Western Spring
February 4, 2014
Readers of Western Spring will need no persuading of the manifold evils of race mixing, most important of which is the destruction of traditional ethnic and cultural identities. We often find cited against us the supposed advantages of “hybrid vigour” although in reality the examples given are often of peoples who are genetically very close but differ culturally – Normans and Saxons for example. We hear very little of the medical disadvantages of hybridisation between genetically very different peoples.
Some of you will have seen advertisements in the on-line editions of some newspapers for volunteers to have themselves tested to see if they could provide a bone marrow transplant for a delightful little one-year old red-head called “Margot”. Margot, the daughter of Yaser and Victoria Martini, is suffering from a very rare form of leukaemia and all attempts to find a match in the international register of donors have failed.
In the Evening Standard of the 27th January we are told why:- ” the difficulty is that at least nine antigens must match and Margot has one that’s unusual…genealogy has contributed to Margot’s rare antigens, Yaser is half-Syrian, a quarter Siamese and a quarter Scottish. He grew up in Roehampton. He has a ‘funny name but is a south London boy’….Vicki, who is from Wolverhampton…is half English and half New Zealander. Yaser says ‘as the world increasingly becomes a melting pot donors become more difficult to find”.
So there, in Yaser’s words, we have the problem – for a tissue or organ transplant you must have a donor who is as close to you genetically as possible, and mixed race people with a jumble of unrelated and very different ancestries have no-one who is close to them genetically except, if they are lucky, their own siblings.
This case and other like it should stand as a warning to those who might be tempted to start a mixed race family because they run the risk of placing their own children in the unfortunate position that Margot now finds herself in.