Challenge: Majority Black United States.

I've often thought about if there's any way to make the premise of the movie White Man's Burden, which has a majority black U.S. with a white underclass, plausible. I think it could just barely happen, but I'd be interested to hear the ideas of others.

Here's the limitations.

1. The POD doesn't have to be after 1776, but the state needs to be derived from British colonies and called "The United States of America"

2. While it doesn't need to be as large as the modern U.S., it can't contain only OTL's South. It must at minimum contain some of the Mid-Atlantic states. It can contain bits of the Caribbean and Latin America if you wish, but they should be a distinct minority in terms of population and land area.

Any hot ideas?
 
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Orry

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A plague is always good - after all european diseases killed off many peoples in the 'third'/'two-thirds'/developing/you know what I mean world. Africa was considered a 'deadly' place for white people to go.

Have one of the last boat load of slaves brought over from Africa to America have a plague that kills 10-15% of African Americans and 90% of 'whites'. (Some form of Ebola that there was some resistance to in the African population from previous outbreaks in pre-history?) Give it a nice long incubation/contagian period and have the survivors be carriers so that the europeans do not want to re-populate - or if they try they get sick and die.

This gives you a majority African American USA in the mid 19th Cent with the infrastructure surviving. The long incubation/contagian period is to make sure it spreads throughout the USA - but that the number of people dying at anyone time does not exceed the ability of the population to deal with the bodies.
 

Anaxagoras

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People of African descent are much more resistant to malaria than people of European descent, so perhaps some minor climatic change could make malraia more widespread in North America. But I don't think this would help, since malaria can be dealt with by some fairly basic measures and, in a few generations, the white population would also develop stronger resistance.
 
Have one of the last boat load of slaves brought over from Africa to America have a plague that kills 10-15% of African Americans and 90% of 'whites'. (Some form of Ebola that there was some resistance to in the African population from previous outbreaks in pre-history?) Give it a nice long incubation/contagian period and have the survivors be carriers so that the europeans do not want to re-populate - or if they try they get sick and die.

That won't work, as Ebola has a death rate of ~90% regardless of race. This will also be true for any newly humanised disease, only if the disease has been infecting humans for several thousand years the virulence decreases. And if there was such a diseases in Africa which can perist in temperate climate it would have long since spread to Europe and Asia as has happend with smallpox.

The best way would be to continue slave importation from africa. This could be done by implementing some of the earliest proposals to regulate slave trade. With the worst excesses removed the actual abolition could be prevented for several decades.
 
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Orry

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Yes - thats why it needs to be something really nasty that the Africans have some genetic resistance to.

Oh and when I say it kills 10-15% of the African Americans it is not that less of them catch the disease but that many more of them survive after a period of being ill.

Give it an incubation period of 6-8 weeks - the last 4 of which you are contagious and those fit looking 'slaves' bought down on the docks will have time to spread through the system before there is any chance of it being noticed. And it would have to be an air borne and fluid borne virus that can live outside the human body for a couple of days for maximum spread.
 
Give it an incubation period of 6-8 weeks - the last 4 of which you are contagious and those fit looking 'slaves' bought down on the docks will have time to spread through the system before there is any chance of it being noticed. And it would have to be an air borne and fluid borne virus that can live outside the human body for a couple of days for maximum spread.

In this case the first slave traders coming to africa will get infected and spread the disease to America and Europe. And once the disease spreads to Europe (and kills 90% of the people) the whole slave trade will collapse long before a large portion of slaves has been transported to the Americas.
 
Well, several Southern states were majority black, so perhaps have the slave trade last a little long, increasing the overall black population
in the U.S. to the point that msot Southern states are black and significant black minorities exist in several Northern states, then have the
White Americans simply have a lower birth rate than Black Americans, perhaps as a result of prolonged racism lading to Whites being
economically well of and less likely to have alot of kids while the Blacks are'nt and have more kids as a result.
 
Sad to say, I think a runaway increase in slave importation is the easiest way to do this. Especially if we can somehow slow down the abolitionist feeling among whites of the period. If the North allows slavery, and the British take longer to ban the international slave trade, then Americans might bring in more slaves than there are whites. (Nobody has just one slave. It takes a lot of labor to run a plantation.)

Of course, in these circumstances, the prospect of an enormous and bloody slave revolt, or series of slave revolts, becomes nearly unavoidable. But if cooler heads prevail (blacks don't decide to exterminate the whites and overthrow the government, abolitionist influence persuades the white population to give in and abolish slavery rather than trying to exterminate the blacks, and so on), we may be able to preserve the United States as the United States, albeit one where whites have to learn to accept the fact that they're outnumbered.

It's also possible that there isn't a slave revolt, and that slavery is still abolished at some point. But it's not as likely, once you get enough slaves that they realize they outnumber the masters everywhere. It's hard to dominate someone who's just noticed that he can crush you.
 

