Redheads: Philosophical Meditations By Brian Simpson

 

As an ethno-racial minority, with the rarest phenotypes on earth, red heads face discrimination which is tolerated by no other group. This discrimination has been become the focus of academic papers, for example: E. Anderson, “There are Some Things in Life You Can’t Choose … An Investigation into Discrimination Against People with Red Hair,” Sociology Working Papers, 28, (2002). Suicides of young red heads in recent years comes from the cult of calling redheads, “ranga,” comparing them to orangutan apes, which are also red.

An English think tank found that discrimination against red heads was an entrenched form of inequality. The Centre for Equality Policy Research found that red heads per head of population were discriminated against more than all ethnic minorities, and only disabled people suffered more discrimination.

Against this resistance, redheads to come degree have tribalised, with the annual Melbourne Ginger Pride Rally, and in the Netherlands, Roodharigenday (Redhead Day). Amazon also has an array of books celebrating red hair, such as E. Rosa, The Big Redhead Book: Inside the Secret Society of Red Hair (2017), E. Graeber, A Field Guide to Redheads: An Illustrated Celebration, (2016); Adrienne Vendetti, How to be a Redhead, (2016) and perhaps the best: Jacky Colliss Harvey, Red: A History of the Redhead, (Black Dog, 2015). More on this.

The inside cover of Red has a montage of quotes, all pro-red hair, with these two interesting ones. First, by Michael Fassbender: “I’m a ginger, and there is not much more fun you can get as a ginger. And I think that’s why there is a lot of resentment towards the ginger community. We’re Vikings, essentially.” Second quote by Julianne Moore: “We redheads are a minority, we tend to notice each other – you know, and notice our identity.” That is true. My redheaded son came upon a famous female Scottish busker, who was touring Australia, who has luscious red locks. A crowd of men were watching her, all darkish hair colours. When my son stopped she noticed him, and waved, to the jealousy of the assembled. I do not know how the story ended.

Harvey traces the history of redheads, regarded with both fear and admiration throughout the ages, with there being many famous redheads, supposedly King Arthur and Cleopatra (unlikely), Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth I, Vladimir Lenin, Vincent van Gogh, and even Julia Gillard, but perhaps not natural, hopefully. In the Middle Ages, some unfortunate redheads were burnt at the stake, being seen as demonically possessed by the fanatics of the day, with their eyes on stalks. The gene for red hair, R1b, was prevalent in the Vikings, and is found in 13 percent of Scots, and 10 percent of Irish, with the highest percentage of redheads in the world being in England, in the northernmost counties of Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland and Westmoreland.

https://www.scotlandsdna.com/products/chrome2-red-head-dna-trait-test

Harvey says: “The study of hair … does not take you to the superficial edge of our society, the place where everything silly and insubstantial must dwell. It takes you, instead, to the centre of things.” Lance Welton, would agree, as expressed in his article: “R1b  - Gene of Modern civilization (and Red Hair), vDare 9//2019:

https://vdare.com/articles/r1b-gene-of-modern-civilization-and-red-hair

“Some 60% of English men, and 80% of Irish men, carry the R1b haplogroup, as I do myself).” So, what about this R1b haplogroup?

Simply put, it is the gene that pretty much defines being Western European. As such, it is the gene of modern civilization.

And, curiously, it’s often also the gene for red hair.

R1b is the Y chromosome haplogroup of between 60 and 100% of the Irish, Welsh, and southern English, as well as in much of France and Spain. For the rest of Western Europe, it’s the paternal line of between 30% and 60% of the population. (And about half of American men are R1-b [Race, Ancestry, and Genetic Composition of the U.S., by Richard Morrill, NewGeography.com, September 23, 2015].

According to genetic analyses of archaeological finds, R1b first made an appearance in Europe—specifically Veneto in Italy—about 14,000 years ago [The genetic history of Ice Age Europe, Q. Fu et al., Nature, 2016] with the original point of origin believed to be somewhere in Western Asia [A major Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b Holocene effect in Central and Western Europeby N. Myres et al., European Journal of Human Genetics, 2010].

R1b’s presence is extremely high in the far west of Europe and decreases as you move eastwards. This is because R1b in the East has had longer to be diluted by other migrations. It has been argued that R1b spread northwest with the Indo-Europeans, who had originated farming in the Middle East roughly 12,000 years ago and were therefore able to outcompete indigenous hunter-gatherers. This fits with other findings if we remember that the estimates of age for skeletons can only be approximate. Indo-Europeans eventually ended up in Ireland, where they found a natural barrier to any further westward expansion in the form of the Atlantic Ocean [The peopling of Europe, by B. Arredi et al., in M. Crawford, Anthropological Genetics, 2007, p.394].

