This morning, my co-worker and I are up hella early at our retreat condos in Guernville, CA right on the Russian River. I got a Tweet this morning from my girl Amalia back home saying it is -20 degrees air temperature in Minnesota right now. Now, I don't think most folks that are not either from Antartica or Minnesota really understand what it means when the air is that cold. Add to that the windchill and the air temperature, currently, feels to be -33 degrees.
Carlo and I were talking about what a People of Color weather broadcast would sound like, here is the transcript...
"Listen here ya'll. It is -20 degrees outside today. If your ass is not pearly white. I mean nigh on albino. Keep your simple ass in the house. You ain't biologically designed for this shit. Go on outside if you have too, but know that the wind is waiting on your ass and is going to snatch off your skin down to the meaty bones. White folks, by all means, go outside and make you some snow angels, build you an ice fortress, cut a hole in the lake and go skinny dipping and shit. If you are Italian, Spanish, or Greek, please get you a piece of unlined printer paper...if you are darker than that, please refer to the instructions above. Thank you."
My anthropology course indicates that African-American soldiers experienced frostbite at a rate 6 times that of "white" soldiers during Korea, and that this has been consistently the case over time. I'm presuming that they've corrected for other factors in making these calculations, so you appear to be totally correct, although no one seems to know what the exact physiological mechanism is.
ReplyDeletehttp://emedicine.medscape.com/article/770296-overview