David SimsEssays

The Black Bluff

dogon-sacred-siteby David Sims

HOAXES ABOUT BLACK achievement go back quite a ways. A Black commenter on YouTube took exception to my remarks about the intellectual deficiencies of his race and haughtily directed my attention to the Dogon people, a Black African tribe, who “taught advanced astronomical knowledge to White people” during the early 20th century.

I didn’t know at once what, exactly, this Negro was referring to. As far as I knew, the only original scholarship that the Dogon had to teach any White people involved their theological beliefs. The very idea that they were more accomplished than White people in scientific discovery was amusing.

And so it turned out to be. Because what this Black fellow was talking about was the fact that the Dogon knew about the existence of a white dwarf star known as Sirius B. In the grand tradition of the ol’ Black bluff, this guy tried to sell me on the idea that the Dogon were the first to discover Sirius B, and that the White man learned all he knew about the astrodynamics of the Sirius star system at the feet of a wise African tutor.

Of course, the truth is otherwise. The existence of Sirius B was indirectly discovered in 1833, when a (White) German astronomer named Friedrich Bessel noticed that the bright component star, Sirius A, seemed to wobble around a point on the sky. By 1844, Bessel had mathematically deduced the elliptical orbit of the companion star. In 1863, a (White) American astronomer named Alvan Clark made the first direct observation of Sirius B, confirming what Bessel had calculated.

The records regarding Dogon knowledge of Sirius B go back to 1931, which is the year that French anthropologist Marcel Griaule began to study them. So what apparently happened is that the Dogon, through prior contact with White people, learned what White people had discovered about Sirius B, and parroted that particular bit of lore back to a White anthropologist.

Blacks just will never give up this sort of fraudulent rigmarole. They don’t have any record of intellectual progress prior to their contact with Europeans, and they’ve made very little progress of their own since. Everything from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Ph.D. to the railroads in South Africa was enabled by the civilization that Whites built.

The male Black who introduced me to the idea that aliens from outer space flew down to give the Dogon tribe lessons in astronomy asked me, by way of changing the subject, how would I explain the “fact” that the Greeks were taught math and science by the Africans? I explained that the Greeks were generally far superior in both subjects to the Africans, and that if any teaching was going on, it was most likely in the opposite direction.

Aristotle, the discoverer of the rules of deductive logic, was a Greek, and he had no peer among Black Africans. Euclid, the discoverer of the rules of plane geometry, was a Greek, and he had no peer among Black Africans. Democritus, the first proponent of the atomic theory, was a Greek, and he had no peer among Black Africans. Now, there were a few persons in Africa who were renowned scholars: scientists, philosophers, or mathematicians. But none of these persons was Black. One of them was Hypatia, a Greek woman who lived in (the extreme north part of) Africa during the late 4th and early 5th centuries.

Just exactly which persons did this Negro believe he could point to? What were their names, and, for each of them, what were their additions to the sum of human knowledge? Silence. And, no, there is no evidence at all that the Dogon knew about Sirius B prior to its discovery by White men. That kind of declaration is an example of what I call “the Black bluff,” an unsubstantiated assertion (or, more often, a series thereof) about alleged historical Black achievement, discovery, ingenuity, etc., which never really happened.

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Source: David Sims

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Theop
Theop
7 March, 2016 4:05 am

There are actual scientific and mathematical contribution made by Black Africans. There are original writing system developed by the Bantu. In the Nigerian- Biafran war in the 1970s , Biafran made original Technological Progress that any body can research on the internet. The extremely arithmetical computation of Yoruba numeration is mind boggling enough. There was a time when the British have to be thought alphabet. The challenge of living in the tropics is enough to retard Intellectual growth. I will believe in the innate white ability if you can show me an authentic white advancement in a Tropical Setting about 1500 years ago. With the progress made by non white recently and the globalized nature of knowledge what matter is not the past achievement of white but who will be… Read more »

Anthony Collins
Anthony Collins
7 March, 2016 6:42 am

I’ve heard that George Lincoln Rockwell once published a booklet, titled Great Achievements of the Negro Race, featuring numbered blank pages.

John Calhoun
John Calhoun
7 March, 2016 9:40 am

White folks was in the caves while we (Blacks) was building empires…We taught Philosophy and Astrology (sic) and Mathematics before Socrates and them Greek Homos ever got around to it.

-“Rev.” Al Sharpton-

George Wright
George Wright
9 March, 2016 4:19 pm

I suppose it is theoretically possible that Blacks would have done better in a different climatic setting, but overcoming obstacles is the hallmark of any truly great people. There is little evidence of a propensity amongst blacks as a whole for cultural/scientific advances regardless of where they’ve lived. Not arguing that there no exceptions, just making an observation.

Arvin N. Prebost
Arvin N. Prebost
9 March, 2016 4:29 pm

“There was a time when the British have to be thought alphabet.”

Theop, what does that even mean? If you are going to defend tropical races, at least be literate.

T. the brilliant Bach
T. the brilliant Bach
12 March, 2016 6:29 pm

The thing that really makes your theory baseless is the mere fact that Africans have not been able to keep their great inventions and additions to humankind intact amongst yourselves (not even the ones who stayed in Africa) not to mention the obvious inability to evolve them further or even re-acquiring them today. This is just too stupid. You think and speak like a feminist, just uttering some words and pretending they are true because you’ve read three to five books saying that it is so, without checking the sources of those books, the author’s backgrounds (let me guess: their last names end with ‘stein’, ‘thal’ or ‘burg’) nor their views on empirical evidence. I have worked with students from all over the world and after seven or so years… Read more »