Folks, I am REPOSTING this TRINIDADDY analysis from another thread :
- 13 Aug 2021 12:34
Billy, how come all the people you cite are racists?
To prove that Van Sertima is right, you are quoting Dr Douglas Richmond. Richmond, however, believes that Van Sertima is wrong (“the case for Africans crossing the Atlantic before Columbus is based largely upon conjecture,” he says, and “there is not any linguistic, botanical, or artifact evidence that shows Africans in the Americas before Columbus” ).
The text you've quoted from him – which is a partial quotation from a larger paper, which I've just read in its entirety – also neglects to mention that Richmond goes on to say that the only “evidence” proving Sertima right is from the skull and cranial theories of a guy called Earnest Hooten.
Hooten was a racist guy who believed in dividing humanity up into races, with whites being the primary race and Africans being a subtype. He helped set up an anthropology committee which was comprised of many eugenicists and which focused on the anatomy of “not quite human” blacks. The committee endorsed a comparison of African babies with young apes. Ten years later, the group published findings which pretended to "prove that the negro is phylogenetically closer to primitive man than the white race."
Hooton played a key part in establishing the racial stereotypes about black athleticism and black criminality of his day, and was one of the first to attempt to develop mathematically rigorous criteria for race typology and advocated eugenic sterilizations of those deemed "insane, diseased, and criminalistic".
So Douglas Richmond is saying that the only evidence corroborating van Sertima is a racist guy, and that Hooten's own theories – that black civilizations originated in Texas before the Spaniards arrived – is wrong. Because in the full essay you quoted, Douglas goes on to say that “it is certain that Africans reached Texas only after Spaniards brought them into central Mexico. Undoubtedly, the first African in Texas was Esteban (or Estevanico), who set foot near present-day Galveston on November 6, 1528.”
So Billy, you're quoting a guy who DISAGREES with you. And a guy who is pointing out that the ideas of those who agree with you, originated with prominent racists. It's almost like you don't check or verify any of the crap you spam
Anyway, Van Sertima's book “They Came Before Columbus”, where he espouses the theory that MesoAmerican civilizations were African, is routinely ridiculed for being filled with lies and incompetency.
For example Sertima famously quotes scholar Beatriz de la Fuente, who says: "If at any time one could imagine there were Negroes in Mesoamerica, it would be after seeing Head 2 of Tres Zapotes." But Van Sertima deliberately ignores the next line, where de la Fuente says: "certainly the colossal heads do not represent individuals of Nubian or African descent." This is the most disrespectful, unprofessional, detestable thing you can do when writing a book.
And all of Van Sertima's theories were based on things which have since been debunked. For example:
1. The ancient languages and scripts which he says have ties to Africa, have long since been sourced and translated. They have not even the slightest connection to African scripts.
2. The latest DNA (gene studies of bones etc) evidence proves his whole theory wrong; the first civilizations in America are Native Americans descended from Melanesian and Australian/Polynesian aborigines.
3. Much of Van Sertima's motive for placing Africans in Mesoamerica come from the famed Olmec stone heads, which supposedly exhibit "negroid" traits. But these “traits” were taken from early 20th century racists who studied the now debunked science of phrenology. And we also know that Central Americans share the same features as the statues, most notably the flatter nose which Sertima gave lots of focus to. This feature is also completely absent from depictions of Egyptians and Africans at the time of supposed "contact."
4. Van Sertima claims that a Phonecian man appears on an Olmec stela, but ignores that the stela was made hundreds of years after the heads.
5. Sertima claims that the Native Americans of southern Mexico were just wandering along idly doing their typical barbaric, hunter-gather thing until the Africans came and taught them the proper way to live. But the archaeological record definitively shows a natural evolution/progression of Olmec culture from preceding ones, not a sudden boom of inspiration. We're also supposed to believe that the Olmec were so in awe of these superior Africans that they decided to carve enormous monuments to them, but that's not how cultures work. Otherwise you'd have George Bush statues in Iraq or statues of Caesar in Israel
6. Experts in pyramids refute everything Sertina wrote about them. The central American pyramids are distinct from those seen in Africa and across Asia.
7. Van Sertina says African gourds appaered in Mexico, but we they've been carbon dated, and show otherwise. We also have domesticated bottle gourds in Mexico from 7000 BC and in Peru from 3000 BC. This is 1500 years before we see the Africans creating similar gourds (and domesticating crops).
8. Van Sertina almost never references primary sources. He mentions no historical documents, excavation reports or other experts. When he does occasionally cite another scholar, he overwhelmingly lies about them or approaches them uncritically. He cherry picks.
9. Van Sertima claims Africans brought purple dye in 800 BC by dishonestly using a ~1500 AD Mixtec Codices. He claims Peruvian natives sacrificed black sheep to appease rain gods when sheep were only introduced post-Columbus (and there's no identifiable Andean rain god anway).
Bottom line, Van Sertima is as phony as your covid conspiracies. No one has been able to find any African artifacts linked to Mesoamerica. His theories simply took the Euro-centric racism which whites applied to Africa, and applied it to Native Americans. It is bad science, gobbled up by people prone to fantasy, delusion or intellectual laziness.
