What do you say to my question: why isn’t “human history since the dawn of man” by definition the level playing field?
I am underwhelmed at the argument that genetic diversity per se is sufficient to say a population cannot be considered a cohort if their genetic diversity exceeds the diversity of a second cohort.
I’d be willing to participate in a discussion of how populations might be grouped and to what extent the phenotypic expression of a single gene set with protean phenotypic manifestations might separate off a population more distinctively than any other consideration. It’s OT, though, and I am not restating my OP which has been more or less answered: none.
But as an example, imagine that there is a genius gene set. Population A has tremendous genetic diversity but minimal representation of genius genes. Population B has less genetic diversity overall, but has a broad expression of genius genes. These two populations can be identified as distinct groups because the phenotypic expression of the genius gene has such far-reaching ramifications. No matter that Population A is more diverse; no matter that it cannot be lumped into a single category other than its paucity for the genius gene; no matter that it can be subdivided into more genetically-based subgroups than any other cohort. The presence of a single significant difference is sufficient to identify two cohorts, and insisting that all variations are equally significant (and therefore there is no real groupable cohort) is a totally invalid artificial constraint.
Now this thread is not about whether non-parity of black is genetic or environmental. It’s not about success or lack thereof of individuals in any population. One common fallacy about group averages that you repeat above is the notion that isolated successes disprove the mean. In the US, of course, where standards are specifically lowered to accommodate the disadvantaged, it’ even less persuasive. In any case, this thread is not even about the “why” for differences.
I’d be willing to participate in those types of threads although my experience on this board to date is that they rapidly degenerate into name-calling and assumptions that anyone who might consider nature over nurture as an explanation for much of the world’s inequities is a rabid and reactionary closet racist whose secret agenda is to sneak hate crimes into the SDMB.
For most posters on this board, that issue is closed: we are all equivalent genetically if we are humans, and no populations that can in any way be tied back to commonly-accepted categories of “race” are unique enough in their genetic heritage to be considered a separate cohort. The obverse of this mantra is that any and all inequality must therefore be from circumstance. Where inequality exists–even if it’s universal–it must be nurture.
I disagree with that observationally, but more importantly I disagree with what I perceive to be an absolute unwillingness to examine both sides of the issue. And that discussion is so far OT I’ll leave it for a different thread.
It’s the choice of populations that’s at issue. The choice, in your case, stems from social and political factors. You have an axe to grind. Why deny it?
Of course it is. To claim otherwise is laughable.
Please provide one instance where anyone made this argument.
So we’re talking about political and sociological categories rather than biological ones.
Find the genes first, and demonstrate their paucity in a given population. The last time a genetic researcher thought he found the genes in question, they turned out to be rare among the Han Chinese and abundant among the peoples of New Guinea.
I don’t know. Maybe, as Jared Diamond suggested, it takes more raw intelligence to survive as a Stone Age hunter gatherer than it does as a member of a venerable, advanced civilization.
You’ve posited categories which don’t actually exist. Pointing out they don’t exist is a necessary part of a reasoned discussion. Your wanting these things to exist because it suits your political purposes simply isn’t enough.
There is generally a steady growth in education and wealth over generations. I was raised middle-class because my parents had educational opportunities because their parents were middle-class, because they were raised by European immigrants who came to the Americas with some money and education themselves in the 1890s (except for my maternal grandmother’s family, who had been landowners as far back as the 1830s).
I have a huge head start over your average American black of my age, whose parents were raised in a situation with institutionalized prejudice and limited opportunities. When my great-grandparents were setting up businesses as new immigrants, their great-grandparents were being raised by the children of slaves in a country where there was very little they could do to improve their lives. You can’t expect a group that was openly discriminated against only a couple of generations before and who were slaves only a few generations before that to be equal in accomplishments just because the limiting factors were removed only 30-40 years ago.
Ummm … 'cause it’s not level?
Nor is this restricted to humans. In a number of animal populations, individuals who are perceived by the group as being “different” because of their appearance are shunned, made outcast, pushed to the bottom of the social structure.
So you can go back “beyond the dawn of man”, and the playing field is still not level, there is still prejudice based on appearance.
w.
Chief Pedant, you say:
You lost me there. I thought that your question was designed to settle exactly that question. Isn’t that what your second example, of the Vietnamese, was specifically set up to answer?
I mean, if we could find a place where, to mis-quote Garrison Keillor, “all black people are above average”, that would tend to show that the non-parity was environmental.
So I don’t get it. If the question is not “nature vs. nurture” then … what is it you are trying to determine?
w.
This is the point where Dopers always start citing Guns, Germs, and Steel. I mostly haven’t read the book, but dang if it isn’t the most frequently-cited book in GD and GQ. Although you were making a sociological point about bigotry, while Jared Diamond was IIUC looking at geography and its impact on technology and economics.
You make it sound like being born with black skin is almost a birth defect? Given differential appearances, how would you determine that having black skin was being “different,” rather than white skin being “different?” It’s not exactly like the case of the albino crow you (indirectly) posit.
Also: Assuming that there is a one-way white-on-black appearance based stigma, persecution, etc. – that doesn’t answer the part of the OP that would apply to, say, Sub Saharan Africa in 1700, before the big European-power colonial land grab (which didn’t really boom till the mid-1800s). There were plenty of parts of the Continent where no “different looking” black guy had to worry about skin-color prejudice.
And a few things did happen there – Timbuktu (though there was a significant Arab influence). But the OP is asking if (in the years when Europeans and sub-Saharans both existed in large numbers but didn’t mix enough for one’s success to be suppressed by the other’s skin-color-prejudice) there was not the equivalent of a Florentine Rennaissance, Hanseatic League, etc. etc. developing in broad areas of sub-Saharan Africa. It appears there were not. I don’t know why, but I have to reject racial prejudice as an explanation (unless they were engaging in black-on-black self-hatred) simply because of the lack of significant interaction or meddling by Europeans up until fairly recently.
