“What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?”

Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist once married to Margaret Mead. Intellectually I knew of Margaret Mead as an important anthropologist but nothing specifically from her oeuvre. Until one afternoon wandering through the library stacks of a local college, I discovered a set of cassettes from A Rap on Race.

There is a point to the series of vignettes I…