Can I have the Martin? I'll gioive you good malt whiskey in exchange.

Azizi, confronting othe racism of the nineteenth century as it is embedded in folks songs is a real problem not only for people with brown or balck skin, but also for people of white skin. It is not comfortable to consider that your great-great-grandparents might have been atrocious abusers of human beings. It is not comfortable, I am sure, to think your great-great-great grandparents were atrociously abused.

However, I do not think human bestiality as such is a white or black issue. If you were to collect and translate the songs sung by the Fan people as they existed when du Chaillu first visited among them, they would probably include a celebration of killing and eating enemy tribes. This is not much of an issue here, because those songs are lost (AFAIK), but it is not comfortable to think that any of us could easily have those histories in our DNA.

We all have a limbic, lizard-like part to our brains, I think, which under certain conditions can make brutal animals out of any of us. We also have forebrains and analytical abilities to manage things into better shape with. If my ancestors were brutal, or if they were brutalized, it is no reflection on what I have chosen to do with my time on the world. You are not bound by your protoplasm.

Where do we go from here?


A