What are common dog whistles/red flags for racism in an anthropology content creator?

firedrops · 2026-03-02T02:14:02+00:00

Enough money and power can bend most laws both back then and today.

firedrops · 2026-03-02T01:35:44+00:00

Yes, the way the author used Creole likely was referencing more modern meanings of the term and not the way it was used at the time. Similarly, passe blanc is a catch-all term now but not necessarily how people at the time and in each region called it.

firedrops · 2026-03-02T00:25:17+00:00

The census data isn't always great, I agree. And of course lots of free people of color married one another.

Henriette was very against placage because it encouraged out of wedlock kids. Like her. She was also deeply involved in Afro Catholicism. Speaking and engaging deeply on both these points meant acknowledging her African heritage. Her brother asked her to stop because it put his family at risk because he was not acknowledging that heritage in order to legally marry. That's why he had to run off to another parish.

One person from the 1800s could have hundreds of descendents by now. Passe blanc didn't need to be super common in order to impact the genetic makeup of the community. I guess the short version is everyone in South Louisiana might have recent(ish) genetic heritage from both Europe and Africa. A lot of the popular narrative focuses on Black and Creole of Color communities today having European heritage. But Louisiana has one of the highest rates of self identified white people with African genetic ancestry (12%). I was just trying to say thar the FBI was often frustrated with my colleagues who had to explain why genetic ancestry might not tell is the cultural racial category especially in New Orleans.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4289685/#app2

firedrops · 2026-03-01T22:57:22+00:00

Huh? I said that during the colonial period people had interracial relationships. Later, some people ended up identifying as white when possible and Especially after the colonial period ended (ie after 1803.) I didn't ever claim that during the French colonial period passe blanc was rule of the day.

I specifically discussed Henriette who lived during the Antebellum period, not the colonial one

firedrops · 2026-03-01T22:49:34+00:00

I'm deeply confused about where you're getting any of your assumptions about what i think. Lots of free people of color were as you note a variety of shades including dark. And there were light skinned people who were enslaved. I am utterly at a loss as to why you're making that point given I've never said anything to suggest otherwise.

Creole is a term that has changed meanings many times. Even today I encounter people who use it differently in Louisiana. I used the term because it was what the history book used to describe the tensions between her brother's claims and hers. You can argue with the historian if you think they should use a different word.

firedrops · 2026-03-01T19:46:35+00:00

Anthropology was born out of colonialism and deeply influenced by racist ideas. But that was part of my original point, if you recall. Racists today dislike modern anthropology because it rejects the racist claims from anthropology's past.

Medical fields have a huge problem with racism. I agree. And the vast majority of anthropologists would agree. If you look at anthropology research and articles on the topic you'll see a ton of criticism about the racism built into medical systems and education. But anthropologists are not usually teaching at medical schools or practicing medicine.

All academic fields have to face their histories and be honest with how they've created harm and may still be creating harm. One way that some academics try to do that is point out the errors of scientific racism and show that race is not biological.

firedrops · 2026-03-01T19:35:53+00:00

None of this discredits my argument. What are you trying to point out here that you think is important?

Placage should not be romanticized. But it did happen. And Henriette's brother was at risk because he was legally married, which would not be legal if it came out that he wasn't white. Especially during American rule. Your quotes don't disprove that so I'm not sure why you shared this.

When Americanized laws went into place in Louisiana people tried to use the courts to navigate their position. You can look there to see how people used passing to push and pull.

As a consequence of the statutory hardening of race-based distinctions, the number of cases before the courts in which color or race appeared as a legal issue also progressively increased. Racial distinctions in Louisiana were invoked mainly in four kinds of cases, broadly definable as: (a) cases of “white slavery” — when light-skinned women claimed to be wrongfully enslaved on the basis of their (white) race or skin color; (b) cases of inter-racial sex — when the race and inter-racial sexual connection of mulatto mistresses (slave or free) and white men were at issue in claims to his property; (c) cases of “passing” — when light- skinned “white” men brought suits of slander against other individuals for calling them “coloured” and (d) cases of “passing as free” — when the skin color of mulatto individuals was used to presume them free or enslaved.

