Pride in ancestry

Here in the United States we're celebrating Thanksgiving today, hopefully by staying home and not turning this into a nationwide superspreader event.

It's a day a lot of folks think about their heritage, and the weird old story about the Pilgrims and Native Americans having dinner together gets rehashed, despite the fact that just about everything we're taught about it in elementary school is wrong.  That's the way with cultural mythology, though, and we're hardly the only ones to engage in these sorts of exercises in history-sanitation.

It did, however, make me start thinking about the whole pride-in-ancestry thing, which also strikes me as kind of odd.  To quote my evolutionary biology professor's pragmatic quip, "Your ancestors didn't have to be brilliant or strong or nice; they just had to live long enough to fuck successfully at least once."  Which might be true, but it hasn't stopped me from being interested in my ancestry, while always trying to keep in mind that my family tree is as checkered as anyone else's.

Take, for example, my 3x-great-grandmother, Sarah (Handsberry) Rulong.  She was born some time around 1775 in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and her surname probably started out as something Teutonic like Hansberger or Hunsberger, especially given that her marriage certificate says she was a Lutheran.  At the age of twenty she set out with a group -- none of whom were her immediately family members -- to cross just shy of a thousand miles of what was then trackless wilderness, finally ending up in New Madrid, Missouri.  She lived there for a time as a single woman, ultimately marrying three times and outliving all three husbands.  She had a total of nine children, including my great-great grandmother, Isabella (Rulong) Brandt, and was in southern Louisiana in 1830 after being widowed for the third time -- but I don't know what happened to her after that.

Now there's someone who I wish had left me a diary to read.

Sarah's father-in-law, Luke Rulong (the father of her third husband, Aaron Rulong, and my direct ancestor) also was a curious fellow.  We'd tried for years to figure out who he was; the Rulong family was of Dutch origin and lived in Ocean County, New Jersey, but we couldn't find out anything specifically about him in the records of the time.

Turns out we were looking in the wrong place.  Look in the court and jail records of Ocean County in the late eighteenth century, and he was all over the place, having been arrested multiple times for such misdeeds as "riot," "mischief," "disorder," "public drunkenness," and "poaching."

See what I mean about interest not equaling pride?

Most of my ancestry is from France, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, and England, something I know both from genealogical research and from the results of my DNA tests.  So I'm solidly northern/western European, something I found a little disappointing.  It'd have been kind of cool to discover a Nigerian ancestor I didn't know about, or something.  But no, I'm pretty much white through and through.

Still, there are some interesting folks back there on my family tree.  I have a great-great uncle who has his own Wikipedia page: John Andrews Murrell, the "Great Western Land Pirate," who was a highwayman in the early 1800s in what is now Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.  Murrell was also a con artist who claimed he was a revivalist preacher, and went around preaching to standing-room-only crowds (apparently he spoke well and knew his Bible; so the praise-the-Lord-and-open-your-wallets televangelists are hardly a new phenomenon).  While he was speaking, the story goes, his cronies would go behind the crowds and loot all the saddlebags.

My great-great-grandfather, John's brother James Henry Murrell, had to go all the way to southern Louisiana to escape the bad reputation John had given the family name.

I have a number of ne'er-do-wells in my ancestry.  One of the wildest stories is about Jean Serreau, one of my mom's forebears, who was a landholder in Nova Scotia (then called Acadia) in the late seventeenth century.  Apparently he came home one day to find his wife in bed with a Swiss army officer, and was so outraged that he walloped the guy in the head with a heavy object and killed him.  (Brings coitus interruptus to new heights, doesn't it?)  He was promptly arrested and looked likely to hang, but his status gave him the leeway to sue for a pardon.  He eventually had to go to France and appeal to the very top -- King Louis XIV -- who upon hearing the case pardoned Serreau immediately.

"Do not fret, Monsieur," the king told Serreau.  "I would have done the same thing."

