What Roget reveals
           
        A superficial examination of Roget’s “Thesaurus of English Language” reveals the following facts: The word “whiteness” has 134 synonyms, 44 of which are favorable and pleasing to contemplate, like for example: “purity”, “cleanness”, “bright”, “shiny”, “fair”, “blond”..., only 10 synonyms which are negative, and then only in the mildest sense, such as “whitewash”, “pale”, “ashen”. On the other hand, the word “blackness” has 120 synonyms, 60 of which are distinctly unfavorable, and none of them even mildly positive. Among the offending 60 were such words as “blot”, ”blotch”, ”smut”, “smudge” , “obscure”, “dingy”, “unclean”, ”dirty” , “deadly”, ”foul”, “unwashed”.. In addition, and this really hurts, 20 of these – I exclude the villainous 60 above- are related directly to race, such as “Negro”, “Negress”, “nigger”, “darkey”,  etc.

* adapted from Negro Historical Bulletin, volume 30, No. 18, April 1967, USA

 

 

        The human global village 

           If we could shrink the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, the village would look something like this:
                        ● 57 are from Asia, 21 from Europe, 14 from America, 8 from Africa;
                        ● 52 are women/girls, - 48 are men/boys;
                        ● 6 own 59% of the wealth;
                        ● 70 are non-Christians  and 30 are Christians;
                        ● 70 are unable to read;
                        ● 1 owns a computer;
                        ● 1 has higher education;
                        ● 8 have experienced battles, imprisonment, torture;
                        ● 75 do not have food in the refrigerator, clothes on their back, a roof overhead                            and a place to sleep.
                      

*based on figures by Dr Philip M Harter, Stanford University School of Medicine