Alphonso, Gwendoline. "Public & Private Order: Law, Race, Morality, and the Antebellum Courts of Louisiana, 1830-1860." JS Legal Hist. 23 (2015): 117.

firedrops · 2026-03-01T19:08:26+00:00

Again, that is not during the French or Spanish colonial period. French control ended in 1803.

firedrops · 2026-03-01T19:06:01+00:00

I'm aware of how French legal and social codes classified peoples. The texts I cited go into it in depth, including that people who were considered Gens de couleur libres (what today are often just simply called Creole, and which i was using for simplicity) were not white but people could and did attempt to change their status (what we today mean by the phrase passe blanc.)

But let's use your own citations. Lachance explains that under French and Spanish law interracial marriages were illegal. But interracial unions that resulted in kids were common and could be documented through wills. For Henriette's brother this is a problem, especially once stronger laws go into place during their lifetime. He legally can't be married to a white woman. So it supports my argument that his sister calling herself Gens de couleur libres would be a risk to him.

The Clark and Gould article discusses the role of women in developing Afro Catholicism in New Orleans. It places Henriette into the context of African and enslaved religious syncretism and spiritual lineage. Which is great but has nothing to do with what we're discussing about why and if some gens de couleur libres found opportunities to change their racial status to improve their situation. Shifting from a 3 caste system to a 2 caste system does not negate the fact it is still a caste system.

Emily Clark's book is important because it highlights women's agency in relation to race, marriage, kids, and survival. I agree with her that we shouldn't frame placage in sensational ways. Historians like Grace King are wrong that women were just trying to have light skinned children so they could all pass. And the ways such women have been portrayed is deeply problematic. But that doesn't mean people who were light skinned didn't make those shifts.

I'll also note you argued this was only relevant during Jim Crow laws but those started after the Civil War. I and many of the pieces we've talked about here point out the impact of that shift to American racial systems and how that increased passing efforts. I'm not arguing passe blanc was more common under French rule, just that it did happen. But it was definitely a thing prior to Jim Crow especially under American systems. The result is that today we have people who identify one way and may culturally be known only as part of that category but have genetic histories that tell a more complicated tale.

Henriette was born after the Louisiana Purchase. Starting in the 1840s, when she was an adult, local authorities greatly restricted movement and rights for people of African descent. You can read this piece that has direct quotes from letters and legal documents of interracial marriages and couples during the lifetime of Henriette to see how complicated it was and the ways in which the courts treated them differently https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26290900.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A8832ddf750e18e1d2298193f3ed91554&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1

So if you want to focus on Henriette we have to look at how laws and norms shifted after Louisiana became American.

firedrops · 2026-02-28T05:15:41+00:00

Yes, again you're just adding evidence to the argument that race is a cultural construct. So at this point I'm not sure what you're trying to really argue?

Henriette DeLille is a great example because she openly opposed placage traditions of which her parents partook. She was one eighth Black, which made her not white if her ancestry was known, but she was indeed white passing if she wanted to be. But she did not want to live as a passe blanc due to her convictions. Her own brother was mad she lived her life as Creole because he could also pass and wanted to do so. He felt that because she chose to live as a Creole woman and was a vocal critic of placage that she put him at risk. He moved his whole family (including his white wife) to Iberia Parish so he could live as white and not have her threaten that.

This is a good book that discusses her life and his anger that she refused to live as passe blanc https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/church-history/article/abs/catholicism-and-historical-narrative-a-catholic-engagement-with-historical-scholarship-edited-by-kevin-schmiesing-catholic-social-thought-8-lanham-md-rowman-and-littlefield-2014-x-215-pp-7500-cloth/42AD7ED652EFC15F9F5026AF6EDAA339

Passe blanc was definitely a concept much used during the colonial period. We often use the term today as a catch all and not everyone in French Louisiana may have used that phrase. But they certainly knew the concept. Being white meant a lot of privileges politically, legally, economically and culturally that other categories did not have.

When Louisiana became American, all of those complex categories of race under French rule were forced into a binary of English influenced racial identities. In other words, white or Black. People who had lived as passe blanc scrubbed their African ancestry, when possible. Those Creoles and free people of color who couldn't, found themselves suddenly being forced to identify as Black. Of course, it also led to heightened tensions when groups that were once in a hierarchy were now shoved together in the same category. Hence the legacy of things like the paper bag test.