Like all families, mine has its share of tragedy.  My mother's great-grandmother, Florida (Perilloux) Meyer-Lévy, was widowed at the young age of 37, and unlike the redoubtable Sarah never married again.  Her husband was apparently an unreliable sort, a breeder of horses who "made bad deals while drunk" (this sort of thing seems to run in my family).  Florida was left penniless with nine children, four of them under the age of ten, at his death.  She rented out her home as an inn, making enough to squeak by, but ultimately had to sell the house and ended her life as a domestic servant.  Here's a photo of her, taken shortly before her death at age 77 -- can't you see the hard times etched into her face?

It's tempting to be all edified by her tale, and see in it stalwart courage and an indomitable nature, but in reality, who knows how she dealt with her adversity?  She died when my mother was only three years old, and according to my mom and her cousins, no one much talked about that side of the family.  So anything I could extract about her character from what I know of her life would only be a surmise, with no more anchor in reality than the happy Pilgrims and Natives eating turkey together on the First Thanksgiving.

The truth, of course, is something you can't really tell from looking at a family tree; my ancestry, like everyone's, is made up of a broad cast of characters, kind and nasty, rich and poor, honest and dishonest, servant and master.  We're too quick to jump into fairy tales about noble blood and hereditary lordship, without keeping in mind that a lot of those noble lords were (frankly) nuttier than squirrel shit.  Pride in ancestry has all too often slipped into racism and tribalism and xenophobia, and realistically speaking, it's not even justifiable on a factual basis.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts on Thanksgiving.  We're all the products of a mixed bag of forebears, and if you go back far enough -- honestly, only four thousand years or so, by most anthropologists' estimates -- we're all related, descending from the same pool of ancestors who "fucked successfully at least once."  No real point of pride there, or at least, nothing that you should feel superior about.

Much more important, really, how we treat others here and now.

So for those of you celebrating, I hope you enjoy your meals, and I hope you all stay healthy and happy in these fractious times.  Take care of those around you -- let that be the legacy we leave behind, and maybe our descendants a hundred years from now will remember at least a little bit about who we were.

**************************************

I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event.  The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).

There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future.  One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man.  There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.

The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine.  There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later.  This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre.  This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The specter of bias

Back in 2005, a study by David Kelly (of the University of Sheffield) et al. showed something simultaneously fascinating and unsettling; that racial bias begins to crop up in children as early as three months of age.  The authors write:

Adults are sensitive to the physical differences that define ethnic groups.  However, the age at which we become sensitive to ethnic differences is currently unclear.  Our study aimed to clarify this by testing newborns and young infants for sensitivity to ethnicity using a visual preference (VP) paradigm.  While newborn infants demonstrated no spontaneous preference for faces from either their own- or other-ethnic groups, 3-month-old infants demonstrated a significant preference for faces from their own-ethnic group.  These results suggest that preferential selectivity based on ethnic differences is not present in the first days of life, but is learned within the first 3 months of life.

I suspect, although this is yet to be rigorously tested, that this tendency of like-prefers-like comes from the fact that in our ancestors, strangers -- i.e., people who don't resemble us -- were more likely to be dangerous.  A built-in tendency to develop an aversive response to faces that look different is unfortunate, but certainly understandable given the fact that our forebears, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, lived lives that were "nasty, poor, brutish, and short."

It's easy enough to think that by the time we become adults, most of us have unlearned these natural tendencies.  I consider myself to be unbiased with respect to race or ethnicity -- and I suspect most of my readers think the same thing about themselves.  But a pair of studies that just appeared last week that appeared in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology give us the uncomfortable truth that racial and ethnic bias may not be that easy to expunge.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with the one called, "Whites Demonstrate Anti-Black Associations But Do Not Reinforce Them," by Jordan Axt and Sophie Trawalter of the University of Virginia, that looked at how easy it was to instill and/or eradicate negative racial associations.  Axt and Trawalter write:

