🚀 go-pugleaf

"Bob LeChevalier" <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote in >

>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.

> 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.
>
> >Well, the obvious response is: where do black students score?

> They score lower.

>> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>
> 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.
.
> >
> >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)
>
> >> >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.

See the pattern? For every scenario there's the convenient excuse.

I'll grant you this: if a people lived in a relatively benign climate that
was rich in food and water, they might stagnate developmentally because
there had no pressing needs to overcome. Perhaps they might continue for
100,000 years in relative contentment, and then be dazzled and amazed at
what other cultures had created when contact was finally made.

So why do I reject this argument in reference to blacks? Simply because upon
being exposed to the wondrous new technology, they did not copy it and adapt
it to themselves. It is often said that it took the white man to build a
modern civilization in Africa, but that is not exactly true. They did not
bring in hordes of Belgians and Swiss etc. to tame the wilderness and build
great European-style cities. No, actually the local blacks did it. The
whites provided the ideas and the motivation, but mostly blacks did the
work. They also achieved at least mid-level management in all the African
colonies, so they were involved in the day-to-day operation of a functioning
economy. Yet in every case - every single case - upon the departure of the
whites the former colonies descended into chaos. And the worst "villains" of
all, the South Africans, provided the most enduring civilization, although
it, too, is doomed.

So never mind what could have happened, should have happened, or didn't
happen in the last 2,000 years. Right now today, why is there not a single
African country that simply maintained the goodies it inherited from the
colonials?

My answer is: because they are run by blacks. You do not accept that answer.
But since all available evidence says it is, your argument requires the
greater proof, which is probably why it uses such long and convoluted
explanations.

> >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.

Because I am part of management.

> > 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 blacks are more incorporated into white society. OK, but most blacks
don't live in white society. They live among other blacks. So what's better
for them?

> >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"

Well, just for the record, the only division of Americans that makes sense
to me is between the taxpaying and the non-taxpaying. Unfortunately, because
of the realities of our country today, that position is often construed as
racist, since any attempt to let working Americans keep their money results
in less money for blacks.

I am no socialist. "We Americans" should not have the legal obligation to
support "those Americans" who can't or won't support themselves, regardless
of what color they are.

> 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".

American blacks, you mean. African blacks will almost certainly die off in
great numbers before the next century.

> 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.

Only if you are correct. If I am, we will be surpassed by countries that
aren't so narrow-minded that they keep throwing money down a rathole.

Mark