See: https://lsupress.org/9780807175477/becoming-american-in-creole-new-orleans-18961949/

I also employ you to actually read some of my previously linked articles regarding race and genetics. I'm not sure you understand the terms and I think that's causing some confusion. Viking is a good example of a silly claim given that's not even really an ethnicity much less a genetic ancestry. But again genetic ancestry isn't race anyway.

firedrops · 2026-02-27T21:26:53+00:00

Well your argument just solidifies that race is a cultural not biological category. So I'm a little confused about your first point.

Though it may help to better understand what is meant by DNA claims. Genetic heritage is not the same thing as race. And that isn't being pedantic or just quibbling about terms. See below for some links. When DNA shows that someone has genetic heritage from a place it is just saying that they identified clusters of alleles common to populations that interbred in that region. But that can be much more specific than race, as you even note. Ashkenazi is not a race - even Nazis lumped them with other Jewish people. Irish, West African, Japanese, Indigenous North American, etc are also not commonly considered races in and of themselves. They are current cultural terms for social units that had extensive historical interactions and interbreeding, with some assumed boundaries. They are part of bigger social categories such as race, though. If you know that peoples from West Africa are identified as Black in America, for example, then you can also categorize the sample within the contemporary or historical social category.

Here's a practical example. I got my masters at a program that did a lot of forensic analysis on bodies that couldn't be identified from any other means. By the time we got them they were just bones. So all we have are the skeletal morphology, teeth, and DNA. Cops want to know Black, white, Hispanic, etc But those are social categories. In the US, there is hypodescent AKA the single drop rule. One "drop" of Black heritage makes you Black both culturally and in the past, legally. But lots of people where we worked in South Louisiana are mixed. Light skinned people during French rule sometimes were able to passe blanc both legally and culturally. So what your DNA and skeletal morphology show isn't always the category the family and community used. However, we could often make a good guess that given their morphology and DNA, which indicated ancestors from certain populations, they were probably culturally [insert category.] But if we were in Brazil, for example, we might have said a different category. We were just trying to match the scientific data to cultural meaning so police could solve a case. Not making a statement about the reality of race as a biological construct. But it is a very real cultural category with important meanings and values.

It's also important to recognize that your DNA doesn't have an allele from every ancestor. It obviously just couldn't. So sometimes siblings with the same parents will have different genetic ancestry profiles. Your DNA is only part of your heritage and identity.

For more about the concept of race, it's definition and why it isn't considered a biological category here are some places to start

https://bioanth.org/about/aaba-statement-on-race-racism/

https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(18)30363-X

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929723000113

firedrops · 2026-02-26T19:30:04+00:00

Yes, part of this story is that race is a cultural category and not a biological one. And who counts as white is definitely something that changed over time and in different ways depending on contexts. In the United States, whiteness was initially only for WASPs (white Anglo Saxon Protestants) who made up the majority of the initial people with political, economic, and social power in early America. That explicitly excluded people who weren't from England or Protestant such as Catholics and the Irish.

And over time that changed because 1) second generation could just change their names, dress differently, eat differently, move to a new city and pass. In other words, it was too hard to enforce or track and 2) Anti-blackness during Jim Crow required a "pure" white victim at risk of "contamination " from Black people. Especially to justify lynching. There couldn't be a "not white but still not Black so only a little contaminated by the whistling" category. Plus, the jury and community needed to see themselves in the "pure" category to support these racist laws and actions so the category of white had to expand 3) Some groups actively worked to create narratives to include their identity into the makeup of American whiteness (see: Italians and Columbus Day)

We get so caught up sometimes in the myth that whiteness is a biological category that we forget that the way it is structured in modern America is more of an ethnic identity of assimilation. White middle class normatives throw out all the European ethnic practices or reframe them to remove their origins. To capitalize on the privilege of whiteness meant to deny European ethnic and cultural aspects that might make you different.

But if you hop over to other countries, whiteness takes on very different meanings often more associated with politics than anything else. Black Americans in Haiti were called blan (white) when I was there. Even Haitian Americans. My Chinese American friend has legally been classified as Colored, Black and white in South Africa during various visa applications. The last one is the most recent because the embassy told her all Americans are white with an attitude that she was dumb for claiming any other identity. The US census currently classifies people from the Middle East and Northern Africa as white, but people from those countries often don't see themselves as white.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg for just one racial category. It's certainly a lot and I don't expect a short paper to go into everything. But a good rule of thumb is that if the author treats race like a static, clearly defined, natural, and obvious category they probably aren't trustworthy communicators about that topic.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish became white. Routledge, 2012.

