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Something similar that I find both fascinating and heart-breakingly tragic: The "Black Belt" in the U.S. Deep South. The Black Belt is both a geological term us
by daveslash 4y ago
Something similar that I find both fascinating and heart-breakingly tragic: The "Black Belt" in the U.S. Deep South. The Black Belt is both a geological term used to refer to the rich & dark soil [0] and a geopolitical term to refer to the high percentage of African Americans [1]. During the Cretaceous period, the shore-line at the time ran through the middle of Alabama and Mississippi, depositing rich organic deposits, which in turn allowed for plantations to thrive in those parts of the deep south. Even nearly 160 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, those counties still have some of the highest percentages of African American Populations. Overlaying the population demographic map on a a map of the cretaceous shoreline shows a correlation [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_(geological_formation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_(geological_formati...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_in_the_American_South https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_in_the_American_Sou...
[2] https://politicartoons.livejournal.com/4422659.html https://politicartoons.livejournal.com/4422659.html
- 333c 4y agoYep, this is cool, and it's mentioned in the thread!
- daveslash 4y agoOh! So it is!!! Oops, I didn't scroll down enough on the Twitter Thread to see! My bad - thank you!
- fsckboy 4y ago> heart-breakingly tragic African Americans are glad to be living in the US, and they're deeply enmeshed in the fabric of American society. Slavery was a bad part of history (and of the present where it still exists) but it's not more "heart-breakingly tragic" that a large number of African Americans today live on fertile land in the Old South any moreso than a large number of Aficans living on all sorts of land including not-so-fertile in Africa.
- bag_boy 4y agoI did not know that African Americans got together, had a vote, and decided that they’re happy to live in the US!
- tomrod 4y agoOr that they voted that living in the South is tragic! In fact, let's take a step back instead of escalating the point. OP used a weird term for the context without qualifying the tragedy. Yes, slavery and other systemic abuses existed and we see echoes and displays of it today. That is tragic. But the simple fact where people live isn't tragic. It's the why they live where they live, to a degree.
- fsckboy 4y agono vote necessary, Americans overwhelmingly are glad to live in America, and African Americans are not different.
- david422 4y agoI wonder if we'll ever get to the point where we can just refer to people as Americans, instead of just some <subset>.
- JohnClark1337 4y ago
- EdwardDiego 4y agoHuh, didn't realise that the Voice of African Americans was a member of HN.
- MomoXenosaga 4y agoI encourage people to read about Liberia. It's one of those hilarious episodes of American- African American relations that makes learning about history so interesting (and they will never teach it at school).
- whycombinetor 4y agoWhat's heartbreakingly tragic about this? Your statements reads as if a county having a high percentage of African American residents is negative.
- bag_boy 4y agoMost of African Americans who live in the BB are descendants of slaves. They didn’t want to be in the black belt.
- irrational 4y agoDo they want to be in Africa? I doubt it. Slavery is bad, but that doesn’t mean it is tragic that the descendants of those slaves are living in America.
- Robelius 4y agoI think bag_boy was trying to highlight the tragedy that we can still see direct effects of slavery in the United States, not that it's tragic that descendants of Africans live in America
- mistermann 4y agoIt isn't absolutely tragic, but there is surely some tragedy within the overall story, including in some lingering after effects.
- 4y ago