Dude, who even knows.
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I think one of my biggest realizations out of our country’s latter-day tensions is there’s a black nation in the United States, amalgamated from separate origins like the American/white one was assembled from Scottish, French, English, later Italian etc.
Which is a change from my 90s End of History model of like, an ill-treated subculture within the same people as me, or even my later one as the latest wave of immigrants from rural feudalism, dating to the Great Migration
That makes some things make sense - MLK as the consensus like, president of the black nation, and that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson’s occasionally farcical insertion of themselves into every “black issue”, everywhere, was a competition to succeed him
Segregation, the whole water fountains thing, goes from a blatant insult to a surreal China Mieville attempt to maintain two states for the nations - a white bourgeois metropole and a South American extractive colony - in the same place, which is destabilizing because I was never trained into a moral sense that Havana should by right have as nice facilities as Boston or anything
It explains a lot of what’s happened since Obama got elected. I see a lot of black writers now gawping that white people (like me) expected the Obama election to be a final resolution of racial tensions and not like, the opening of some sort of settlement process. Because they saw it as the black nation getting its deserved seat at the table of US government, AT LAST
But yeah, speaking for myself and the other whites, yeah, we saw it on the model of (Catholic) JFK being elected as a sign of a new golden age where the “white ethnics” became white together, and black people would be White now - maybe we’d make something up like “Judeo-Christian” or “Abrahamic”, maybe we’d just leave it there for comics to get easy dunks on.
That’s what all those well-meaning years were for, right? Of giving to the United Negro College Fund ads on football, and euphemizing inner-city crime as multicultural graffiti gangs on the shows you train your kids on, or ESPN commercials where multicultural office friends come together around The Game, or the reconciliation ministries at megachurches that are ESPN At Prayer
(huh, broadcast sports. that’s why the NFL stung and Huffy Young Man Journalism swapping MLB for NBA matters)
so what was it for, then?
Photo reblogged from Architecture of Doom with 219 notes
documerica: john h white… chicago, 1973 @ usnationalarchives
true funny story, the African-American association with basketball comes from the Playground Movement of the early 1900s
That was like “we need open space for urban residents esp. kids to run and play so they don’t picnic and fuck in our city graveyards”
And basketball (originally a Canadian indoor winter sport, thus Hoosiers and the Minnesotan Prince’s shirts v. blouses matches) was the perfect small court sport, smaller than sandlot baseball
AND THEN come the Great Migration all these negroes showed up in the northern American rust belt cities with all these b-ball courts waiting for them
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Whenever I hear “it’s like cops always go straight to a gun like it’s their only tool for resolving a situation” I think of how much the Rodney King backlash focused on breaking the long-standing nightstick/billy club blunt melee tradition
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One thing that gets overlooked in discussing “respectability politics”. The civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s? Dominated by the black church, marches dressed all formal? That aesthetic wasn’t just some attempt to prove blacks were bougie enough to deserve rights or something.
The thing about preachers and suit-and-tie types delivering speeches invoking Protestant Christianity and American ideals, arrayed against vulgar, corrupt officials, their brutish followers and police thugs, bound by ethnic solidarity and pursuing their selfish interest through brute, unadorned force?
That was exactly how northern progressives – Republicans and the “good government” Democrats who sometimes joined with them in “fusion coalitions” – understood themselves in contrast to the white ethnic machine politics that dominated big cities.
It was saying to the educated professional elites outside Dixie, “your struggle and our struggle were the same struggle all along”.
This is in contrast to the previous civil rights movement of the 1910-20s, which drew more on the then-contemporary imagery of the revolutionary masses and got absolutely walloped by the powers that be.
Question with 31 notes
Anonymous asked: Re: Yalta, do you think black separatism could ever have worked? (i.e. yielded an internally stable state with not-unusually-contested borders?)
Well, depends on your unspoken terms, really.
Haiti was a country that did and does exist, if you want to talk about the U.S. in particular Liberia is a country that did and does exist. If you want to keep things to the American mainland, the Seminole - who came from fugitive slaves as much as North American autochthons - had effective sovereignty over the Florida peninsula for a while, there were other maroon colonies besides.
