Firman Brown
The aftereffect of the book is the enhanced capacity for diversity, which comes from examining and redefining key parts of popular history, language and perceptions learned since childhood.
Written with an impartial view of the past, this text shows how current ideas, perspectives, fears and realities came to be. By examining common global human attitudes and emotions in specific survival situations over time, it shows how groups and individuals have become who they are. The standard premises used to solve contemporary social problems have lacked insight. In studying the terms that we use to define our world we find clarity by understanding the mindsets that created them. The resulting new understanding can socially bring us into the 21st century.
This is my planet where I live with my people.
Thoughts From Our Readers:
”This book is clearly about why a divided America does not get along and how it can.”
-A. Cottingham,
Program Manager and
Teen Life Coach for Student Services; a character development and self-esteem program for resident teens in Northeast Ohio.
He was born in 1956 and was taught by his parents to love everyone, no exceptions. From 1957 to 1961 his family lived in a multi-ethnic neighborhood (a social engineering project) in Cleveland, Ohio. It was there that he and his 7 siblings learned to see people as “people just like us from different cultures,” not races. Since he was age 4 they attended the Church of Christ 3 to 5 days a week.
His family moved into what turned into an African American neighborhood 5 years after their arrival in 1961. By sixteen he began seeing that most people had a problem loving people of other ethnic groups. He relocated to attend California’s ethnically diverse Santa Monica High School and College, earning a business degree. He continued his studies with Music, also becoming a certified computer programmer. But his personal pursuit for answering human behavior questions led to an ongoing 20-year multidiscipline study that included History, Geography, Sociology, and Economics.
He currently lives with his family in southern California and has worked for a major multiethnic corporation for over 29 years.
Chapter 4 p. 21
At this point it’s important to note that the issue of ethnic humor not being politically correct and the backlash of people thinking our society is overly sensitive are misconceptions. It is the presence of ethnic humor with the absence of social acceptance that is the issue, where humor is used as a tool for dominating or competing with someone of a minority ethnic group. In this case, minority humor is a clearly ignoble advantage for a majority population and one strong motivation to be biased for less capable individuals.
Chapter 6 p. 36
For example, potentially, someone could have 0% melanin to 100% melanin. It would be very accurate when describing someone. If they had 25%, 50% or 75%, it would paint an accurate complexion of someone. In describing water in a glass, half full, one third gone or one-quarter cup communicates a clearer picture. Yet when we refer to humans we use an inaccurate version of red, orange, green and blue. How did this happen?
I think the colorizing process of humans began when we learned to use colors to identify things. We innocently used those colors to describe each other lacking a deeper understanding. With the need for forced labor in the Americas we cemented those raw or naïve references. “Forced labor” played a major role in helping to make Western Europe and America uniquely great and redefining the human race into races of color.
Chapter 13 p. 95
The churches in the African American community also separated church from state, providing a base for ethnically segregated social access (as well as spirituality) for idealistically moral, disciplined and strong-willed individuals of good character. Though most members were also informally biased, the churches allowed it, probably to counter the hypocritical and biased European American churches. Slowly, the number of biased individuals and churches (European American) is decreasing (older members still have their learned bias), since the end of the civil rights era. I believe the inevitable change will come and those religious individuals will provide the greatest value to the American society's quest for a united country, while socially honoring religious freedom more. In the past, however, many African American preachers were concerned most about church fundraising (their churches survival) and the souls of their members.
Chapter 18 p. 133
The research conducted by a geneticist and physicist named James D. Watson and Francis Crick, along with gains achieved by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, with help from other scientists, allowed the first real scientific gains to be made in understanding human biology with the discovery of DNA structure in 1953 (US News and World Report).
