A while back, there was a post on Unz about creating a black homeland. The piece was not very well done so there is no point in linking it. It was about how efforts to make race relations work had failed so a two-state solution was the only option. The plan was to turn a few states in the South into the new black homeland. Again, itt was not very well done so the particulars are not important.

What is striking about the idea of a black homeland, is it is an idea you never hear mentioned, even by racists. Lincoln wanted to send the freed slaves to Haiti or other Caribbean islands, but that’s forbidden knowledge these days. Yankee abolitionists would never have gone along with that as they wanted the freed slaves to riot and murder the bad whites in the defeated South. A dream they still nurse.

The American Colonization Society tried to create a black homeland for freed slaves, which eventually became Liberia. This probably would have worked if the demand for cotton had not made slavery so wildly profitable in the American South. By the end of the 18th century, Southern elites saw slavery as a dismal and dying institution, but the spike in the demand cotton changed those attitudes and killed any hope of ridding the nation of slaves and slavery through peaceful means.

The 20th century had some black nationalist movements that wanted to bring the former slaves back to Africa. Marcus Garvey is probably the most notable, but those efforts never went anywhere. The Nation of Islam guys are essentially black separatists arguing for blacks to withdraw from white society whenever and wherever possible, but they stop short of decamping for another land.

It’s not a crazy idea, if you think that blacks and whites can never truly live peaceably in a color blind society. If you’re black and assume the white majority will always have you under their thumb, a separate homeland should be attractive, as long as it does not mean going to Africa or the Caribbean. Those places are terrible and unfixable. A black homeland could only work if it is a part of the Anglosphere.

Some Basic Principles of Blacktopia

If you’re going to set up a black homeland, you have to start from some basic principles. The whole point of the endeavor to arrange things so that blacks can run their own shop and avoid the pernicious racism they must contend with in modern America. It is a form of reparations, just with a more logical end. The trouble with the TN Coates brand of reparations is it is really just a childish tantrum so that a middle-aged man-boy can pay his rent. Real reparations repair the damage and closes the books.

With that in mind, the first rule of Blacktopia is it has to have the promise of making black lives better. No one can know the future so the results of Blacktopia cannot be known in advance. All we can reasonably achieve is an arrangement where blacks are given every chance to succeed, and the results are in their hands. That means the land carved out for the new nation has to have all the natural resources you need for a successful country. It also has to have enough existing capital to provide for a strong start.

Carving out a new nation and moving millions of people into it is no small endeavor. It has to involve the least amount of harm in order to work. Money has to be allocated so the new citizens of Blacktopia can start their new lives with the least amount of hardship. Similarly, the people already living in Blacktopia need to be compensated where necessary. It’s not going to be cheap, but this is about trade-offs and the trade-offs need to be a consideration when creating this new nation.

Finally, it has to be sustainable and by that, I mean it has to settle the issue of race in the long term. Whites from Yankeedom have been making war on the bad whites over race for centuries. The point of Blacktopia is not just to provide closure for black victims of white racism. It has to close out the cold civil war between Yankeedom and the rest of America. That means the final configuration of this new nation has to be such that Yankeedom can no longer complain about the racism of whites.

Location

Finding a habitable spot that can support roughly 40 million people is not so obvious. The temptation is to find the least populated states and use those or maybe carve out part of Canada, but Blacktopia is not going to survive in a tundra or desert. Again, the first principle here is it has to have a chance to thrive. At the minimum, that means a decent climate, access to the sea and usable land.

The most obvious choice is California and maybe Oregon and Washington. Despite the massive flow of Mexicans into the state, California still has a low population density of 246 per square mile. New Jersey, by comparison, is 1210 per square mile. Washington state is 105 and Oregon just 41 souls per square mile. Without moving anyone out and just relocating black people to those states, the population density climbs to 311, which somewhere between Pennsylvania and Florida.

The trouble is Hispanics are not very friendly to blacks. Compton, which was made famous by the hip-hop group NWA, has slowly turned Hispanic, pushing out the blacks in a slow motion ethnic cleansing. This is a pattern seen all over America, one that liberals are fond of using to gentrify their strongholds. Washington DC imported Salvadorans, for example, as a way to freshen up the city.

That’s going to be a problem in the other lightly populated coastal area, the American South. Geographically, it is about perfect. You have mild climate, great agricultural areas, access to the sea and many good ports. There’s also the long history of blacks in the South, good and bad. In many respects, turning the South into Blacktopia would close the books on the Civil War. After all, the Abolitionists hoped the freed slaves would murder all of the white Southerners.

But, there’s a big problem. Southern whites have always been awful to blacks and there’s no reason to think that will change. Blacktopia would quickly look like South Africa circa 1975. One of the rules here is to make sure the new nation can survive. In theory the blacks could overwhelm the whites, but it is not a given and history says it is not the way to bet. The whites from Yankeedom would never tolerate it so this would lead to another civil war. Therefore, this option fails the basic principles outlined above.

That leaves New England. The population density of the six New England states is around 200 so there’s room for a lot more people. If you throw in New York, you have loads of room. The population of those seven states is roughly 35 million. Add in 40 million new people and you have a population density of Pennsylvania. Given that there are big cities like Boston and New York City, the density in the hinterlands would be quite low.

This region also is blessed with two world class cities and several smaller vibrant cities like Providence and Hartford. The current population is educated and productive. Most important, they have been lecturing the rest of us about race for 300 years. They fought a bloody war to help black people and fought a legal war to end segregation. Today, no people on earth fret over racism like the old Yankees of New England. They love black people!

Logistics

Now that we have the perfect location for Blacktopia, there are a few things that will need to be done. One is the current population of these states, and anyone born in these states are automatically citizens of the new nation. If you were born in New Hampshire, but now live in California, you are immediately a citizen of Blacktopia, but will be issued a visa for one year so you can decide to move back to your new country.

The reason for this is the new nation needs more than natural resources. The indigenous population is educated, rich and resourceful. They have built out the social organizations that a new nation will need in order to thrive. There’s also the goal of separating the old Yankees from everyone else as that has been a source of problems for 300 years. By keeping the current population in Blacktopia, we satisfy the core goals of the project.

Now, moving 35 million people to New England is no easy trick. The way to do this is to pay these folks $50,000 per head for relocation expenses. That’s well more than necessary, but there’s a hassle factor involved. The cost of that will be roughly $2 trillion, but in a big economy like ours that’s very manageable. There are trade-offs to everything and continued racial strife has costs well above this figure, I’m guessing.

The one last bit here is what to do with the people now living in New England and New York who were born elsewhere and wish to remain Americans. They would be allowed a year to move back to their home state. You can’t let this go on forever, so after a year, they either become a citizen of Blacktopia or they remain in the new nation. This solves the long term problem of people claiming rights in America, despite not having lived in America for decades. No more anchor babies either.

Conclusion

This little exercise has turned out better than I imagined. My instinct was to assume it was economically and logistically impossible, but once you think it through, it is very workable. Not only does it solve the problem of black people being treated poorly by whites, but it also solves the problem of whites warring on each other over the issue of race. The good whites are separated from the bad whites and that long running feud can be ended.