I have always doubted the historical consensus that Africans sold their own people into slavery. The whole point of slavery is that you’re forced to work without pay. If whites were powerful enough to force millions of blacks to work without pay, they would have been powerful enough to take those workers from black countries without having to pay for them in the first place.
Also, if they were going to pay for slaves, then why go all the way to Africa to get them? The whole point of going to a less technologically advanced region to get slaves is that you can take the slaves by force.
Lastly, if you believe in HBD (which many people dismiss as racist pseudoscience), the average white American is about 15 IQ points higher than the average black American and that gap would have perhaps been 20 points before white genes entered the U.S. black gene pool in large numbers. A 20 point IQ gap (if it reflects a genuine gap in intelligence) is so large that whites would have been dominant enough to simply help themselves to whatever resources they wanted in sub-Saharan Africa (including human ones) without having to pay anyone anything. In fact if whites really had to pay for slaves, it calls HBD into question because it implies a business deal among equal races, not an advanced race enslaving a more primitive one.
Ironically, Professor Black Truth agrees that whites stole (rather than paid for) black slaves but he uses it to argue their moral inferiority, not their cognitive superiority:
I remember being a child when I first learned how black people came to the Americas. Before then I had just assumed they were immigrants like other visible minorities but to be told they were brought as slaves was too much for a child’s brain to process. I had never even heard of one group of people enslaving another, even in fiction, let alone in reality. WHAT?
I remember being disturbed by this for months as a child, but learning this fact really paved the way for me to believe in HBD. If slavery could be true, then HBD was likely true too; indeed one would seem to lead to the other.
For how else could one race of people have been so advanced they could just march on to a foreign continent and drag millions of the natives kicking and screaming to the New World as slaves?
However as I got older, a more nuanced picture of slavery emerged.
In 2010, Henry Louis Gates Jr wrote the following in The New York Times:
The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike….
….For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”
But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
Gates is trying to make it sound like many African Americans are in denial about the role Africans played in slavery, but perhaps it’s Gates who is in denial and thus projecting onto his co-ethnics. You see, for Gates to admit that white people just marched into Africa and simply kidnapped native Africans by the millions is to grant the white man a level of utter superiority that Gates simply can not live with, so instead he pushes a narrative that slavery was somehow a business exchange among equals.
Perhaps Gates would rather believe his own people sold his ancestors out than believe his own people were so utterly dominated by another people. Meanwhile white academics, eager to absolve their own ancestral guilt over slavery, are more than happy to push Gates’s narrative, which also fits the anti-HBD narrative of the elite.
Ironically the issue of who captured African slaves could make for strange bedfellows, with HBDers and reparation advocates both arguing that it was the white man, and black professors & white republicans arguing Africans sold themselves.
Although pumpkinperson.com started as primarily a horror blog, my readership is now so intelligent that few of you can relate to my low-brow interest in slasher films. But with Halloween only days away, it is an interested that must be indulged. But Halloween itself is an experience many readers can’t relate to, and not because you’re intelligent, but because a lot of you live in climates where the leaves don’t change colors and where pumpkins don’t thrive. Many of you will never understand the sheer joy and coziness of lying on a couch with a blanket and a warm cup of hot chocolate on a cold Canadian night, and watching a great horror film.
Racism in the horror community
Of course most horror fans disagreed with me that Texas Chainsaw 3D was a great horror film; indeed even hardcore fans of the Chainsaw franchise thought it was a disgrace that tainted the entire series. Although they’ll never admit it and lack the self awareness to know it, there’s a lot of racism in the horror community, and the fact the film’s protagonist was an absolutely gorgeous young white woman whose boyfriend was an athletic black man, was anathema to the predominantly white male horror audience. I believe horror attracts a lot of racists, because prehistorically, it was the mostly manly members of the tribe who defended the tribe against rival tribes, so even today, guys who are manly enough to watch horror films are genetically predisposed to ethnic nepotism. And indeed as I’ve previously discussed, subconsciously, the entire slasher genre was a rebellion against the liberalism of the 1960s.
But there’s another reason why slasher fans tend to be racist and that’s the fact that slasher films historically were uniquely focused on the white American experience. They tend to take place in stereo-typically white settings like suburbia (John Carpenter’s Halloween) or summer-camp (Friday the 13th), the backwoods of Texas (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) or a sorority house (Black Christmas). Indeed those four films really invented the modern slasher film and none of them had a single black character so for the Texas Chainsaw 3D to not only have a black character, but one who was played by prominent hip-hop star, and in a relationship with a gorgeous white woman, was a culture shock for many slasher fans.
