Welcome to Litsy!

Confession: I have a deep and inexplicably powerful love for popular science books. This one pulls on so many disparate threads, and uses them to explain something startling and beautiful. Strong recommend.

Society's common views on migration--wildlife and human--are based on racist, xenophobic, and weirdly sexualized BS "science" that we're only just now seeing corrected. The idea of exclusivity, of belonging to and originating from particular locals does not hold up to what the science shows. Everything has been on the move since life began, trying to institute borders is an exercise in stupidity and futility.

I loved this book and I learned a lot from it. Everyone should read it, especially those that think whiteness is everything. MAGAs should definitely read this book, too. We are all immigrants. Our species has been on the move for a very long time and no one should be demonized for it. Let‘s work towards a more loving, just world for all.

Throughout much of our history, kingdoms and empires rose and fell with blurry edges, each culture and people shading gradually from one to the next. It‘s not that borders were open or closed. They didn‘t exist at all.

It is possible to envision a world on which people, too, safely move across the landscape. People seeking to move as the climate changes or as their livelihoods dry up don‘t have to risk being hunted down by Border Patrol agents or drowning in the sea or dying in the desert.

If the fever of xenophobia evolved as a kind of immune defense, perhaps it once helped protect us. It is no longer useful for that purpose. Modern medicine provides us with the insights and technology we need to protect ourselves from pathogens, whether we shun strangers or not. Politicians can harness its heat simply by pointing to a border between “us” and “them.”

When powerful actors need immigrant labor, xenophobia diminishes; when they don‘t, it flourishes.

As the myth of a sedentary past evaporates, a previously obscured question emerges: not why people migrate but why their movements inspire terror.

Walls don‘t necessarily function as the impregnable barricades they‘re meant to. Whether crossing the border means scaling a wall or not, people keep moving, regardless.

The more potent barrier to wild species‘ movement is us. So far, our cities, towns, farms, and sprawling industrial infrastructure have swallowed up over half of the planet‘s land surface. Our massive footprint makes life impossible for so many wild species that an estimated 150 go extinct every day, speeding up the background rate of extinction by a factor of one thousand. 💀😔

Our bodies have evolved to evade substantial ‘genetic commitment‘ to local ecological conditions. Such environmental mutability does not evolve in immobile creatures that live in static, unchanging environments. It evolves in creatures who migrate. Our bodies are built for it.

Over 180 different genes influence our height. At least 8 different gene variants influence the color of our skin, each instructing skin cells to produce variable quantities of pigment. In notable distinctions to the principles of eugenics, all those gene variants originated in Africa and are present in the genomes of both dark-skinned and light-skinned people today.

While confusion reigns about why we move and which reasons, if any, should be considered legally acceptable, telling evidence suggests that migration is encoded in our bodies, just as it is in wild species.

In the case of migration, I‘ve come to realize that asking why people move reveals more about us and our expectations and fears than it does about migrants or migration. The idea that there should be a single explanation for migration “is rooted in a sedentarist notion,” the geographer Richard Black suggests, according to which “migration is seen as a problem or exception from the norm, which needs explanation.”

Climatic regimes came & went, geological eruptions made their slow-motion advances & recessions; sea levels rose & fell; monkeys crossed the ocean; ferns colonized Hawaii; koa trees sired their progeny on Reunion Island. Homo migratio left Asia, canoed into the Pacific, guided by stars. With each change, new opportunities for species on the move opened.As those opps arrived, the migrants came. Because nature transgresses borders all the time.

Even the spiders thought to be passively carried around on the winds actively climb to the tops of plants, where they attach their silken threads and stand on tiptoe, waiting for the breeze to gather them up.

The highland tamarind directly descended from the koa. The seed that connected the two had accomplished the epic journey between Hawaii and Reunion Island 1.4 million years ago, before Homo sapiens even evolved. Genetic evidence meant that somehow the koa tree had traveled across 18k kilometers of ocean and colonized Reunion Island. The koa‘s voyage was the longest single dispersal event ever recorded.

The otherworldly highland tamarind tree shares a striking similarity to another tree, which similarly lives on a volcanic island ringed by coral reefs: the koa tree, which can be found growing in the deep ash deposited along the slopes of Hawaii‘s volcanoes, smoky blue butterflies drinking nectar from its flowers.

Human migration is not exceptional. Long isolation did not differentiate our species into separate races. Feats of navigation are not the sole province of “white gods” from the West. The oceans can be crossed by canoe. And humans aren‘t the only ones who move across the landscape, leaping over continents and oceans. Plants and animals do, too.

The potato made it across the Pacific on its own. In 2018 a survey of sweet potato DNA showed that the Polynesian sweet potato had started to evolve separately from American sweet potatoes about 11,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before humans reached Polynesia. Most likely it made the journey afloat on the water or was carried by birds.

