White Pride

I think white people have a lot to be proud of. They can drive loud fuming pickup trucks around like nobody’s business. And they are pretty straight shooters, especially when they have dark targets. All of this takes nerves of steel and muscles of meat.

But here’s what I don’t understand. Why is it that so many white people feel inadequate in their own self-image unless they can degrade people of other races? Can’t whites just be proud of being white without shooting blacks or releasing dogs to attack Native American children? Why can’t white people just thank their white God that they are white, without having to carry out acts of degradation against other races?

There’s nothing wrong with white pride, or black pride, or Native pride, so long as people do not degrade members of other ethnicities.

Do Police Killings Show a Racial Bias?

It seems like at least once a week, if not more often, we get news of an unarmed black man being killed by white police officers. When it happened in the city where I live, I started thinking more about what is happening.

I have not seen evidence that any of the white officers were motivated by overt racial hatred. But it appears that there is an underlying racial bias, of which most police officers may not even be aware: a bias that makes them pull the trigger on black men more than on white men. The number of police shootings of black men is way out of proportion to the percentage of black people in the population. It looks as if the idea—conscious or not—of “shoot first and ask questions later” motivates police more against blacks than whites.

White pride groups usually respond to this by saying that blacks commit more crimes, per capita, than whites. This, however, is no justification for having a quicker trigger finger for blacks than for whites. It may explain the higher conviction and incarceration rates for blacks than whites, but not the disparity in police shootings.

And we all understand that mistakes will happen. When a police officer has to make a quick decision, and when he or she thinks his or her life is in danger, there is no time for logical thought. But these are exactly the circumstances under which unconscious bias can have the greatest impact.

It becomes even clearer when you consider how many white men have been shot by black police officers. An online search suggests that this happens about once or twice a year. Here are the examples I found, in reverse chronological order:

• November 2015: A black cop killed Jeremy Mardis, a white boy with autism in Louisiana.
• November 2014: A black officer shot Gilbert Collar, a white student at the University of Southern Alabama, after he banged on the police station window.
• October 2014: A black cop killed Dillon Taylor, a white man, in Salt Lake City.

This takes us back almost two years. In two other cases I could not determine the race of the police officer who shot the white victim: Castaic, California, and Fresno, California, both in 2016. The killing of Dylan Noble in Fresno made it all over the internet. It looks like a lot of cases until you see how many of them are about the same man, Dylan Noble. There has also been a lot of rage over the police killing of a white youth, Zachary Hammond, in South Carolina in 2015, even though the police officer was also white.

White officers kill black men: dozens of times a year. Black officers kill white men: about twice a year.

As indicated in the above graphic, Native Americans are even more likely than blacks to be shot by police. As a member of the Cherokee tribe, I took notice of this, although no police officer in a hurry would think I was Native American. If the police killings have an underlying racial motivation, it is not surprising that Native Americans should also be the victims of lots of police shootings.

A version of this essay, in an evolutionary context, will soon appear on my evolution blog.

New blog essay by Amy Kennedy

Amy Kennedy has posted a new essay on her blog: "How could anyone ever make it in life without God? I'll tell you." She describes herself as self-disciplined, moral, respectful, caring, genuine, hard-working, honest, empathetic, and kind. I can affirm that this is correct. 

An open letter to Governor Bevin

Dear Governor Bevin:

I wish to applaud you on your statement earlier this week that Republicans should be ready for blood to be shed in the defense of their Party. In saying this, you have echoed the words of your Supreme Leader, who said that if he lost the election there might be violence.

You are far from alone in your sentiments. The man who hung an effigy of Hillary Clinton along an Oregon highway this week has made it clear that Democrats will soon suffer the fate that lynched blacks suffered in earlier decades.

I realize that you have left open the possibility of bloodshed in either direction: Democrat blood by Republicans, or Republican blood by Democrats. But Republicans have a lot more guns. Therefore it is very unlikely that Democrats would shoot Republicans.

Opposition to the Republican Party has gone on far too long. Anyone who hesitates to give complete devotion to your Party should be swept away as quickly as possible. And you can start with me. While I am not indicating whether I support Clinton or not, I unhesitatingly affirm that I do not worship Trump. He is a mere human being who does not deserve the religious reverence that his followers give Him.

So I invite you to begin your bloodshed with me. I teach classes in the Biological Sciences building at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. You can find me there almost every weekday. You can send somebody to shoot me, assuming you do not have time to do it yourself. Other than a few hundred students who might be in the way, it should be a pretty clear shot. There might be some difficulty in crossing state lines to do this, but you can probably hire someone in Oklahoma to do it.