White Americans, on average, associate Black people with negativity (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002), and have an easy time learning that Black people are associated with negative information.  Not surprisingly then, they have an easier time associating negative experiences (e.g., an electric shock) with Black vs. White faces (Olsson, Ebert, Banaji, & Phelps, 2005).  For example, in one study, participants received a mild electric shock while viewing either Black or White target faces.  Subsequently, they viewed Black and White target faces without receiving the electric shocks.  All the while, researchers measured participants' skin conductance responses as a proxy for fear, and found that White participants who had been shocked while viewing Black vs. White target faces then had an easier time learning to fear the Black vs. White target faces, and also had a harder time unlearning this association between Black faces and negative outcomes.  This pattern of results is consistent with the notion that Whites have an easy time associating Blacks with negative information.

Once acquired, though, these negative associations are rather resistant to strengthening, and a protocol intended to instill positive associations with people of other races strengthened far more easily, a result that is at least a little cheering:

Across five studies, the IGT paradigm revealed an intriguing asymmetry in participants' acquiring and strengthening of racial associations.  White participants readily demonstrated an association that paired Black faces with negative outcomes, supporting earlier work showing that Whites are better at learning an association between racial outgroups and aversive stimuli (Olsson et al., 2005).  However, Whites in our studies were then unwilling or unable to strengthen this initial anti-Black association.  Conversely, White participants were less able to initially acquire an association that paired Black faces with positive and White faces with negative outcomes, but were willing and able to reinforce this association.

So it's encouraging that these biases can be modified in a positive direction.  But the second study suggests that such subconscious prejudice may not be as eradicated as we might wish.

The paper called "Welcome to the U.S., But Change Your Name," by Xian Zhao and Monica Biernat, explored the reaction of professors -- who as a group, you'd think, would be more cognizant of the dangers of racial bias -- to receiving inquiry emails from someone with a Chinese name versus ones from someone with an Anglo name, and also of undergraduates presented with a lecture using the same distinction.  The researchers found a disquieting pattern:

In Study 1, an email from a Chinese student requesting a meeting about graduate training was sent to 419 White professors with the name of the sender being varied (Xian versus Alex).  Use of the Chinese name led to fewer responses and agreements to meet than using the Anglo name.  In Study 2, a lecture recording from an international graduate student was presented to 185 White undergraduates with the name of the lecturer varied (Jian versus John). The preference for Anglo names over Chinese names was apparent among those high in assimilationist and low  in multicultural ideologies.

It'd be nice to think that in the 21st century, we're beyond dealing with racism, but the neurological underpinnings are still there.  The attitudes are not that easy to eradicate even in the best of times, and with the current upsurge in xenophobia, suspicion, and stereotyping we need to be even more on guard for letting these flawed perceptions influence our behavior.

In short, it's not enough to say "I'm not a racist" and be done with it.  The specter of like-prefers-like bias is too deeply ingrained in us to dismiss so quickly.  And it's easy enough to criticize those tendencies in others; it's as important -- possibly more important -- to be on guard for the same biases in our own perceptions of our fellow humans.

The right to fear

I keep telling myself "this will be my last political post," but circumstances keep intervening.

The circumstance this time was one of my Facebook friends who posted an article that said that the people who didn't vote for Donald Trump, and who are now in a serious freak-out about the future of our country, are simply sore losers who can't handle not winning.  We are, the author said, "whiny safe-space liberals" who "were told by mommy and daddy that it's only fair if everyone gets a trophy," and therefore we just need to grow up, suck it up, and deal.

My first thought, after reading this, was that it must be nice to see things that black-and-white.  Makes life easy.  In reality, of course, there were dozens of reasons that people voted the way they did (on both sides).  The pro-life/pro-choice issue, considerations of foreign policy and our relations with China, Russia, and the Middle East, concerns over the rights of LGBT individuals, the size of government, the role of the military...  The reason the election went the way it did is not a matter of a single issue.

