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Where would black Americans be if their ancestors had never been enslaved?

Where would black Americans be if their ancestors had never been enslaved?

  • Total voters
    51

Granted, the Arab World, India, and the Far East probably could have advanced on their own, if they'd had the right factors to work with.

Unfortunately, however, they didn't. Their cultures were also too mired in anti-progressive world views to even think to try.

The West changed their thinking in this regard by tearing down the existing status quo.

SubSaharan Africa and South America, however, were a bit farther behind than even that. They were basically stuck at Bronze and Iron Age levels of technology and development, with little hope of moving beyond those limitations at any point in the foreseeable future.
 

I wonder if other lefties hold her same distorted view?
 

Oh. My. God.

And it all comes back to your Christian beliefs. :doh

If you didnt believe in my God, you were inferior. Period.

That's good enough for me! Such thinking is always obscured by dogma.
 
Lursa said:
You need to pick up a history book. At least everyone else here recognizes that it occurred. Try looking up Sierra Leone and Liberia for starters.

But more than the US, it was Europe and Asia.
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So your premise is that societies that were primitive for tens of thousands of years would somehow now be prosperous and advanced saved for the colonialism of the last 1000?

Hint-what success has come out of africa has been BECAUSE of foreign influence. If it hadn't been for that-much of africa would look like the more isolated cultures look today.

 
Lursa said:
I never said colonies, I said colonialism. Those different words each have different meanings.

Check Sierra Leone and btw, much colonialism was sponsored by private business interests. Check out "Dutch East India Company"
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You can't have colonialism without colonization

The Dutch east India company was chartered by England not the US

Which is the specific point I'm making, Europe got Africa pregnant so why are we making the child support payments ( foreign aid) we never colonized Africa so I hate hearing people talk as if we share the blame. The constitution banned the slave trade internationally a decade after founding. As of 1800 not a sigma slave was brought legally to the US for sale. We had little involvement in African affairs from that point on

Edit sorry Holland not England, and it predates our founding as a country
 
Infinite Chaos said:
You're missing out the interconnectedness of scientific developments that link advances in Africa (writing and numbers)....
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What?
Numbers may have started in Egypt, a mixed, not sub-saharan culture.
Writing probably started in Sumeria/Mesopotamia.

Sub-saharan Africa would still live like they had for Hundreds of Thousands of years (and some still do) were it not for the importation of other dispersed Cultures/races.

AIDS/Ebola (Malaria, Polio, Famine, etc), and the like would have certainly and continuously wiped out Large parts, if not Most of the continent were it not for Western Medicine. And of course, Tribal warfare. Nature was 'in balance' and primitive before IQ wiped out other species.

While slavery was intolerably cruel, these people at least had/Now Have existence and Much better lives due to their importation. Though probably 1/3 or more died in hideous transit.
There is No large movement to return to Africa.
Liberia, Center of the recent Ebola outbreak, was a small effort to do just that. How they doing?

Subsharan Africa is pretty much a disaster as far as self-government ("Tribes with flags"), except for those countries that Did have Colonial vestiges: Western Peoples/systems. ie South Africa.
 
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Lursa said:
Oh. My. God.

And it all comes back to your Christian beliefs. :doh

If you didnt believe in my God, you were inferior. Period.

That's good enough for me! Such thinking is always obscured by dogma.
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:lol:

It's no where near that simple, first off. Many of the ideas that ultimately resulted in Western supremacy in the Early Modern Era predate Christianity, and go all the way back to Greece and Rome. Christianity simply made them a bit more humane.

Secondly, the history is undeniable.
The Industrial Revolution and Liberal Enlightenment took place in Europe and Europe's immediate sphere of influence, no where else. They spread outwards from there, and spread their various benefits with them.

Again, I'm sorry, but dem's the facts. :shrug:
 

*sigh* I should have realized you wouldnt get that DEIC was an example of privately sponsored business investment-driven colonization, which you implied was an exception. And it was private business that had a special and symbiotic relationship with the Netherlands.
 
US Conservative said:
Its true, in most places man was able to hunt them out of existence-but I dont think thats why african cultures didn't flourish. There were always tigers in India, and many similar large animals but they comparatively flourished.
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I hardly think it's the only factor. However, I think it probably did play a role.

The mortality rates would've been higher because all of the things trying to kill humans, and agriculture would've been a lot more difficult because most of the animals native to SubSaharan Africa are too vicious/instinctively wary of humans to allow themselves to be domesticated.

It was a lot easier for us to reshape environments outside of Africa to our needs.
 
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OP confused nuance for red herrings. Bit like asking where WASPs would be if WASPs didn't colonise North America.