If our past is a tree, it is this special kind of tree. Our ancestors migrated, met, merged, then migrated again. We continue to do the same today. Linnaeus named our species Homo sapiens, Latin for “wise man.” A more apt name might have been Homo migratio.

Myths about Linnaean-style biological differences between human racial groups continued to seduce medical professionals. In 2016, 1/2 of white med students claimed that black skin was thicker than white. That false belief, which correlated with med professional‘s inability to accurately assess black people‘s pain, is likely indicated in pregnancy-related deaths of black women, which occur at a rate 3-4x higher than in white women.

Hints that the past was neither isolated nor sedentary appeared in 2000 with results from the Human Genome Project. Sequencers found barely any difference in any of our genes. Our species had not diverged into separate branches at all. Human beings, were 99.% the same, “regardless of race.”

Racist persons should take a look at that⬆️.

Segregationists rejoiced in Carleton Coon‘s notion of barely human Africans and primitive aboriginals, disseminating his theory in newspapers and in their own pamphlets. Coon provided scientific feedback to leading segregationists like Carleton Putnam, whose book on the biological backwardness of African people inspired a young KKK enthusiast, David Duke.

Politico called it ‘the bible of the alt right‘, the 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints. The far right French leader Marine Le Pen kept a dedicated copy in her desk. Steve Bannon considered it prescient, visionary; suggesting the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea would create a similarly horrific social meltdown. He called it an “almost Camp of the Saints-type invasion.”

Bannon imagined a version of the past that biologists championed for centuries: in which peoples live separately in long isolation, adapting to distinctive landscapes, differentiating from each other; which migration‘s role was ridding ecosystems of excess individuals; which movement across landscapes/biological borders presaged ecological doom; which modern migration, by bringing biologically distinct people together, disrupted the natural order.

“Let them call you racists,” Steve Bannon said in a speech to an anti-migrant party in France. “Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor… History is on our side.”

How shameful!!!!!

The implied that mixing biologically distinct peoples disrupted the natural order, as early 20th century eugenicists had. “‘Diversity‘ is not our strength,” one of Trump‘s national security officials wrote. “It‘s a source of weakness, tension, and disunion.” —Michael Anton

They referred to the inferior biology of people of African descent, as Linnaeus had. Some people, noted Trump advisor Steve Bannon, in reference to Black people shot by police, are naturally aggressive and violent. “Laziness is a trait in blacks; some people cannot, genetically, handle pressure,” Trump said. “Go out in nature and you don‘t find equality anywhere; I don‘t believe in this doctrine of racial equality.” —Arthur Jones, (R) for IL

“You have to have the right genes. I have great genes. I‘m proud to have German blood. Great stuff. I have a genetic gift for business”, Trump said. His treasury secretary agreed: “He‘s got perfect genes.” The Trump family, one of Trump‘s sons said, subscribed to the “racehorse theory” of inheritance, which “places a high value on bloodlines.”

Ever notice the ‘thinking pattern‘ in racist minds? 🤦🏼‍♀️

White Wilderness infiltrated the public mind for decades before the expose. The scene of the lemming suicide made it a hit. It would be shown in schools across the country for years, bringing Charles Elton‘s vision of the ecological necessity of migrant deaths. With borders around countries such as the US closed, no one pondered the political, ecological dilemmas that might arise if migrants didn‘t martyr themselves. That would change.

The head of the Reich Central Office for “Vegetation Mapping” called the delicate flowering herb Impatiens parviflora a “Mongolian invader” and recommended its extermination. The Nazis zealously protected wild species considered “native.” Under their regime, killing an eagle was a crime punishable by death.

What did this beautiful plant ever do to you, assholes?

In Germany, people purged plants deemed foreign from the landscape. Nazi leaders instructed locals to banish “foreign” plants from their gardens and to practice a new kind of landscape design in keeping with their superior race. Heinrich Himmler issued rules for landscape design forbidding the use of any plants deemed “non-native.”

What the fuck?! Too bad Kudzu couldn‘t swallow them up.

In 1939 an ocean liner carrying 900+ terrified asylum seekers from Germany arrived in Miami. US officials refused to dock. For days, it circled off Florida‘s coast, its passengers sobbing on balconies, until the captain steered back across the Atlantic to war-torn Europe. Some of the passengers made their way to Britain. Most ended up in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, where they soon faced Nazi occupation. Over 250 died in the holocaust.

In February 1939 a bipartisan bill granting 20,000 Jewish children asylum from the Nazi regime was introduced into Congress. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pointedly took no stand; his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, didn‘t either. Anti-immigrant Congress members killed the bill. 20,000 “charming children will all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults,” one advocate, the wife of the US immigration commissioner, testified.

That‘s very ‘pro-life‘.

