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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I just read his Wikipedia page. Under the conditions of his time, how was he a racist? The article says he opposed slavery, opposed “scientific racists” of the time who argued polygenism and that some races were “transitional” between animal and man, and he asserted that science could never excuse the atrocities of slave owners.

    He did have incomplete theories about a racial hierarchy of intelligence, which was a common idea at the time. The article doesn’t suggest that he was a primary champion of that theory, or that it heavily featured in most of his work.

    In my opinion, he seems like a man who was doing what he could to expand his understanding of his observations, even if he was limited and misled by the prevailing methods and attitudes of his lifetime. Perhaps he should be judged against his peers rather than modern sensitivities, particularly without any evidence of malice in his work.











  • Wikipedia suggests that the origin of the j in marijuana is a bit more obscure than that:

    The origin of the word “marijuana” foreshadowed its current use. Historically, the earliest and most numerous group of users in the Americas were slaves from western Central Africa (modern Gabon to Angola. Their words for cannabis are now used in nearly all the places they (involuntarily) ended up during the 1700s and 1800s…Most notably, in Central America, the Kimbundu (Angolan) word mariamba became the Spanish word marihuana.

    The word “marijuana” as we know it today did not appear until 1846 in Farmacopea Mexicana, though it was spelled “mariguana”. In most following instances, the word was spelled marihuana. In Chilean Spanish, mariguanza is the dance of a shaman in an altered state of consciousness.