I am a member of the Cherokee tribe. You used to have Cherokees in Kentucky (though most were in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia), but you got rid of us in 1838. I provide this information just in case it makes it easier for you or someone else to shoot me. Proportional to population, far more Native Americans have been shot by whites than the other way around, so my assassination would not be too unusual in American history.

Think of the prestige you would get if you back up your words with actions. You should get started. When can I expect you or your surrogate to arrive?

Oh, and I teach evolution too.

Love and Writing

People who, like me, grow up to be writers have put in hundreds or in my case thousands of hours writing (in sheer bliss) by middle age. Daniel Levitin said that a genius is simply someone who has practiced something for ten thousand hours, I am quite certain that this is an incomplete picture. But there is probably no genius who has not practiced for ten thousand hours.

I have a natural talent for writing. It manifested itself more strongly when I was young than did my talent for music. I believe I will yet become a great writer. But I do not believe that I would ever have become a great musician even if I had practiced ten thousand hours. I might have been the modern equivalent of the baroque composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, competent and forgotten. (Wikipedia says he was also a silvologist, or forestry expert. Perhaps he did better work with trees than with music, like me.)

But to get to the level of skill that I have today, I had to go through my juvenile experimental period. I worked at it very hard when I was in elementary school, using an old Undersood open-sided sturdy typewriter. I also did a lot of composing.

One of the novels I worked on was about Russian spies building a rocket out in the desert of Arizona. The hero of the story was pretty sure that this is what they were up to; they drove panel trucks with a hammer and sickle on it, after all. Every chapter of plot was separated by a chapter in which the hero described all of the plants in his parents’ garden. Future botanist here. I do not remember what the climax was; maybe that was because I might not have finished it.

Another novel was about three kids getting lost in the woods: two boys and a girl. I was right on the cusp of puberty, and I wanted to have one of the boys get together with the girl inside a blanket to stay warm during the cold forest night. The other boy wouldn’t have minded; all he did was recite Shakespeare. But I did not have the courage or foolhardiness to pursue that path. The climax was when the kids, who had dug trenches and buried themselves to stay warm, were sniffed out by a bear, which inexplicably left them alone. I don’t remember much about it other than that I described the mountain as if it had loving parental arms that embraced the hikers; I had read a story in which O. Henry used the word philoprogenitiveness, and I wanted to use it too. My idea of good writing back then was to use as many big words as I could.

When I was in college and old enough to know better, I started writing a romance novel set in medieval England, about which I knew nothing. (About either romance or medieval England, as it turned out. I was too meek to have a romantic life at that time.) It had so many plot bloopers in it that when I wrote a (good) novel decades later I used my earlier novel as an example of one that was hilariously inept.

I spent hours and hours on this stuff. I did not realize it was bad. But had I known how bad it was, I might have stopped writing it and never developed my talent. I remain thankful to my teachers, such as Mr. Jim Kliegl, who put up with some of this stuff and even encouraged me. I think he knew I would become a good writer, based not on what I wrote but on the fact that I was writing it.

Okay, so I finally learned how to write. But I still had a few things to learn, things that I still have to carefully avoid. Here’s an example. As I have written previously, we have patriotic Confederates down here in Oklahoma, whose only purpose in life is to sell confederate flags and drive around with confederate flags waving from poles in their truck beds. Based on my conversations with them, I consider them to be among the most hateful people I have met. They are really scary. When I recently started a new novel, I had a female Cherokee heroine and a male Confederate villain. I won’t give away the plot other than to say I based it on the apocryphal book of Judith.

As I wrote, I made the villain as hateful as possible. Every little detail was disgusting. I was ranting. But then I started running an experiment in my mind. If he was really that disgusting, the heroine would have stayed away from him and there would be no plot. This was when I realized that I did not have a character, but a foil. In order to make him a real character, I had to get inside his mind. I had to empathize with him.

I discovered that, to write a good novel, or even a good story, I had to love even the characters that I hated.

I believe that, with this discovery, I have finally reached the plateau of professional competence. I am beginning a new round of queries to fiction agents in an attempt to market another novel, one which I have thoroughly rewritten twice. How many times, hundreds perhaps, I have been turned down by fiction agents. But maybe it has been for the best. (This can’t go on forever, of course, or I’ll be dead.) One agent told me that an earlier version of this novel was episodic rather than having a strong plot. It only took me a year to realize she was right. I will send the new one back to her as soon as tomorrow. I am now glad the earlier version was not published. I have published science books, but am ready now for fiction.