Laws that temporarily and partially restricted immigration had already been passed into law during the 1914-18 war. The bill that Madison Grant and Henry Osborn‘s Committee wrote would expand and make permanent those restrictions, war or no war. President Calvin Coolidge (30th) readily signed the bill. “America,” he proclaimed, “must be kept American.”
🤔
“Keep America Great”—Trump (45)🤔

The blood of America, had to be “kept pure.” “We are a different race.” The immigrants “will vitiate our population.” Of the foreign born people already in the country, nearly half were “inferior or very inferior” according to intelligence tests. Contaminated by inferior foreign biomatter (DNA), future generations would be permanently diminished.

These things were said in 1923 by Congress members. They are still said today.

Language instruction and other assimilation services aimed at immigrants should be shut down, for they built bridges between the races, the results of which “we will deplore and regret when it is too late.” —Jon Alfred Mjoen

Sound familiar???

Jon Alfred Mjoen studied Laplanders, more specifically Lapp-Norwegian hybrid people, whom he evaluated for physical and mental deficiencies. Most of the hybrids, he found, exhibited what he called the “M.B type,” which stood for “Mang-Lende balance,” or “want of balance.” They were good-natured and willing but unbalanced and unreliable, he decided, with the main symptoms of the hybridized condition being stealing, lying, and drinking.

In late September 1921, leading scientists from the US, Europe, and elsewhere descended on New York City for the Second International Congress of Eugenics. During his opening address, Henry Osborne explained the political aims of the conference. “We are engaged in a serious struggle,” he told the assembled attendees, “to maintain our historic…institutions through barring the entrance to those who are unfit.”

Trump gave a speech in 1921...?

Many scientists felt certain that so-called mulattoes, people born to one black and one white parent, showed signs of dysfunctionality. They had “irregular dentations”. They were a nuisance to others because they had inherited ambition from their biological superior white parents but “intellectual inadequacy” from their black ones, Charles Davenport claimed.

Guess what assholes? Biracial, interracial is beautiful. Fuck your master race!

In 1916 (Madison) Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, in which he set out his ideas of deep biological, historical origins of racial hierarchy, & the dangers of upsetting it through migration. Roosevelt, excited for it, he wouldn‘t just read it, but “study it.” Kenneth Roberts said immigration would turn the American population into a hybrid race as worthless, futile; good for nothing mongrels of Central America/south eastern Europe.

Across the city, settlement houses strove to assimilate the newcomers, providing cooking classes, debating societies, and sewing instructions to help them shed their native customs and adopt American habits (eating creamed corn fish and corn mush, for example, rather than a typical Mediterranean fare of meat, vegetables, and pasta, which late 19th century American experts considered “overstimulating” and indigestible).

That‘s: erasing culture.

Congress had closed US borders to people from China and to anyone judged to be suffering from lunacy or idiocy back in 1882. Dozens of states across the country prohibited “feeble-minded” people from getting married, for fear that their “feeble-minded” offspring would contaminate the populace. Some states even legalized their forced sterilization. Roosevelt said, “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.”

🖕🏻🖕🏻

“Miscegenation,” (Madison) Grant wrote, “is the first step toward extinction.” Immigrants, by contaminating the nation with their inferior germplasm (DNA), would breed superior human subspecies into oblivion.

⬆️This is what the original ‘browning of America‘ sounded like. This is fascism. This is the lie that white supremacists still believe and spread.

Americans could “rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art,” (Charles) Davenport warned. They could become “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immmorality. Whatever the biological outcome, the hybrids would spell absolute ruin for American society.

Ya‘ll see this rhetoric? Does it sound like Trump linguistics? White Supremacy linguistics?

Scientific concerns of sexual relations between biologically distinct couples had first spiked in years after the Civil War. Presuming bonds of slavery stymied relations of European Americans & forced enslaved African migrants, scientists worried abolition...allow people of African/European descent to mix freely...break apart compatible physical/mental qualities which established a whole in each race by 100s of generations of natural selection.

William Z. Ripley spelled out the implications of Weismannism and race science on societies experiencing mass immigration from distant continents such as their own in his lecture “The Migration of Races”. Newcomers wouldn‘t just overwhelm society with their numbers. Immigrant bodies carried inside them microscopic time bombs. If their germplasm (DNA) entered into the population, they‘d permanently contaminate it with their inferior traits.

(Francis Galton) called it “eugenics,” for eu, or “good,” with genesis. Instead of devoting resources to improving schools and nutrition, eugenicists said, policymakers should instead focus on who had sex with whom. Henry Osborn and Madison Grant agreed, founding the Galton Society to spread the eugenic gospel in the United States.

😔Noooooo.

Weismannism meant that...so long as those with the best traits had the most children, society would be assured of a brilliant, beautiful, morally upstanding populace.

⬆️Sounds like a road paved and headed towards Nazi beliefs.