I mentioned my Odd and Even street addresses analogy in another forum and someone pointed out to me that the Hutu and Tutsi designations in Rwanda and Burundi started out as designations almost as arbitrarily as street addresses.

Here are a couple quotes from the Wikipedia entry for “Tutsi”:

“When the Belgian colonists conducted their censuses, they desired to classify the people throughout Rwanda-Urundi with a single classification scheme. They merely defined “Tutsi” as anyone with more than ten cows or a long nose.”

“In Burundi, a campaign of genocide was conducted against Hutu population in 1972 and an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Hutus were killed by Tutsis. In 1993, Burundi’s first democratically elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated. It was widely believed that the assassins were Tutsi extremists.”

So this means that people are capable of essential thinking “that guy’s great grandfather had fewer cows or a shorter nose than mine did - I must kill him!”

Paul and I detail how this insanity evolves in our book “God Wants You Dead.” So upon looking at this book, another guy in the same chat forum notes that one of the author’s last names is “Rosenberg.” He then concludes that the book is an attempt by the Jews to get all other cultures (and of course specifically the “White Race”) to abandon their group loyalties so the Jews will be the only ones with any group unity left and can rule the world unopposed. (Apparently all the Jews get a special memo telling them not to read this dangerous book.)

I find all this very depressing.

Especially the knowledge that my people, the Scots-Irish (where my last name “Hastings” comes from) are not perceived as a serious threat to the “White Race.” We should qualify as being just as non-white as the Jews. Why couldn’t we be the ones with a vast world-domination conspiracy based on encouraging individualism in others?

Give us a little credit…

Your,
John Kipling Lewis 1/4

There are also some notable differences. Hofstadter’s piece shed light on sexism by casting it in terms of racism. Mine is intended to shed light on the many accidental differences that some people use to divide human beings up into silly and arbitrary groups. To this end I have invented a division that is clearly stupid but then shown it to be equivalent by analogy to many groupings that people actually take seriously: race, nationality, sexual preference, etc…

Other influences might be Dr. Suesses “Star Bellied Sneetches” and Jonathan Swift’s “Guliver’s Travels” where the tiny island nations of Lilliput and Blefuscu are engaged in a long and bloody war over whether it is the big end or the small end of a boiled egg that should be peeled first.