I feel like a plant with dozens of unopened flower buds (the novels). The plant keeps developing those buds to be better and better so that when they open, perhaps one after another in quick succession, the result will be spectacular and pollinators will come buzzing and whirring from miles around. In the event that this happens, that the playfulness of my youth and continued playfulness of my middle years pays off in my maturity, I will let you know.

I posted a version of this essay, in an evolutionary context, on my evolution blog.

A Story about Leaving Adventism

Amy Kennedy has written a blog entry about her experiences with leaving Adventism. It is a thoughtful essay and I recommend it. The link is here.

Some Religious Insights from Literature: W. H. Hudson

Green Mansions by W. H. Hudson is a classic. It is considered to be one of those works you have to read at some point. And I admit that it gripped me when I read it, and it was beautifully written.

As I writer, I could recognize numerous problems with the structure of the story, which other writers even contemporaneous with W. H. Hudson would have avoided. The main problem was that it had no closure. It reached a climax, and the climax was extremely vivid. Then after the climax, the narrator just fell apart into depression, stumbled about, and the story ended. This went on for 25 very long pages after the climax. Some of it was very good—especially the image of the white moth doing the same thing that the young woman Rima did—but for the most part it was just heavy depression.

The structure of the story was that the original narrator got a Venezuelan, Mr. Abel, to tell the story he had kept secret all his life. Most of the novel is Abel’s first person account. This makes Green Mansions a double-first-person structure. Briefly, Abel recounted the old man’s story, making it a triple-first-person for a brief period. This would be fine except that, at the end, as I said, there was no closure: there was nothing about any conversation or parting between the author and Abel.

Having such a closure would have solved at least two problems. First, the events in the story were so much like a fantasy—the young woman Rima (flitting around in a skirt of spider silk) seemed too ethereal to be a real person, too good, too naïve, too nimble, which made me think that maybe Abel had imagined her. Abel claimed to have brought Rima’s bones with him in a jar (sorry I had to spoil that). He could have shown the jar to the narrator who, looking inside, would have found it empty. Or not. Anyway, Hudson could have done something with that for a really good ending.

Second, during the long depressing end, Abel told the author about how he had concluded that God either did not exist or was evil. I, like many readers of this blog, found this interesting; but it was just a long rant. How much more interesting it would have been if Abel had told the author what he thought, and the author might have probed and questioned him on it. I believe this is what H. G. Wells would have done.

I want to include here some of the vivid passages that the new atheist Abel spoke. I will repeat them here largely without judgment. They are just vivid, that’s all.

Abel imagined speaking with Rima before she perished in the fire (sorry I had to spoil that): “To me was your cry; but your poor, frail fellow-creature was not there to save, or, failing that, to cast himself into the flames with you, hating God.”

Then he continued (in these fragments from the next twenty pages). “Thus, in my insufferable pain, I spoke aloud; alone in that solitary place, a bleeding fugitive in the dark night, looking up at the stars I cursed the Author of my being and called on Him to take back the abhorred gift of life.

“Yet, according to my philosophy, how vain it was! All my bitterness and hatred and defiance were as empty, as ineffectual, as utterly futile, as are the supplications of the meek worshiper, and no more than the whisper of a leaf, the light whir of an insect’s wing…when I thanked Him on my knees for guiding me to where I had heard so sweet and mysterious a melody, or hated and defied Him as now, it all came from Him—love and hate, good and evil…though my cries did not touch nor come near Him they would yet hurt me; and, just as a prisoner maddened at his unjust fate beats against the stone walls of his cell until he falls back bruised and bleeding on the floor, so did I wilfully bruise my own soul, and knew that those wounds I gave myself would not heal.

“For no reaction, or submission, had followed on that furious revolt against the unknown being, personal or not, that is behind nature, in whose existence I believed. I was still in revolt: I would hate Him, and show my hatred by being like Him, as He appears to us reflected in that mirror of Nature. Had he given me good gifts—the sense of right and wrong and sweet humanity? The beautiful sacred flower He had caused to grow in me I would crush ruthlessly; its beauty and fragrance and grace would be dead forever; there was nothing evil, nothing cruel and contrary to my nature, that I would not be guilty of, glorying in my guilt.

“For they were all dead at last, old and young, all who had lighted the fire round that great green tree in which Rima had taken refuge, who had danced round the blaze, shouting, ‘Burn! Burn!’

“That is my philosophy still: prayers, austerities, good works—they avail nothing, and there is no intercession, and outside of the soul there is no forgiveness in heaven or earth for sin.”

Green Mansions is one of those novels that is so gripping and flawed that I fantasize that someday I will write my own version of it. Or not.