Peeking into the rock

So you probably know my predilection for listening to Youtube's automatic playlists starting with a song I know. They tend to drift and it often dismays me to find out where we end up. But usually that's just an esthetic problem. Today I got a shocker.

I started with Gid Tanner and the Skillet Licker's "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" which is a nice and kind of innocuous old dance tune. I have to be careful with Gid Tanner because while he does sing a verse about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree (in "Pass Around the Bottle") and who can blame him, I've never been sure whether that was a true hatred of the Confederacy and the traitors who ran it or whether that was supposed to be a characterization of someone else's sentiments, and there's more than one verse in various other songs that embody crude racism. So when something comes up with that it in, I skip: man's been dead for years, there's no dealing with him now. "Fly Around M Pretty Little Miss" and "Give the Fiddler a Dram" do not have that, by the way.

Youtube likes to mostly play the same things for me, so there's a pile of Doc Watson and Dock Boggs and a nice little surprise with The Tarriers who I didn't remember at all (first interracial group? folk group? on tv) and I'm relentlessly skipping all the goddamned lady-murdering ballads.

Okay now comes the shocker. I know I shouldn't drive hits there so don't go and listen to this unless you're committed to flagging it, okay? Because this piece of inflammatory garbage has been floating around for at least four and a half years, has been upvoted over two thousand times,and you don't even want to know about the comments. Let me tell you a bit about it first. It's called "Coonshooting boogie." Already you're uncomfortable, right? The artist is listed as ARYAN. Now you know for sure, don't you. I needed more than that before flagging it so I listened to bits of it. If it was subtle, I'd have to explain it, right? Not subtle. First random line I listened to was enough: "shoot em up good, shoot em up bad, hand a noose over that coon's head."

I have flagged it and Youtube's flagging menu is dumb. You have to choose violent or racist.

Do us all a favor if you're up to it-- go flag it. It's right here. It's got more than two thousand upvotes. More than two thousand times some actual human being has come across this piece of shit and said, yow, this is awesome.

Every so often somebody tells me about a study they read that tells us something pithy and surprising about human nature and the evolutionary determination of every damned thing about human psychology or cultural quirks. Honestly, I never care much about these things, because I don't believe a methodology exists or can exist that would legitimize any such study. I've railed before about prettiness studies which purport to prove that people naturally favor whatever kind of cute appearance the authors have decided are the best. ("And so therefore you're accounting for all the large majority of the people who live in the world who do not fit whatever standard of beauty you are proposing -- how? Why have we all not been bred out?")

The one I want to talk about I cannot track down. I have heard about it from a couple of intelligent people who mention it as if they came across it embedded in some other discussion, but googling does not aide me. It goes like this: "studies" have revealed that infants prefer people who look like themselves, or possibly that they express more stranger anxiety when confronted with a person who does not look like themselves.

Not being able to track down these "studies" I cannot confirm what criteria were used for "look like themselves," but the first time I heard this there was a really strong implication that it was skin color we were really talking about. It was a while back, so I can't be certain, but I am pretty sure that skin color was in fact the overt topic of discussion that time. But with my inability to track down the articles that these people seem to have seen reference to somewhere, I am not sure the articles really exist, or that they really make any claims about infants' recognition of "people who look unlike themselves," or that the articles did reference skin color.

This is pretty flimsy stuff to be discussing, so let'ssay I'm not responding to anything in particular. I am responding, I suppose, to the question, whether anybody has raised it or not: "do babies exhibit race recognition?" Because I can, in fact, answer that. You probably can too.

Spread out over the last thirty years or so, I have maybe twelve? fifteen? years of experience with infants and toddlers in modestly diverse settings. Most of these groups were majority whitish, with sprinklings of other kinds of babies and adults. The current group is majority Hispanic, adults and children, with a smattering of other things. So what I've seen is a lot of babies interacting with people "who look like them" and "who don't look like them."

(Lori, there's something you want to say right now, and if you bear with me, I will say it, loud and clear, pretty soon. But I have a piece of foundation to lay first).

