Xenia Psyllaki is the name of a character that appeared in the book “The Nonentional Outlook of an American at War” by Donald Rumsfeld. She was a young female US GI who was assigned to the 6th’s Special Forces Group (Airborne) and was posted in Kuwait. In this book, she was working as an intelligence analyst and was assigned to work in an Arab Republic during the Gulf War. Her job was to study the alliance between coalition forces, working to determine whether or not the United States could win the Gulf War by using their alliance with Saudi Arabia and Gulf Cooperation Council nations.
During her period as an analyst, she became interested in height and gender issues that were of great importance to the military. She had worked as a police officer in New York City before being deployed into the Middle East. She had previously studied mathematics in college but was interested in international affairs, so when she received her degree in international relations she entered the academia of law and worked as an intern in the International Crisis Group in Brussels. Once there, she started to develop her interest in height and was fascinated by the issue of genetics and human height, which led her to begin a personal research into human evolution and ethnicity. This later work earned her the nickname “Xenia,” which is translated as “agenarian.”
While working at the World Health Organization, she began to wonder about race and ethnicity and how race and ethnicity might impact height and gender issues. After doing much research in this area, Xenia Psyllaki came to believe that there are biological factors that affect human height and considered herself to be an “xenoist.” The extent to which the various biological traits that she had examined in her research influenced her career is unclear. However, her expertise on human development and ethnicity makes her a unique case study in our ongoing discussion about race and intelligence.