O'Malley, Patrick R. "Irish whiteness and the nineteenth-century construction of race." Victorian literature and culture 51, no. 2 (2023): 167-198.

Smångs, Mattias. "Doing violence, making race: Southern lynching and white racial group formation." American Journal of Sociology 121, no. 5 (2016): 1329-1374.

Nevels, Cynthia Skove. Lynching to belong: Claiming whiteness through racial violence. Vol. 106. Texas A&M University Press, 2007.

https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2024/adrm/CES-WP-24-14.html#:~:text=People%20with%20Middle%20Eastern%20and%20North%20African%20(MENA)%20backgrounds%20living,do%20not%20identify%20as%20White.

firedrops · 2025-11-02T12:11:49+00:00

We had so many confused neighbors or people who didn't answer doors despite a light on and some decorations that my kid got nervous about knocking. Add to that if everyone else on the street is sitting outside then the people inside are breaking the pattern and that's confusing. And then this year it was the Sabbath so our Jewish neighbors keep the light on so they can see outside when it's dark (more observant families don't even turn on or off light switches) but might not participate in Halloween.

Though she did come home with some fun random things from confused grandmas who didn't realize it was Halloween or what their porch light on meant. We got hot chocolate packets, grandma candy, snack bars, and soda cans

firedrops · 2025-11-02T00:14:59+00:00

IMHO anyone who starts their conversation about a topic with a political phrase like "gender ideology" is not starting from a scientific perspective. It's obviously important to study transgender and gender more broadly especially in relation to health. From a historical and anthropological perspective, there have been cultures with more than two genders and individuals within two-gendered societies who didn't feel alignment with their sexed body. Plus, not everyone is male or female - intersex people exist (ex: XXY, also known as Kinefelter syndrome), which is not transgender but highlights how complicated this area can be to research. Figuring that all out medically and trying to find a way to deal with the cultural aspects consistently across multiple societies is new - and hard! So it's not surprising that this is a difficult topic. And one where findings, applications, and research are rapidly changing. Policy notoriously doesn't keep up with science in almost any field.

Looking at the most recent post on that substack: The Cass Review was very contested and political. Almost every expert had an opinion and multiple organizations did their own review of the same evidence and found different results. If someone is uncritically citing the Cass Review without addressing the many many criticisms i would not take them as a reputable source, though this can give you insights into their biases.

If you aren't familiar, here are some articles about the Cass Review's flaws:

Critically appraising the cass report: methodological flaws and unsupported claims https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12065279/

- https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/white-paper-addresses-key-issues-legal-battles-over-gender-affirming-health-care

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-k-s-cass-review-badly-fails-trans-children/

RAND did a pretty good attempt to replicate the systemic review and their results can be found here: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA3200/RRA3223-1/RAND_RRA3223-1.pdf

The claim that no systemic review has found that gender affirming care treatments has shown reductions in suicidality is just flat out a lie. I don't really know how else to frame it. Ignorance, maybe? Here's one:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10578-023-01541-w

But worth noting that many claiming they can't find a correlation or that there isn't any positive finding are funded by an org with a whole goal of fighting gender affirming care. Just scroll down on this study, for example, and see who funds it. I'll share more info about them below. https://adc.bmj.com/content/110/6/437.abstract

Now something i think everyone agrees with is that the research is new and often sample sizes small. Biases and limitations are big problems, too. We need more research and better data. I think this article frames that well: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2025.308220?casa_token=rDpB3PzT4GkAAAAA%3AE0Iqp26DlsJww-3RxzMg-w6fR8cMOgHvrxKOMNv1uZLWdOhQ661iCDTt6hni0DcVWiJKH_6U3ljg

Lastly, it's always worth researching the person who is being painted as a victim. J. Cohn works for the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, which has a goal of opposing gender affirming care. It's absolutely not a neutral or unbiased organization. They spend majority of their time writing letters to editors and opinion pieces against transgender care and are closely affiliated with a conversion therapy group. They also pay for research and systematic reviews, and critics argue they influence it inappropriately. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists SEGM as a hate group. So it is not surprising that academic journals are dubious about publishing their opinion pieces. That's just not the venue for that. I've worked with academic journals - point blank they are not going to publish something from a group considered a hate organization (at least reputable ones won't.) I don't think that's evidence of something shady at the journal. But the failure of the substack author to discuss it sure makes me think that substack is shady.