If you’re talking about the ‘60s wave, Amerikkka was never going to let a definitionally oppositional state establish from its sovereign territory in the middle of the Cold War, come the fuck on. (That same Cold War pressure also brought things like elite accomodation to black demands and the replacement of the draft with an all-volunteer military so as to keep eyes on the prize and not internal race war.)
I think a lot of contemporaries realized that and so the more practical enthusiasm got channelled into pan-Africanism as decolonization proceeded apace. There were GOING to be Westphalian states run by blacks for blacks, with borders and institutions, and hopes were high.
T’Challa, Marvel Comics’ “Black Panther” that’s getting some heat right now, is a daydream of those diaspora hopes for post-colonial leadership - a strong, noble philosopher-warrior-leader who drives his particular country on to technological self-sufficiency, then dominance (South Africa managed to build a modern economy, jet-set cities, and a nuclear military on a base of black labor, after all) while standing up for all of Africa as a continent and a people.
(You will remember that Rastafari, originating in the early 20th century in the black diaspora, holds early pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey as a prophet and Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie - at establishment head of the only indigenous government in Africa - as a messiah.)
In practice, the warrior leaders weren’t that noble, the philosophers weren’t that strong. Rather than standing for Africa entire, the newly independent countries engaged in border warring (that was largely Cold War shit - after the Sino-Soviet split a lot of countries got to host 3-way proxy wars, which no doubt was fun). Rather than even standing for their own countries entire, politics tended to shake out along lines of tribal identities that were meaningless in the diaspora, with at best an ideological gloss that was efficiently shed with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
All that said, I think an alternate history (or future) where this panned out, and maybe drew return migration from the diaspora is still more likely than the establishment of a black-identity state on North American mainland.
I think rather than an encompassing concept of “blackness” organically emerging from the wisdom of the native African people, this would likely involve a founder state establishing an “African” identity that’s heavily salted with their own particularity, expanding across the continent, brutally suppressing other local identities over the course of several generations in favor of this “Africanism” in a way that uncomfortably reminds of European colonialism, and that any inspirational “pull” factor on the diaspora would be matched by a “push” factor as other states increasingly consider inhabitants sympathetic with the identity of this rising power to be suspect aliens, but hey.
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Something I like to remind people of to highlight the fluidity of history is that well into the 20th century major Anglophone associations with Islam were “decadent sexual deviance, cosmopolitan tolerance, particularly queer-positive”.
Something similar is that if you go back to early 20th century America, stereotypes of Black manhood get a little off. You still see “bestial brute” but you also get dopey, cringing, lackadasical, henpecked, can’t get or keep a woman. (The unifying theme is lack of self-mastery) Like, a cuck. Remember, like, The Blues? And how they’re about how your woman left you, or doesn’t stay true to you, or won’t accept your love? One of the central contentions of the infamous Moynihan Report was that the reason the mid-60s black American community was unhealthy even after the 1950s civil rights movement was that repression had prevented black men from establishing *dominion* - hadn’t been able to earn a breadwinning wage, could by honest toil have less earning power than a sex worker, couldn’t offer black women enough to discipline them by threat of its withdrawal - in short, had prevented them from establishing a healthy, stable patriarchy and reaping its benefits. And one of its central recommendations was to promote this patriarchy.
A lot of 60s-70s black activism invokes “masculinity” in a way that seems incongruous to moderns because it was experienced as not only a valued but long-denied reward but a valuable resource to be deployed in service of the cause.
(Which means that the pre-X Malcolm Little strutting around Harlem in a zoot suit and a guy in a suit and a sandwich board reading “I Am A Man” and Richard Roundtree posing with a leather jacket and a gun while the soundtrack called him a sex machine to all the chicks [Shaft!] were going in on the same political project. The same one as Eldridge Cleaver reclaiming “rapist”. And, I mean, it worked. When’s the last time you associated “black man” and “harmless cuck”? [When’s the last time you did “white man”?])
In a world where Trump was competent rather than a holy fool of a d100 that got nominated because sometimes it came up “America was legitimate even before the ‘60s”, he’d take advantage of this and redo Reagan’s trick of defining himself against the “welfare queen”, updating it to be an overweight 36-something with a government/NPO social service iron triangle job she got by taking community college all through the terminal postgrad level and a sense that men are dismissably wrong for not living up to her.
