Prometheus 6

P6,

If Fryar was arguing the opposing case you could safely bet your entire income for a year that the Harvard/New York Times Publicity Machine would not be trying to convince you, me and others that he is the reincarnation of W.E.B. DuBois. Skip Gates should be ashamed of himself but he isn't.

RE: Salt eating

This has been on my mind since I read the paragraphs in the piece about Fryar regarding his take on an illustration he once saw that "seemed to show a slave trader in Africa licking the face of a prospective slave." Fryar theorizes that slave traders may have tried to select "with a lick to the cheek, the 'saltier' Africans." The principle being, according to the author of the profile on Fryar, that "a person with a higher capacity for salt retention might also retain more water and thus increase his chance of surviving" the passage from Africa to the Americas. As a result, the "Africans who did manage to survive the voyage - and who then formed the gene pool of modern African-Americans - may have been disproportionately marked by hypertension." In other words, the stress of living for centuries under racialist barbarism may not be as sufficient a factor in the rates of hypertension and strokes occuring among African Americans as an inherited capacity for salt retention.

This is an interesting supposition and it reveals the workings of a nimble mind that is quite open to novel insights. What troubles me, however, is that salt was not widely used by West Africans in their food prior to the mid-20th Century. In other words, if slavers were testing slaves for salt retention then it was because the slaves were being literally forced to eat salt because the slavers - most of whom were from Europe where salt was widely used - believed that it would help the slaves to retain water and better ensure their chances for survival.

At some level it may seem that I am not saying anything markedly different from what Fryar has theorized, however there is a subtle but major difference in how my interpretation differs from his. Proponents of his findings would argue that slavery and racial oppression alone would not account for the high rates of hypertension and strokes among blacks because genetic predisposition also plays a role.

This is undoubtedly true but it is equally true that forcing people who did not normally use salt in their diet to eat salt, perhaps in higher than normal amounts, for generation after generation while simultaneously denying them access to the foodstuffs that they normally consumed would eventually result in a disproportionate number of people who retained salt in their bodies. Those who could not retain salt died in higher numbers and could not pass their genes along. What made this peculiar dietary system possible was the existence of chattel slavery. And the unhealthy dietary practices that took root among these displaced Africans has continued to this day among their descendants.

If Fryar and others want to claim that today African Americans are free to make other choices about what foods they should ingest little or no argument can be made to the contrary. What should not be overlooked, however, is that centuries of American slavery and racial oppression are what was used to create this predisposed gene pool.

just to tag along on the more-than-astute comments of PTCruiser...

this guy seems to be in the mold of Ogbu or McWhorter, with the benefit of a Harvard patrone and the empirical alchemy of computational sociology. i've been trying to clearly articulate my problem with the aforementioned academics in other venues; let me take a stab at it here as well:

These academics, for all of their professed allegiances to Blackness and Black culture, are significantly NOT interested in promoting any worldview of Black behavior and culture that is not in line with assimilationist thinking. Rather than correctly place Black behavior in a matrix of institutional and environmental racism (see: your link to Willam Raspberry's column the other day), they prefer to formulate the Black experience strictly in terms of deviation from 'norms'.

it sucks as scholarship because they never clearly articulate their biases. it sucks as reading material because of the ways they play with language - again, never clearly articulating their biases - in order to slyly blame Blacks for their own problem.

now that i think about it...maybe it's time to write that paper where i use Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark to analyze these scholars work. i bet that would be illuminating (pun intended).

My problem with the salt thing was just not being able to picture guys licking captured strangers.

Maybe Europeans been freaky a lot longer than anyone suspected.

I intend to read a couple more of his papers over the next few days. I hope they don't all make assumptions about the data than make any conclusion useless in the real world like this one did.

ConPermisso, I'm not familiar with that book by Toni Morrison. Could you give me a clue?

"Maybe Europeans been freaky a lot longer than anyone suspected."

I'm still not entirely convinced that the drawing that Fryar saw was not a depiction of a sexual fetish but so far I have not been able to identify it. There are sexual fetishes that involve spitting and rubbing one's body against a stranger but I haven't found anything for face licking or salt eating yet.

RE: Toni M

So in 1990, Toni M. came out with this lovely little monograph entitled "Playing in the Dark". In it she discusses the ways that American fiction writers (Hemingway, Cather)use Africans as signifiers for qualities which are deemed antithetical to whiteness and white identity. i can't remember any of her examples off hand, but a good example of her premise would be how Stephen King is often cited for using 'Magical Negroes' in his books to signify the mystic and the occult...especially since these characters tend to die once they've saved the white hero (Mother Abigail in the Stand...John Coffey in the Green Mile). Morrison also argues that Africa is also used as a metaphor for the darker side of the human (read: white) psyche.

The book fits neatly into the theoretical side of the canon of critical race theory; many consider it a seminal text. i thought of using it to critique, say, McWhorter because of the unexamined tenets of white supremacy and privilege lying (no pun intended) underneath the texts these academics generate.