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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26688 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Bantu-maximization

Not being familiar with this term, I had to look up "so what is so bad about the Bantu, anyway?"

Turns out that they were a migrant population that displaced hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, developed agriculture, and smelted iron:

Another stream of migration, having moved east by 3,000 years ago (1000 BC), was creating a major new population center near the Great Lakes of East Africa, where a rich environment supported a dense population. The Urewe culture dominated the Great Lakes region between 650BC and 550BC. It was one of Africa's oldest iron-smelting centres. By the first century BC, Bantu speaking communities in the great lakes region developed iron forging techniques that enabled them to produce carbon steel.

Huh. What was that again about civilisation arising out of agriculturalists, and science/technology coming with the use of iron?

The peoples of other continents (sub-Saharan Africans, Indigenous people of the Americas, Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. He believes this is due to these societies' technological and immunological advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last ice age.

I think the term as used by @futuristright-substack is a swipe at e/alts trying to save as many lives as possible. In practice, this (buying mosquito nets) effectively prioritizes saving the lives of sub-Saharan Africans over all other because they are the cheapest to save.

Okay, but using "Bantu" as a term of disapprobation is dumb, since the Bantu are one of the more "like us Europeans" in terms of "successful civilisations" in that context.

I do wish 'people who want to talk like racists without openly being racists' would at least do some fact-checking before throwing around terms.

I think anyone who is using the term "Bantu-maximization" is:

a) familiar with the history, using the phrase in the context of the Bantu expansion, and the negative consequences there-of b) familiar with the genetics, Bantu peoples being about as far away genetically as you can get from Eurasians, with the exception of KhoiSan, pygmies, ghost population remnants in Africa etc. c) probably comfortable being openly racist, not designed to disguise the target but in fact making it explicit (this Hakan tweet is relevant: https://images.app.goo.gl/Sr4T1UADRFBM4nCh9) d) and derivative of a, b and c, specifically including African-Americans in their sights.

It is naive to assume that someone using this language would consider a group to be 'more like us Europeans' because they developed iron. It is precisely because of this and a) above that the term is used.

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