One of the issues brought up by Michael Plavcan and Phil Reno in yesterday’s BU dialogue on sexual dimorphism was the issue of human violence, specifically male-initiated violence. Humans are unquestionably violent in many nuanced and complex ways. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson provide at least one evolutionary perspective of human and non-human primate violence in his book, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (1997). Ray Kelly provides a slightly different take, using archaeological and ethnographic examples, on human violence in his book, Warless Societies and the Origin of War (2000). I bring this up because Ta-Nehisi Coates, an editor and blogger for The Atlantic, has a wonderful essay up today on what violence meant to him as a kid growing up in crack-era Baltimore. The piece is short and worth reading in its entirety:
I was not a gangster. I wasn’t even a fighter. I was slow to anger. I didn’t simply fear being hurt, I actually didn’t like hurting other people. I only changed because it was made clear that the quickest path to peace was, in fact, a sharp, immediate demonstration of violence.
…Violence was a language in the crack era. I have never, in my life, been as scared as I was on the first day of middle school. What petrified me was that the boys–most of whom were older–spoke the language of violence. Violence shaped how they walked. Violence shaped who they walked with. Violence shaped when they laughed and what they laughed at. Violence shaped how they wore their Starter caps. Violence told them when to give dap and when to give the ice-grill. It was an entire range of cues, an intricate dance, all designed to either protect your person, or dramatize the effort.