(The flip side of that is the “woke bro”, the new worthy object of ridicule who tries to define his total identity, including social and sexual capital, around racism-awareness… was already comprehensively roasted 25 years ago in A Different World and School Daze, treatments of pretentious Black yuppie larva)
Of course even within whiteness this stuff’s never been as stable as either the eternal-order conservatives or the ultimate-revolution whigs would have you think. If you’ve ever harkened to the authentic masculinity of the 1950s, or Teddy Roosevelt’s kettlebell strongmen-and-Muscular Christianity, or the ruggedness of Victorian explorers, know that a lot of that stuff was considered self-conscious and borderline pretentious artifice at the time, part not of an organic maleness but deliberate initiatives to promote and assert masculine force in the face of a threateningly feminizing, white-collar, peaceful, touchy-feely world.
Link with 11 notes
Portland’s Albina district gentrified. Its public school, Boise-Eliot/Humboldt, didn’t. →
Interesting article, but I say that coming in knowing the context. If you didn’t, I suspect the fact that a famously liberal American city is in 2016 proudly trying to maintain designated schools for black students seems a little underexplained.
Okay. So in the 1960s Portland moved to desegregate its schools. Like other cities, it attempted to create rough parity among schools’ racial makeup despite huge residential segregation by busing students to schools far from their home neighborhoods. Like other cities, there was serious resistance from parents and the program proved politically unsustainable, collapsing by the late ‘70s.
So far so America, but the novel thing here is it was the black parents taking the lead in resisting bussing and returning to neighborhood schools.
For one, with the black population representing a sliver of the district’s total (a resource extraction economy isolated from Dixie, with a white nationalist “free soil/free labor” heritage, Portland missed out on the manufacturing-driven Great Migration and remains the whitest major city in the US) and concentrated in the redlined Albina neighborhood, their children were disproportionately the ones being dragged on hourlong commutes across town.
For another, well, integration proved unsatisfying. After years of seeing their children spread so thinly they represented a critical mass nowhere, under a district making a point of giving them the same education it gave white students, the black community began to appreciate the virtues of black schools embedded in black neighborhoods under the influence of black parents where black teachers-cum-role-models taught students amid an atmosphere of proud and enthusiastic blackness.
(Similar desires on behalf of black Brooklynites turned into a huge shitshow a decade earlier in New York - after attempts to set up schools under autonomous black neighborhood control, the United Federation of Teachers went on a devastating and successful months-long strike in defense of the prerogatives of its (heavily Jewish) membership, shattering the city’s black-Jewish-labor social democratic coalition just in time for the ‘70s debt crisis and ultimately spurring the development of neoconservatism.)
So, a bit over a decade after black Portland’s leadership pushed for school integration under the NAACP, it ended up pushing black schools for black kids, this time under the Black United Front. A great example of the contemporary turn in black activism from equal rights and civic inclusion to black pride and nationalism, tbh.
And as far as I can tell people seemed more or less satisfied with the outcome and no one particularly wanted to tear the system down and it’s continued like that since, and now you know.
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Pretext, Past, Posterity
I don’t think the question of what really actually truly happened in Ferguson - at any stage - is really even all that important, the whole thing was just a pretext anyway.
- = - = -
Benghazi. I swear this loops back in in three paragraphs in a productive way, stick with me. The official Republican complaint about Benghazi - what even was it? Something about not sending backup, or a coverup? Whatever.
But fundamentally it’s a pretext. I mean some people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext. But the actual issue is about the Arab Spring, the actual issue is “Who Lost The Maghreb?”. With the implied answer “the Democrats, by doing that dumb Carter thing where you only support foreign allies who are nice and polite and democratic and don’t repress and torture and massacre their citizens, and then when the ones you abandon fall and the people who replace them - the people who had been being repressed and tortured and massacred - come to power and start doing shit that you hate, that is completely incompatible with the things you most emphatically and sincerely want, go ‘Oh shit, right, that’s why we were supporting that guy in the first place’”.