Orry

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The idea with the plague is that like Ebola it has some natural resivour (like monkeys) and very infrequently crosses over into man. Because there have been outbreaks in pre-history there is a level of resistance in the African population - not that they do not get very sick - but that far less of them die.

Shortly before being captured by a costal tribe in a slave raid into the middle of Africa one or two of the captives killed and ate an infected monkey which they did not cook well enough to kill the virus.

So basically the POD is that a plague rather like Ebola (but with a longer incubation period) exists in the African wildlife. It does not normaly kill its animal hosts as they have developed an immunity making it not much worse than a cold to them. Occasionally it crosses over into the human population killing many but those who survive pass on whatever it was that protected them to their decendents. The difficulty of travel and lack of communications in Africa being the reason why such outbreaks have never got out of hand before. If we make that a dominant gene (or what ever) the result that the majority of the African population has some immunity to it but outbreaks are rare and the Europeans have not been slave raiding THAT long in terms of the history of humanity.

When it now breaks out in America (and europe when the sailors on the slave ship get back) you have a disease that will do to the white european population in America and europe what smallpox etc did in the new world. Modern (C19) ease of communications will ensure that it spreads faster than any warning - people passing on the disease for weeks before they feel ill.

Not only can you end up with a African America USA but an African dominated world :D
 
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Sad to say, I think a runaway increase in slave importation is the easiest way to do this. Especially if we can somehow slow down the abolitionist feeling among whites of the period. If the North allows slavery, and the British take longer to ban the international slave trade, then Americans might bring in more slaves than there are whites. (Nobody has just one slave. It takes a lot of labor to run a plantation.)

Of course, in these circumstances, the prospect of an enormous and bloody slave revolt, or series of slave revolts, becomes nearly unavoidable. But if cooler heads prevail (blacks don't decide to exterminate the whites and overthrow the government, abolitionist influence persuades the white population to give in and abolish slavery rather than trying to exterminate the blacks, and so on), we may be able to preserve the United States as the United States, albeit one where whites have to learn to accept the fact that they're outnumbered.

It's also possible that there isn't a slave revolt, and that slavery is still abolished at some point. But it's not as likely, once you get enough slaves that they realize they outnumber the masters everywhere. It's hard to dominate someone who's just noticed that he can crush you.

This is pretty close to what I thought was most plausible. Essentially.

1. More expansive slave trade expands slavery into the North, particularly the Delaware valley, so that *Pennsylvania and *New Jersey have as much slavery as say Maryland or Delaware.

2. Migration of whites to America is slowed down during the colonial era, whether due to more disease or more restrictions on migration by Britain.

3. When the U.S. gains independence, either New England and New York stay loyal and become part of *Canada, or they become their own independent nation then or at a later time.

4. At some point, either peacefully or through violent revolt, the black majority gains political control. As with the Caribbean, many whites leave, particularly upper class whites.

5. Blacks form a solid majority through the Atlantic lowlands. Whites are found mainly scattered along the border states and in Appalachia - the "White Belt" of TTL.
 
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called "The United States of America"

I'd imagine that would be the hardest part (I'm always surprised this doesn't piss people off more, a country that called itself the United States of Earth would piss people off). I was thinking you could simply have a black nation in Southern America, for free slaves perhaps, and call it the United States of America.
 
Oh, goody, the tired, fatuous old "it's not really America" argument.

Like it or not, there are sound historical reasons why the United States of America has that name. Aside form paraphrasing "United States", there weren't many other names that could have been used. "America", by itself, had already ceased to be a generic term for "the land across the Atlantic". (A Peruvian isn't from "America" in modern usage. He's from "the Americas".) If people meant "Mexico", they said "Mexico". If they meant "Brazil", they said "Brazil". But there was no other word that referred to the Thirteen Colonies, because until the revolution came the Thirteen Colonies didn't even think of themselves as an entity. They didn't even know there would be thirteen of them until it happened; Canada could have joined up, say, or Georgia could have decided not to. Any name referencing specific colonies would have alienated others. Virginians would not have joined a "Republic of New England". New Yorkers would have rejected "Republic of Virginia", and so on. The only word they had available that meant "New Englander" and "New Yorker" and "Virginian" and "Georgian" was "American".

Because it was a collection of American states uniting together, they called it "the United States of America". If Britain had had the foresight to fuse those thirteen colonies, and only those thirteen colonies, into one big colony with some arbitrary name like "the Hoobastank Colony", then maybe we could have been "The Republic of Hoobastank" and everybody else would shut the hell up about how we've appropriated the word "American". But as it happens, that's not the way it worked out.

So, no. You can't just throw a bunch of people on to some random spot, give them a country, and call it "the United States of America". There needs to be a history behind the name, which, in our case, there actually is.
 
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