🚀 go-pugleaf

"Mark Richards" <markrichards8@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> You recall "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."
>> have you heard the story of the Boer's trek which was hardly
>> comparable to that of the settlers of this country that crossed the
>> continent.
>
>But what is the point? Hardships were encountered, and overcome. There was
>no reason that when the white man arrived in Africa, he didn't find a
>civilization equal to Europe or perhaps even surpassing it.

There are MANY reasons.

The path to civilization had many steps (as anyone who has played the
computer game "Civilization" can tell you).  Civilization was born in
a few fertile river valleys: the Nile, the Indus, the
Tigris/Euphrates, all of which were in warm, temperate climates.
Civilization spread along transportation lines and grew most rapidly
in places that had both resources and transportation, and which had no
weather negatives.  Africa south of the Sahara did not have the rich
agricultural land, did not have the transportation, did not have the
resources, and DID have tropical weather.  

Civilizations did spring up historically in Africa, but they were
small (because of the lack of transportation) and therefore transient
like the city states of the Fertile Crescent before the first of the
great empires.  You don't read much about them, but then you probably
don't know much about the ancient oriental or Indian civilizations
either.

>In fact, there
>is no reason that Africans could not have sailed north and discovered Europe
>instead. No reason, except for the limitations of the Africans themselves.

They did.  The Egyptians that is.  The ones in the South did not have
the Mediterranean Sea, on which to develop ships that could sail long
distances without dealing with oceanic weather.  They also needed a
reason to explore.

>But the fact that black people are overrepresented in just about all areas
>of deficiency, government interference always favors them.

Yet that favoring is seldom so much as to make an enormous difference
in results.  Even with affirmative action, colleges still have fewer
blacks attending than their share of the population.

>> 4th grade white kids in Mississippi have reading test scores 8 points
>> below the national average.  8th graders, 10 points below average in
>> science.  (I'm not being selective - those are the two subject/grade
>> combinations for which NCES reports test scores broken down by both
>> race and state).
>
>Well, the obvious response is: where do black students score?

They score lower.  But since the question was whether Mississippi had
an awful economy and education level because of the blacks, it was
useful to point out that the whites are also below normal.

>> We do?  Society as a whole has an obligation to educate its young.
>> There needs to be no racial lines drawn, and it would be better that
>> there be no racial lines drawn.
>
>I don't think you believe that.

Yes I do, as a matter of fact.

>If the best education system available
>resulted in 98% of white kids but only 65% of black kids graduating I doubt
>you would be pleased even if both figures were higher than what we have now.

I would be pleased only if no one could give stats based on white kids
or black kids, because no one ever took statistical note of their skin
color.

>> Not the same argument.  Except by the voucher supporters that think
>> that the inner city kids ARE being deprived the opportunity in inner
>> city public schools.
>
>Yes, we seem to think that, don't we? Perhaps we should go in and tear up
>the sidewalks, roads, and buildings since thay are what constitute the inner
>city. Then all the poor people who live in such accursed places will have to
>move somewhere else and the problem will go away.
>
>Come on, Bob. "Inner city" is a euphemism for "black". 

Right, and you are simply a racist, not an altruist.

>> >> That is why they first
>> >> imported slaves.  If the had had to pay workers, the wages would have
>> >> been high because of the shortage.  If they had had to pay their
>> >> slaves, and if they could not sell them, they would have gone
>> >> bankrupt.  Indeed that was WHY the South was unwilling to abandon
>> >> slavery, and part of the reason it did not recovery quickly from the
>> >> Civil War.
>
>That is not why slaves were imported. They were imported because slavery was
>a common occurrence at the time.

No it wasn't.  Furthermore, shipping slaves from Africa was expensive
and dangerous.and only practiced because the slaves were so valuable
in worker-starved Hispaniola and America.

>>  Northerners profited from the import of slaves to the
>> South.  Slavery never was significantly established in the North
>> because the industry and crops did not require the manpower that that
>> of the South required.
>
>That's a lame argument. Northern factories needed every bit as much manpower
>as Southern plantations.

There were no "factories" in the colonial period when slavery grew.
Northerners were farmers too, but they grew food crops on small
acreage that a single family or maybe an extended family could manage.

>And some of those Northern factories were so much
>more inhospitable to human life than was working on a farm. The North could
>have utilized slaves quite advantageously.
>
>Besides, when slavery was no longer available machinery was built to do the
>work. maybe the machines would have been built sooner if slaves had never
>been here.

