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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Turns out that they were a migrant population that displaced hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, developed agriculture, and smelted iron:

ones successful in the most similar to European fashion

I think that's part of why it gained use among white supremacists in the first place, because it complicates the mainstream african colonization narrative. For instance they like to talk about how the vast majority of black people in South Africa are Bantu but there were few Bantu in the region prior to Dutch colonization, mostly the region was inhabited by Khoisan. So they can argue that the Bantu pushing decolonization in South Africa are themselves colonizers barely more native than the Dutch.

More generally, since the majority of sub-Saharan Africans are Bantu I'd guess it's a way to refer to the main African population without having to say "sub-Saharan" and without including smaller groups like the Igbo (often claimed to be the most intelligent African ethnicity).