Pigments of Our Imagination

I grew up on the fuzzy, flapping fringe of the color line in the United States. My paternal grandmother had five generations of Cherokees behind her, and before that it was several of the “First nations people” of Canada who got together with my Scottish and French ancestors on my grandmother’s side, which makes me, according to the Canadian constitution, a Métis (I am “Aboriginal under section 35 of the Canadian Constitution Act 1982”–it says so on the back of my official registry card with the Eastern Woodlands Métis Nation Nova Scotia). Additionally, there is also knowledge in my family of some Osage heritage in my paternal grandfather’s line as well as more Cherokee. My adoptive maternal grandfather was Cajun. My closest cultural associations growing up were with Melungeons, Lumbees, “half-breeds, “and Creoles. Because of this and because of my own certain awareness, I really do not consider myself as “white” and I never really have. When I have to mark that little box, I write in my own line that simply says “human.” “White” is what it says on my birth certificate. “White” is what you would think to call me when you look at me. But “White” doesn’t account for everything and “White” seeks to disguise so much. I do not like the term “white” because as a designation for ethnicity it is a really modern invention and actually a part of a great big lie.

Do you know that when the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there? There were “English” people there. There were “European-Americans” there, but they did not think of themselves as, or call each other “white.” In fact “white” as a term of social status appears in no records in the American colonies until 1691. “White” as an identity had to be carefully taught for six decades before such a term could be on the books. In the Genesis creation account, every living thing, including human beings, is made according to its “kind.” The Hebrew word translated here is the word “miyn.” This word means species. In terms of human kind, there is but one species. The apostle Paul (a Jew) confirmed this truth when speaking to an audience of Gentiles on Mar’s Hill when he said, “we are of one blood/one man.” According to the Bible, in these and other passages, there is no such thing as the concept of “race,” that is, unless all we are talking about is one race, which is to say, the human race; and, the whole concept of “mixture” is predicated on purity and what can any human possibly purely be except human? We must avoid the erroneous teachings of men, brethren! Racism, in any form, is erroneous teaching. And dividing up the human race according to skin color? Not Biblical either!

You cannot tell from a person’s DNA whether he or she is black, red, yellow or white. I would not expect you to think in terms of the social constructs of “race” in the way that a citizen of Japan would think, or like someone in Brazil, or India. Do you think of an “Irishman” as being of another “race?” Prior to the civil war, that is exactly what people in this country thought! But the “color line” soon took care of that with the appearance of “Jim Crow” and the “One Drop” laws, “quantum blood requirements” for Native American citizenship, the use of terms such as “Caucasian” and “Negroid,” the invention of the “white race,” and other such Satan-infused poison darts of our shared cultural heritage. We have been taught to accept that there are “races” and that the basis for race is skin color. But it is not true! “Race” is not real; ethnicity is! But ethnicity has no genetic basis in reality but is rather something that is imposed by social experience.

Skin color is determined by the interaction of so many different genes working together; the same interactions that are present in every ethnic group, with such a wide degree of variation that it is impossible to attribute skin color to race. There are the components of our D.N.A which have been termed “genetic markers,” but these are not unique to ethnic populations either. You might be much surprised to learn what genetic “markers” are present within your genome. There is a greater and deeper technical discussion which could be entered into here, but suffice it to say, there certainly are no “race” genes, and there are “black people” living in these United States with overwhelming distribution of “Caucasian” genetic markers, and, conversely, “white people” sharing a significance of shared markers with populations of people who have never left Africa. We are about truth brethren, not lies (1 Timothy 3:15, 6:20)!

Satan has already induced our culture to swallow one poison pill. Now he is trying to get us to swallow another. The same misrepresentations of the facts of genetic science that gave rise to the social construct called “race,” have for some time been applied to what the world calls “sexual orientation and preference.” It’s the same old story, the same old flawed reasoning that men use to endeavor to prove or advance their own willfulness. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, divulges the results of a study done on 400 homosexual men. The study looked at a region of the X chromosome called Xq28. Although reports soon followed this study with bold claims about how science had vindicated the “born that way” crowd, a careful and honest examination of this study, gives no such certainty. In point of fact, the study was inconclusive as the words of the scientists indicate. Please consider this: “The gene or genes in the Xq28 region that influence sexual orientation have a limited and variable impact. Not all of the gay men in Bailey’s study inherited the same Xq28 region. The genes were neither sufficient, nor necessary, to make any of the men gay.” Another study involved the examination of identical twins. If sexual orientation is genetically determined, then the concordance rate among identical twins should be 100%. If one twin is gay, so should be the other. Alas, the concordance rate, according to researchers Peter Bearman from Columbia and Hannah Bruckner from Yale, is somewhere between 5% and 7%. The publication The Guardian swallows hard, but has this to say about that study: “The flawed thinking behind a genetic test for sexual orientation is clear from studies of twins, which show that the identical twin of a gay man, who carries an exact replica of his brother’s DNA, is more likely to be straight than gay. That means even a perfect genetic test that picked up every gene linked to sexual orientation would still be less effective than flipping a coin.”

In other words, brethren, the genetic evidence for biological causation is so poor you’d have better luck predicting sexual orientation by throwing darts blindfolded. In truth, the only sure thing about saying that there is a genetic component for homosexuality is the certainty that people will continue to say that there is. Satan is very clever at what he does.

It has never been about what is “in your blood” as far as God is concerned! God only makes humans and he does not make them to sin. And the only blood that matters is the blood of God’s dear son. Are you washed in THAT blood?

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).