Watch videos of animals in the wild--they sleep at least as much as my dog does.

(Depends on the animal, of course, but the big apes definitely sleep a lot, and they are our closest relatives.)

Which then feeds into the "we can't talk to them--they are all crazy radicals" rhetoric. Providing even greater excuse for bombing them again in the future. With the end goal of destroying any hope at all of a Palestinian state.

There is no reason to be unnecessarily mean. But there is a reason to take his views personally.

We all say stupid things sometimes. We most of us have deep down absorbed a lot of the racism in our media. But to just accept it, to not rebel against it, is condoning it. Be offended, be outraged even. You are a human being, and his views are offensive to humans.

If you can express your outrage and he can hear you, then I think you can be friends. If you have to pretend to feel something you don't, what is the worth of this "friendship?"

Racism exists, there is no doubt. And many African-American children go unadopted.

On the other hand, race is not likely the only reason so many people choose international adoption. My girlfriend is Black, I am Latina, and we briefly considered international adoption because the odds that we will get a baby if we adopt domestically are so slim. We'd like to have our child for as long as possible before he or she starts school, and we want to be part of our child's life for as long as possible. We were told that even getting a toddler is difficult, because the process of becoming eligible for adoption once you are in the foster care system takes so long.

We are still going to adopt domestically (and still hoping for a toddler), but this knowledge has made me more sympathetic to the people who adopt internationally.

All the black people I know well (including my girlfriend) get very dry skin if they don't slather on lotion. They also can go more days without washing their hair before anyone would notice, because their hair is dry and tightly curled. (Sometimes they add oil--actual oil--deliberately to their hair.)

Everything about race varies widely, since race is socially constructed, but if I were to generalize, I'd say that higher sun=less oil, rather than more.

I've seen you post around Salon for a while, and I nearly always learn something from your posts.

However, I think you are misunderstanding the idea of social construction of facts. It is not that there are no facts--it is that we see facts through eyes that have been shaped by our experiences. So, for many years scientists saw extreme racial differences. They measured and cut and took notes, and came up with a lot of nonsense.

We can't get out of our culture, but that doesn't mean we can't do our best to figure out what is going on, knowing that we may be (probably are) shaping the facts to some degree based on our own biases. It is more a matter of humility than of asserting that there are no facts.

At least that is the sort of postmodernist that I think is worth reading.

How do you think the story of black suffrage and woman suffrage proves your point, rather than the opposite point? (Given, I mean, that most black men didn't effectively get the right to vote until 1964, after giving in to pressure to stop fighting for universal suffrage, including suffrage for black women, back in 1868?)

The point of the black suffrage/woman suffrage analogy (which Aravosis raised, though it does not much help his case) is that in politics gains can be, and often are, taken away. So don't fuck over your allies.

First, it is misleading to say "black people got the right to vote in 1870." Black women, obviously, did not get the right to vote in 1870. Also, for the vast majority of black men, who lived in the South, that right to vote was short-lived, ending shortly after Reconstruction, and not being regained until 1964.

The moral? Don't throw anyone under the bus. It may seem expedient at the time, but it will come back to bite you in the ass.

Why not "recognizably primate?" Wouldn't that be more accurate? Even more accurate, "recognizably animal."

Here is a chart on fetal development. Are you honestly going to say that a fetus of under three months is "recognizably human?" Have you seen the fetus of a pig?

http://www.babycenter.com/pregnancy-fetal-development-index

One that stands out is the use of phrases like "black thugs" combined with talking about these 6 teenage boys, only one of whom had a criminal record, as if all of them did.

If we stopped dealing with any organization that had a history of violence, we'd have to move off the planet.

but also the views of Adam Smith. Smith thought that manufacturers will collude whenever they get the chance, so the workers had to have the chance to collude back, if we were going to have anything approaching fair economics. He was in favor of labor unions, and in today's health care market, he'd be in favor of finding some way to organize against being walked on by the health care industries.

"Neither the organization, nor Marshall, welcomed the civil rights protests that formed the movement of the 1950s and 1960s."

If that were true, how would you explain the NAACP's role in organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or Thurgood Marshall's active and visible support (you can see him in Eyes on the Prize) for the civil disobedience required to implement desegregation?

While it is true that the NAACP and Marshall focused on legal strategies, it isn't true that they opposed other strategies.