They'd be like any other minority in the States or how they are in other predominantly Anglo-Saxon nations maybe. Smaller percentage of the population, little political power as a group and probably no president sharing their race.
 
Jesse Booth said:
The hypothetical question itself operates on the assumption that they or their ancestors would have all immigrated here at some point. Therefore, to address this question, we must also operate from that assumption.
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Perhaps, but there are two kinds of assumptions: reasonable ones, and badly flawed ones. This is the latter...
 



I will admit I am not an expert on either African or South American history. I probably know a lot more than the average Joe on the street, but my knowledge of those two subjects is admittedly well short of scholarly.


However, most of Africa was still tribal and stone-age when Europeans began muddling the waters.... same for South America. To assume 500 years would have been sufficient time for them to develop an advanced culture remotely comparable in level to our own if left to their own devices, seems to me to be quite a stretch. The West had vast empire-states, iron-age technology, advanced math and architecture and so on around 2000 years earlier than that (Greece, Rome).

But you pays your money and makes your assumptions when playing what-if... :shrug:
 

Ok. Thanks Urethra.
 
shrubnose said:
You obviously know very little about the Irish. :roll:
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Really. The Irish overachieve do they? I thought they were a bunch of retards. What is so great about Ireland. What is it with Americans and the Irish? In British and Aussie/New Zealand culture there is none of this 'Boston Strong' nonsense. Irish are a bunch of retards. You dont know Irish jokes? The thrust is that the Irish are stupid. And where did you get the idea that the Irish are strong anyway? You Americans are really impressed by the little Irish? How about when the Normans invaded Ireland. The Normans were insulted if the little Irish even dared try to attack them.

Why do Americans love the Irish? And what exactly is so great about the Irish again?
 
Jesse Booth said:
The hypothetical question itself operates on the assumption that they or their ancestors would have all immigrated here at some point. Therefore, to address this question, we must also operate from that assumption.
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Yet important information is lacking from that hypothetical, such as:
The reason for their immigration to the USA (War in home area? Better prospects in USA?)
How they were treated after immigrating to the USA (was there still racism and bigotry? Discrimination, legal or illegal? Was there a civil rights movement? If so, or if not, was it necessary?).
What culture they brought with them, how it affected US culture, if at all, how they integrated into the US culture, etc. Does this hypothetical USA even resemble our current USA?

It's in no way a simple "well what if the people enslaved and brought to the USA voluntarily immigrated" question.
 
mbig said:
What?
Numbers may have started in Egypt, a mixed, not sub-saharan culture.
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Actually you don't know where numbers came from. Indian mathematicians have been doing advanced mathematics for thousands of years. Pythagoras got his theorem from the Upanishads.
 
MildSteel said:
Actually you don't know where numbers came from. Indian mathematicians have been doing advanced mathematics for thousands of years. Pythagoras got his theorem from the Upanishads.
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I have often used Indians myself, especially when some PCer says "Arabs invented numbers/Algebra/Zero/etc."
However, Egyptians/Mesopotamians easily PRE-Date those you mention on the Overall question.
5000+ years ago.
About Twice as old as the Upanishads.

Number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

First use of numbers

Bones and other artifacts have been discovered with marks cut into them that many believe are tally marks.[10] These tally marks may have been used for counting elapsed time, such as numbers of days, lunar cycles or keeping records of quantities, such as of animals.

A tallying system has no concept of place value (as in modern decimal notation), which limits its representation of large numbers. Nonetheless tallying systems are considered the first kind of abstract numeral system.

The First known system with place value was the Mesopotamian base 60 system (ca. 3400 BC) and the earliest known base 10 system dates to 3100 BC in Egypt.[11]​


So "Actually, YOU don't know where numbers came from."
 
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As an Australian, i cringe almost everytime i read your posts. Your views in no way represent the average Australian. 10% of Australians claim Irish ancestory and nearly 30,000 working visas are granted to Irish Citizens each year. Overall they are beautiful people and they are more than welcome here.
 

You seem nice.
 

do you all have the equivalent of the "Irish Travelers" in Australia? I learned up on them after our office had a complaint about inter-state fraud committed by alleged members of the "Irish Travelers"
 

You read it more than once?
 
TurtleDude said:
do you all have the equivalent of the "Irish Travelers" in Australia? I learned up on them after our office had a complaint about inter-state fraud committed by alleged members of the "Irish Travelers"
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No we don't TD.
 
Serenity said:
No we don't TD.
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Thanks, I was wondering if it was confined to the USA or prevalent in other nations with lots of Irish Immigrants.
 
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