Of course it would be absolutely idiotic and evil to smear everyone who didn’t love this film as much as I did as a racist, because ironically, another reason why this film was so hated is ignorance of HBD. Allow me to explain…
MAJOR SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING IF YOU PLAN TO SEE THIS FILM
The plot: A young woman (Heather) who hates the parents who raised her discovers she was adopted, so she and her friends go on a road trip to Texas to visit the house she just inherited from her recently deceased biological grandmother. Little do they know that locked in the basement of the house is Leatherface, a mentally retarded chainsaw wielding maniac who wears the actual faces of his victims as masks. After Leatherface kills her boyfriend and her friends, Heather flees to the police where she discovers that Leatherface is actually her biological cousin and her only living blood relative. Other family members (the Sayers) were burned to a crisp by a mob of angry Texas rednecks who were furious that the Sawyers were cannibalizing the local teenagers.
When Leatherface and Heather discover they are relatives, Leatherface stops trying to kill her and Heather stops trying to flee him, and instead the two join forces against the rednecks that burned their family to death. This plot twist infuriated horror fans because (1) it portrayed Leatherface as a hero when he’s supposed to be a villain, and (2)they found it completely unrealistic that Heather would join forces with a homicidal maniac who sawed up her friends, just because he’s her only living blood relative. Horror fans found it unrealistic that Heather would even want to avenge the burning of a family she never knew, since that family were chainsaw wielding murderers who deserved to be burned alive.
HBD themes
An understanding of HBD (i.e. behavioral genetics) helps one appreciate this movie. HBD teaches that we are genetically predisposed to help those most genetically similar to ourselves, so this could have overwhelmed Heather’s disgust for her biological family’s vile nature. In addition, this tendency to help the genetically similar is intensified in inbred people according to blogger HBD Chick, probably because when you’re inbred, your kin are even more genetically similar to you; and the Sawyer family epitomizes the stereotypical inbred Southerner, though I don’t know if this inbreeding has occurred for enough generations for selection to work, which HBD chick feels is important. HBD also teaches that behavioral traits are highly genetic, especially in adulthood. Blogger Jayman sometimes argues that parenting has virtually zero impact; so it really doesn’t matter that Heather grew up a normal girl, instead of being raised by a family of murderers. She didn’t need to be raised by the murderous Sawyer family to become just like them; her genetic link was enough.
Another way all Texas Chainsaw movies are HBD aware is that Leatherface has an extremely low IQ. This makes sense from an HBD perspective because he comes from a family of inbred psychotic right-wing murderers. Studies of cousin marriages show it clearly depresses IQ (and other Darwinian fitness traits like height) and the criminally insane also have low IQ’s, and some HBD research suggests conservatives might too.
The film doesn’t touch on race, but that’s clearly the elephant in the room as the town rednecks fail to respect the authority of the black sheriff who in-turn does not respect them, leading to an interesting climax that horror fans also condemned as unrealistic.
The age of the heroine
Another reason so many horror fans hated this movie so much is that the film’s timeline implied that the character Heather was born in 1974 (the year of the first Chainsaw movie), making her nearly 40 since this film appeared to be taking place in the present day (the film came out in 2013) but since actress Alexandra Daddario would have been about 25 when she played her, horror fans went absolutely ballistic. I tried to calm a few of these people down, saying maybe the character is a just a really young looking 39 year old who hangs out with 20 year olds since she works in a grocery store (I had a boss like that), or maybe the character had plastic surgery; but horror fans would have none of it, and condemned it as an absurd plot hole they could not get past.
The psychology of this is quite interesting: young people value their youth so much that they don’t want to believe an older person could ever look as young as them, and young male horror fans are disgusted by the thought that a woman they are sexually attracted to could possibly be almost 40. I believe this relates to the conservatism of horror fans, since traditional values suggest a man should never be attracted to an older woman, and that women should be sexy only when very young (peak child bearing years) since it’s conservative to believe that sexuality is only for reproduction. On the DVD commentary, the film makers do a lot of damage control, denying that a timeline was clearly specified, but it was too little too late.
For years I’ve seen speculation on HBD blogs (usually in the comment section), that a lot of HBD people are a little autistic. I believe this speculation is correct, but nobody to my knowledge has articulated why, probably because it’s so obvious; but here’s my explanation:
Autism is a phenotype defined by low social IQ and obsessive interests (especially mathematical ones). People with low social IQ are more likely to explore HBD because they don’t understand how politically incorrect certain parts of it are. In addition, autistics tend to treat other people like objects, or like animals, and HBD requires you to study human populations like they’re rats in a field, rather then thinking of humans as divine creature’s created in God’s image, and thus divorced from the laws of nature. In many ways autism is the opposite of schizophrenia, and since hyper-mentalizing schizophrenics tend to be very much in-touch with God, and other imaginary members of the spirit world, autistics tend to be very atheistic, and thus, huge believers in Darwin (to the point that they hyper-apply his theories to humans).
