I originally posted this at the end of the previous page - I'm moving it so it won't get lost.
Beautiful update, Jonathan. I kinda found myself wishing that Africa was actually like this in IOTL.
Keep in mind that the latest update took place in the better-run parts of West Africa, which in turn is one of the richest and most developed parts of the continent. Few secondary students would want to visit universities in war-torn Mauritania, or in the worst-off parts of Central Africa.
That was deliberate in this case: I've shown some of the "other Africa" in the narratives and will discuss more of it in the academic updates, but I wanted to show how the cultures of some of the peaceful middle-income countries (or at least middle-income countries where conflict is mediated through politics and law) had developed.
Anyway, are there any other thoughts on the update? I tried to put a good deal of cultural detail in there.
This comes out of the blue, but how does TTL US view interracial mixing between whites and blacks ? How common is it compared to OTL ? And is there a difference between social classes ? Like perhaps it's more common among upperclass blacks and whites, or vice versa ?
It's more common than OTL, if only because anti-miscegenation laws have been a dead letter since the 1920s. There's still a lot of social opposition, though: even many white people who are comfortable with civil rights believe that people should marry their own, and the more nationalist black people feel the same way, especially toward white man-black woman pairings. The legacy of the civil rights struggle also casts a shadow: in general, the less bloody the civil rights conflict was in a given area, the more interracial marriages are accepted.
There probably is a class division, although it might go different ways in different places. On the one hand, the black and white upper classes move in the same circles by now; on the other hand, old-line Boston Brahmins or Southern aristocrats would probably want to keep their relationships with rich African-Americans on a strictly business level. Mixed upper-class marriages would be most common in the parts of the country where money is more important than blood.
There might also be a significant number of marriages between working-class families that worked at the same jobs and lived on the same streets. Intermarriage between Christians and Jews in 18th-century London, for instance, was most common among the working class: the social dynamics of 20th-century America are different in obvious ways, but there's something to be said for intermarriage occurring among those who have the most day-to-day contact.
To build on that, what is the big fracture point in American politics ITTL? In OTL, I would argue it's race. Here, I'm not so sure.
There's still unfinished business from the civil rights era, as we'll see in the next update, but you're correct that race isn't an overriding fault line the way it is IOTL. I'd expect the primary fracture points ITTL to be economic: business-friendly social market versus populism versus social democracy, and environmental conservation versus short-term economic benefit. There will also be cultural fault lines, especially as the consensus of the 1940s-50s erodes and the sexual conservatism that came in with Congo fever is challenged.
Well, THAT's probably true of Paris, or any other major city, too.
Fair enough - which shows all the more than shining cities by the sea have their seamy sides.