That’s interesting. Irish also have a 1 in 50 chance of being a carrier compared to a 1 in 300 chance for the general population.
Now that I didn’t know either.
And I didn’t say sickle cell was a “Black African” disease, just that I had hear – wrongly, as it turns out – that it was more common in Africa. You corrected that information. Thank you.
No problemo. Sorry if that came across as harsher than I intended - my patience for race-related misinformation being repeated on these boards is wearing a little thin.
Cool. Actually, IIRC, aren’t Cajuns descendents of French Canadians?
Yes. The name is derived from the region of Canada called Acadia where they lived. They have a high rate of least one other genetic disorder that leads to blindness, and deafness too I think. These are separate group of people from other French Canadians but I think they share the same genetic problems.
So basically, African slaves already had a market system for slavery, were more likely to survive many tropical diseases, were also more likely to survive other Old World diseases, could not easily disappear and blend in to the local free population easily, and were best-suited for heat and tropical sun.
When you line it up like that, it looks like the only things that could have stopped the slave trade before it hit its heyday were advanced farm machinery or less ignorance about race and culture. Neither were available, so that’s how we have rock 'n roll (for instance). Was it a good trade-off? Have we made it worth it? If not, can we make it so?
Yes, but more precisely, they’re both descendant from French colonies in what would become Canada, but Cajuns mostly comefrom a different colony to most Quebecois (the largest French-Canadian group) - and when it comes to Tay-Sachs, the French Canadian variant is a different version from the Cajun/Ashkenazi one.
I do know the Acadians who didn’t migrate to Louisiana have the same Tay-Sachs incidence as other French-Canadians, and also that the Cajun and Ashkenazi mutations seem to be from two different mutation events.
Not for Africa, not for the slaves, and I’d argue, not for the Southern slavers, either. Being invested slaveholders held them back economically.
Nope. It’s still a festering sore that oozes poison into your entire national psyche. Two sores, actually - for both the Natives and the Africans.
Who knows? You’d have to show a lot more willing than your current system.
Another of the many factors:
While N.A.s had developed agriculture, in North America especially it was a highly gender specific role: agriculture was women’s work. Period. Men built, fished, hunted, fought, and provided in other ways, but women tilled the field and harvested. This might seem minor, but it was not: many N.A. men simply refused to do agricultural work even when enslaved, literallY choosing beatings or death first, and besides which they honestly did not know how.
West Africans were more similar to Europeans in their agricultural techniques and gender roles. In many cases, such as the growing of rice in the Carolinas, The Africans imported knew FAR more about cultivating the crop than their masters. The same was true of architecture for that matter (some Africans were accomplished carpenters and carvers and artisans before they ever got to North America) and of cattle.
Of the factors above, the fact that if Indians escaped it was a lot easier for them to disappear or make it to people of their own language group (or speakers of a regional patois) and culture and clan is not to be underestimated. For centuries the best chances Africans had escaping of successfully and permanently were to make it to a sympathetic Indian tribe and gain sanctuary, but this was far from automatic and there were all kinds of barriers, not least of which was language and familiarity with geography and what plants were edible, plus many villages came to be allied with the whites and would return escaped slaves.
Remember also that in what is now the United States, many Indian tribes OWNED African slaves. At first it was generally more communal, and the Africans were probably treated more like equals by their masters than they would be in white society, but with Cherokees and Creeks private ownership of plantations and slaves evolved, especially among the Chiefs who were of mixed ancestry.
Those are the same thing. I’ve seen no evidence that Africans are any more likely to survive tropical diseases than Europeans or Asians. They are more likely to survive than American Indians because most tropical diseases are Old World, nothing more.
Nah, that’s just an old racist stereotype. There’s no real reason why Africans were better suited to the tropical sun than Greeks or Japanese. Darker skin provides a degree of protection from skin cancer, but people had invented clothes by the time the New World slave trade had started, skin cancer isn’t a major mortality factor for people with a adult life span of 45 years and plenty of Europeans, Indians and Chinese worked right alongside the Blacks in the Southern US.
The idea that Africans as a group are innately better adapted to heat and sun to any degree that makes them superior slaves has little basis in reality.
