I was recently corrected in some ascertains I made about how genetically mixed African Americans are with Europeans. Apparently it is around 20%, which does not diminish the point, for I dare you to find ten American “blacks” who will believe this. I would like to point out that black populations 150 years ago were far more mixed then they are now. Otherwise, in a world where most blacks have babies with blacks, how would we still have 20% European DNA after 10 generations of predominantly black-on-black procreation?
However, the reader, while agreeing that post-modern American blacks are currently behaving and being treated like an old European aristocracy [the cavaliers that became slave holders in the colonies], disagreed with my ascertain that African-American culture is more Anglo-American than African. Throughout my life I have trained, worked with closely, supervised, or coached about 1,000 men. About 250 of these were blacks, with about 10 percent of their number from Africa or the West Indies. In my daily life my mass transit and pedestrian commutes involve contact with mostly blacks. Here are my reasons for believing strongly in African American culture as being more Anglo-American than African.
Impressions of Real Africans I have Known
1. All of the two-dozen Liberians, Ghana boys and Nigerian men, as well as the Jamaicans, Haitians and Antiguans I have known from the West Indies, deny that American “blacks” are black, and name them mongrels instead.
2. These men are all darker than the darkest skinned African Americans I have known.
3 These men all speak a dialect that is further from black American “ebonic” English than ebonics is from white American English, and is closer to The King’s English than is standard American.
4. These men are no more violent than whites, while the American blacks are extremely violent. [I do suspect they are well-behaved exceptions to general African behavior patterns.]
5. All of these men work or worked multiple jobs at the same time, or own their own business, whereas most of the American blacks I have known declined to work at all, even if they went to the trouble to land a job, and thought that going into business was “for chumps or fools.”
6. All of these men were fiercely patriarchal, despising men who were ruled or supported by women, where their black American counterparts are almost universally ruled and supported financially by women.
7. Most of these men were not particularly attracted to white women, with some being repelled by them, whereas all but one of the hundreds of American blacks I have known were virtually obsessed with white women—and that one man, Israel, was “black as night” [possibly, like Joe Frazier, a descent from runaways or maroons] as a light-skinned coworker said.
8. The music these men listened to was vastly different from American Motown, R & B, or hip hop.
9. These men were all intelligent, educated, and well read [with the exception of two of the Ghana boys] whereas most black men I have known have never read a book—ever, not one.
Below are some general cultural points for my opinion:
1. Soul food has no African component other than the yam.
2. There are no sports of Africa origin played by African Americans.
3. West African cultures from which American slaves were drawn were universally patriarchal, yet African American culture is strictly matriarchal, a direct legacy of slavery.
4. African and West Indian immigrants value education almost as much as Asians, most attending college and reading on their own, whereas in the black American community education is seen as selling out to the white man, which I would argue is a direct legacy of slavery.
5. African Americans are overwhelmingly practicing or nominal Christians, not animists. According to Patrick Buchanan, in the 1950s, blacks were "the most churched community” in the nation. Though many African immigrants are Christian, they are immigrating here often because they are in the minority in their homeland [Nigeria]. When attending churches in Baltimore, they attend churches for African immigrants, pastured by African ministers and bishops, not local Southern Baptist congregations.
6. The first African American millionaire was a black woman who developed hair straightening products that enable blacks to look less African and more European. To this day, the single most numerous and most successful businesses in urban American areas are hair salons, most of which are dedicated to destroying the African American woman’s afro in favor of chemically treating it to resemble black Аrуаn hair, or making way for sewn in black Аrуаn hair from Indian.
7. While worldwide the beauty standard for women is white, in the black American Community the standard is overwhelmingly “light-skinned” Mulatto with a tendency toward quadroon.
Some general points against my opinion:
1. African populations are more violent than European and Asian populations, just as African-American populations are more violent than other American racial and ethnic groups.
2. Africa is the only continent to have socially sanctioned chattel slavery from the dawn of civilization until now. Slaves bought from these slave societies were highly prized as they were more obedient and less rebellious than European slaves. To this day black speakers such as Doctor Umar Johnson and Tariq Nasheed state that African style slavery was a humane social system. To this day American blacks are politically easily led, docile adherents to dogma and more enamored of celebrity than their white counterparts, which seems to reflect an African propensity to the cult of the strong man dictator and continued chattel slavery.
3. African music—which is one thing that could be carried within the person on the slave ship—is clearly the root of American blues, jazz, R& B, hip hop and rock and roll.
4. As reflected in Robert E. Howard and his work, the African oral story telling tradition survived the middle passage and slavery, and has influenced other American literary forms, including my own brand of horror, and the propensity of black Americans and Africans to get their news and opinion from radio [Rwanda was essentially a radio-incited genocide] and such YouTubers as Nasheed and Tommy Sotomayor, rather than through literature, which again, makes the population in general more susceptible to hysteria and manipulation, marking them as an obvious target for media indoctrination.
Conclusion
Although I agree with Howard that black Americans have and do cultivate an underground psychological current ripe with racial sensibilities, that most whites find incomprehensible and unknowable, I am of the opinion that a population of African Americans that are genetically 20% white and culturally more than half Western [minus the belief in freedom] makes them not an African people, but an Anglo-African mongrel people of the type that Howard continuously depicted as being vicious in their treatment of pure blacks, and duplicitous in their deceit of whites.
Thanks for this thoughtful response.
I think your conclusion is spot on. Black Americans are around 500 years removed from Africa. That is enough time for a lot of evolution, both in the genetics and cultural senses, particularly when there are two populations in close contact, such as Europeans and Africans have been in North America. American English varies somewhat from that spoken today in England, as do Spanish and Portuguese in South America vs Europe. I have often noted that people educated in English in foreign countries have speech patterns that resemble modern British more than American speech.