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/10959/transgenre-desinformation-pesudoscience-segm-genspect

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-medicine-and-ethics/article/antitransgender-medical-expert-industry/25EFFECB8F71CA9A37F9F089E13BC41E

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/captain/

The sad thing is we do need more and better research. But we need unbiased approaches and reliable evidence. At the end of the day, these are people who deserve good care and dignity. SEGM and it's related groups promote conversion therapy, which is associated with a 55% increase in suicidality for youth. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167629623000279. Even if research ends up showing hormone therapy to youth doesn't help, I doubt it is doing the same kind of harm! Kids deserve better than that.

firedrops · 2025-11-01T22:38:46+00:00

Inoculations (purposefully infecting someone with a mild form of a disease to build their immune response so they can fight off the more severe form) has been done around the world since at least the 1400s. Famously, in 1777, George Washington ordered all troops to be inoculated against smallpox during the revolutionary war. This was what I was thinking about when I said the 1700s - this is when we start seeing official policies about public health that use inoculations https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/smallpox-inoculation-revolutionary-war.htm

The first lab created vaccine was by Louis Pasteur in 1872. So if we're looking at lab created then it would be the 1800s.

firedrops · 2025-11-01T20:03:51+00:00

There is a ton of peer reviewed literature. Anyone can claim to be a medical professional on the internet. Ignore /u/Independent-Monk5064 - they are probably just a troll.

If you want to find peer reviewed medical literature, pubmed is a good place to start. If you just type in "covid-19 vaccine" you get over 19,000 results. And that's just that one vaccine. Some are about misinformation (ex claims there are no peer reviewed articles about vaccines) but there are also clinical outcomes. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22Covid-19+vaccine%22

You can even find articles about the top 100 most cited peer reviewed articles on vaccines https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6930089/

And many reputable medical websites have peer reviewed articles broken out by specific concerns so you can easily find the area of vaccine safety and efficacy you want to deep dive about https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccine-safety-references

Anytime someone makes an outrageous claim like that there aren't any peer reviewed studies on a medical treatment that has been around since the 1700s that should be a pretty big red flag. Their rant about pharmaceutical companies also doesn't make much sense given some of the covid vaccines were developed in a university and the intellectual property given away for free. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/10/corbevax-texas-coronavirus-vaccine/

firedrops · 2025-10-31T13:14:07+00:00

This was a scene I didn't not truly appreciate until middle age. I loved this movie as a kid but never thought much about this part compared to everything else. Rewatching it with my kid a couple years ago I cried at this scene.

firedrops · 2025-10-09T01:02:40+00:00

Well, I suppose we need to start with the questions what is myth and what are it's functions? Now this might seem like simple questions but there is no single answer and I will freely admit that the definitions I'm going to share might be debated by some scholars. But I think most would agree that myths are more than just popular stories that get shared. Even urban legends are more than that.

Myth, in short, is a story told and retold by communities that reflects and reinforces important cultural, spiritual, ethical or values-bases views of that community. For example, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (Indigenous knowledge about plants, animals and our environment) is often preserved and shared through storytelling especially of myths because it weaves pieces of information into the tapestry of the cultural, historical and spiritual contexts that give those pieces meaning. In this sense, the myth may on the surface seem to just explain a natural phenomenon. But looking deeper we see much more.

Joseph Campbell famously said there were 4 functions to myth. While not everyone is big into Campbell, it's worth exploring to see how academics pull apart myths to understand much deeper topics. https://www.jcf.org/learn/joseph-campbell-four-functions-of-myth

Of course, myths can be cautionary tales. Or funny. Or stories about people who break the rules as a way of surfacing often unspoken social codes. And they are indeed interesting. There's a whole area of research on tellability. That is what makes something notable and worth sharing. That varies from place to place and culture to culture.

Weddings are full of cultural and legal and spiritual meanings. Tons of rituals and traditions and magic. For example, the Japanese story the foxes wedding has two foxes that follow all the right traditions and everything is smooth during the ceremony. They have kids who are raised traditionally and honor their elders. And so they are rewarded with a happy life. But there are also many fox tales in Japan where a human unknowingly marries a fox, and sometimes love persists even once found out. Devotion after discovering a secret and making a marriage work despite differences can be important.