But the awkward thing, the reason they run with this pretext instead of saying it explicitly (like they did with the original “Who Lost China”), is that going Carter in the Ummah didn’t start with Obama, this started with Bush the Younger and the neoconservatives, and a lot of it that happened under Obama’s watch was under the influence of holdovers from the Bush era - Robert Gates and all that. And in any case unlike Carter, Obama had a second term in which to reverse course himself, and now the military is back running Egypt and Mubarak was just released scot-free.
- = - = -
Ferguson, Mike Brown, all that’s a pretext. And a lot of people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext, but the actual issue is that even as the civil rights movement of the 1950s-70s has been institutionalized as a sacred part of our national history, the actual gains made - “let’s flip the national switch away from repressing black people, and towards helping them” - have been allowed to gradually erode. Because white people found that completely incompatible with the things they most emphatically and sincerely wanted, and remembered why they had the switch on repress in the first place.
And the awkward thing, that makes this difficult to address head-on, is that it was “First Black President” Bill Clinton that blessed the erosion. The Democrats had, since LBJ, been the party of “let’s keep the switch in the helping position”. And between LBJ and Clinton, 1968 to 1992, 8 whole terms, the Democrats only won one term as President. Carter. With the whole Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon tailwind at his back.
And Clinton got elected, and more significantly got re-elected! By taking the Democrats’ hand off the switch. Federal funding for 100,000 more cops. Welfare reform. (Subtextually, federal funding for how many fewer black babies?) School uniforms, which was rinkydink but was the idea was “yes, we are willing to walk back ‘60s-style freedoms in order to further discipline urban black kids - you know, the gangbangers, the crack babies, the superpredators.”
Sister Souljah - I used to wonder what that was even about, I’m no rap genius but I at least recognize big names and I’ve never even heard of her in any other context. Does anyone cite Sister Souljah as a musical influence? But I’ve come to realize that was the point - deliberately picking a fight with someone who didn’t actually matter (and thus bore no cost) - just to make a point, a branding point.
“The Democratic Party: Once Again Willing To Tell Uppity Blacks To Stuff It”
“First Black President” Bill Clinton took the Democrats’ hand off the switch and at least let other hands pull it back to “repress”. And under actual first black President Barack Obama, of the Democratic Party, who owes two elections to being black, and at least one to black votes entirely, putting it back hasn’t even been on the agenda.
And I can see how you’d get upset.
-=-=-
“What we really need is for everyone - black, white, whatever - to respect each other.”
Okay, that’s correct, and that’s impossible, because here’s the thing. When people say they want “respect”, what they mean is they want other people to acknowledge their own conception of the world, where they’re the protagonist, and their story is the main plotline, and everyone else is, I guess, NPCs? Or at least, at least for those other people to not explicitly challenge that conception, to allow them to maintain that fiction to themselves.
Which doesn’t necessarily set you at odds, a good share of NPCs are allies, or questgivers, or shopkeepers, or background characters, and most people prefer the paragon path, and in the normal course of things you get along fine.
But only as long as there’s nothing important at stake that can only be resolved by conflict. If that NPC is the only source for a good drop, and you’re sure they’re not going to be critical to any of your future quests…
“He was murdered for jaywalking!” Even accepting that framing, here’s the thing. Physically being in the street is important. The inciting incident of the Hamburg Massacre, back during Reconstruction, was white guys angry about black guys standing in the road blocking traffic.
Because two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. The fundamental example of something that can only be resolved by conflict.
You know, if you look in the right parts of the web, where white people complain about black people in complete, properly spelled, passive-aggressive sentences, one of the most commonly recurring stories is black guys walking, or having a conversation, in the middle of the road, and they can see I’m waiting, and they don’t get out of the way, don’t even make an effort to let me through.
(There’s a tumblr post with half a million notes on it. Right here.
i know i give white people a lot of shit but u guys are really nice. like when the light turns green and there’s a white pedestrian that’s almost across the street u guys always do that jog thing. i know it’s kind of insignificant but i appreciate it white people. u and ur half jog thing.
)
The flip side of that story of course is “what the fuck this is a public road and I’m as much the public as you are so why the hell would you think it’s my duty to stop using it how I want so you can use it how you want, Mr. King Shit of the World?”