In line with this, all of the more recent subclades to R1b have developed in Europe.

However, another reason for the extreme dominance of R1b in certain parts of Europe is a combination of “back and forth migration” and mini “revolutions” providing its carriers with further advantages. The innovation of agriculture gave the groups that practiced it a massive advantage, because they could build larger populations and specifically could support people who didn’t have to engage in subsistence agriculture—allowing them to concentrate on developing better weapons, for example. This refining of culture must have led to numerous other “mini-breakthroughs” that gave particular groups, notably those that carried R1b, an edge.

Thus Beaker Culture, named after its signature inverted bell-shaped drinking vessels, showed up in Western Europe roughly 5000 years ago, seemingly displacing the previous “culture” in the British Isles, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and northern France—the precise areas where R1b is now the most dominant. In fact, Beaker Culture was so successful that it took R1b to North Africa and to Sardinia, although it never became dominant there.

Nor was this some linear sweep in a particular direction. Archaeological and genetic evidence indicates lots of “back-and-forth migration,” especially between Brittany, Spain and Ireland.  

And why do certain countries have so many people with red hair? They simply reflect a specific form of the R1b gene on the Y chromosome. This subclade of R1b appears to explain the rise of the “carrot top”—not, as was once believed, north European intermixture with Neanderthals [Neanderthals didn’t give us red hair but they certainly changed the way we sleep, by Darren Curnoe, The Conversation, October 6, 2017]. (The Bashkirs, a concentration of redheads on the Eastern edge of European Russia, may be an exception).

Red hair is very rare globally, but in so-called Celtic nations, such as Ireland and Scotland, as much as 10% of the population are ginger. Flaming locks are also very noticeable in England (4%) and in Iceland, as well as in parts of Norway and Germany. But only 0.57% of Italians are ginger [Mapped: Which countries have the most redheads?, by Oliver Smith, Telegraph, January 12, 2017]. In fact, the Romans, such as the writer Tacitus, remarked upon the high levels of ginger hair among the Germanics while others documented it among the Celts [Ancient Greece and Rome: Demeter-Law, Roman, by Carroll Moulton, 1998, p.93].

Many Norwegians are blond, but, in the southwest of the country there are a high proportion of gingers. This red-haired prevalence coincides with a higher percentage of Norwegians with the paternal line haplogroup R1b-L21, including its “subclade” R1b-M22, which is usually found in northwest Ireland and in Scotland. The probable reason is that the Vikings took male slaves from Celtic countries and these slaves interbred with the native population.

Even in southern Europe, ginger hair occasionally manifests itself, due to it being a recessive trait and two parents both carrying the recessive gene. However, it has been heavily selected out, as light skin provides an advantage in the dark north—allowing vitamin D to be absorbed from the sun—but can lead to skin cancer in the sunnier south [The genetic causes, ethnic origins and history of red hair, by Maciamo Hay, Eupedia, 2019] 

Ginger-haired kids, with their allied pale skin and freckles, are stereotypically bullied at school. South Park’s Eric Cartman refers to them as “Night Walkers”—until he wakes up one morning to find that he has red hair, leading him to morph into a fervent ginger rights activist.

But perhaps Cartman, generally portrayed as the most red-pilled member of the South Park cast, should be fighting for “ginger rights” no matter what the color of his own hair—because of R1b’s role underpinning Western civilization.”

 

 

          As always, there is the problem of the looming extinction of red hair this century, as discussed by Caroline Overington, “Redheads are Really the World’s Shrinking Violets,” The Weekend Australian, October 27-28, 2007, p. 30.  Redheads are presently two percent of the world’s population, and decreasing. But, who know where this will go since most things are heading to an inevitable crash anyway.

Still, there are fun facts about this perhaps diminishing group. A 2003 McGill University study found that natural redheaded women could tolerate 25 percent more pain than non-redheaded women: “Science Says that Redheads are Super Resilient People!”:

https://lecoloriste.com/science-says-that-redheads-are-super-resilient-people/#:~:text=Science%20Says%20That%20Redheads%20Are%20Super%20Resilient%20People,-Erin%20reveals%20many&text=She%20says%20that%20according%20to,gives%20their%20hair%20its%20color.&text=This%20means%20that%20redheads%20are%20actually%20super%20resilient%20people.

 

Redheads can also make their own vitamin D:

 

https://gingerparrot.co.uk/facts-and-myths-about-red-hair/#:~:text=Redheads%20can't%20absorb%20sufficient,exposed%20to%20low%20light%20conditions.

This could come in handy in the coming ice age.

 

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Thursday, 28 March 2024

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