There's a famous pair of things that babies do in the second half of their first year. These are stranger-anxiety and separation-anxiety behaviors. They are not the same thing, but they do arise at about the same time, and they feel really similar to the observer. I believe (along with most people) they have roots in closely related cognitive and emotional developmental issues. Most babies show some of both of these: but beyond that. they vary widely in every aspect. Some babies start up remarkably young, some don't go through it till much later. Some babies are strongly affected by both of these issues at the same time, others are bothered more by one than the other, or they have one issue first and the other after, or they glide through with a mild case, and a very few really don't seem to go through it at all. Then the specific triggers and expressions and coping mechanisms that babies have vary a lot too.

Really quickly, separation anxiety is when a baby is worried, sometimes to the point of panic, at the departure of the parent or close caregiver. "But that's only natural," you say. Yes, it is. But for a period of a person's infancy and young childhood, it's not just prefering the favorite, or loving Mom: it's a deep-down, existential concern -- that's why we call it anxiety. Experts will tell you it is normal and even healthy, though it can be nerve-wracking when the baby screams for hours when Mommy goes away. It accompanies strong bonding -- though it is not the case that babies who don't show strong separation anxiety are not strongly bonded to their parents. You'd think that maybe babies who were generally ill at ease with the world would cry more about this, but it doesn't seem to be very true in my experience. It's a "some of this, some of that" situation as far as I can tell. Some of the babies with strong separation anxiety seem to want the object of their affection to sit right there and never leave the baby's side, and they seem tio be afraid of noises and bugs and things. Others -- not so much. They're taking on the world in other respects, happy and outgoing, and relatively unafraid -- they just hate it when their caregivers leave them.

Stranger anxiety can accompany separation anxiety or stand on its own. A baby with marked stranger anxiety hates it when a person they don't thuink they know well enough -- or a person they don't expect in the present contect -- comes into their presence. Or soemtimes they get upset when someone comes too close to them when they first come into their presence. Or when they see a half-familiar person for the first time that day or week. Again, it's a normal thing for babies to do. Some of them are really, really vocal about this for a long time, and some of them just skitter away to a familiar caregiver and signs to be picked up. Or, being in the caregiver's lap, will try to climb deeper into the caregiver's embrace -- sometimes it feels like the kid is trying to get back into the womb. Or sometimes the child will make a worried face and look at the trusted caregiver for a bit, and then stare in horrified fascination at the newcomer for a bit.

So this rumor that I keep hearing is that some folks, in a study or studies somehow conducted with some number of infants of the appropriate age, found that these babies either were more likely to show signs of stranger anxiety, or were more likely to show stronger signs of it, when certain people entered the testing area than others. And that these certain folks could be described as "looking different" from the babies. I see a lot of methodological problems with this.

How do you decide what features to control for? If you're going to use, as I suspect they did, skin color, as your marker of difference, then have you made sure that the test people were identical in other salient ways? Have you controlled for the non-verbal messages the babies are getting from the other people present? Have you checked out children who come from backgrounds of different levels of diversity? Remember, at least as this was presented to me, the claiam is being made that theis is an innate tendency. So if it is innate, then if your sample is large enough, the effect would tend to maintain over time and with repetition with kids with different backgrounds . . .

What about babies whose parents don't "look like them"?

In actual fact, adults don't look a whole hell of a lot like babies. Mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts and grandmas and grandpas don't look like babies. They look like adults. We all say "she has her mother's eyes" or "He has great-grandma's chin" but we're talking about subtleties and sometimes lies when we say those things. We're not talking about really categorizable differences. Are we really supposed to think that babies are searching for aquiline noses -- but they all have baby noses -- or deepset eyes -- but they all have baby eyes -- or what? This is why I'm inclined to think "looks like" was meant to be "has the same skin color."