(“Mr. King Shit of the World” is the hostile way of saying “protagonist”.)
And you know how much you fucking hate it, how much of a personal affront you take it when NPC pathfinding is so fucked up that they block a door and you can’t get through? (Alternately, when collision detection is set up so that random NPCs can force you out of the way, maybe knock you out of a dialogue tree or screw up a quest?)
Gives you the unshakeable sense that this world was not properly designed for you, for the purpose of furthering your plotline.
And if these issues came up in the last update, you’d want a patch to revert them. You’d go on the devs’ forums and bitch forever, it’s like the devs don’t even care about the players, and you’d threaten to never support anything they did again, take your money and give it to some other devs, and devs, WHERE’S THE FUCKING PATCH.
And the patch, of course, is white supremacy. (It also buffs your class so you’re not grinding for fucking ever just to spend your loot on repairs and potions, and reduces your random encounter rate in safe zones.)
“But this isn’t a game, this is REAL LIFE!”
If you ever end a sentence with “REAL LIFE” in all caps you are being an idiot, I guarantee it. Yeah, the fact that the stakes of this game are real, that’s gonna make you more willing to let things slide? That’s not how people work. Not enough of them to hold a coalition together.
- = - = -
The activists are worked up! There’s a new civil rights movement coming! We! Will! Fight!
The veneration of the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, that makes people think that’s the only and inevitable way this can play out. Let’s set aside the way those gains eroded with time (same as the movement of the 1860s-70s, as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption). You know what I’m reminded of? The civil rights movement of the 1910s-20s.
You didn’t hear about that one? The founding of the NAACP, Garveyism, W.E.B. DuBois, black troops returning from European service in WWI, sharecroppers moving north to work the factories, pumped up to reclaim the promise of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, a countrywide surge in leftist radicalism, and new wave of immigrants asserting their claim on America. You don’t hear about it, because it didn’t win. The Palmer Raids, the First Red Scare, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Riot, the founding of the Second KKK.
Well, let them try, it won’t matter because trends suggest the, aah, “Coalition of the Ascendant” will gain overwhelming dominance in the intermediate future, right? Yeah, white Americans noticed that back then, too. That’s why they cut off immigration and started pushing eugenics.
Not convinced things’ll turn out like that this time around, but they could. Learn your history, kids, it keeps you from looking the fool.
- = - = -
I grew up in the Huxtable ‘80s and the End of History ‘90s, I kind of expected the two classic nations of America to merge, black into white, just as the white ethnics had the generations before.
Who knows what we’d call the amalgam, maybe still “white” just to play up the ridiculousness of it all, maybe some hyphenated neologism to bridge the gap, like we played up “Anglo-Saxon” to meld the English and German populations that originally formed the white American nation, or coined “Judeo-Christian” later on.
But I’m less and less certain of that. You look at the people saying interesting things about race these days, they’re pushing other possibilities, each with their three-letter acronyms. The left-racebloggers pushing “PoC”, “Persons of Color”, the idea that there’ll be white on one side and on the other this black-hispanic-asian-amerindian coalitional nation. The right-racebloggers “NAM”, “Non-Asian Minorities”, suggesting a white/asian against black/brown split.
And then there’s always the possibility that things’ll go the classic American route, where there’s black on one side and everybody else eventually joins “white”, earns a spot specifically defining themselves against “black”. Given a choice between the two, it’s an awfully appealing option.
- = - = -
Race is the fundamental tragedy of American history. A tragedy being where everyone’s understandably, sympathetically human, even (especially) in their failings and shortcomings and trespasses, and the inevitable consequence is suffering.
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Black History Month (Orthodox): Introduction
Went back to the Black Pride framing shop the other day to get this old double-hemisphere map print done up.
The place, like my house, is in essentially the black neighborhood of the state, so it makes sense there’s a market for appealing to pride in your black heritage. God knows Portland’s got plenty of opportunities to flatter your white heritage - Scandanavian, Scottish, Irish, German (click that one, ‘dwracu). Hell, the retro-rustic chickens/mason jars/filament bulbs aesthetic we breathe like oxygen these days is basically the midwest-American variant. (And that’s not even to mention the black/white heritage fusion places.) Even the Portland city flag (which you see more often than the American) is a Scandanavian cross, only kinked a bit and with an outdoorsy color scheme, which is pretty much Correct.
