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sharon johnson
sharon johnson
3 years ago

Thank you Dr. Ehsan! Perhaps we ought to dispense with the whole skin color designation entirely as few people are actually white or black. I am not white. On the melanin scale of 1 to 6, white to black, I am 1.5. My next door neighbors, Ken and Ellen, are about 4.5 to 5. My best school pal and fellow jazz lover was also 4.5 to 5. When humans are packaged by extremes on the color scale there are expectations of narrow color-based thinking and behavior. What if Black Lives Matter, celebrating Melanin Level 6, were to say just that? ‘Melanin Level 6 Lives Matter’. What if we whose lives fall out of that narrow designation formed our own group? “Melanin Levels 1 to 5 Lives Also Matter”. Or what if we accept Martin Luther King’s belief that it’s character, not skin color, that matters?

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
Reply to  sharon johnson

I congratulate you for your perfect post, you completely captured the zeitgeist of race discussion in the 2020s.

Rosy Martin
Rosy Martin
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

Agreed, but in fairness to Dr Ehsan I think that is the position he is edging towards too. He has to go a little slowly, and carefully, as an academic, but my guess is he is with Martin Luther King on this.

Alan Girling
Alan Girling
3 years ago
Reply to  sharon johnson

Of course, they’ll tell you it’s not melanin they are concerned about, it’s ‘whiteness’, as a construct of oppressive ‘Western’ values that anyone can manifest. It’s a dodge, though, because in any real world sense, it will be the the colour of your skin that counts, and they will speak about ‘whiteness’ and ‘white people‘ in the same breath. It’s quite astounding that they experience zero cognitive dissonance about this and appear to have no awareness of their own racism.

Last edited 3 years ago by Alan Girling
Peter Dunn
Peter Dunn
3 years ago
Reply to  sharon johnson

1000upticks!

G Worker
G Worker
3 years ago
Reply to  sharon johnson

For the native victims of replacement colonisation it’s not character but ethnicity which matters. A coercive mass immigration such as the one that is occurring in Britain, and has been so for seven decades, is always destructive of the native people and, therefore, always profoundly unwanted by them. Mixed-race people demonstrate the ending of ancient native family lines; and the whole process can only lead to disaster for said natives. Nativism plus the mass repatriation of the colonising population is the only way to life for them.

Last edited 3 years ago by G Worker
Iliya Kuryakin
Iliya Kuryakin
3 years ago

So a group of people who tend to be more religious and have more stable traditional family structures are more satisfied with life? Who would have thought!

Alex Mitchell
Alex Mitchell
3 years ago

Surely we don’t need a research fellow to explain this. How hard can it be to realise that people from Jamaica, Nigeria, Somalia and Zimbabwe are not culturally homogeneous. The question to research is why on earth so many people seem to think it makes sense. Explain this instead and we might make some progress.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago

It’s ironic, isn’t it. The social justice crowd treats minorities as segments of The Borg, yet no one would ever think of applying that to whites.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

I had a quick look at the writer’s work, he studies race and integration in UK, a subject as scientific as Victorian doctors doing examinations on women wile they sat on one side of a privacy curtain and the doctor on the other, for decency’s sake.

‘Best not inquire too deep’ is the thing, less one be swallowed up by a wrong word or set of data, or even of thinking of incorrect sets of data one would like to create. The best insight to race and London I would get was from taxi drivers who always seemed to be happy to talk about different groups and what they thought of them as customers and even as people. One thing one learns this way is that no one is as unbiased as White people, and different national origins are not always that fond of others who are lumped together with them.

I remember one study I read decades ago where outcomes of migrants were quantified, and as a surprise to me Hungarians topped the list, as highest in entrepreneurship and monetary success. Such a study today would mean termination of who ever was silly enough to compile it though, and the end of any one silly enough to publish it.

David Fellowes
David Fellowes
3 years ago

I was born in Africa, and spent some time growing up there, so Black means nothing to me, either. It’s as useful as White in Europe. Yoruba conjures up memories, as does Igbo, but I left before Biafra, so they are more nostalgia than understanding. Dinka is still the standard of beauty, but that is something I share with the world.
Most of all, I am uneasy with the whole idea that there is something deeper than culture that distinguishes White from Black. I have never encountered it in any of my travels. I really don’t believe it exists

William Cameron
William Cameron
3 years ago
Reply to  David Fellowes

I too grew up in Africa. West Africa. People were not racist . Everyone got along fine.
But then there wasn’t much serious crime, few if any drugs, no Drill or Rap and children had parents at home.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
3 years ago
Reply to  David Fellowes

Yes, and as biological fact, the ‘between-group’ human genetic diversity is greater in Africa than elsewhere. This is unsurprising because modern humans arose there and only small ‘genetic bottle-neck’ populations ever left that continent to populate the rest of the world. However ‘race’ is in any case a very weak category in Homo Sapiens, with genetic variation typically much greater between individuals than between population averages.

William Cameron
William Cameron
3 years ago

Interestingly Black African folk tend to do economically better than White folk economically and academically .
Whereas Black Caribbean folk do not.

G Worker
G Worker
3 years ago

A couple of decades ago a friend of mine who was a humanities professor in a California university told me that he always inflated the marks given to blacks and Hispanics, and so did everyone else in his department. It was just too risky to deal with those students fairly.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 years ago

I’m wondering why my comment agreeing with the authors point has not been retained
It was basically saying that many people drawn into generalised groupings such as BAME and BLM don’t appreciate it.

Last edited 3 years ago by Ian Barton