Neither, I might add, is the reaction of the people who were on the losing side.  Maybe some of 'em are of the sore-loser variety; they do exist.  Those of you who are regular readers of Skeptophilia know that I've railed as hard as anyone about the tendency of colleges to cave in to students who want nothing more than to be continually validated, who demand that above all, they never have their preconceived notions challenged.  The whole "safe-space" concept completely contradicts the real purpose of education, which is to push the envelope, look at other points of view, expand the mind.  (Note that I am referring to "safe spaces" insofar as the term applies to intellectual pursuits; of course students should be safe with respect to discrimination, bullying, or bodily harm.)

But to characterize the protests now going on over the prospects of a Trump presidency as solely due to Democrats being poor losers is to miss the reality.  Not only does such a stance conveniently forget the ugly, and often racist, rhetoric that flew about from Republicans each time Obama won, it also ignores the fact that many of the people who are protesting are justified in being afraid.  Trump's stump speeches marginalized one group after another -- immigrants (legal and otherwise), Muslims, LGBT, women, atheists... the list goes on and on.

Oh, but that was just chest-thumping, a way to get his base excited, right?  He didn't mean any of that stuff literally, it was just the political version of "locker room talk."  Okay, add to that the appointment of Steve Bannon of Breitbart as Chief Strategist of the incoming administration -- a man who was called "a racist anti-Semite" by John Weaver, adviser to Republican Governor John Kasich of Ohio -- and you might understand why a Jewish friend of mine said, "We always heard, 'Never Again.'  I believed that.  I don't now."

And whatever you might say about Trump's intentions, it appears that some of his followers are in no doubt about taking the whole thing literally.  Hate crimes spiked right after the election -- to the point that even conservative media outlet Forbes commented upon it.  There is a new website called "Why We're Afraid," started with the intention of documenting cases where this ominous rhetoric has crossed the line into actual threats.  Here are just a few of the cases this site records:

• At work at a hospital where I'm a member of the junior staff.  An elder physician came up to me and told me I should get ready to go to the death camp now that Trump was elected.  I'm openly gay, and he knows this.
• At a church support group.  A women of Latino heritage says that a family member, a child, was told at school that he and his family were going to be sent “back to Mexico.”  The response from a member of the group: “Well, I’m sure you’ll be happier in Mexico.”
• Overheard at work at a trucking company. Oregon, 11/11/16: “This is a white country.  It’s always been a white country, and now we’re taking it back.”
• [From a U.S. citizen of Syrian heritage] I was minding my own business pumping gas when a pick-up truck filled with four white males blasting country music drove-by.  As they passed the gas station, the passenger leaned out and yelled, “Trump’s President now take that fucking dirty rag off your head you towel fucking desert nigger before I take it and hang you with it.  Make America White Again!”
• Woke up this morning to find someone had spray-painted "Die Faggot!  Your time here is over!  Trump 2016" on my car and the side of my house.

I know that like with most ugly acts, these are the actions of a few and don't represent the majority of voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump.  But for fuck's sake, don't tell the rest of us we have no right to be afraid.  Own up and admit that your candidate did incite such behavior, whether or not he "meant it literally."

And better still, let's hear you repudiate such horrific acts.  You're saying that the folks who don't support Donald Trump are overreacting, that they have no justifiable reason for fear?  Prove it.  Stand up and shout down the people who are, right now, doing these things.  You may have perfectly legitimate reasons for voting for Trump, but it is now incumbent upon you to demonstrate that a Trump presidency isn't going to turn into the horror show that is already, before a week has passed, beginning to unfold.

I grew up in rural southern Louisiana.  The lion's share of my family and high school friends are conservative, and the majority of them voted for Donald Trump.  I know them -- I know they would never condone such things.  So I'm asking them, and any other readers who are conservative: show us that you will not tolerate the scapegoating of minorities and other marginalized groups, that you will stand up for the right of all citizens of this country to live, work, and play without fear of being the targets of harassment and violence.

You want us to pipe down, to be good losers, to "suck it up and deal?"  Okay.  But only if you put your money where your mouth is and show us that we on the losing side have no reason to fear.