Right – and really, it’s nature/nurture/development. They’re all intertwined from the time of the egg and sperm. The dichotomy is really a false one as the moment the egg/sperm come together (which interestingly enough, are not as old as the parents are, a fact I never thought about until I read a thing the other day, but “new”), – the environment and the genetics work together along with the developmental processes
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and with regards to statistics:
they are usually compiled by government agencies for the purposes of developing government programs.
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It’s really quite an amazing fact though:
The adult man and adult women are epigenetically DIFFERENT than when they were born.
But those stressful years as a teenager DO NOT show up in the sperm or egg. The egg and sperm KEEP the original material they had.
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I’m not talking political leanings in this stuff. I have my own personal background and I’ll bring up class differences, etc, but political leanings are usually further down the list in my mind.
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I’m late to thinking of everything in left/right ways. Took my first political test at 44 years of age 6 years ago. Was shocked to find I’m ‘far left/anarchist’ and _not_ centrist which is what I thought all my life.
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I used to only have a very narrow focus of concerns. Self-actualization, kids in the school system and society and how they’re treated, how poor people are treated by the middle class/wealthy both in the US and other countries and, well, that’s pretty much it.
I only started really ‘seeing’ systemic stuff relating to race and other issues not that many years ago.
Those parents that were talking around me when I was a kid about “single parent homes” and crime/divorce being due to “women’s lib” etc, and little me getting mad and having an outburst at the adults for talking shit about my mother and me, well, I didn’t know they were talking about little black kids and black mothers in code. I didn’t know coded racial language because we never used it.
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They may. It’s an odd day that I’d hear that brought up without it also being linked to women’s rights, spanking of children, authoritarian parenting, zero-tolerance policies, etc. You might not be bringing up those things too now or ever at all, but I’ve had these conversations about these zones of topics for decades online, and it’s rare that these things don’t eventually end up being connected
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It’s all around the same topic.
You brought up race, which is fine.
But has that BEEN an important part of discussing food scarcity and I missed it, just as I missed those parents talking in coded language as a boy about “single moms” “women’s lib”, “kids of single moms committing crimes / on more drugs / bad influence on ‘our kids’/ getting girls pregnant’ ?
I was sure they were talking about all children of single parents.
But I didn’t know they were talking about black kids and black moms until I was in my early 40s, 30 years after having my little outbursts at the soccer parents, church parents, cub scout parents, whenever it’d come up.. .and they were ALWAYS talking crap about single parents. They were worse than kids at school.
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Ok. ’cause “they’re too lazy to go the extra 1/2 mile to get good food for their kids” – if that was the sentiment you’d been expressing, certainly fits into the common racial trope, which is a very standard US trope – both democrat and republican share this kind of thinking.
I remember the first time I realized that “inner city” was just code for “black neighborhood” – I was like in my late 20s when that one clicked in. I felt pretty stupid – and I thought of all the people I’d heard that’d talked about it and it lowered my opinion of all of them