Because it’s unlikely to be due to circumstances local to someplace else. People in Haiti are affected by conditions in Haiti. People in Nigeria are affected by conditions in Nigeria. People in the US are affected by conditions in the US. This isn’t a difficult concept, and I doubt it’s beyond your comprehension. If you actually just want to argue that black people are genetically inferior then stop trying to pretend like you’re asking a “General Question” and go have a “Great Debate” about it.
As has already been alluded to by Belowjob2.0 already, black Americans haven’t done any worse economically than other peoples with comparable recent histories. The poverty rate for African-Americans and Native Americans is about the same. Australian Aborigines have a much higher poverty rate than either. Oh, and although the indigenous people of Australia have sometimes been known as “black”, they are genetically the human population least similar to the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.
As I mentioned above, I don’t know much about African history. But I think that maybe, just maybe, having the world’s largest desert(*) separating them from the rest of the planet might somehow have impeded the ability of sub-Saharan peoples to engage in trade with, wage war on, or steal land and resources from other regions.
That said, the Benin Empire did pretty well for itself.
Upon what do you base that claim? Again, this is not an area in which I possess a great depth of knowledge, but I do know that the arts were flourishing in Ife before the Italian Renaissance. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone who’d actually studied African history could provide other examples, and I hope that such a person will visit this thread. Or perhaps I am wrong, and Ife represented an isolated high point in African culture. I don’t know, but I figure my guess is as good as yours until someone who really knows what they’re talking about shows up.
(*)After Antarctica, but nobody lives there anyway.
I’m not an Africa history expert, but I have been surprised at how much I’ve learned in casual study. Before I moved to Africa I’d ever heard of the Fulbe (Peul). Turns out they had great-horse riding, empire-making, religion-spreading empires- at least as big and influential as, say, the Mongols. Thanks to them someone on the sandy coasts of Mauritania can speak with some success to someone at the foot of the jungle a thousand miles away in Cameroon (I’ve tried it!). Furthermore they continue to be a cultural force across the vast areas where they often still rule as traditional leaders. One of the greatest and most influential warrior cultures on earth- who just about shaped a good chunk of a continent- and we learn shit all about it.
And you see it right in this thread. It’s not Arabs who spread Islam in West Africa, it was the Fulbe from the West and the Kenen/Bornu Empires from the East.
I was also surprised to find that the culture in my corner of Cameroon did not date back to the mid-1800’s Fulbe Jihads as I had thought, but actually had roots stretching back to the 7th century Kanen Empire. Imagine my surprise to find thousand year old references to things I was familiar with!
The point is that we never hear of wars in medieval Europe referred to as “tribal warfare.” There have been not just one, but wave after wave of great kingdoms in West Africa. No, I’m not an Afrocentrist who believes that everything good came out of Africa. But there is so much there that most Americans have no idea about.
Even Sven, you make a fantastic point even if ti is a bit far from the OP. Once you’ve studied someone like Mansa Musa, the “Tarzan” view of Africa tends to go away.
As to the OP, the answer is no.
Trying to escape this by genetics or history is silly. The causes may be completely independent of high level of skin melanin, but the reality exists. The opposite example of non-black minorities flourishing in black countries, such as Chinese and Indians in eastern Africa, does exist. I know that the circumstances are different, though.
At the beginning there was the idea that it, I’ll repeat it: that idea is completely wrong.
The importance of skin tone (aside from other unknown-to-me factors) cannot be overstated.
Perú had “black” slavery until the 1850s. To solve the “problem” of lack of labor, Chinese (and later Japanese) peasants were brought into (what turned out to be) temporary slavery. Despite this, within 100 years of arriving the *Tusan *(Peruvians of Chinese descent) had become more a zillion time “socially accepted” and their cuisine (esp. the alomost-Peruvian “Arroz Chaufa”) had become unseparable to the rest of our food. 100 years after the arrival of the firt Japanese, a Niséi (Peruvian of Japanese descent) had been elected president, with his condition of being a “Chino” (meaning Chinese, the generic , non-derogatory term for Chinese and Japanese) being important to his election, due to the fact that “chinos” are seen as hard-working and intelligent. There are many reasons for this, but the fact that skin tones are not that different make it easier to “pass” and blend.
Thanks for the replies all. I think this thread has strayed far enough off the original question for me to bow out and let it fade away.
Responses and insights much appreciated.
Huerta88, thank you for an interesting question. You ask:
I determine that black skin is seen as “different” and not white skin because of the worldwide prejudice against people with black skin. Why black and not white? I haven’t a clue … but that’s how it is, from China to Ceylon to Columbia to Cuba to Colorado. White is seen as good and black as bad … stupid, I know, and unexplainable, but there it is.
w.
Not to make to big a deal of it, since your basic point is sound enough, but this a bit, actually a lot, exaggerated. The Mongol empire at it’s height covered somewhere north of 12 million sq. miles, at least 24x the largest of the great empires of the Sahel and its international impact was immeasurably vaster. If you are actually saying that states like the Mali, Songhai or Fulani empires had a local impact in West Africa equivalent to the Mongol impact on Eurasia, I’d say you were a bit closer, though still not quite.
Which isn’t to dismiss the big Sahel states - few enough enough people are aware that African empires existed capable of fielding large armies of mailed calvary over an area twice the size of Texas, that it is usually well worth pointing it out.
“The black race” is a social construct, not a genetic characteristic. Indeed, blacks as a whole are far more genetically diverse than other races. How is it possible, then, to pin any demonstrable characteristic of blacks on a genetic defect?