Nowhere on earth is a thirteen-pound, six-foot long unit of 'scandal' or 'integrity' to be found, for example. Nor apparently can someone find a benchmark unit of 'race'. The second thread runs through the slides 1887, 1934 and 1997. Jim Crow led to better homes for whites than Blacks even after they fought WWII side by side. What this demonstrates is one clear way we very literally live within the tangible outcome of discrimination today, and the Web site goes on to expand on this in "Where Race Lives" and "To See or Not To See" very convincingly. What interests me here is specifically the assertion that "Jim Crow unites poor and wealthy whites, while denying African-Americans equality." I do not contest that the U.S. legal, i.e. white, institution actively and deliberately removed non-whites' means to confront and dismantle discrimination at law. Nor do I contest that the intent of Jim Crow was to unite whites against non-whites. What interests me here is the depth of wealthy whites' 'unity' with poor whites: While skin color undeniably prevented non-whites from the polls and courts, white skin hardly guaranteed passage to privileged spaces endowed by wealth. The result demonstrates the last slide in this 'thread,' what discrimination aims to achieve, which I argue is privilege. Elitism is the objective of subordinating, rather than expelling or simply destroying the Other. Had whites hated Blacks that much they could have wiped them out like the Native Americans. But privelige is useless without...

Jim Crow institutionalized Black exclusion but nor that did not enfranchise white women. It will be interesting to find out the demographic profile of subprime mortgage lending once the legal dust settles after another decade or so. Perhaps PBS will have a new slide called '2007: Reverse Redlining' to complete this series.
I did better on the "Human Diversity" quiz than on the 'sorting' exercise, but that may only demonstrate ability to game multiple choice tests. I missed the 'modern human' age, that 'Asians and Sioux' would be closer than any others; and that 'tanning oil' was not a trick answer for 'melanin' [!], which probably demonstrate the existence of some stereotypes I claim were inherited by exposure rather than any deliberate work on my part. Geographic proximity was the theory underlying the similarity between Ethiopians and Arabs which was why I chose Asians and Sioux (land bridge). I simply guessed that 94% of diversity would remain if Asia was the only surviving human stock: Amino acids are amino acids wherever they show up in the end. I did however recall the distribution of sickle cell from prior slides on this Web page which is a concrete definition of learning, as well as remembering that if we count back less than 30 generations the possible ancestors outnumber the actual possible number of individuals, which means Nefertiti and Caesar are equally likely as ancestors, another concrete, measurable demonstration of learning from this exercise.