-Udi Bear, from an appearance on the Jewelry Channel

I realize that last quote could get my Man Cave residency pass revoked on two counts. The statement above bears on the following discussion only in that the jeweler who uttered it reflects a common assumption held by shaman, priests, prophets, and academics throughout the ages—that is all of the various mind-control experts who have shepherded us from the Stone Age to the Hip Hop age—that men are slaves to irrational passions and must be controlled by a force structure, usually in the form a of a hierarchal institution, lest bestial chaos reign.

This is the unseen crutch of philosophers, sophists, politicians and pundits; that men are irrational beasts, who, in the absence of whatever brand of mind control is being sold by the speaker or writer, will act destructively. Below I will give a symptomatic sample of this tendency from my personal experience as the father of a young man in his fifth year of college.

Glen was discussing his literature class with me. His professor had been lecturing on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein on the very day that Victoria and I posted our review, My Dead Child Walking In The Garden. I was thrilled to have this discussion with Glen. Then he told me that his professor postulated that Mary described Doctor Frankenstein’s monster as having yellow flesh out of a racial hatred for Asians!

I naturally countered with the following facts:

1. That when one hears hooves a reasonable person does not immediately assume a unicorn or zebra, but a horse.

2. That in 1816 Britain had such little direct dealings with China that there were unlikely to be many Chinese in Britain, and that a Brit of Mary’s time would think of Asian people in terms of India, and that there was no known hatred or fear of ‘the yellow races’ by western Europeans at this time period, unlike later periods from the 1890s on.

3. That the French military disaster in what is now Haiti resulted in over 20,000 well publicized deaths from ‘yellow fever’ in Mary’s life time.

4. That death by alcoholism-induced jaundice [accompanied by yellowing of the skin] was more common among Brits of the early 1800s than it is among Russian men today, and that, as Mary wrote, thousands of starving British Sailors—who had been controlled largely through alcohol rations—discharged after serving what amounted to a prison term aboard warships in the recently won war against Napoleon, had been dying on city streets and country roads during the coldest year in memory, abandoned by the nation they had preserved in battle.

Our academics, who teach our young people, have grown into middle-age harboring the belief [among liberals] that white people have a natural biological hatred of other races, and [among conservatives] that blacks have a natural biological hatred of whites. Look, I have lived my life among racists of all stripes. And, for the most part, even though I believe they are wrong, many racists have experience-based reasons for their beliefs.

Many blacks look at more affluent whites and assume they have been undermined by these folks who own the nice houses and drive the police cars, and therefore tend to hold a distrustful need-based view.

Many whites [like a friend of mine who was attacked almost every day of his teen years by groups of black youths] hold a dim view of blacks based on crime.

In fact, even the racists that I have known generally show more of an open mind than this academic who supposes that a white author who had probably never met a yellow-skinned Asian would hold them up in her mind as a horrific image. I give you three examples from this very same week of reasonable working class people addressing and defining racism.

Rafael was complaining to me about this ‘drunken redneck whiteboy’ who kept calling him a ‘wetback’. I responded to him, “Did you tell him that you were a Puerto Rican, and not some Mexican?”

He said, “Of course. It would have been one thing if he called me a spic, or whatever, but he has to equate me with some wetback scampering over a fence to come pick lettuce!”

The ‘drunken redneck whiteboy’ was duly straightened out in a kinetic manner, being somewhere at the intellectual level of the above professor where an understanding of racial animosity is concerned, for he could never fully appreciate the animosity between various Hispanic groups, which generally have little or no racial basis.

Big Chev is a large violent racist white man who I occasionally take the bus with. We were standing among a group of blacks of mixed age and means as one young hoodlum became rude with his head set. Big Chev, incapable of whispering, rumbled, “I hate n*&&#$@!”

I looked at a black gentlemen standing next to us with a questioning eye, even as the ghetto boy boogied with his headset rapping about ‘bitchez en hos, you knows’. Big Chev clarified his statement, pointing to the young hoodlum, “That is a n*&&@$#. It has nothing to do with color. He is what he is. This man here works for a living. He’s black. I’ve got no problem with that.”

Yes racism exists, but at a much more nuanced level than academics like to think, locked into mindless biological constructs as they are. One of the uses for certain insulting terms such as Chev and the above redneck use are as shorthand for labeling people according to social stigma, just or unjust.

Malcolm is a young black man who recently, in the same minute, stated that “The Tea Party is just the KKK in disguise” and “I have no problem with a White Student Union. Blacks get to have their own student union, why not whites?”

Even though Malcolm has been raised in city with a lot of black versus white animosity, he sub classifies white people into many groups from friend to foe.

My point is, even among working class people looking at each other across a racial dividing line that has been chalked by politicians, soaked with gasoline by special interest groups, and set on fire by the media, they can still, through the flames, see that there are people like themselves on the other side of the social divide.

Academic opinion is often cited by militant figures who seek to inflame civil violence. So, to me, men like this literature professor are, in the long term, manginas with proxy blood on their hands. I have less loathing for the idiot who carries out the hate, who at least took a risk.

On one hand I stand surrounded in my daily life by functional racists working in mixed race environments who make clear distinctions between the people of this race that they approve of, and those that they disapprove of, indicative of informed [if in an ever-so-muddled manner] nuanced opinions rather than blind hatred.

On the other hand, in the face of people of numerous races and ethnicities attending the same eateries and colleges, and working together without violence or discord in his daily life, we have a supposed thinker pass over two clearly probable inspirations for the Frankenstein monster’s flesh appearing horrifically yellow [namely alcohol-induced liver failure and yellow fever]to suggest that a natural Caucasian hatred for Chinese inspired this metaphor for loathing?

I have paid this man to teach my son that he is a natural born hater, a carrier of some eugenic original sin, that must be mentally reconditioned.

That is horrific.