In addition, HBD requires a lot of math and statistics, so having an autistic obsession with numbers is very helpful.
Of course, not all (or even most) HBD people are autistic, but because many of them are, it becomes a vicious circle: Autistics are drawn to HBD because they don’t fully grasp it’s taboo nature, but HBD remains extremely taboo because the autistic HBD folks lack the social IQ to know how to market it.
The blogger destructure recently implied on this blog that I am too liberal, which he attributed to my putative sheltered life as a Canadian. I don’t consider myself liberal at all, but I think I seem so liberal because my path to HBD (i.e. behavioral genetics) was very different from that of many HBD people. I would imagine that many people get interested in HBD because they have certain right-wing politics (maybe anti-affirmative action, anti-immigration) and hijack HBD to push their political agenda, much like the peaceful religion of Islam is hijacked by violent extremists pushing agendas. In both cases, a burden is placed on all the millions good HBD people (and millions of good Muslims) to defend their ideology from those who would want to twist it.
For me, HBD was never about politics, but started when a babysitter rented the movie Quest for Fire when I was five. This movie was set 80,000 years ago and depicted a tribe of cavemen who have their most valued resource (fire) destroyed by a violent tribe of primitive monkey-men who brutally slaughter most of the cavemen. Amazingly, a few of the most adventurous surviving cavemen walk from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa where they find a tribe of behaviorally and anatomically modern gracile humans, one of whom was a beautiful young African woman, who falls in love with one of the cavemen and teaches him to be fully human. Til this day this remains one of my all time favorite movies and makes me nostalgic for life 80,000 years ago.
But at age five, this wasn’t just a movie, it was an obsession. Every time I would go camping, I would look for a pile of ashes to roll around in, because the advanced African tribe I worshiped were covered from head to toe in ashes giving them a completely grey skin color.
The advanced Africans colored grey by ashes make fun of less advanced caveman for falling into their trap. Image found here
As a child I remembered thinking how boring life was in the modern era because all living human populations were at the same level of evolution. Things seemed so much more exciting 80,000 years ago in the movie Quest for Fire when you had three different levels of evolution competing in a struggle for survival.
But then I began hearing about the theories of scientists J.P. Rushton who argued that there were indeed three different levels of evolution coexisting at once, except instead of Africans being the most advanced people, Rushton put “mongoloids” at the top of his nice neat pyramid, arguing that they were more advanced than other humans because they evolved most recently, having split-off caucasoids in a bigger brained, less sexual form. When I first heard this theory I was absolutely fascinated because it was as though the movie that had dominated my early childhood had been true all along, but because Rushton’s theory was condemned as racist, I felt great shame and guilt for liking his theory so much.
Luckily, as I grew older, I came to realize there was absolutely nothing racist about such theories because virtually the entire range of intelligence, personality, sexuality, and athleticism exist in every race, and there’s an evolutionary trade-off, such that races that are higher in some traits (brain size, IQ, mental stability) are lower on other valued traits (sexual anatomy, rhythm, sociability, artistic creativity). I don’t think one should have to deny science to prove they’re not a racist. It’s very easy to spout politically correct platitudes about all races being the same in the abstract; but the real test of character is whether you treat everyone as an individual, regardless of race.
The incredibly popular blogger HBD chick, who is quite active on twitter, recently Favorited my post about autism and IQ, but the sheer power of HBD Chick is such that simply by re-tweeting it, the traffic on pumpkinperson.com leaped to its highest level in history yesterday, with the number of unique visitors increasing 42% from the previous day and the number of page views increasing an astonishing 52%.
As the only woman to have dominated the ulta-competitive male dominated field of HBD blogging, I have long suspected that HBD Chick is an extraordinary individual. I find it quite amusing that a blogger with such a girly persona has such a male readership, yet her razor sharp female brain offers the male dominated blogosphere much needed social insight which she very skillfully applies to how inbreeding and out-breeding mating patterns shape human behavior.
Her star has risen to the point that other bloggers want to interview her, and when they do, it’s headline news on Steve Sailer’s blog (one of the biggest names on the entire internet and arguably the father of HBD blogging). Despite all the rave reviews, HBD chick remains one of the most humble and down-to-earth writers I have ever read.
She is popular. She is BRILLIANT! And I’m incredibly honored to have her as a follower on twitter!
Pumpkin Person 