you’re a little kid, a powerful movie can do it.  Some of us search all our lives without ever feeling it -- the membrane between us and the universe may be too thick, too guarded, too quick to censor and filter.  Or our self may be clenched against pain and starvation.   Our curiosity atrophies because our lives are too safe -- we are sessile in our shells, letting the bits of sustenance come to us on the tide.

What Performance Art can crack open an adult oyster, well-anchored?  Ritual?  Violence?  Sex?  Drugs?  Threats of burning in Hell?  We keep trying to find out.  These days it takes a good deal of study and skill.  Atrocities don’t seem to move us much anymore.  Injustice?  Personal danger?  Combat?  Poverty just dulls us.  Therapy?  How much can we absorb from a fellow creature?  Can you get an oyster drunk?  (Is there anything more phallic than a geoduck?)  What paroxysm of epiphany will wake up a Wall Street banker who doesn’t even work on Wall Street anymore?

Or let’s look at it the other way around.  For a child who has been abused and sexually taken to climax by a well-loved adult, in a storm of pain, ecstasy, love and terror, ever be content with an ordinary life?  Can a person tortured to the edge of death and forced into gratitude by the tiniest respite, ever reach out?  Can a man captured by terrorists and forced to choose which leg will be shot off, ever stop making choices in his head?  We are our bodies, we are our minds, and we are both -- there is no boundary.  The boundary is at the skin.  Wonder in the front end; boredom out the rear end -- the result is AK’s “astonishment of living.”   Life is stalking us.  The Sacred is dangerous.

THE ONE-CELLED VILLAGE & THE MIGHTY MITOS

THE ONE CELLED VILLAGE: POWER, SEX AND SUICIDE (Just like a mitochondria) “Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life” by Nick Lane, a big handsome guy who looks vaguely like Clive Owen, is the most exciting book I’ve read in a long time. Here’s the url for more info. http://www.nick-lane.net/Power,%20Sex,%20Suicide.html This is the gaudiest “scientific” website you’re likely to encounter, and -- believe me -- the book is just as bright and exciting! That means both the ideas and the writing, which is full of witty asides that make it much easier to grasp and digest. This is a guy you could spend a roaring evening with in a pub! His science benefits deeply from it -- no lack of ATP in his social mitochondria!

I don’t suppose there will ever be a village with an athletic squad called the “Mitochondrians,” but if there were, both team and village (likely populated by biologists), would be formidable, with many backup strategies. Yet so much simple loyalty to the purpose that the Infections and Traumas would rarely win a game. Even Old Age might be backed off. I’ve returned the book (Had to borrow it from the U of Montana Bozeman library) so don’t trust the accuracy of my account of what is traced here, but the main storyline is worthy of a troubador. The theme is membranes (think of castle walls and coastal cliffs) and their necessity in the creation of life (community).

The creative generation of energy to be used by one little entity is what we call “life.” It needs to be separated from the primordial soup and so the question has been “where did the first membrane come from?” Nick (it seems permissible to call him that) likes that idea I first saw in the Fifties in Life magazine where guys in lab coats were zapping soup in a fish aquarium with mini-lightning to see what they got. It turns out that metals might be the key, though that’s not intuitive unless you’re trying to create mechanical life. Still, with the right conditions, the result is a blob with a membrane around it. Pretty soon -- I must have got up to feed the cats at that point because I don’t remember the details -- a nucleus forms, a bracelet (one chromosome arranged in a circle) that has the formula for both how to make ATP and how to make a new bacterium, because that’s what this is: a bacteria.

They’re promiscuous little beasts who leak enzyme instructions right and left, acquiring and discarding all the time. But their membranes are unyielding -- they cannot change shape. There is another couple of kinds of little beasts and one DOES have a flexible boundary. It eats by surrounding little bits and drawing them in. (Amoebas.) It’s BIG and has LOTS of genes, arranged in double rows. It likes buddying up with the stiffer bacteriums, and one day it swallows its little pal. But it doesn’t digest it. It lets the bacterium, now a mitochondria, replicate and share nutrients. The mito, in turn, stuffs a few of its genes into the nucleus of the eukaryote, delegating authority, as it were. But it always keeps the secret ingredient of how to make ATP for itself, in its bracelet.

Now Nick tells us what ATP really is and how it works. It’s an itsy bitsy bucket brigade of electrons the same as the power cord on the lamp. It’s made by pumping electrons across the membranes. Mitos know how to control the flow, how to pass it along, signal to slow down or speed up. The eukarote is now free to evolve by forming colonies, specializing, and generally thriving while the mitos keep stoking the fires of the ocean liner species that eukaryotes become. They are literally “burning” because one main ingredient -- the “beef” -- is oxygen. (I love mixed metaphors but I probably should say “coal”.)

We think of evolution as being a matter of sex as a means of pressing mutations against the environment so that the creatures’ mutations become more suitable for survival, but when scientists were able to look at the mitos at the ATP level, it became clear that they were still swapping genes around and that life takes leaps. Of course, if it goes hopping around too much, it’ll just disperse itself. So sex developed as a way of letting one donor’s eukaryotic egg -- which is an egg because it carries the donor’s mitos along with a bunch of other funny little inclusions captured from the bacteria world -- dump the donor’s mitos way back in the scrotum. Some of the little mitos manage to smuggle along with the sperm, but they aren’t entirely welcome and the egg mitos will try to eliminate them. Mito wars and failures are probably at the heart of the many, many (MOST!) discarded fertilized eggs that fail to develop.

But it’s a quiet carnage. There are two kinds of cell death: one is necrotic: “blood”, bits, and general mess. The other is called “apoptosis” which is just quiet, voluntary disintegration. I can’t help thinking of a pop-it bead necklace that loses all its connections and becomes little bits, which the surrounding tissues “eat.” Apoptosis means that worn out mitos and cells are told “that’s it, time’s up, stop existing.” So they do. No muss, fuss or bother. No evidence, no fossils. Re-sorbed. If apoptosis fails, the result is cancer, our scourge. If mitos are faulty, they create an array of hard-to-diagnose and possibly one-of-a-kind afflictions.

Figuring out how all this happens and the evolutionary path from soup to -- dare I say, “human nuts?” -- is clear and exciting because it begins to point towards a future that might not be so much “post-human” as “trans-human,” since it will admit at last that we’re not the lone, proud individuals we thought we were -- nor is our species. We are processes with electrons and oxygen molecules pouring through us, carrying information that could be either “eu” or “mal.”

It may be that we’ve been neglecting the uses of apoptosis, depending far too much on carnage to control each other in our greed to maintain our own emotional membranes and internal mitos. The way we see the world has a deep impact on how we manage ourselves and what is around us. This book can change the world. Certainly it describes how it’s already changing constantly. Maybe the mighty Mitos can’t survive if the towns that support high schools all die of apoptosis. Or maybe old teachers and coaches fail to retire, so the game plan never changes and the larger shifting world snuffs it. Is this a plot for a novel or what?