Nope. Not at all. Some places women did all the work, other places (like the Pueblos) men did most of it. And are the Mesoamerican cultures not North American? Again, there, all the large-scale farming was primarily men’s work, AFAICT.
Again, I don’t think you can be quite so pat about this - West Africa covers a huge area and many varied cultures, with way different gender roles in different cultures.
You are not wrong. It is more common in Africa. Parts of it, at least, and in populations descended from those parts.
It just so happens to be common in a few other populations as well. That is irrelevant.
As for Tay-Sachs, the presence in French Canadian populations makes it no less of an Ashkenazi disease, and vice versa.
Well, as an inhabitant of a part of the world you seem to have never heard of, allow me to introduce you to the rest of the New World.
Yes, she is.
well, which is it? Parts, or all of it?
No, it isn’t
Yes, it does.
From Merriam-Webster:
The most common sense of the term “New World” is the Americas. While Oceania was not part of the traditional “Old World” of Eurasia and Africa known since antiquity, and historically may be part of the “New World,” in modern usage the terms Old and New World almost always apply to the Eastern and Western Hemispheres respectively.
Shakester, what point are you trying to make? I was saying that the various diseases that killed something like 85% to 90% of the inhabitants of the Americas after the arrival of Columbus hadn’t just spread out over all of Europe during the Middle Ages (and before), but they had spread out over all of the Old World. I take the New World as meaning North and South America (and any nearby islands). I take the Old World as meaning Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania (and any nearby islands). The inhabitants of the Old World had had contact with the various diseases that native Americans were being wiped out by when the Europeans arrived after the time of Columbus. Thus the Africans who were imported to the Americas by slavers were more likely to be immune to these diseases than the native Americans.
The terms “Old World” and “New World” are pretty standard. Before the time of Columbus, there was general knowledge among educated Europeans of all of Europe and a limited amount of knowledge of Asia and Africa. I don’t know exactly how much knowledge they had of Oceania. I don’t know exactly what knowledge that they had of islands off the coast of Asia like Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. I presume that they didn’t know about Australia, New Zealand, or the islands of the Pacific. I think there has always been a limited amount of contact between Indonesia and Australia. Educated Europeans just before Columbus wouldn’t have been too surprised to discover that there was some islands to the east of Asia and maybe even another continent just beyond that. (I guess that Antarctica doesn’t count as either the New World or the Old World.) Does anyone know if the various plagues of the Middle Ages reached, say, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, or New Zealand?
However, they were astonished to discover that the World Ocean that surrounded the parts of the world that they knew of was in fact two oceans and that between those two oceans were two continents they knew nothing of. Because of this, referring to the Americas as the New World is common. Incidentally, I have spent four weeks in Australia (and about an hour in New Zealand).
I said “almost always.” In some limited contexts Oceania may be considered as included in the “New World,” but that’s not a very common or widespread usage.
Note that the term “New World wines” counts South Africa as being one of the places where it’s produced. The term “Old World wines” only covers those that are produced in Europe and the Middle East. This is not the typical use of the terms “Old World” and “New World.”
This thread has devolved to the single answer “disease resistance.” I don’t dispute that disease and its resistance played a part, but there’s a factor I haven’t seen raised.
Given a choice between imported slaves who speak no indigenous language except what their owners teach them, in a strange land where they have no cultural or civilization connections and they are permanently marked out by an unchangeable personable characteristic, with little or no hope of returning home or to a familiar/culturally connected region;
…and a slave from a local population, in his own indigenous setting, with near and distant relatives and cultural kinsmen who will support and hide him, who can blend in with non-slave components of the population…
…which choice is going to turn out docile, submissive, isolated, controllable slaves and which one is going to produce endlessly troublesome “captives of war” who will flee, fight back, remain independent and probably kill you at the first given chance?
That the latter eventually developed among black slaves in the US is irrelevant to the first century or two of the situation. Not until there was a sub-population both motivated enough to take action and having a place to get away - free zones and the frontier - did rebellion on any level have a purpose. Nor did any slave rebellion lead to any significant number of freedmen - it took an all out national war to even start that process.