eat light:

wow, that was quick. cold spring harbor's board of trustees has suspended james watson from his post because of the racist remarks i posted about yesterday. in the world of science, this is pretty huge. he's been there for 40 years.

i find it very disturbing, though, to hear comments like that from the guy who was in charge of a huge part of the human genome project (HGP).

lest cold spring harbor's trustees get too uppity on this matter--and don't get me wrong, they're doing the right thing, but their own station played a large role in the u.s.'s racist agenda: for decades during the first part of the 20th century, charles davenport worked at cold spring harbor. if you're not familiar with his name...he was a leader of the eugenics movement in the u.s., and he ran the central eugenics record keeping office at cold spring harbor along with a guy named harry laughlin. their agenda? to forcibly sterilize anyone deemed "feebleminded," which usually translated as "poor" or "of color." for them, this was an issue of national "racial hygiene." their agenda had a lot of popular support--theodore roosevelt wrote and spoke widely on the subject. it was also endorsed and enforced by the u.s. supreme court in buck v. bell.

lest we forget.

Here's Lynette Clemetson's NYT editorial, "The Racial Politics of Speaking Well". this is the piece i blogged about yesterday.

It's a good piece--check it out.

This is one of the most offensive pieces of film criticism I've read in a very long time. I use the term "criticim" very loosely. It is actually a piece of cheerleading for Mel Gibson's Apocalyptico, a film that the critic, William Arnold of the Associated Press, calls an "all out attack on tribal culture." WTF? Here are the last two paragraphs of the piece:

But his movie definitely is telling us that tribal sensibility, which films like "Dances With Wolves" celebrate so nostalgically, actually is primitive and backward; and its resurgence in Africa and the Middle East is causing all the problems in our world.

In the climax of "Apocalypto," when signs appear that the white man and his Christian civilization are coming, we feel relief. That relief flies in the face of everything the movies have taught us since the '60s, and no one but Gibson would have dared try to induce it.

Well, certainly Dances with Wolves has all kinds of problems, including (but not limited to) fetishizing Indianness and yet again, ala James Fennimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans, for example), setting up a white man and his Indian-reared white wife as rightful heirs to the land and culture of the "tragically disappearing" Sioux people. But Arnold seems to think that depicting "tribal culture" as "primitive and backward," and then linking 15th century Mayan culture to "its resurgence in Africa and the Middle East" is the needed corrective. Here, notice the slippage in that pronoun "its." All "tribal culture" is the same, wherever and whenever "it" exists or "resurges."

Holy fuck! What an asshole. Right next to Mel Gibson, an asshole's asshole. In fact, from what I saw in the preview for this movie, it seems to me that it will "teach us" exactly what "the movies have taught us since the '60s", and the thing that most needs un-teaching: that Indians, lumped together into a single, monolithic group, are doomed to disappear--no, not doomed, but fated to yield to the benevelont superiority of white Europeans. The only thing that changed in the 60's, if anything did, was a shift in emphasis in depictions of Indian people, still "noble savages" but now retooled to be more "noble" than "savage." (However, see the 1992 film adaptation of Cooper's Mohicans, and notice the character of Magua for example.) But still doomed, tragic figures. Never mind that populations of Indian people are on the rise, and that there are more Indian people living in the U.S. now than there were in 1900--but we are taught to think that they are not "real Indians" because they've lost their "real culture." (How many of us still practice the "real culture" of 1850's white Americans? Huh? Oh right, white people don't have culture; "we" have science and the cold light of objective reason instead. And McDonald's. And the Gap.) And never mind that the massive holocaust of Indian people in the Americas was caused by white European violence, genocide, and the expropriation of any remaining Indian people from the land (in a telling reversal of the English Enclosure Laws that Marx wrote about, though, Indian people weren't fenced out of the land, they were fenced in--after first being forcibly relocated and "re-educated," of course; a method later perfected by Hitler. And Roosevelt, with the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII).

This film--at least in William Arnold's affirmation of it--apparently takes another dangerous and deeply troubling step, however, in linking Indians of the Americas and their "regrettable but necessary disappearance" to African and Middle Eastern people. I can only imagine the postscript to both the movie ("we feel relief"??? at the arrival of the Conquistadors???) and this piece of crap criticism: "Hey, it worked real slick in the Americas. Let's export the killing machine(TM) ideo/techno/logy."

I'm afraid we already have, we've been doing variations on the theme for generations. And in the paradigm of consensus democracy I have to say "we," right? I'm a tax-paying (to the extent that I have an income to tax), relatively law-abiding citizen of the U.S., a nation that was founded on the aforementioned expropriation and genocide, and that continues to perpetrate this bloodshed around the globe. The only weapons my democratic upbringing have left me are my voter's registration card, my right to form political groups and associations (NION, anyone?) and my pen (here rendered metaphorical, blasted to bytes).