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"Legends Fed by Bioethnic Conscription"

So, I admit, that I was quite naive as a child. That must be why I believed the following myth

//"Do you know why Japanese kids are so smart?" "No, why?" "Because they came from this feudal system, that's like kings and queens ya know. And when the king, I mean emperor, was displeased with his samurai, he would tell them to fall on their swords and die. And they would stick their own sword, in their tummy and twist their guts out on the ground." "Eeeeeewww" "Yeah, it's gross. And so, only the smart samurai lived long enough to have smart children. So all Japanese kids are smart, survival of the fittest." "Oh. Ok."//

At the time, I congratulated myself as having a knowledgeable and sophisticated world view. If explained the difference, I would have said my mode of bioethnic conscription was descriptive, when really it is attributive. (Montoya 95)

I have more stories like these..."Only slaves who could retain water and survive high stress-levels safely made the crossing from Africa to the States -- that's why Black people tend to have higher blood pressure than other races."...and so on.

These myths are easily perpetuated. They make a seductive sort of sense, wrapped in layers of familiar social history. Yet there are no biological grounds for associating the Japanese race with intelligence, or, the African-American race with cardiovascular disease. The 2001 Human Geonome Project studies found the difference in human DNA to be only 0.1%[|(Quackenbush)]. Craig Venter's "by chunk" study of the DNA of his parents found the difference to be only 0.5-1% [|(Ritter)].

I think it would be interesting for an anthropologist or historian to more closely examine why we spread these legends fed by bioethnic conscription. Why do clinical researchers think that race has more to do with health problems than socioeconomic status? When do we as people in American society, go from categorizing Native Americans as having a certain morphology (wide feet) to a specific "clinical sign" (obesity) [|(Associated Press)] ? How do we re-train ourselves, professionals and laymen alike, to think in terms of socioeconomic strata instead of racial strata when we are trying to define important problems, in order to solve them.

Montoya, Michael "Bioethnic Conscription" CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 22, Issue 1, pp. 94–128.