WHITE DEVIL said:
Indigenous Americans were wiped out...almost completely obliterated from Quebec to Mexico. The degree to which they lost life and property on a per capita basis certainly dwarfs that of African Americans.
Thats one way to put it. The other is to consider the fact that tens or even hundreds of millions of slaves died
EN ROUTE to this country, ON TOP OF the millions that were butchered and maimed and psychologically anihiliated when they finally got here.
You keep talking about Life, and pure Numbers, and you are missing the point. As i said, you can fuck your way back into a higher population share. You CANNOT fuck your way back into knowing your history and culture. Natives were allowed to maintain at least A GOOD AMOUNT (don't get on my dick about MOST or ALL) of their customs, languages, histories and traditions. Slaves were permitted to maintain NEXT TO NOTHING.
I have never met an "American Indian" in my life, and I grew up in San Francisco. That has to say something about the serious lack of Indigenous American peoples in our country. Most are relegated to out of the way reservations in sparse, remote locations. Cointelpro and discrimination are one thing - raw genocide to the point of near-extinction is another.
You will NOT have difficulty finding a black man/women in 99.9% of America. The same can not be said for American Indians. I'm sure, given the choice of racism and discrimination or death, they would choose racism, discrimination, and public housing; situations they already face and live with on a daily basis.
Come again?
Most Natives in California have been Mexicanized. Just the way it is. Either that, or they moved away to Arizona or New Mexico or places like these. Second of all, go OUTSIDE of the former Northern Mexico states, and you WILL find Natives ALL OVER. Go to my hometown, Aberdeen WA, and look around. 90% white, about 0.1% Black, and yet you will find numerous Natives there though there isn't a reservation for 40-50+ miles.
Your arguments are somewhat asinine - Black Americans do have traditions and a culture, some of it remnants of the African past, some new pieces of identity created in America. Black historians can tell you all day about lore, games, and traditions among slave communities, variants of which still exist today - most notably in American popular culture but also in science and philosophical contributions, especially American epistemology.
To say that Black Americans were completely stripped of individuality, culture, and history upon arrival in America is a patronizing statement. Much of pre-slavery Africa's lore and traditions had strong roots in oral histories and transmission through stories and prose.
I have already covered this. It is hard to pass down your so-called "oral histories" and prose and stories, when you have been separated from everyone else that speaks your language and it has been effectively eradicated.
There is nothing asenine about my arguments. I am speaking the truth, and you are speaking in generalities and sugar-coatings. You desperately want to defend Natives, and that is your right. But it doesn't mean you can't be wrong, and in this case, you are very wrong.
History...gone. Language...destroyed. Ancestry...unknown. Traditions...disappeared. Every last one of these things, unless you want to count 7 or 9 isolated instances and apply them to millions of circumstances, have largely gone away. They no longer exists. What exists now is the White Man's History of Africa, and we all must learn and accept it, as there is no alternative. There is no African Reservation to go to where we might at least have a CHANCE to find out where we came from or how we used to speak.
And yes, the Indians do own Casinos. However, they are en masse conspicuously second-class Americans, for reasons rather unbeknownst to me, but which I'm sure have roots in discrimination, the downward spiral of poverty, and th eheavy rate of alchoholism in during reservation relocation post-reservation Indians.
And Black people have S.D.E. And then what? The conversation has shifted here, sport. We're no longer talking about money, the main measure of MONEY being HOUSING, which people know is a losing argument.
We are now talking about culture, and in that regard, Native Americans are about 150x better off. Again, African Reservations...
DO NOT EXIST. You can talk about how shitty the N.A. ones are until you're blue in the face, but something will ALWAYS be better than NOTHING.