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Notes -
Not really. I often see this (perhaps unintentional) oversimplification from HBD enjoyers where the strong hypothesis it affects outcomes is overdetermined and actual historical and environmental factors get minimized. Liberia was a colony of voluntary self-deports, as sleepyegg says, comprised both American freedmen and Caribbean freedmen (big cultural differences there already), and had to deal with a native population even less amenable to western statehood. Plus it was cut loose by the much more isolationist American second republic c. 1850 and was on its own eking out an existence on the Dark Continent, only getting the typical New Dealer foreign policy gibs beginning almost a century later.
Nevertheless, it was one of the more functional African countries because the Americo-Liberians set up a based Yarvinist sham democracy that never let the natives near anything important and even had the impishness to call the one ruling party the Whigs... until they fell for the democracy meme in the 80s and were consumed by brutal intra-black civil wars.
In any case, I think a black state or associated commonwealth would definitely have worse outcomes than, say, Oregon, but it would benefit from inclusion in the American economy, American military protection/military-industrial complex subsidies and so on and so forth. Still wouldn't work without killing the invisible Texas oilmen wreckers mind-virus.
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