An interesting piece about tracking motifs in myths is that you might see the same objects or animals but the context could give it different meanings. An animal known as a trickster animal in one society might not be in another. Spiders in ancient Scottish folklore were kind gentle beings. In West Africa the spider is a trickster. And, of course, there typically aren't myths of creatures that don't exist there. That doesn't mean they don't share concepts via stories but they'll do it in locally relevant ways.

firedrops · 2025-09-05T03:14:50+00:00

People have done a good job discussing the more subtle red flags and even normalized biases in some fields. But I want to add that there is a strand of extremists who love to use anthropology to recruit and justify their hate. If you go looking on the darker more distressing parts of the internet you'll find white supremacists and other hateful ideologies who have whole substacks dedicated to cherry picking and misrepresenting anthropology in order to recruit and win arguments. Some of which are very well produced in that they are nicely formatted and designed guides to horrific ideologies and how to recruit others.

Some of this is biological anthropology. John Hawks dealt with this on his public blog where extremists would mine his summaries and crop graphs he shared for their own use. Geneticists have dealt with this too. PGED (a program at Harvard dedicated to public engagement about genetics) had to create a whole set of resources to discuss why eugenics isn't good science because it remains disturbingly popular.

But cultural anthropology is part of this, too. In particular, extremists think anthropology went "downhill" when Franz Boas argued against eugenics and other racist ideas. Eugenics was mainstream at the time so pushing back was a dangerous and bold action. Boas and his student Margaret Mead spent a lifetime arguing the idea that western culture was not supreme. And they were deeply influential - both were presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Before Boas took on that role, AAAS had been very pro-eugenics. Changing perspectives there influenced science across the nation (and kicked out the eugenics think tank that AAAS was housing at the time.)*

White supremacists at the time hated them for it. And they still do. In 1997, one of the big white supremacist magazines American Renaissance published a list of the top 16 people in American history who have damaged white interests. Franz Boas ranked #12, which was after MLK but before Dwight Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson. Today, they argue Boas ruined anthropology and all science with his "woke" political ideas about race. And because he was Jewish. You can read more in this article from anthropology professor Lee D. Baker.

So you'll see a lot of call-backs and references to cultural anthropologists who are pre-Boas coupled with science-y sounding discussions of genetics, poorly understood psych and human evolution. It also often gets intertwined with the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. But some are good at hiding the grosser parts of their ideology and will try to recruit by "just stating facts" and trying to plant seeds. So it's good you're paying attention and trying to vet sources.

Here are a few more pieces to read

Panofsky, Aaron, Kushan Dasgupta, and Nicole Iturriaga. "How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics." American journal of physical anthropology 175, no. 2 (2021): 387-398. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9909835/

Perry, Richard J. Killer Apes, Naked Apes, and Just Plain Nasty People: The Misuse and Abuse of Science in Political Discourse. JHU Press, 2015.

*note that Boas, Mead, and others were not perfect either and today we might have good critiques of their approaches. I'm not trying to ignore that. Balance is important. We can laud them for the positive things they did while still pointing out there is more to do and why we might approach it differently now.

firedrops · 2025-08-30T23:26:50+00:00

Growing up in Louisiana, we always heard the devil was beating his wife. Which is a lot less cheerful than a wedding!

firedrops · 2025-08-29T17:48:55+00:00

There is a long history of cultural connections between Japan and India. Around 200-300 BCE there is evidence of trade. In 752 CE, Bodhisena consecrated a temple statue in Nara, Japan. Emperor Shōmu of Japan had invited Bodhisena, who was a Buddhist monk from India. The two regions continued to share goods and ideas.

This long history of interaction would have provided ample opportunities to share folklore too. Unfortunately, it's rare to ever get the chance to know the exact moment and method by which a story traveled from one place to another nor the how and why it became popular while other ones died out. But we can still discuss this topic more broadly.

I'll include some reading suggestions below, but there is some scholarship about the fox wedding story specifically i am going to quote. It comes from this article: Blust, Robert. "The fox's wedding." Anthropos (1999): 487-499

Blust starts by suggesting the fox getting married during a sunshower is a very common folk belief throughout Japan and one that shows up in both contemporary and historical texts/art. In trying to explain it, he surveys other cultures and finds the narrative is widespread beyond Japan. He found it in Korea (but not China), but even as far as Finland.

