Africans and members of all races can always thrive and build good communities when they have economic freedom, and not when they’re deprived of that freedom, whether by slavery or socialism or any other form of intrusive government. In Africa, one need only compare the side-by-side examples of Botswana and Zimbabwe. Botswana is a free, capitalist country where prosperity and well-being have been increasing steadily for decades. Zimbabwe is a communist dictatorship, and like all countries with centralized economic planning it’s a miserable ****hole. In Europe, you have the obvious example of East and West Germany from 1945 to 1989, with capitalist West Germany being wonderful and communist East Germany being awful. In Asia, you can compare North Korea to South Korea, or China to Hong Kong. In South America, you can compare Chile to Argentine. Prosperity, health, and well-being do not depend on race; they depend on economic freedom. The closer that a country is to libertarian government that protects people’s rights but otherwise doesn’t interfere with the economy, the higher the standard of living.
Or around 700 BC, in which the Nubians were probably far ahead of any in Europe.
Man.
If black people could quite being fucked with they would get some shit done.
Are you agreeing or disagreeing with any of the above posts?
Let me put it this way.
North America was inhabited by Indians for something like 10 or 20K years. Yeah, they built some interesting stuff in canyons here and there. And a few other things.
But when push came to shove they were just camping out.
So, yeah, American Indians were phoning it in advancement wise.
And I say this as a person who is recognized (like by law and paperwork and shit) as a descendant of “American Indians”.
Either shit or get off the pot as they say.
Genetics? Culture? Some of both? Bad timing?
Who knows…
You may possibly have overlooked (and I feel humbly hesitant to point this out, lest it give offense) the Aztec, Olmec, Mayan and Incan empires.
Which, actually did what?
Besides getting whoop assed by Europeans?
Quite a bit more than just camping out. Do some googling.
Is that the sole criterion for a civilization’s merit; not getting conquered by another civilization? Just about every European culture has been overrun by someone else at some point - what survives is something of a mishmash of technologies and philosophies.
This is good to hear. Thanks. It isn’t the entire story. African-Americans have economic freedom and don’t do so well in the aggregate. But this is certainly an important factor.
Without the wheel? Pretty hard to believe.
How does this relate to the topic of discussion.
Ughh yeah…I like my AC down here in the deep south.
Never mind my last post about the wheel. I just remembered there have been fairly advanced civilizations without the wheel.
Ah, so it’s a “random shit” debate, is it? I’ll be sure to get my galoshes.
Build stone pyramids we still haven’t figured how, on top of steep fricking mountains to boot ? Develop sustainable farming methods the productivity of which hasn’t been equalled since ? Make gorgeous gold ornaments & jewelry that more than rivaled what Europe produced at the time ? Not confine astronomers to house arrest for being demonstrably right (tee hee), or burn people for “sorcery” ?
Oh, and BTW, Cahokia (the Iroquois capital) was larger and more densely populated than London in the XVIth century. The reason the Europeans could ever “whoop their asses” was that over 95% of the continent’s population died on their feet from disease before the Euros actually came in with war on their mind. Kinda easier to win when there’s no one left to fight. And then, the Euros still managed to get their arses handed to them.
It shows that there’s nothing special about now, or any particular time period. We can find times in which the most “advanced” groups were in Asia, or Africa, or Europe. There’s nothing special about outcomes now, and nothing special about outcomes at any particular time.
Sub-Saharan Africans knew about wheels.
(I was going to write that Sub-Saharan Africans had wheels. But that would have been wrong. They had feet like everybody else.)
The “economic freedom” of black people in the U.S. is fewer than 50 years old, meaning that they started with a deficit when they finally got the law changed to make that happen. (And despite the law, there has been ample evidence that they continue to suffer from less than total “economic freedom.” E.g., our current president-elect was among many people who continued to deny them housing more than ten years after the laws had been corrected to ensure that they had such freedom. Red-lining has been illegal for 48 years, but the Justice Department continues to discover banks engaged in the practice. “Reverse redlining”–the practice of offering sub-prime loans almost exclusively in a neighborhood–has also been noted in many black neighborhoods.)
Atlanta, Birmingham, Richmond, Jackson, and dozens of other US cities that seem to be doing reasonably well are also majority-black.
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In America, white flight is understood to be bad thing… the unspoken thesis being that Africans are unable to thrive without whites.
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There’s nothing actually race-specific about the “white flight” phenomenon, which is better described as “middle-class” flight. Different racial groups in different communities have been affected by the general phenomenon of middle-class residents leaving to avoid new residents whom they consider socially undesirable, which has the effect of depressing property values and tax revenues, which makes communities poorer.
Many communities in northeastern US cities in the 19th century experienced this effect from “Yankee flight” in the face of Irish immigration. Middle-class Americans didn’t want to live near the poorer neighborhoods inhabited by the despised Irish, so they moved out, and the lower-status Irish-immigrant population moved in, and the neighborhood went downhill (since the newcomers generally had much less wealth and stability than their predecessors). Nothing to do with race, everything to do with socioeconomic status and cultural identity.
:dubious: Well, for one thing, the response to the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami wasn’t being run by Bush’s FEMA. I think you might be looking at a Japanese/American disparity and falsely identifying it as a Japanese/African-American one.