Re: guns, germs, steel

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "Ricardo Duchesne" <RDUCHESN@xxxxxxxx> 04/12/00 10:23AM >>>

> >
> >Simply saying that one can, as  Diamond does, draw a rough line accross
> >the African continent to distinguish "white" Africa from "black" Africa
> >proper.  Egyptians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Libyans and others in the
> >Northern areas are "white".
>
> No. They're not. They're Mediterranean--it's really easy for them to
> trade, fight, and learn from people from all over Eurasia...
>

In quotation marks because Diamond knows that "...the divisions between
blacks, whites, and other major groups are arbitrary...", so I,
following D, have no objections to your qualification/distinction.
But to the impertinent people here who have
decided that Diamond is this or that, or is a racist (!),
without even reading him, let me cite this

____________

CB: It is not impertinent to describe your report of his book as describing a racist concept. When you ( or whomever) says:

> >Simply saying that one can, as  Diamond does, draw a rough line accross
> >the African continent to distinguish "white" Africa from "black" Africa
> >proper.  Egyptians, Tunisians, Moroccans, Libyans and others in the
> >Northern areas are "white".

if he does draw such a line, it is racist line drawing. To draw a line rougly distinguishing "white" Africa from "black" Africa is crudely racist compared with   saying that African harbored five of the world's six major division of humanity " . But even the notion of "six major divisions of humanity" is an old, racist anthro concept. There are not "six major divisions of humanity" recognized by modern , physical anthropology.  That sounds like Carleton Coon.


CB



: "But very different
peoples may have occupied much of modern black Africa until as
recently as a few thousand years ago, and so-called African blacks
themselves are heterogeneous. Even before the arrival of white
colonialists, *Africa already harbored not just blacks but five of the
world's six major divisions of humanity, and three of them are
confined as natives to Africa. One quarter of the world's languages
are spoken only in Africa. No other continent approaches this human
diversity."*

Nor is Diamond Eurocentric: "Concealed at the top of Figure 19.2 is
our first surprise, a big shock for Eurocentric believers in the
superiority of so-called Western civilization. We're taught that
Western civilization originated in the Near east, was brought to
brilliant heights in Europe by the Greeks and Romans, and produced
three of the worl's great religions: Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam. Those religions arose among peoples speaking three closely
related languages, termed Semitic languages: Aramic (the language of
Christ and the Apostles), Hebrew, and Arabic, respectively. We
instinctively associate Semitic peoples with the Near East. *However,
Greenberg determined that Semitic languages really form only one of
six or more branches of a much larger language family,  Afro-asiatic,
all of whose other branches (and other 222 surviving languages) are
confined to Africa. Even the Semitic subfamily itself is mainly
African, 12 of its 19 surviving languages being confined to Ethiopia.
This suggests that Afroasiatic languages arose in Africa, and that
only one branch of them speard to the Near East. Hence it may have
been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of
the Old and New Testament and the Koran, the moral pillars of
Western civilization"*