Historic black suffering trumps all other human suffering, hands down. And we must never forget this, even in the midst of our own paltry suffering, otherwise known as 'whining'. Got it. I assume this is why we're now obligated to vote for Obama or commit our souls to the fire?

I'm here to tell y'all that in matters political as in all else, blacks are capable of being just as venal as whites.

I stopped stating the obvious when I was 12.

To believe anything else IS racism.

No. It isn't. That is a silly form of idealism. You keep harping on this term, "reality," as if you have some notion of what that is. It's not your personal experience. It's greater than that, It is greater than your tiny little mind and lifespan and you've never grasped it yet.

Think about the lives of blacks in this country. Think about having your ancestors cross over on one of those ships to a life of slavery and all that followed and continues to this day. You've heard about genetics but you don't know any more about that than Shooter does about anything. Epigenetics is a relatively new field. Our lifestyles and environment can change the way our genes are expressed. Your lifestyle might affect the health of your children and even grandchildren. In other words, this complicates the nature vs. nuture debate in ways you will never comprehend. We all took it for granted that genes made us what we are. We debated about how environment may have altered or changed that. Now we have to consider the imponderable: Our environment and lifestyle may affect the genes we pass on to later generations. There really are no victims to blame in the final analysis because we are all victims of racism, slavery and oppression.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

Frederick Douglass

Historic black suffering trumps all other human suffering, hands down. And we must never forget this, even in the midst of our own paltry suffering, otherwise known as 'whining'. Got it. I assume this is why we're now obligated to vote for Obama or commit our souls to the fire?

-- KateTex

In the "free world" after the enlightenment. But I never said that it did trump all human suffering. The Irish Potato Famine was no fun and neither was life under Stalin or Hitler, if you were a Jew. I'm sure Palestinians feel the same way, whether that's justified or not.

Nor am I making excuses, just trying to help you see a more complete "reality". As far as who to vote for goes, that's your business. You get two flavors: Democrat or Republican. Chocolate and Vanilla are at Baskin Robbins.

For decades, our view of heredity has been written in the language of DNA -- and genetic mutations and recombinations have driven most descriptions of how phenotypic traits are handed down from one generation to another. Yet, as is amply demonstrated in Science's special issue of 10 August 2001, recent discoveries in the field of epigenetics -- the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the DNA sequence -- have blurred that neat picture, and are changing the way researchers think about heredity. Epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation, histone acetylation, and RNA interference, and their effects in gene activation and inactivation, are increasingly understood to be more than "bit players" in phenotype transmission and development. And, with the prospect of human cloning now being actively discussed in some quarters, understanding the twists and turns of epigenetic inheritance has become especially important.

To provide an extra dimension to coverage in the 10 August 2001 special issue, we're launching a new epigenetics section here on the Science Functional Genomics Web site. On this page, you'll find a collection of links to interesting Web resources on chromatin, methylation, imprinting, and a variety of other topics with an epigenetics bend. Also, we've gathered together a selection some groundbreaking research papers, Reviews, and Perspectives published in Science over the past five years, in a special new epigenetics section of our Functional Genomics Research Archive.

I'm still laughing.

http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/plus/sfg/resources/res_epigenetics.dtl

but if his supporters and especially his opponents can convince enough people that he did, or that that is what he "really thinks" or even what his supporters "really think" there isn't going to be much of a "national conversation", or an obama presidency for that matter.

Are we rehabilitating Lysenko now? Say it isn't so -- I already feel old enough, especially after reading the bulk of this thread.

My 'tiny little mind' is all too familiar with child abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, suicide, schizophrenia, mental illness, homelessness, rape, family betrayal, a city destroyed by the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known (and subsequently abandoned), the near-death of a spouse due to horribly botched surgery and oh, let's see...what am I forgetting here? You have NO idea who you're talking to, so spare me your tidy little lectures. Granted I have never suffered racial discrimination, unless you count all those years in New Orleans when my husband was denied promotion because he didn't fit the right racial profile. I entered New Orleans a flaming liberal, steeped in the ethos of the Sixties, and I left it mumbling to myself, "I need to leave this place while I'm still a liberal."

So yes, this country very much needs to have a conversation on racial relations. But this conversation needs to be an honest one, not a futile exercise in extracting guilt from those who needn't have any, nor a game of one-upmanship. There are plenty of blacks in this country who've had easier lives than whites, and vice-versa.

Put it this way: some of us came from homes which were severely dysfunctional. The challenge is to understand what happened and lose the anger, self pity, and bitterness, to simply get on with life, stop looking back, even though we may end up handicapped in the American, capitalist scheme of things. Is there anything wrong with applying this paradigm to matters racial?