C was built for a minicomputer which might or might not be the brains of a phone switch, a software development environment, a word processing cluster for a newspaper, industrial control for a steel mill, etc.

The thing about Java is that it has promised and delivered a much better threading experience than other programming languages. When somebody proved the Java memory model was unsafe, Sun fixed it. C and other languages have adopted essentially this memory model but a decade and a half later. Java provides bulletproof tools in forms of Executors, Latches and other specialized concurrency constructs. It takes time to learn to use them, but you can ship fast and correct code for something like the LMAX Disruptor.