Looking around the shop there was all sorts of Egyptian-themed jewelery and busts of Nubian princesses and Zulu motifs and whatnot, which like the Swahili lingustics of Kwanzaa are a little eyebrowable as icons for proud black Americans given that Afro-America mostly traces its lineage to slaves from Western Africa. But how different is that from proud white Australians around here posting pictures of Viking warriors and Roman ruins and Viennese architecture? As long as they don’t crawl too far up their own fantasias or try to fabricate irredentist causus belli out of it, both have my blessing.
(Of course, this Pan-Africanism does have roots in a multinational and intermittently violent campaign towards regime change which… hrm.)
Aaaaaaanyway, this all reminded me that I’ve had a few essays stewing for a while on black history in America that I had in my head to post for Black History Month, only for two years now I’ve missed it. Probably because I don’t have any schoolteachers reminding me by running lessons about peanut butter. So screw it, I’m declaring Black History Month (Orthodox), lasting from now until whenever I finish up. I’ll be tagging the stuff (plus some archives) as afamhist, riffing off the “amhist” tag I shamelessly stole from monetizeyourcat, PBUH. (Who will hopefully recover from her show trial and purge by the sad anime transmarxists before too long and eventually deliver that “Oregon as Peak Free Soil/Free Laborism” piece I’ve been looking forward to for damn near two years now.)
Anyway. First up: The Crack Era, or why gangsta rap is closer to haiku than funk.
Photoset reblogged from Local Guileless Libertine with 557,133 notes
zacharielaughingalonewithsalad:
During the Bubonic Plague, doctors wore these bird-like masks to avoid becoming sick. They would fill the beaks with spices and rose petals, so they wouldn’t have to smell the rotting bodies.
A theory during the Bubonic Plague was that the plague was caused by evil spirits. To scare the spirits away, the masks were intentionally designed to be creepy.
Mission fucking accomplished
Okay so I love this but it doesn’t cover the half of why the design is awesome and actually borders on making sense.
It wasn’t just that they didn’t want to smell the infected and dead, they thought it was crucial to protecting themselves. They had no way of knowing about what actually caused the plague, and so one of the other theories was that the smell of the infected all by itself was evil and could transmit the plague. So not only would they fill their masks with aromatic herbs and flowers, they would also burn fires in public areas, so that the smell of the smoke would “clear the air”. This all related to the miasma theory of contagion, which was one of the major theories out there until the 19th century. And it makes sense, in a way. Plague victims smelled awful, and there’s a general correlation between horrible septic smells and getting horribly sick if you’re around what causes them for too long.
You can see now that we’ve got two different theories as to what caused the plague that were worked into the design. That’s because the whole thing was an attempt by the doctors to cover as many bases as they could think of, and we’re still not done.
The glass eyepieces. They were either darkened or red, not something you generally want to have to contend with when examining patients. But the plague might be spread by eye contact via the evil eye, so best to ward that off too.
The illustration shows a doctor holding a stick. This was an examination tool, that helped the doctors keep some distance between themselves and the infected. They already had gloves on, but the extra level of separation was apparently deemed necessary. You could even take a pulse with it. Or keep people the fuck away from you, which was apparently a documented use.
Finally, the robe. It’s not just to look fancy, the cloth was waxed, as were all of the rest of their clothes. What’s one of the properties of wax? Water-based fluids aren’t absorbed by it. This was the closest you could get to a sterile, fully protecting garment back then. Because at least one person along the line was smart enough to think “Gee, I’d really rather not have the stuff coming out of those weeping sores anywhere on my person”.
So between all of these there’s a real sense that a lot of real thought was put into making sure the doctors were protected, even if they couldn’t exactly be sure from what. They worked with what information they had. And frankly, it’s a great design given what was available! You limit exposure to aspirated liquids, limit exposure to contaminated liquids already present, you limit contact with the infected. You also don’t give fleas any really good place to hop onto. That’s actually useful.
