Thursday, February 3, 2022

Little known history

The Winter Olympics are starting soon in Beijing, though I heard that the US and other countries are doing a "diplomatic boycott" due to China's human rights violations. This means that athletes will be able to compete, but no government officials will attend. I mean, it's probably best to minimize people traveling anyway due to Covid-19. I've stopped watching the Olympics because I lost interest in figure skating and don't really care about the other sports.

When Amber Ruffin went to the summer games, I watched the clips on Peacock, but that's it. Right now her show is on winter break until after the Olympics, but I didn't find that out until this week. I thought she would have made an announcement like that on her last December episode. No new episodes until Feb 25, so she'll miss most of Black History Month. At least there will be plenty of specials and documentaries to watch on several networks.

It looks like PBS will be rebroadcasting a bunch of their Black history shows starring Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Just this week on his Finding Your Roots show, he highlighted in "Mexican Roots" how Spain imported African slaves to many of its New World colonies, and that they intermixed with the indigenous populations. We even saw the "casta paintings" showing how Spain categorized different castes of mixed-race people by their skin color. Sixteen subcategories to effectively promote racism and colorism.

Unfortunately, PBS could do better, because I remember them airing a very flattering biography on E. O. Wilson as a respected biologist, but the documentary let him dismiss the accusations of racism raised by his peers. Recently, Wonkette provided a link discussing the scientific racism that Wilson absolutely supported while mentoring a more openly racist professor. Scientists are human, and subject to human faults too, even though they might convince themselves that they are acting logically and dispassionately.

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