But skin color is likewise an elusive thing. Even in a relatively homogeneous population of human beings, there's a significant spread of skin color. You can see people in families holding their forearms together and musing about where this color came from and isn't that interesting how much darker this one is than that one. Along with scurrilous jokes, of course. And any time you have one part of the family that comes from a populatin who has darker skin than another part of the family, the children will have the potential to come out any color at all. Really. People are not Sims. We have complex genetics. In my current batch of babies, I think there's maybe one whose skin color is all that close to that of their siblings and parents.

And what do I see triggering episodes of stranger anxiety? Not me, though I don't look much like any of my babies (None of my babies have hairy arms, for one thing). New people in the room. People they know, but who they have not decided are "normal" for the infant room. People who sh8ow up suddenly. People wearing hats or sunglasses (they're pretty used to regular glasses because I wear them). People with unexpected voices. People they know but they have decided are a problem (usually for reasons we can't determine. Oh, a correction to the beginning of the paragraph: I've had a baby, who I was really close with, decide I was not a Good Person for Stressful Ocassions. He acted like I was a true monster if I approached him when he was already upset about something. I figured I was not Lupe or Normita -like enough, and after a while he decided I was okay after all.)

So, what about the question that these studies purport to answer(if they really exist outside of whatever pop society books people were reading in the last couople of years -- writers of such books have been known to lie in the past)-- is xenophobia innate?

Well, maybe. Probably. But it doesn't matter. I mean, xenophobia is a thing that we find in human beings. So I think it is a natural variation of the things that people can do. But it's not an itneresting question -- is this innate, is that innate, what is the nature of humanity? Clearly, if people do it, it's a human thing to do. But it's not all that helpful to characterize behaviors as natural or abberant. It doesn't really answer the question of why people do the things they do. Because as innate as a thing might be, the fact remains that some people do them and some people don't. So what it comes down to is, is this a behavior that we want to foster or one we want to minimize, and either way, how do you go about that? And for that, you don't want an evolutionary just-so story, you want to watch what real people really do in real conditions in the real world and with respect to other real people.

I'm teaching my babies to be friendly, generous, cooperative, communicative, and brave. I'm teaching them to take delight in each other, to care about each other, and to stand up for themselves and each other. None of these is more "natural" than greed, racism, selfishness or hate. They just work better.

Warning: really offensive "racial" ideas in a Sims context.  Especially in the linked bit, but the quote is bad enough.

In a Sims forum I read and post to, I saw this request:


(how do you get those lines on the side of a block quote that show it is in fact a block quote and not your own words?  I would hate to have anybody think I wrote this stuff)

Frank sends me snippets of news from time to time, usually about the US and not about Czech Republic. But he sent me links about this thing.

Briefly, about 600 people joined a demonstration by the "Worker's Party" which is a right-wing nativist outfit to march into a housing area populated by Roma. They carried signs, rocks, and "petrol bombs" (by which I assume is meant Molotov cocktails). They were met, to the credit of the Czech people, by 1000 counter-protestors and also 1000 riot police, though when you click through to here you might be a bit concerned, as I was, about their methods. But they were engaged in stopping a mob which proposed to firebomb a neighborhood where people actually live.

There are some terrible details. There were, apparently, some people from the town who were not in the demonstration but were chanting for the police to let the people with firebombs into the neighborhood. Yes. They were calling for the police -- whose job it is to protect people -- to allow thugs to stone and bomb and burn their neighbors. Frank thinks they were local Worker's Party members, and not additional racists just popping out of the woodwork. I hope so.

Roma are the scapegoats of Europe.

On another front, I have decided on the colors for my house. Currently it is sort of pale brown: too yummy a color to be beige, but otherwise sort of beige. I call it the color of hazelnut mousse. The roof is reddish.

The roof will continue to be reddish. The walls will be a creamy butter color on the horizontal siding part and a light ochre on the plywood sheathing part and the corner reinforcements. The gutters and window trim will be a light dusty blue with roof-colored accents on the windows, and the door will be roof-colored with blue and possibly ochre accents.

There you are. None of the colors are gaudy by themselves, but when you combine them, you have the epitome of gaudy: all the primary colors together.