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We are all cousins Even sad eyes... |
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We are all cousins Even sad eyes... |
| Even Abraham Lincoln who is credited with freeing the slaves was not in favor of equality for Blacks. |
| While my parents were working very hard, trying to survive the really tough years of food rationing and war time austerity, I was being cared for and nurtured by a very wonderful African-American lady. Her name was Anna Mae Carthen. She took care of me from the time I was one years old until I was seven. And black really is beautiful. Sometimes I feel black. |  |
Race is a mythical construction. There is genetic uniformity in the human spcies, despite superficial variations in appearances. "If you take blood and compare protein molecules, or if you sequence genes themselves, you will find that there is less difference between any two humans living anywhere in the the world than there is between two African chimpanzees." (Richard Dawkins - "The Ancestor's Tale" 2004) The human species went through a population bottleneck about 70,000 years ago during a great volcanic cataclysmic event when the human species almost went extinct. It was a volcanic winter which was followed by a 1,000 year ice age and only a few thousand humans survived and they became our ancestors, which is why we are so genetically uniform.
I loved Anna Mae like she was my own mother and during that period in my life it was because of Ana Mae, my surrogate mom that I had a unique awareness and identity and I am very grateful for that experience and her love.
There are so many wonderful, fond memories of my life with Anna Mae and even as young as I was I remember them vividly like they just happened yesterday. I remember my time with her even more than I do many events which happened since.
She would take me to her home for days at a time, sometimes on weekends and sometimes during the week.
There was this big four poster bed of hers where I would sleep cuddled up and warmed by this sweet wonderful lady, her body next to mine. It was the biggest bed I ever saw but if I saw it today it probably wouldn't appear so big.
I used her chamber pot because there was no indoor plumbing. And she would take me to her Baptist church on Sundays and sometimes on week nights also. I was the only white face there, but the rest of me was black, and I didn't know there was a difference and I never felt out of place. She was, like many African-Americans, very spiritual, sang in the choir in her church and I was there. I felt more at ease and more accepted there in that African-American Baptist church than I would in Christian chapel with white boys when I was in military school
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Bell Hooks, 1996 |
I have never been able to tolerate racism even in jest, you know the way some people like to think it is a joke to disparage others, and fought against bigotry whenever I was confronted with it, which has been often.
 | Teddy was my first dog. She was a stray that my parents adopted and she lived with us. I have had a love affair with dogs ever since. Today I have 2 Chihuahuas and 1 Chihuahua-Pincher living with us. |
My parents were typical middle-class and they worked very hard at their own business so I was left in Anna Mae's care most of the time and that was a good thing for me. I loved her very much and even years later when I had my own son about that age I revisited with her and she met my first born, John.
I have memories of my "black" playmates teaching me how to make my first sling shot out of old garter belts and I remember too, the smell of greens and fat back frying in Anna Mae's kitchen. I loved the smell of "soul" food cooking in her kitchen. My wife who came from a poor southern family cooked like that and it brought back some of those memories and the familiar smell of my childhood. My parents never cooked ham because it wasn't kosher and any greens or beans came right out of a can.
I miss my Anna Mae. Those were great memories. We are all the same really. What separates us is class more than race though race is used to divide people. Our best man when Jane and I were married was a black man who I was in the army with at Ft. Monmouth. I always felt comfortable with people of color. We shared some of the same feelings and the were subject to the same kinds of prejudice. I think a lot of Jews felt that same way and were very much involved with black liberation because of it.
As for being related, well, we came out of Africa also but at a different time. And while differences have evolved through natural selection, fit genes surviving specific environments and conditions, we neverthless share the same genetic code as we do with all living things.
| Even outside our species when you look at a living thing it is hard not to recognize that if we are responsible to each other in our own species we should also be responsible to all those other living things with which we have a common ancestor. |
There is evidence that since no aliens have ever been found, the genetic code of every living thing contains the same detailed complexity and can be traced back to over 3 billion years ago. Even bacteria is related to us. Scientists date the oldest bacterial fossils at about 3.5 billion years.
Some didn't make it. While we have the same lineage as everything else, some took a different direction and didn't make it. But we're not the best; we're just the most recent and we think, therefore we think better of ourselves. One relative of ours who did make it was the chimpanzee and before the chimpanzee there was the bonobo which we are less directly related to but is closer to the chimpanzee.
99 per cent of all the species that ever existed are now extinct and there is a very good chance we are headed that way also. And nothing we do may be enough to stop that from happening and if it doesn't happen from some natural catastrophe as has happened before it is likely it will happen by our hand as we destroy the very infrasture we need to survive unless we figure out a way to preserve our very fragile biosphere.
 | I grew up in New Jersey, until I was seven which is when we moved to Florida. I was born in Camden at Cooper Hospital and my grandparents had a tailer shop there. My parents lived in Pennsgrove in South Jersey where they had a "mom and pop" grocery store. Mom was originally from Camden. Dad was from Philadelpha. |