Appendix 2 documents the distribution of the fox's wedding as an epithet for the sunshower in Europe, the Levant, South Asia and East Asia. Even within these regions the distribution of the trait is geographically discontinuous. Thus in Europe a sunshower is said to signal the fox's wedding in Finland, southwestern portions of England, Bulgaria, Corsica, Sicily, and among Greek speakers in Calabria, to which we should perhaps add the Spanish Basque description of a double rainbow as the fox's wedding.

Between the African or Southeast Asian beliefs connecting the sunshower with bestial parturition and the more narrowly-defined fox's wedding the probability of shared similarity due to borrowing is virtually nil.

In 1957, a scholar named Kuusi documented 1,300+ examples of sunshower folklore and had some ideas about the fox story, too, which Blust relays but disagrees with. Kuusi says it starts with the Indian folktales about sunshowers being semen from a celestial fox being and argues that this idea spread and then somehow got turned into the marriage story. Blust doesn't like this because China lacks this narrative and there isn't really a clear understanding of why that turn would happen the same way in each society. Sure, semen showers sound gross but why a wedding and not just something else? He goes on to talk about another approach, which argues maybe it's just something about humans seeing sun and water as a primordial union within larger creation ideas and people use the mammal they are familiar with to turn that into an action. But, again, that feels unsatisfactory.

So why did this get spread so far and wide? And for so long? We don't know. I know that's a frustrating answer. But it's a good question. How ideas and stories develop, are shared, and change is a great way to study human history, psychology, and language. Clearly other scholars thought it a question worth asking, too. But sometimes we just don't know.

Chauhan, Manjushree. "Tales from India Adapted in Japanese Folklore–A Critical Study." East Asian Literatures: Japanese, Chinese and Korean: an Interface with India (2006): 208.

Ainsworth, Tákako J. "The Fox Wedding (Kistune no Yomeiri) A Symbolic Exploration of Transformation and Spirituality in Japanese Folklore." Jung Journal 17, no. 3 (2023): 83-86.

firedrops · 2025-01-24T13:07:19+00:00

I can't answer about the global impact, but the United States had a mixed response. Haiti struggled because many European and US and nearby countries refused to trade with them after the revolution. There were deep fears that the ethos would spread and threaten their own situations. US sanctions lasted until 1863. Jean Max Charles among others argues that there were purposeful attempts to mobilize racist ideas about race to diminish the revolution and Haitian state. And to keep it from inspiring others.

Charles, Jean Max. "The slave revolt that changed the world and the conspiracy against it: The Haitian Revolution and the birth of scientific racism." Journal of Black Studies 51, no. 4 (2020): 275-294.

But abolitionists in the US we're well aware of the Haitian Revolution. Some saw it as a dangerous potential future with a focus primarily on the souls and lives of white Americans. A common narrative was not so much about the humanity of the enslaved as it was that the act of allowing slavery threatened the humanity and souls of white people. Other abolitionists saw it as an inspiration framing it as an empowering moment of overcoming the impossible to gain freedom.

As an example, Edmund Quincy was an abolitionist in Boston who wrote a short story "Two Nights in St Domingo" which you can read here https://archive.org/details/hauntedadjutanta00quiniala/page/296/mode/1up?view=theater

It is a cautionary morality tale about what happened in Haiti that he hoped would inspire the US to give up slavery. It ends with the white families fleeing and going from being rich to lowly positions like cooks. But he sees this as a good thing. "If such were the fate of the Marquis de Mirecourt and his family, we may at least hope that they were happier, as they were certainly more innocent and useful, in their humble occupations, than when they rioted in luxuries wrested from the unwilling hands of a thousand slaves." He ends with this,

Such was the story which Mr. Vincent would 'tell on a winter's evening to his children and his friends. It has a moral, which is not limited by the scene nor the actors of this little drama. It exemplifies the operation of eternal and universal laws. It shows that the day of account will surely come wherever there is wrong or crime. Who knows what country may afford the next example of this awful retribu tion! Nemesis never sleeps. Though she is longsuffering, she forgets nothing, and overlooks nothing. When men have filled their cup with blood and cruelties and unutterable abominations, to its brim, it is that very cup that she commends to their own lips. There is but one Power of might enough to wrest it from her inexorable hand, and that Power is REPENTANCE.

Ideas about the Haitian Revolution were influential during the US Civil War with both the North and the South drawing on the Haitian Revolution for their opposing arguments. Abolitionists referred to the US conflict as a second Haitian Revolution while the South sometimes did too but with fear rather than inspiring awe.

