I am clearly out of my element at this latitude. Yesterday I went to Galveston, and I managed to get sunburn from being out a measly two hours (maybe less). I started thinking: what did people do before there was sunscreen? Particularly back when society was mostly agricultural, or even hunter-gatherer. They would have had to spend many an hour out of doors. How did white people deal with the sun?
Then it dawned on me: my people didn't have to deal with the sun. While white people currently reign over the United States, Canada, and Australia and currently control (or "influence") most of the world, we really come from a geographically tiny (not to mention climactically chilly) region. Certainly my Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestors rarely had to worry about a bad sunburn. Those countries are nice, but they don't face the blazing sun like much of the United States does. My French and German ancestors would also not have faced the sun like this. I have no Spanish blood in me, and you can tell; sunny Spain is actually along the same latitude as New York City, and Spaniards are considerably darker (and less burn-prone) than other Europeans.
Perhaps the magnitude of my displacement is best illustrated with a fact I just learned: Texas and Florida are on the same lattitude with the Sahara desert, Saudia Arabia, and Northern India. (Click here for a map to prove it)
In short, my poor skin genes never realized what they were up against. Sunburn really is the curse of the white people. Maybe it's one of our punishments for trying to conquer so much of the world. If white people stayed generally where they came from, they would never have started suffering the wretched pain and tenderness of nasty sunburns, not to mention melanoma down the line.
I can hear a faint voice coming from my red, itchy skin. "See? We told you not to take over like that. How easy is it to bear that white man's burden on a beet-red sunburnt back?"
4 comments:
The races need to keep intermarrying until we all have the complexion of Indians with greenish brown eyes. That would be my ideal at least.
Nice post! There was a cover of Time Magazine about 2 years ago about how Hispanics are going to be the largest race group in the U.S. by 2010 or so. Later that year they had a morphed picture of what an every- racially mixed person would look like and how close we are to that as a species. Won't that be cool? Too bad I married a white guy. (at least he's 1/32nd Cherokee.) I always say my next husband will be Asian! I guess it doesn't matter since I won't be procreating, huh?
We definitely should have stayed where we belonged. Manifest Destiny is bull shit!
According to a recent UN report, Blondes are supposed to be extinct in 200 years.
From looking at the map, it looks like most of my ancestors lived at a lattitude that was more like that of Alaska and/or Canada. What am I doing in Texas? Let's all move to Canada. It also feels good to see some one else who thinks manifest destiniy is bull shit. Thanks co.
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