I recall some older writings by an African scholar, about going everywhere in the world and being reminded that your people had nothing to do with any of the technology or wealth everywhere else. This sort of neverending reminder of one's inferiority breeds non stop envy and resentment.
Think you pavement apes have it so bad here? Fine, by all means I’m sure you can make a perfect utopia in Africa right? I’ve talked to length with my black colleagues (we are all doctors) about race and they straight up admitted to me that if every race but black people were wiped out tomorrow, educated people like himself would be useless since they are outnumbered 20 to one with morons that couldn’t even be bothered to read and write in the 21st century
“For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.”
Stranger in the Village, James Baldwin
That's some brutal, self-aware stuff right there. And this was written back in the 1950s.
I recall some older writings by an African scholar, about going everywhere in the world and being reminded that your people had nothing to do with any of the technology or wealth everywhere else. This sort of neverending reminder of one's inferiority breeds non stop envy and resentment.
To stop that envy and resentment, we should send them all back and not let them get outside of Africa ever again
Something we should’ve done a loooooong time ago.
Think you pavement apes have it so bad here? Fine, by all means I’m sure you can make a perfect utopia in Africa right? I’ve talked to length with my black colleagues (we are all doctors) about race and they straight up admitted to me that if every race but black people were wiped out tomorrow, educated people like himself would be useless since they are outnumbered 20 to one with morons that couldn’t even be bothered to read and write in the 21st century
A ten thousand year timeout, or until they build a functional agrarian society.
“For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.”
That's some brutal, self-aware stuff right there. And this was written back in the 1950s.
Damn. Thanks for posting that. Fascinating bit of observation and of introspection from Balwin there.