Melatonin, Reflectance, and Race

Here’s the thing that I love about humans. Genetically it makes most sense for us to mix and match. It’s best for us to have lots of sex with a diverse group of our fellow travelers. Why? Because mixing-up the gene pool is essential for mutation, and mutation is essential for adaptation. Humans are nothing if not for our adaptations.
 
Essentially, we are a collage of adaptations that more often than not, tend towards doing the correct thing in the face of a myriad of life threatening challenges.
 
Sex is an adaptation, and that’s why sex is so much fun. Sex represents an accumulation of adaptations that encourage us towards greater and greater amounts of pleasure, fun, and massive rewards for our efforts.

That’s why it’s so crazy for me to think about sex and race at all. We are all homo sapiens -- humans. But as I’ve written about previously, we know that myths alter our sense of reality. Myths become our reality, personally, communally, religiously, societal, and globally.

The idea of separate races is a mythology.

Last week on Twitter, Amanda Bynes announced that she likes chocolate - more than vanilla. Unfortunately for her, she has also discovered the cost of her “racial” preference to her career.  With announcing her sexual preference for ample melatonin, she has also announced her retirement from acting. It seems Amanda received a ton of hate mail over expressing her sexual preferences.

It’s sad. You see, color is a perceptual event. It’s not based in reality. The ability to see color at all represents a series of adaptations that gave us the advantage of noticing ripe fruits, picking predators out of hiding places, and feeling the intensity of inspiration.

Color gives live bass and depth.

Skin pigment has to do with something called the subtractive color system. It’s the mixing of paint,  pigments (like melatonin), and dyes, that each absorb specific light frequencies. The rays of light reflecting back from the absorbing source represents what we psychologically perceive as "color".

In short, color exists in our heads. But so do myths, and myths color our perceptions of color. Myths are where we add the emotional story and meaning to color.

Sadly, we continue to care everything about skin pigment reflectance, as we continue to care everything about sexual repression.  We so deeply believe in our delusional mythologies about sex and color, that we continue to embrace our ridiculous myths of separate races.

Frankly, I found it offensive to make the mythological distinction about my “race” on this years census form.  There is no box for the reality that we are one race.

Tribalism, which has to do with emotional, religious, and psychological differences in belief systems of differing groups, will always be part of our symbolic, emotional brain. We will continue to believe that those people who are not part of our tribe are bad, and those who look like us and think like us are good. As slow as evolution is, I don’t see anything like this changing for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Tribal distinctions are part and parcel to our symbolic brain, and run in the form of concentric circles. You are different from me, but we are linked by bigger and bigger circles of tribal delusion.

For example, during 9/11, everybody in New York City, regardless of neighborhood or borough, became a New Yorker. All the separations were down as we shared in the bigger tribe that was under attack. Even for all of the melatonin-color injustices in America, in times of hardship, we are still able to find bigger symbolic concentric tribal circles to connect with one another through. I am no longer from this neighborhood in the Bronx, rather I’m now a New Yorker, unified by the larger issues at hand.  And, for a little while, we even unified around the bigger tribal circle - being an American.

Getting back to what I love about sex is that it’s a common denominator. Regardless of skin pigmentation levels, sex brings different folks together. Sex is a universal language that makes us part of the same planet earth tribe.

We seem to endlessly want to fight and wars about borders, beliefs, and brides. But at the end of the day, it’s all about protecting our insane, ancient myths outworn.

What biologically does exist is the brain’s ability to perceive “difference” and label that difference as bad, evil, wrong - even if that difference is only at the level of melatonin levels in the skin.

I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1970’s, in an artist housing. So many of my friends were and are “multi-racial.” However, the reality is, there is only one race of humans. So multi-racial really means people of differing tonal reflectance had sex together and created children with different tonal reflectance.

Learning to live together is about recognizing that differences need to be embraced. Learning to accept and embrace differences is good for our brains. It expands our thinking, and keeps our thinking supple, protecting us against aging.

It is the people that resist change, that want themselves and others to remain a closed system that are at the heart of hate, war, death and destruction.

Subtle as it may seem, it begins with religious thought. There are legions of people who think the invisible man, god, has chosen them to be “his” righteous people. The absurd idea that there are a chosen people of any kind is not only ludicrous, it is disastrous thinking.                                                                

We are one global tribe, with common ancestry in Africa. Grandma and grandpa for all of us were African, and fortunately for us, they enjoyed sex.

We are unified by our humanness. We are unified by our sexuality. We are unified by our endless abilities to adapt.

For this reason, I have hope that someday, our limited symbolic, superstitious brains will catch up to the reality that we are actually living in. A remarkable time of expansive thought, shared influence, and the opportunity to embrace rapid and continual change.

Change was, is, and always will be. Adapting to change, sharing ideas, and having lots of sex with diverse groups of people is what has made us successful as the human race that we are.