Beyond that, there were contracts the doctors would sign before they even got near a patient. They were to be under quarantine themselves, they wouldn’t treat patients without a custodian monitoring them and helping when something had to be physically contacted, and they would not treat non-plague patients for the duration. There was an actual system in place by the time the plague doctors really became a thing to make sure they didn’t infect anyone either.
These guys were the product of the scientific process at work, and the scientific process made a bitchin’ proto-hazmat suit. And containment protocols!
reblogging for the sweet history lesson
You know how malaria was defeated?
Well wait, you know what malaria is? It’s this mosquito-borne parasitic illness, you just get sick, and then you die. You know why swamps are considered places of death? Today we’re like “wetlands are critical verdant natural habitat, the kidneys of the world, and it’s important to protect them”. It’s because swamps had still enough water for egg-laying, so they were full of mosquitos, who were full of malaria, so if you hung around them you’d just fucking die.
What was the treatment? Well for thousands of years there wasn’t one. If enough generations of people lived in malarial areas they’d eventually be selected for resistance, because if they didn’t have it they’d die.
That’s why African-Americans have such high rates of sickle-cell anemia, because that comes from a recessive trait that codes for resistance, because they descend from slaves captured and exported from the wet western coast of Africa or inland along rivers, which meant mosquitos, which meant malaria.
They were imported from west Africa because the Caribbean and the Atlantic coasts of South America and the modern southern US were great climates for growing valuable cash crops that required intensive agricultural labor, but they were wet and malarial, and if you put a lot of people with ancestors from cool dry central-to-northern Europe there and had them work outside, especially in large groups, they would get malaria, and then they would die.
That’s why of all the places they “discovered” and colonized, the only places really thickly settled by Northern Europeans were Australia, South Africa, and the northern coasts of North America and southern coasts of South America, because they were drier temperate zones, or the mountainous/hilly highlands where it was cold and gravity made the rivers run fast, so they wouldn’t get malaria and die.
If you could kill the mosquitos that would help (that’s why DDT was invented and used in extermination campaigns everywhere), if you could drain the wetlands that would help (that’s why so many were destroyed, one of first things that set Rome off on the course to world-empire was draining the swamps around the city), eventually we finally developed drug treatments, the first one discovered was quinine.
You know how that was discovered? When Europeans were first establishing dominion in South America, a guy on the cold mountain highlands of the Pacific coast noticed the locals chewed this bark to keep from shivering. He was like “hmm, people with malaria shiver a lot, maybe this would treat malaria!” and it did!
It’s still not clear how quinine treats malaria, but it’s established that it has nothing to do with the mechanism by which it stops cold people from shivering. This was a complete fluke.
The father of the kid across the street that I played with when I was a kid ran a business. His business model was basically to comb through thousands of wild unsubstantiated claims of, basically, “alternative medicine”, which is what we call folk medicine as practiced by white people who live in subdivisions and watch TV. They’d try to find the few that might have potential, and then run them through initial tests, and taking the ones that showed some results and run them through further tests, in hopes of eventually finding something, most likely something that could be sold on to a pharmaceutical company who would have the resources to do further tests on the by this point maybe 20% chance it would do something and 5% chance it could be a profitable product.
His one big hit was Cold-Eeze. They were the Cold-Eeze guys. Someone was like “zinc is a miracle cure for my sickly child”, because, you know, resonant frequencies and homeopathy and chiropraxis (fuck “chiropractic”, that is not a well-formed noun). And so a ton of tests later, as far as they could tell zinc ions happened to be able to bind to the same sites on the nasal membrane where the cold virus would.
(except zinc tastes awful, and most of the flavorings you could use would bind to zinc salts in ways that they wouldn’t bind to those sites, but a particular patentable formulation - zinc gluconate glycine - would work without tasting like ass. And then as soon as the product got popular there were mass-market knockoffs that used other zinc formulations that didn’t do shit)
The problem with this business model, of course, was that most of the people pitching you ideas are either woo-woo quacks or snake oil sales/con-men, and thus if by random chance they hit on something that worked, you’d still be in business with woo-woo quacks or snake oil sales/con-men, who would take every opportunity to fuck everything up, but that’s another story.
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