I don't want to belabor the point by addressing your observations one by one. I would ask you to consider selection bias for one thing. Africans who come to the U.S. today are usually the cream of the crop in their homelands. The people you interact
I'm certain their is a huge selection bias in modern African immigrants as you say.
But also, consider the opposite kind of bias in the 1700s when blacks were being shipped into the Western Hemisphere in great numbers. Docility was selected for. However, socially docile people are easy to incite to violence against individuals and groups that are perceived as weak. They make good mobs material.
In many ways the modern African immigrant is the polar opposite in character from the colonial slave.
Interact with are not the cream of the crop within the U.S. There is also the concept of regression towards the mean. This usually means that the children of even very exceptional blacks will perform worse in school than the children of average or even poor whites.
There can be no doubt that black
To be honest, what I have sensed
I suck at typing on my mobile device and keep hitting the submit button.
Any way, some of the things blamed on slavery were better during the period between slavery and the civil rights movement, most glaringly the matriarchal family. Black illegitimacy has increased the over time. I blame this on welfare benefits being awarded to mothers, in other word I blame our liberal government. Henry Harpending has proposed that this be reversed. He has done anthropological work in Africa. He shares a blog with Greg Cochran and they do a lot of politically incorrect genetics research.
westhunt.wordpress.com
There is a lot to talk about so I will go before I screw up the post again.
Thanks again for your work, you have a truly fascinating life and a really engaging way of writing about it. I feel lucky to get to participate.
Thanks for you input, Man.
Read Up From Slavery and An American Slave, and you will see that the two greatest black Americans, men who had been slaves, represent, in every way, the opposite of the post-modern black American ethos, and it will become obvious that something rotten happened in the 20th Century.
In the 1950s black America was finally recovering from the bizarre "one Daddy" community notion of false matriarchy, which is really just centralized patriarchy, and the elimination of individual men from the culture in favor of a powerful master figure—sounds like a modern republic with a welfare system, doesn't it?
Might something have happened in the 60s that reversed that?
An interesting discussion on African-American culture, James. What I want to know is how is it that the British are able to get their black people to talk like they do? Not only do the blacks in America not talk like the whites, but there seems to be no regional differences in the black dialect. Black people from Seattle or Milwaukee sound the same as black people from Houston or Charleston. Whereas every Briton is able to tell where very other Briton was born and raised merely by his accent. To within inches. Here’s an example of a London accent: youtube.com/watch?v=j7q84o1Bp2A&feature=youtu.be (Black London woman unloads on Muslims). Another interesting development is that the black people in the UK, whether of West Indian or African origin, are starting to act more like African-Americans, in that they are engaging in the same sort of crime, same type of gang warfare and mob violence (dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3262459/Police-shut-street-fight-outside-station-turns-riot.html. Naturally the black criminals in the UK are getting competition from the Muslim (or “Asian” in official Brit speak) criminals, much like black gangs in America are facing opposition from Hispanic gangs. How will that play out?
One thing I have noticed about black Africans, especially educated ones, is that they generally accept the notion that whites are, as a group, smarter than blacks and get impatient with Liberal whites who adopt an equalist posture and insist on behaving like there is no such difference. Much like when “Boomy” pointed out to you that “your n-” were “out of control” and should be kept “far away from decent people” this spring. Of course everyone believes that their own race and ethnicity is unique and special and generally “better” than all other races and peoples, regardless of whatever advantages other races might have in the aggregate.
Thanks for the links Jeremy.
As far as the black American dialect, it is a type of minimal effort dialect, not an artistic diversification but an intentionally ugly degradation that has accelerated and homogenized in recent years. The dialects in Baltimore are chronological, those spoken by people over 50 [expressing a dead-end], and those spoken by people under 50, expressing the homogenous trend. With the advent of hip hop it is now a cultural phenomenon and can expect to go global.
As far as the lack of regional variation in black dialect you are absolutely correct. I would look to this as a symptom of the problem, which is lowest-common-denominator-based cultural homogenization in America, focused on the public welfare and public education system. Whites in America have more varied education when taking into account private schools and school boards reflecting local interests, and their regional cultures—which are eroding, with accents dying out in New York for instance—whereas blacks are completely at the mercy of the feds and the sociology majors and teachers that no act as the managerial style parents of thousands of children in inner cities that are all similarly managed.
Look at black urban America and you look at the future end game of the State.
I stumbled on your blog a few months ago, and I'm enjoying your insight into inner city life and black culture very much, not to mention your experienced comments on combat.
With regard to this article, I would like to offer the following as food for thought:
I am white and I was raised as a child by American missionary parents in Lima, Peru. This was between 1958 and 1966.
During the whole of that time, I never witnessed discrimination of any kind against blacks. There was a considerable population of them and they always seemed to be the best dancers, singers, entertainers...fun to be around. The black women were the most voluptuous and many a song was written and proudly sung about a man and his exciting "negra".
The discrimination was against Indians. They were often mocked as lazy, uneducated and dirty, this despite the fact that most of the population in Lima, Peru were and remain mestizo, as in a mixture of white (Spanish) and native American.
I believe what I have written to have been pretty much true throughout Latin America, continuing on to today.
Thanks for the information, sir.
My cousin married a man from Lima who was a bodyguard to the half Japanese President back in the late 90s I think. I have always been fascinated by Peru.
What you describe is covered to some degree in Born in Blood, a book on Latin America I reviewed on this site under a title I forget, which I think begins with 'A Honcho on Their Back' in which there is an illustration of a Peruvian Indian hauling a European up a mountainside in the rain by way of a wooden chair strapped to his back!