If you spend any time online (particularly after Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show), you’ll find memes saying that blacks built America, a black woman wrote Shakespeare’s work, and black Africans built Western civilization. I’m not convinced.
To put it bluntly, has black Africa ever given the world anything of consequence since humans originated there? Has black Africa ever had a civilization worthy of comparison to the great civilizations we’re all familiar with? Is there a reason why Africa has the lowest IQs on the planet? That almost every country in Africa is poor while the continent has a majority of the world’s gold, cobalt, diamonds, and platinum? Is it any coincidence that 8 of the 10 most violent countries in the world are either in Africa or are majority black? Ditto for wars? Is it any coincidence that black Americans are 600% more likely to commit murder than whites?
We’ve been told that white racism is the driver behind all of that. If that were true, we would expect black Africa before Europeans arrived to be a thriving continent bustling with advanced civilizations. But is that the case?
Some claim it is. Indeed, there were a number of large civilizations in Sub-Saharan history. There was the Mali Empire, home to Timbuktu, which dates back to the 13th century and was once led by Mansa Musa, said to have been the richest man in history. There’s the Great Zimbabwe Empire, also from the 13th century, and the Songhai Empire, which dates to the 15th. Then there was the Kingdom of Aksum, which operated as a trading center between Europe, North Africa, and Asia and lasted 1,000 years from about 200 BC to 800 AD.
Undoubtedly, those and other pre-modern African nations were complex societies that traded, warred, and lasted for centuries, but somehow, none managed to become particularly advanced. Compare the intact ruins of the 13th-century Zimbabwe Empire to Paris’s Sainte-Chapelle, also from the 13th century, or the 11th-century Dogon Cliffs in Mali to Britain’s 11th-century Windsor Castle. The word that comes to mind is primitive.
Moreover, most of sub-Saharan Africa never really advanced much from those medieval empires. While it’s likely that when the Portuguese began exploring the continent in the early 15th century, they encountered numerous population centers of significant size, most would not be what we might call advanced. Compare sculptures from 15th-century West Africa to what was being produced in Europe at the same time.
While we’re constantly told that the condition of Africans in the 21st century is the result of European imperialism, the reality is that Africa south of the Sahara was barely out of the Stone Age when the Europeans arrived in the 15th century.
What about black Africans today? Sadly, while the continent is covered with beautiful modern cities when seen from afar, upon a closer look, virtually every country is economically distressed, and many are wracked with violence and war.
What about blacks whose ancestors left Africa? What has become of them? Well, the picture’s not much different from those who remained behind.
Whole countries, like Haiti, which freed itself from European rule in 1806—at which time it was coerced to sign a suffocating indemnity with France that would take more than a century to repay—is one of the poorest and most dysfunctional nations in the world. This poverty has been unaffected by over $20 billion in foreign aid in the last 60 years.
Here in the United States, black communities are wracked with a spectrum of problems, ranging from violence to unwed motherhood to illiteracy to drugs and economic stagnation. Indeed, in some black communities, the murder rates are among the highest in the world.
So, what does all of that mean? Lower IQs, lack of civilizational development, extraordinary levels of violence? Are the KKK-style racists correct that blacks are genetically coded to be inferior to everyone else? No, I don’t think so.
The hardest-working and kindest man I’ve ever known was black. Thomas Sowell is arguably the greatest economist of the last half-century. We’ve all seen Hidden Figures, the true story of how Katherine Johnson and her team played a critical role in sending the astronauts to the moon. Madame CJ Walker was America’s first self-made female millionaire, overcoming actual racism (not microaggressions) and creating a company that employed 20,000 women at the beginning of the 20th century. There are countless more examples of why it’s impossible for DNA to be the cause. So, then, what has created so much black dysfunction?
Dr. Sowell argues compellingly in his cultures trilogy that sub-Saharan Africa was backward (my word, not his) because its dearth of navigable rivers and deep water ports made it almost impossible to trade and exchange ideas with the world beyond. By the 16th century, Europeans had been fighting, trading with, and learning from one another, as well as Asia and North Africa, for thousands of years.
European advancement (which was paralleled in Southeast Asia) came as a result of man’s natural competitive forces being honed in the crucible of conflict and war taking place within a geography capable of facilitating the efficient exchange of goods, information, and ideas over a large area. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and the interactions between the different peoples fueled their development. By the 16th century, those interactions had produced Shakespeare, Monteverdi, Galileo, Columbus, DaVinci, Michaelangelo, and many more. Black Africa had nothing comparable.
But what about intelligence? Are blacks biologically unequal? Jason Riley, in his outstanding book Please Stop Helping Us, provides the definitive answer: No.
In looking at the past half-century in America, Riley demonstrates that it is the culture that has damaged America’s black communities. He references today’s black ghetto culture and its origin, which arrived in the first half of the 19th century via the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh migrants who heavily populated the south. He quotes Sowell: “The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music…”
While most of those whites would move away from that culture, as would many blacks, in the second half of the 20th century, not only would many backtrack, but a majority would champion those very characteristics in an effort to “avoid acting white.”
In championing those self-destructive values and crying victimhood, black leaders have betrayed the very people they claim to defend. Riley contrasts the results of black students in NYC public schools—completely controlled by the teachers’ unions—and those in nearby charter schools where the outcomes are diametrically different. Drawing students from the same communities and demographics, the public schools foster failure, while the charter schools expect and achieve success, producing some of the state’s best students, regardless of race. Culture matters.
Riley also talks about the fact that, in the early 20th century, when blacks were making consistent and significant gains, two-parent homes were often more prevalent for blacks than for whites. But then the government got involved and, through a variety of programs intended to combat poverty, eviscerated black families. That government-created culture shift, which made single motherhood a viable career path, led to America’s black underclass, which is characterized by poverty, a lack of education, and extraordinary levels of violence (violence that’s routinely celebrated in rap lyrics).
Although blacks were part of the antebellum South, they built neither America nor Western civilization. The West, while it has not always treated blacks well, is not responsible for the state of blacks around the world. As Sowell and Riley chronicle very compellingly, culture matters. Until that reality is recognized and addressed within the black universe, things will never improve. Sadly, in Africa, life does not seem to be valued the way it is in the West.
Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA
Jesus Christ is King
Comments are closed.