I guess personally I like Glenn pointing out that even if African Americans are the poorest ethnic group in America on average and hence there remains much to be done as far as closing the racial gap vis-a-vis whites or Asians, the silver lining is that African Americans are the wealthiest Black people in the world.
Ironically this is a common "racist" argument that members of the alt-right love making. That somehow slavery wasn't as bad as it's been made out to be because the end result was that Blacks in America are on average better off than they would have been had their ancestors never been shipped across the Atlantic in chains. I guess I personally disagree with that kind of tenuous moral reasoning, but I found it interesting nonetheless that Glenn makes the same empirical point, that Blacks in America are better off socioeconomically than Blacks elsewhere in the world.
I pointed out in an earlier thread that although I'm sure per capita income and per capita GDP aren't quite the same and that obviously income isn't the same as wealth, i.e. the Black-white gap in wealth in America is larger than the Black-white gap in income, I found it interesting that according to Wikipedia per capita income for African Americans in 2018 was roughly $23,000 while PPP adjusted per capita GDP for China for 2021 is roughly $19,000. I think most Americans don't realize the extent to which America is a wealthy first world nation. Even the poor in America are better off than most people around the world today.
You see that kind of extreme historical utilitarianism all over the place in revisionist historical scholarship, though. "Sure, Chinggis Khan's conquests killed more human beings than World War I, and so thoroughly ruined Iran, the Middle East generally, and the ancient trading cities of central Asia that their populations may not have recovered to pre-mongol levels until the 20th century, but without the streamlined commerce and travel between China and the west his empire ushered in, all sorts of rich cultural, economic, and technological exchanges would never have happened."
The *really* dark and twisted moral argument about the West African slave trade is that there's a non-trivial historical case to be made that the slaves trafficked to North and South America (as always, the Caribbean slave experience was frequently its own special kind of hell that no human soul should have had to suffer), particularly the U.S. and Brazil, wound up emancipated *before* many of their compatriots back in Africa. E.g., the Toucoleur Empire, a large Senegambian state led by a charismatic Islamic reformer named Omar Saidou Tall, just about extinguished several large remaining pagan tribes, kingdoms, and settlements in West Africa below the Sahel during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, taking slaves all the way. Now, I'm not a West Africa expert - just an interested outsider - but the story is a lot more complex, human, and fascinating than American discourse gives it any credit for. The stories of the Mali, Songhai (which lasted to 1901!), and the other great West African empires are amazing, but just as full of cruelty as anywhere else on the planet (slave societies, all), and because less technologized, more dependent upon pliant human labor to perform large-scale projects. The easiest way to get pliant human labor in large quantities is, of course, slaving.
I guess personally I like Glenn pointing out that even if African Americans are the poorest ethnic group in America on average and hence there remains much to be done as far as closing the racial gap vis-a-vis whites or Asians, the silver lining is that African Americans are the wealthiest Black people in the world.
Ironically this is a common "racist" argument that members of the alt-right love making. That somehow slavery wasn't as bad as it's been made out to be because the end result was that Blacks in America are on average better off than they would have been had their ancestors never been shipped across the Atlantic in chains. I guess I personally disagree with that kind of tenuous moral reasoning, but I found it interesting nonetheless that Glenn makes the same empirical point, that Blacks in America are better off socioeconomically than Blacks elsewhere in the world.
I pointed out in an earlier thread that although I'm sure per capita income and per capita GDP aren't quite the same and that obviously income isn't the same as wealth, i.e. the Black-white gap in wealth in America is larger than the Black-white gap in income, I found it interesting that according to Wikipedia per capita income for African Americans in 2018 was roughly $23,000 while PPP adjusted per capita GDP for China for 2021 is roughly $19,000. I think most Americans don't realize the extent to which America is a wealthy first world nation. Even the poor in America are better off than most people around the world today.
You see that kind of extreme historical utilitarianism all over the place in revisionist historical scholarship, though. "Sure, Chinggis Khan's conquests killed more human beings than World War I, and so thoroughly ruined Iran, the Middle East generally, and the ancient trading cities of central Asia that their populations may not have recovered to pre-mongol levels until the 20th century, but without the streamlined commerce and travel between China and the west his empire ushered in, all sorts of rich cultural, economic, and technological exchanges would never have happened."
The *really* dark and twisted moral argument about the West African slave trade is that there's a non-trivial historical case to be made that the slaves trafficked to North and South America (as always, the Caribbean slave experience was frequently its own special kind of hell that no human soul should have had to suffer), particularly the U.S. and Brazil, wound up emancipated *before* many of their compatriots back in Africa. E.g., the Toucoleur Empire, a large Senegambian state led by a charismatic Islamic reformer named Omar Saidou Tall, just about extinguished several large remaining pagan tribes, kingdoms, and settlements in West Africa below the Sahel during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, taking slaves all the way. Now, I'm not a West Africa expert - just an interested outsider - but the story is a lot more complex, human, and fascinating than American discourse gives it any credit for. The stories of the Mali, Songhai (which lasted to 1901!), and the other great West African empires are amazing, but just as full of cruelty as anywhere else on the planet (slave societies, all), and because less technologized, more dependent upon pliant human labor to perform large-scale projects. The easiest way to get pliant human labor in large quantities is, of course, slaving.