Slavery....good for African-Americans?Follow

Lol, no I'm not advocating that we enslave black people or something. I'm just curious if people think that, in the long run, Slavery was a good thing for African-Americans. Obviously, I'm not saying that slavery was a cake-walk, or that Americans were justified in what they did; it was a horrible experience for the people who were actually enslaved, but what about their descendents?

It seems that if it weren't for slavery, many current African-Americans would probably be in Africa right now dying of AIDS or hunger, and not living in the Land of Opportunity, where they might not have an equal opportunity to succeed, but surely a better one than your average African.

I totally expect to be flamed, but hopefully there are some people out there who won't misconstrue what I'm trying to say.

Prediction: This thread is gonna be no-holds-barred.

no the aslyum is for people who all think alike and rate any one who disagree's with them down. it's pretty much like high-class snobby types.

Ethiopia was never colonised save a brief time in WWII, did not seem to work out so well for them.

True although they were hardly spared European influence. I don't know if the status of Ethiopia alone proves much.

Then again, maybe Africa would be the same place it is today, only with different national borders.

You could say it's similar to what Hitler did with the concentration camps. Sure what he did was horrible, but all those experiments on live humans contributed to today's medical knowledge and procedures. Knowledge that saves lives. I'm not saying he was justified in what he did; it was a horrible experience for the people who were tortured, but what about the health of man kind?

Oh, sure. That was the jist and lead-in from my original response to the thread. Had the US not received an influx of Afrians as slaves in the years prior to 1860, it almost certainly would have after the colonial era in Africa winded down and the people there had access to the US via ships, planes and rail lines to the African coast. Perhaps not in the same quantities but I think it would have, to some extent, mimiced the immigrations from Asia.

Have you actually read any of the threads here?

As Jophiel stated immigration would liekly occur and we'd see a number likely moving to the U.S. and other countries looking for jobs. Or perhaps we would have isntead engaged in trade and invested more in the country, perhaps raising the average standard of living.

There is no way to accurately speculate, nor would a simple yes or no resposne suffice. I would liken the question to a past tense butterfly effect.

From what I've heard, not a whole lot of useful information came from the Mengele experiments (and others like it). Some data on hypothermia and altitude stress on the human body but the bulk of his data was either:

(a) unscientific crap born more of sadism than anything else and thusly poorly documented and executed with extremely shitty methodology including a lack of control variables, shoddy record keeping, manipulating data to fit pre-conceived theories, using malnourished and weakened subjects in physical experiments, etc. This includes the "twins" experiments (minus the obvious 'control' critique).
-or-
(b) available from other sources and generally in more accurate form.

...and even Rascher's hypothermia data is open to debate as it's been suggested that Himmler told Rascher to provide some useful results or else. My limited understanding is that both the Soviets and British RAF made use of the altitude sickness data though and I'd suspect the US as well.

Keep in mind that this is specifically regarding concentration-camp experiments. Pernkopf, for example, was a reknown doctor in the field of human biology and as big a **** as you could hope to find but did not use prisoners in his research.

During the brief window of opportunity where Africa was industrialized enough to allow for such immigration and the United States was still allowing immigration on a "Show up and sign the book" basis, the social climate towards Africans wasn't exactly a welcoming one. Even in comparison to the prejudices against Asians, Eastern Europeans, etc.

Had the nation not built its anti-black prejudices via a century or so of legalized dehumanizing of blacks into property, it may have been a very different story on the immigration front.

Nothing remotely as bad. Not even close.