TGWATY, I am going to assume you are sincere and open minded and not just trying to troll. I have quoted tomndebb’s post because it contains very important information if you want to understand African American culture and how it evolved into what it is today. African Americans have been screwed in America since they came here and that screwing did not stop with the emancipation proclamation or even the civil rights movement. If you don’t know about it, please read the wiki on red-lining and related subjects and try to see ho much short shrift they have received and try to understand how that has affected their society and culture. The FBI Ferguson report is also good reading to see how they are treated.
Regarding other societies, I have spent ~6 weeks in Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya and they all seemed nice enough. We have close ties with a village school we helped build outside of Watamu, Kenya and everybody in the community was awesome. My mother grew up in Tanzania (actually the British mandate on a Mennonite Mission) and she is normal and well adjusted and recalls it with fondness. My cousins (on my fathers side) currently live in Nairobi without complaint. My mother and father in law lived in Uganda for ~4 years (first with the peace corps, then on their own) back in the seventies and they also have good memories and stories. All of these countries were and are struggling with corruption and inequality, but its causes could easily be ascribed to European colonialism.
It’s easy to figure out which sub-Saharan African countries are nice places to live. Make list #1: Write down all the sub-Saharan countries mentioned in the news over the past year or two. Make list #2: Get a list of all of the countries actually located in sub-Sharan Africa from Wikipedia or something. The ones on list #2 and not on list #1 are great places to live.
This approach could be improved a bit, but as is, it’s pretty good.
I was gonna respond to this at length, but I think I can pretty much just point to what tomndebb said and say, “Pretty much that.” The short, one-word answer to this question boils down to “racism”. There’s a great many ways in which African-Americans, in aggregate, are negatively influenced by racism. The housing market. The way the police react to them vs. anyone else. Job interviews. Mentorships in college. Medical treatment. The ability to get a cab. The list just goes on and on, from the trivial to the life-threatening. The effects of racism in America are still there.
What do you mean, “in the aggregate”? Are you under the impression that the majority of African-Americans are struggling or don’t have decent lives or communities?
Because that’s not true. While poverty rates are higher for black Americans than for other groups, they are considerably less than 50%. Majorities of black Americans graduate high school, are never arrested or incarcerated, never receive welfare benefits, earn their own livings, pay taxes, etc.
I don’t see at all how you managed to jump from the fact that social and economic problems are more prevalent among black Americans than among most other groups to the conclusion that black Americans in general are experiencing these problems. Have you really never seen law-abiding middle-class black people? There are quite a lot of them.
I’m not an expert on this, but I guess Jamaica’s kind of all right. Lot of crime in the big city, I guess, but that’s not that strange.
Some of the Lesser Antilles are pretty nice, I guess.
And there are a lot of African countries. (Nope, more than you just thought of. Nope, more than that.) I don’t suppose they’re all bad. Heck, I don’t think even Liberia was a war-wracked mess until about 1980, was it?
Remember that, “Zimbabwe sucks and Mugabe is a bad man,” is “newsworthy” while, “The Gambia is doing basically OK,” is “not newsworthy.” :shrug:
(Not that the Gambia is doing OK right now. Bad example.)
I’m not sure “white people” ever managed to screw up Ethiopia that much politically; unless you count a decade of monsoon failures apparently linked after the fact to European air pollution blowing south and screwing up African weather patterns as “white people screwing with the world.” At the end of that, in 1990, Ethiopia was the poorest nation-state in the world.
(This, by the way, is why minarchists like ITR champion are wrong. Good environmental stewardship, and thus physical science, is more important than an abstraction like freedom,)
So, aren’t you glad my ancestors killed your ancestors? If only we’d prevented you from being born, we’d be a utopia! [/sarcasm]
Well, obviously not. The English started out rather backward in some ways, even compared to those they conquered. English-speaking culture today is as impressive as it is due to cultural exchange with conquered races–yes, probably even yours. The Arabs went through the same process a millennium before.
In addition to the points raised above, it’s important to note that when it comes to countries’ wealth you can’t view it in isolation like this. One of the biggest predictive factors a small country’s GDP are the strength of its neighbours’ markets, and their infrastructure (particularly if the country in question is landlocked).
Even with the best governance, you are unlikely to get a rags-to-riches story like Estonia’s happen in Africa (without it being based on finding some valuable natural resource (which actually brings many problems…see “dutch disease”)).
This may sound to some like just making excuses, but look at say, East Asia.
A century ago much of it was dirt poor and plenty was written about “the inferiority of the asian man”. I’ve read of many examples here in China and I’m sure similar was also directed at other asian nations and the whole continent.
But then…things changed. And then there’s something of a runaway effect. As countries get wealthier their neighbours also get significant benefit.
It’s interesting to speculate on what the growth rate would be in North Korea if they suddenly became a free-market capitalist country; sitting between china and south korea, and with a short boat trip to Japan. (Though of course even with a sky-high growth rate people would starve in the short term without aid).
the comparison is a useful one but false on the second assertion. The government of the Zimbabwe is not a communist dictatorship and it does not have any real central planning. You get too much of your information it appears from strange ideological sources. The system of Mugabe uses some socialist rhetoric but it is not a socialist planned economy. It is more a quasi feudal predator state.
The comparison of the Zimbabwe and the Botswana has usefulness - the simple existance of the market based economy in the Botswana which ITR becuase of his strange ideology uses as a solo cause is not the major difference between the two. The colonial history is profoundly different, the Botswana was never subjected to the exporporiation rule of the racist white settlers, taking land at gunpoint, nor the apartheid rule. The rule of the colony under the British had more positive routes and established a positive model of governance not based on the predator - expropriation model.
With the very different social model of the modern state, it is not surprising that Botswana remains a democracy since the independence.
Well - unless you’re a Bushman wanting to remain as a hunter on your ancestral lands… Botswana is no freer than Zimbabwe, their oppressed minority just isn’t White farmers so less of a stink gets made about it.
That wasn’t for the geocentrism thing (which BTW Galileo was on both sides of), but for calling the Pope (that is, the local ruler) a dunce. Which he may have been but still, it’s a completely different reason.
MrDibble touched on it, but while the drought Ethiopia faced in the 1980s was bad (although nowhere near as bad as the drought they faced last year), a lot of the actual famine and poverty was due to Mengistu and his policies (forced resettlement, seizure of farms, the government not allowing relief aid to go to rebel areas and stealing it to fund its war, etc.)
All jokes aside, Incan masonry is truly unique. They built gigantic shit out of neatly arranged stone blocks worked to intelocking perfection, and the whole thing was earthquake-proof as a result (not an inconsiderable issue in the fricking Andes). All without a trace of mortar or binding of any kind, too - just picking the right stone for the right place.
And they look awesome.
This demonstrates one of the serious problems of U.S. history education. “Interesting stuff in canyons here and there”? Are you utterly unaware of the multiple societies of Central America, South America, what is now the Southeastern U.S. and the areas west of what is now New England? “Canyons here and there” is an utterly dumb way to describe multiple societies in multiple locations lasting hundreds of years. Among their accomplishments are calendars that matched or exceeded those of Europe and Asia, agriculture, law, architecture, and amazing art.
The lack of beasts that could be domesticated and used for transportation placed a nearly insurmountable obstacle to some of their development, yet they still accomplished great things.
And when “push came to shove” they were not defeated by European armies nearly as much as by smallpox and measles.