The Industrial Revolution started in England, not here.  We copied
their machinery for a few decades until we had the wherewithal to
invent our own.

>> Not "only".  But it was a factor. One needs only to look at the
>> relative populations and wealth of Virginia and Massachusetts before
>> the Revolution, as well as the power of Virginia in the early
>> republic, to realize that slaveholding Virginia was the economic
>> engine that made this country possible (Massachusetts especially
>> needed the South during the time that when the port of Boston was
>> blockaded.)  The Civil War continued until Virginia was totally
>> subdued and not significantly longer shows that this power did not
>> dwindle rapidly, while on the other hand, without the slave-picked
>> cotton that was so highly valued in Europe, the Confederacy would not
>> have survived more than a year or so.
>
>During the slave era we were a largely irrelevant outpost an ocean away.
>Since slavery we have become the world's only superpower. Now how could we
>do that without a cornerstone of our wealth?

We might not have been here without that cornerstone.  We might
instead have ended up like the rest of British North America, which
became Canada.  Not that Canada is a bad country, but it isn't a
superpower despite enormous resources  (Canada lacked the good climate
and transportation, just as Africa did, and they had the same whites
that we had)

>Sorry, I don't buy it. Slavery was a blight on our country. We would be a
>far better country today if we never had it.

I'd like to think so, but history doesn't always cooperate with our
ideals.

>> >It's the redistribution of that wealth that creates anger.
>>
>> The redistribution takes place because a large sector of the
>> population did NOT "earn" the wealth of the country, but instead
>> inherited it from others who "gained" that wealth in part by "using"
>> the ancestors of another sector of the population, in so doing setting
>> up unequal conditions that make it harder for the latter sector to
>> "earn" wealth than those who were born with wealth.
>
>If you could show me a financial empire that is a direct descendant of
>antebellum plantation owners, I might concede that point. But the War
>Between the States destroyed the South. Between the War and Reconstruction,
>any financial benefits from slavery were pretty much wiped out.

The financial benefits were LONG before the Civil War.  They were in
the 1700s when Virginia became wealthy enough to contemplate being
self-sufficient and independent of Great Britain.  Few other British
colonies became so wealthy.

>> >The fact is that
>> >blacks as a group take so much more out than they put in. As a group,
>> >whatever they contribute is far offset by what they cost.
>>
>> If they were not so readily identified by skin color, this might not
>> be the case.  I am sure that I could select some 14% of the population
>> which is entirely white, which would be even less productive than
>> blacks if treated as a "group".  But since you can't see that 14%, you
>> don't case epithets at them.
>
>Now that's funny. Where I work, every qualified black is hired. Then they
>are treated with kid gloves because management is afraid to reprimand them.
>(In fairness, they are decent enough fellows who wouldn't cause trouble
>anyway, in my opinion.

Well then how do you know how management would treat them "if"?  You
are ASSuming it.

>> >But it hasn't worked. Every black inequity is at least as bad is it was in
>> >the 50's, and some are far worse.
>>
>> Not hardly.
>
>Really? Other than the fact that overt racism is virtually nonexistent, what
>would you say are areas that are better?

Education and income levels, lack of segregation in some areas, the
kind of color blindness that has allowed my daughter to spend time
with black boys as well as whites without condemnation (and I live in
a southern state).  The fact that her music teacher that was black
itself would not have been possible in the 50s.

>So what is the white responsibility in Africa, if any?

I don't know. Responsibility in what arena?  Where in Africa?

>What responsibility do we Americans have to the millions of blacks living
>perpetually in the ghetto?

To consider them to be part of "we Americans" so that we know that 
"we Americans" are living perpetually in the ghetto, not "those
others"

>And what is their responsibility?
>
> "Equal in every way" means that blacks as a group have the brains, drive,
>and discipline to create a modern 21st century society. Do you believe they
>do?

No. Neither do I think whites as a group do.  Indeed I don't think
that any group can.  A 21st century society is too complex to just
spring up from nowhere.  Every group has to build on what came before.

Luckily for blacks, they don't have to.  They are a PART of a 21st
century society which merely has to sustain itself, something it
cannot do while leaving 15% (or 30% if you count the Hispanics who
have even worse education numbers) "living perpetually in the ghetto".
We have to change that, or our society will fail, passed up by other
countries that are more enlightened and hence more efficient so that
they aren't wasting 30% of their human resources.

lojbab