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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Demographics alone are insufficient to explain the status of Baltimore and St Louis. The black populations of these inner cities have by far the highest violent crime rates (outside of actual war zones) of any black population on earth (Cape Town is still lower when controlled for demographics). Higher than any major African city (and yes, there are plenty of Bantu-majority African cities where it’s likely that the majority of violent homicides are captured by publicly recorded data). Higher even than Haiti, which is in many ways literally lawless.

The complete explanation for Baltimore’s poor status includes inertia and options. The US is the wealthiest major country on earth. Anyone in Baltimore who is unhappy with the state of affairs can leave without expending any great effort. There are plentiful jobs almost everywhere else. The city is entirely selected for people who are satisfied with the state of affairs and do not care to change it. There are a lot of people (including rich and powerful people) who have to live in New York. Nobody has to live in Baltimore.

Higher than any major African city (and yes, there are plenty of Bantu-majority African cities where it’s likely that the majority of violent homicides are captured by publicly recorded data).

I often wonder if we're seeing some sort of terrible example the Founder Effect. Because African American slave descendants aren't just a random sampling of Africans that got plucked up by UFOs and dropped here. They were the losers of inter tribal civilizational fitness tests, captured and sold off. That has to have some sort of selection bias on what subset of Africans ended up in the slave trade in the first place.

Through generations of sexual assault and limited-opportunity marriage, that sub-population was also forced to incorporate substantial genetic contributions from the most brutal and impulse-driven individuals among the white Borderers in their vicinity, a group that had overall been actively pre-selected for violence and low conscientiousness. Given the way white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore, I haven't heard anyone rule out the possibility that the whole thing is just those Borderer genes, full stop.

Slave-owners were the highest class of European Americans. Borderers (in Appalachia) were not the normative background of slave-owners who were pedigreed Anglo-Saxons. African Americans derive their white admixture pre-enfranchisement to the most high-performing European Americans, not to the poor borderers.

So there’s an interesting effect on African Americans: they were (as noted above) the most backwards of the most backwards part of the world; they received upper class pedigree white DNA; after emancipation until probably 1990, the white DNA they received would be significantly worse than normal white, because of the taboo.

It is unclear that most African Americans’ white ancestry is from the Anglo owner class, though. They may have been victims of sexual predation by lower class and lower status local whites, too, and perhaps even predominantly.

I find that unlikely as plantation slaves would not be intermixing with poor whites, and a poor white harming a rich white’s property would be a crime.

My understanding is that a substantial portion of plantation labor in colonial and early post-Revolution America was white indentured servants, some of whom were Borderers and a great many of whom were Irish. Certainly there were white overseers and staff working on plantations, and they would generally have had more direct contact with field slaves than the owners would.

Anyone with more in-depth knowledge of the period is welcome to correct me, but it’s certainly far from clear to me that slave-owners would have been the whites with the most intimate access to, and proclivity toward, sexual predation upon black slave women.

The slave owning class wrote jokes about themselves raping slaves, and broadly tended to keep borderers as far away as possible IIRC. The poor whites working on plantations might have some borderer descent, but the majority weren’t that different, ethnically, from their betters.

Interestingly, plantation owners tried to keep poor landless whites away from their slaves because they believed the "white trash" would be a poor influence on their slaves.

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