What
The Human Race Man’s Home Companion debuts today with this inaugural post. The purpose of this new publication is multifaceted but as I write this, several primary reasons arise.
I want to segregate my writing about race from my writing about the world of ideas and from my writing about technology. This is because race almost never informs those other things.
I think I’m pretty good at making sense of racial mythologies, theories etc in America and that aspect of my thinking has not atrophied. In fact it has strengthened.
The cause of that new strength is the stress that a new set of concepts about race have imposed on American society, politics and mental health.
So I aim to cultivate a new audience with some rigorous thinking, useful anecdotes and sarcastic humor that I believe can help them personally and as advocates for a reasonable resolution to the stresses and strains that the doublethink of racialism puts on our society.
Who
I am MDC Bowen, who grew up in a black nationalist family in Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s. I was there at the original Kwanzaa and gave up Christmas for it. My father, Robert T. Bowen Sr, was one of the original Watts Poets and the founder of the Institute for Black Studies in 1966.
I have an extensive avocation as an essayist in Socratic dialog and have written blogs since their very invention. I was awarded Black Blogger of the Year in 2007 owing to my coverage of the candidacy of Barack Obama. I was founder of the Conservative Brotherhood blog league of center right writers, and I currently serve as a board member and co-founder of the Foundation for Free Black Thought whose journal is here on Substack.
Professionally I am a data architect and entrepreneur. Philosophically I am Western, (Lockean) Taoist and Stoic. Politically I am a civil libertarian and eschew all partisan activities and parties. Personally I am a gadfly and bon-vivant with a variety of senses of humor that range from corny to dark, like my favorite whiskies. I’m also an audiophile and jazz snob.
Why
The most popular thing I wrote on my other Substack presaged the style and depth of the race wars we are now engaging. As I write this, the anti-semitism on American college campuses and rancid and rampant. There is the distinct possibility that the tinderbox in the Middle East may spark domestic rebellions and a wider war there. There is so much ass-backward thinking about so-called minorities, that we need a kind of dialog that transcends finger-pointing and mealy-mouthed sloganeering. I believe that I’m the sort of writer who can see through this and provide some clarity in a way that is different than what journalism, academe and political think tanks provide.
I also find that since I have learned to say the exact same thing to my audiences without presumptions about their racial identity, I have developed a singular method which is quite different than the current fashion of ‘anti-racism’. It has to do with one’s mental health and a modernist, as opposed to tribalist view of society. I perceive that most Americans engage in ‘anti-racism’ from the specific POV of a representative of their ‘own’ race, and thus reinforce the idea that each race has its own special purpose and message to the world. That’s medieval. I’m embarrassed for the intelligent people who haven’t thunk their way out of that racial box. So to be clear, I’m pro-wisdom and I say race is a fallacious and foolish categorization. Fighting against trespassers of racial rules from within a racial box is a self-defeating waste of energy.
When
I can promise one essay a week. Some will be topical, others will deal with high level concepts or answers to specific questions.
How
I will always leave comments open. I will never secret away content for paid subscribers. This is a public service and I’m not good at social media monetization. Neither was Thomas Paine. However, I will comp any donors here on my other more established ‘stack Stoic Observations.
What Else
I am not absolutely convinced that there is a neat solution. In fact, all I may end up doing is debunking racial myths and upsetting people who are what I call racial realists. The short answer here is that Pascal’s Wager on race is a bad bet. In fact, I’m fairly certain on that mark because I’m beginning to see all sorts of racial complaints in America as first world problems. On the other hand, the first world exterminated Jews and Slavs. It may yet come to a point at which the strategy of domestic militias may come to bear on civil liberty - we have already seen the intellectual poison and double standards in action on college campuses.
This bears on the categorization of people in general and the abuse of demography and panoptic analytics through the abstractions provided by internet technologies. Our online shopping, marketing, and political polling profiles all of us. The mom and pop shop is an artifact of the past, except for those in the most affluent markets who can afford bespoke attention. We absolutely know that large language model artificial intelligences think in highly dimensional spaces on the order of hundreds.
GPT-3 and earlier versions: These models often use embeddings with a dimensionality of 768 for smaller models, scaling up to 1,024, 1,280, or even 1,536 for larger models.
So it makes absolutely no sense for us to model our thinking on the reductive terms of race, gender, ethnicity, sex, gender, preference, creed, religion or any of the terms explicitly prohibited in our civil rights anti-discrimination laws. Yet we do and because of this, we may be on the verge of an authoritarian crackdown in the guise of the defense of civil liberty. Yes, we are thinking primitively and incorrectly when using those terms - the terms of populist identity politics. Some of us don’t know any other way. Yet our computers do. Is this our fate? The censorship desired by political partisans and government agencies is real.
