Stunning Research Linking Eye Color to Alcoholic Victims Defies Nasty Racism

Exciting new research reveals that the eyes might have it when it comes to alcoholism early diagnosis and prevention. In fact, eye color alone shows whether one is genetically predisposed to becoming alcoholic or not. Implications for people of color, such as Australian Aborigines, and racist beliefs about them, might be staggering.

Blue-eyed babes and guys have a higher chance of becoming alcoholics, the study finds.

“In fact, light-colored eyes in general — whether green, grey or brown — are more strongly linked to alcoholism,” according to the study published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics, Volume 168, Issue 5, pages 347–353, July 2015.

According to the new study by Arvis Sulovari et al., 2015, people with dark brown eyes have a lower chance of becoming alcoholics. Implications of this finding related to people of color are breathtaking.

Drowning in Sorrow, Not ‘It’s Just In Their Genes’

High alcoholism rates are often associated with people of color, who most often have brown eyes, such as most Indigenous Peoples, – such as Australian Aborigines — now plagued by alcoholism. A long-standing belief is that alcoholism among Aborigines is genetic. “It’s in their genes,” is often heard among Australian Caucasians, especially those expressing other racist beliefs, as this author learned working with Aboriginal communities for ten years.

Critics of that belief, however, attribute Aborigines’ relatively new alcoholism plague to an abusive socio-psychological environment. This author’s theory, based on work of scientists such as author of The Origins of Peace and Violence, Dr. James Prescott, upholds that Australia’s Aboriginal population’s cycle of violence against self and others began when the Australian government forcibly removed Aboriginal babies from their mothers for the purpose of genocide. Prescott can enter a tribal village he’s never researched nor visited before and tell within moments whether it is a peacefull or violent community, mainly based on whether mothers there are carrying and nurturing their babies.

The abusive practices of forcibly removing Australian babies from their mothers, and of rounding up Australian Aboriginal adults and placing them into concentration camps is usually an unspoken reality. Forced removals of babies and children overtly lasted decades, through the early 70′s. The taking of Aboriginal children from their families and communities, however, continues, occurring five times the rate it was in 1997 when the Australian government released the report Bringing Them Home about the “Stolen Generation”—the approximately 50,000 mixed-race, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were removed from their families in an effort to “assimilate” them into white culture.

The report labeled this government-sanctioned effort to encourage ‘past-Aboriginal’ children to take their place in white Australian society as “genocide,” reported John Pilger, an Australian-born filmmaker.

One New South Wales Aboriginal woman, removed at the age of 3 in 1946, testified to the National Sorry Day Committee:

I led a very lost, confused, sad, empty childhood, as my foster father molested me. I remember once having a bath and my clothes on ‘cause I was too scared to take them off. I was scared of the dark ‘cause my foster father would often come at night. I was scared to tell anyone ‘cause I once attempted to tell the local Priest at the Catholic church and he told me to say ten Hail Mary’s for telling lies. So I thought this was how ‘normal’ non-Aboriginal families were. I was taken to various doctors who diagnosed me as ‘uncontrollable’ or ‘lacking in intelligence’.

As of June last 2013, a total of nearly 14,000 Australian Aboriginal children were “removed” from their parents, siblings and relatives. Aboriginal children account for merely 3 percent of Australia’s population yet today, comprise up to one-third of all Australian children in state custody.  “This “breeding out the color”, as one chief protector of Aborigines describes it, is influenced by the same eugenics movement as Nazis, Pilger says. It continues today under euphemisms such as “reconciliation” and “Stronger Futures,” reports Indian Country Today.

The new research supports the latter theory that violence against self and others is a cycle that began with abuse. The study thus provides hope for change through empowering psycho-social programs, such as culturally appropriate Family Structured Interventions, or “Family Healing Circles” this author found effective in leading an Australian Alcohol, Education and Research (AERF) grant project in 2004.

The eye color-alcoholism connection is likely a similar set of genes coding for both eye color and a tendency towards alcoholism. It can thus be used in alcohol prevention programs.

Dr Dawei Li, one of the study’s authors, said about the finding, “This suggests an intriguing possibility — that eye color can be useful in the clinic for alcohol dependence diagnosis.”