This op-ed is interesting, to me personally. By age 9, I was fairly conversant with the terminology of early 20th century physical anthropology, particularly racial categories, though with none of the cultural baggage that such theory had accumulated. So when I mentioned the Mongoloid racial stock, I simply used it as a designator, and was interested to know if my Finn ancestors could be so categorized (it was a not uncommon belief at the time, and Finn stock is not exactly Indo-European — the language isnt, anyway). Anyway, an uncle of mine corrected me, lecturing me about being sensitive to . . . what we now know as Downs Syndrome folk, and to other races, etc., but his remonstrance had nothing to do with what I was saying. It had everything to do with what other people were saying. I was not talking about any mental deficiency, and I was not even aware, then, of the association of Mongols with what we now call trisomy 21. Further, I had read a biography of Temujin by that age, and didnt look at Mongols as in any way inferior to, well, the folks I knew. (A nice but unexceptional lot.) But I got the lecture anyway. It is often startling to see people get upset about things one is not saying. Guilt by association of ideas. In any case, the early identification of the trisomy 21 disabled by recourse to racist theories of the inferiority of Mongols is bizarre and unbecoming, that is for sure. A most implausible theory that I thought had been abandoned decades and decades ago. But alive in Britain? Has anyone in America experienced some of this? Seems nuts to me. I was not miffed by my uncle, by the way. He obviously meant well. And he alerted me to an issue I had not been previously aware. Still, the ethics lecture upon the occasion of expressing a disturbing concept without any malign intent prepared me for post-modern life in these benighted states. For post-Constitutional America.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 22:00:24 +0000