I say I aim to debunk racial theories and it is something I am somewhat loathe to do, like retrieving chicken bones from the garbage disposal with my bare hands. One cannot depend on the machine of society to handle particular nasties. Some require an articulate touch and in providing that, I put my person at risk. I suppose if I were more confident in the ability of others to do so, not that I doubt their sincerity or aims, I would relent as I do from time to time. They are not me, they don’t have my perspective, and I perceive a call for all-hands. You may judge me deft or daft, but here I am.
What I believe I uniquely possess is the concept of what I’m calling a post-black sensibility. It is a soi-disant place of reckoning with culture and race that I see in myself and a few others. There is something familiar about the trajectory of people who reject the very idea of a black orthodoxy and have worked their way through the consequences of race treachery. I use the word treachery pointedly because in particular for black Americans similar to me, my path is almost universally associated with ‘internalized white supremacy’. Nevertheless, it is more broadly understood among black Americans as ‘crabs in the barrel’. So what happens when the crab escapes the barrel? The answer for me has always been encapsulated by the following poem written in 1970 by Nikki Giovanni.
Revolutionary Dreams i used to dream militant dreams of taking over america to show these white folks how it should be done i used to dream radical dreams of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers of correct analysis i even used to think i'd be the one to stop the riot and negotiate the peace then i awoke and dug that if i dreamed natural dreams of being a natural woman doing what a woman does when she's natural i would have a revolution
Except I am not a woman and I don’t want a revolution. I used to think revolution was inevitable, but that’s because I took people at their word about how bleak America was. Then I saw America through my own eyes and came to realize I was at home, just from a different hometown. A small town called Black.
I ask new people I meet two questions to help me remember them.
What town were you born in?
What’s your favorite cartoon character?
I have come to realize that the second question, while easy for me to ask and judge, is difficult for people to answer. So I’m changing it, but the final decision is not in. Nevertheless, I know that people from some odd hometown are here now according to a purpose, a reason or an accident many of which are significant in their lives. It’s a good place to start a multidimensional understanding of a person. Maybe I’ll start asking for blood type. I think every American knows the race they’ve been assigned, but do they even know their own blood type?
While this publication is new I have yet to find the perfect logo, however I am a bit excited to consider a forgotten genius of Craig Venter who decoded the human genome 23 years ago. At the turn of the century he was on the cover of all the magazines, back when that counted for something. Blood type, as far as I’ve bothered to discover is determined by the expressions of certain genes on chromosome 9. Calling this Chromosome 9 is too cryptic, but I like the fact that there are something on the order of 136 million base pairs on that one chromosome. I would expect that someone with Venter’s sort of intellect would be the last to weigh in on anything ‘racial’, but I’d wager he finds the abstraction as useless as I do. It should be obvious once you start digging into the mysteries of genetic disorders that we know very little about ourselves. Starting with blood type, perhaps you and I can start redirecting our own and others’ introspection off the rails of race.
Qualifying ‘Human Race’
I don’t like talking about humanism. I’m more comfortable with modernism. That is the fault of Progressive politics that seek to deign tribal humans deserving of human rights. The contradiction inherent is that those who believe they are the only legitimate people, let’s use the term ‘indigenous’ tend not to reciprocate. So they get allocated full souls but find The Other lacking. As the world is comprised of sovereign nations with their own legal jurisdictions, there are no global human rights defenders whose police and courts we are compelled to heed. There are simply civil rights. “When in Rome” still applies. I say civil rights are adequate and examining the liberties afforded citizens provide the best assessment of the capacities for justice available. It would be nice if there were human rights, but the world is not nice today and is not likely to become much more nice in that regard. We are certainly a diverse species but we are capable only of producing from those labor forces our respective nations can sustain. We are capable only of electing such government leaders from those electorates our respective nations can sustain.
Therefore in the context of justice, our desires for humanism are constrain by the reality of national territorial borders and international network rules. We’re not all invited to the same parties.
Nevertheless, as ambitions go in America, humanism tops most lists, especially among elites in those international networks. People who claim to desire the planet’s salvation happen to have quite the monopoly on our headspace. I intend to give every indication that my concerns about the wrongness of racial categorization is not a mere provincial concern, so that in an international order race would cease to have legal standing. It makes it all the more compelling for Americans and those in the Americas. In many ways we are still the New World. (Until such time as there is an Afro-Austrian Party, although ick). So I use the term ‘Human Race’ in its simplest and most well-understood context that we are of a single species and quite capable of genetic mongrelization to an extent we still don’t even understand. I suppose at some time in the future we can discuss the cultural evolutionary permanence of taboos against incest as yet another proof that pure races are a degenerate pipe dream. For now, ‘human race’ is modernist, not humanist. Modernist meaning not tribal. Meaning Japanese automotive engineers do not design steering wheels in their cars for Japanese hands only, but for all hands. The bucket seats in my Toyota suits my black ass just fine.
There it is.