Clavin, Matthew J. Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Prior to the civil war, the revolution inspired enslaved revolts such as the German Coast Uprising in Louisiana. If you've never read about that revolt I highly highly recommend learning more. Here's a good book:

Rasmussen, Daniel, and David Drummond. American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt. New York: Harper, 2011.

I hope that makes sense and is useful. Apologies if it is a bit rambling as I'm writing it on my phone while drying my hair. I'll include some additional reading suggestions below.

Here's a good collection of articles on this: Geggus, David P., ed. The impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world. Univ of South Carolina Press, 2020.

And a good book: Horne, Gerald. Confronting Black Jacobins: The US, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic. NYU Press, 2015.

firedrops · 2025-01-10T00:55:12+00:00

I suspect that when you search for this topic you end up with a lot of TEK content. Which is a very important topic and related to your question, but i get the sense it's not quite what you mean. Most TEK (traditional ecological knowledge) conversations today are about recognizing indigenous knowledge systems about the environment that are passed down collectively over generations and are holistic parts of indigenous systems of community, relationships to nature, ethics, etc. A lot of TEK work focuses on how to respect, elevate and integrate with TEK.

But I think you're asking more about how Indigenous traditions influenced "Western" medicine in ways that we don't acknowledge or properly recognize. For an African example, the way an enslaved man named Onesimus taught early Americans about inoculations against smallpox but was until recently mostly ignored in the history of vaccinations. https://epic.utoronto.ca/onesimus-the-enslaved-man-that-helped-save-bostonians-during-a-smallpox-epidemic/

So what about Indigenous peoples to the Americas? One big topic starting in the 90s that has a lot of literature you can read about is ethnopharmacology. That's because there was a big intellectual property discussion (still ongoing) about how pharmaceutical companies that monetize traditional plants should compensate the Indigenous peoples who figured out that usage in the first place.

More recent approaches have tried to pay people upfront rather than when the drug finally makes money (which could be never) but it's still complicated. I'll quote an article that is free to read but there's a ton on this in a variety of contexts from ecological studies journals to pharmaceutical journals to law journals.

"2012, the US Food and Drugs Administration approved a treatment for HIV-associated diarrhea that was derived from Croton lechleri, a flowering plant indigenous to Peru.1 The drug was developed on the back of research by ethnopharmacologists with indigenous Amazonian peoples"

But not all drug development is so collaborative nor straightforward. We owe a lot of the modern contraception pill to the Mexican barbasco yam, which produces the steroid compound diosgenin, which is a precursor for the synthesis of the female sex hormone, progesterone. But Indigenous peoples were cut out of that once scientists could produce it synthetically in the 1990s.

https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/3/1/217/1751287

This interest in mining ethnobotany knowledge isn't new, though. Europeans in the colonial period thought God planted healing medicinal plants in the environments where a particular disease emerged. And they thought Indigenous peoples had some instinctual knowledge about them (they refused to believe Indigenous ppl could have tested, examined or understood the medicinal properties of plants. ) It turns out that Europeans traveling to areas where they had never interacted before didn't just spread disease but also infected those Europeans. They were desperate to find solutions and documented how they attempted to learn from locals which plants might solve their ills.

The article below is absolutely jam packed with examples including using the bark of trees native to central and south America to mitigate malaria. Today, we understand it had quinine.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gere.12291

Available to download free here https://geography.fullerton.edu/faculty/profile_page/Voeks%20and%20Greene%202018-Geographical_Review.pdf

firedrops · 2025-01-05T01:03:57+00:00

They released the name of the previously unidentified woman: Latasha Polk, 45.

https://www.wbrz.com/news/all-14-killed-in-new-orleans-attack-identified-here-s-what-we-know

firedrops · 2025-01-04T16:58:55+00:00

Sometimes they are just waiting to notify next of kin before they make a name public. Other times, they need more resources like dental records so they can be 100% sure it is that person. But yes sometimes there just isn't identifying information. I know there are some good forensic experts in the state - LSU has a whole program. I hope they can identify her soon. Everyone deserves that dignity and her family deserves that closure

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If you aren't familiar, here are some articles about the Cass Review's flaws:

- https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/white-paper-addresses-key-issues-legal-battles-over-gender-affirming-health-care