JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  

Attributing human characteristics to extra-terrestrial bodies is an ancient practice.  Constellation It is an ancient human practice of giving stuff human attributes, to allow things to have powers of reason,and understanding, in order to make them understandable, intellectuallyconsumable.  This applies to (Father) time, many aspects of the
possibilities of g_d, constellations, planets, the Man in the Moon, facial appellations of the Sun, winds, rain, and so on. Large chunks of our real and imagined worlds are given faces and mentions–that, plus personifications of elements, where we describe the difficult and the invisible with traits that are in our common human understandable currency:  like, for example, sin “lurking” and storms “hiding” and meteors “racing”. It makes the complex and uncommon more reasonable. 

In all of this, particularly in the personification and anthropomorphization of celestial entities, there are very few examples of vicious and cruel representation of a subject.  That is what struck me so about the following cartoon from Puck magazine–I am sure that I have never seen a racist representation of an element in the sky.  Until
today. 

[The heavenly porter: Caption: “Brush yo’ off, Suh? Ain’t gwine t’ be ’round ag’in foh sev’ty-five yeahs!”  Illustration in Puck, v. 67, no. 1733 (1910 May 18), cover.  Copyright 1910 by Keppler & Schwarzmann. Source:  Trevor Owens, via the LOC.]

This is an example of how engrained racist thinking like this was at that time–and it makes a person think about the unthought aspects of racism exists elsewhere, at other times, and today.