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Revision as of 20:47, 2 August 2006 by Dynamicknowledge24 (talk | contribs) (Reverted back to detailed, factual article which contains more information including references and external links.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)"Black" is a term used as a form of ethno-racial classification. Though literally implying dark-skinned, "black" has been used in different ways at different times and places. It is somewhat of a misnomer in various parts of the world. While the extremes of human skin color range from pink to blue-black, the vast majority of people have a skin color which can be best described as some shade of brown. This includes all races and ethnic groups.
In 2004, the US Census Bureau defined a black as a person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa, including people who indicate their race as Black, African American, or Negro. However, the Bureau also stresses that this classification should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature.
A common element to the dictionary definitions of "black" people today, is that the term refers to those persons of African ancestry who were formerly categorised as "Negroid" in physical anthropology. Indigenous Australians , Negrito and sometimes Dalit peoples of India have also been described as black and in some cases adopt the term for themselves . Likewise, some individuals of African descent have rejected the term as a useful self-identity. The famous African American scholar John Henrik Clarke said "black doesn’t articulate my geopolitical and cultural reality."
Blackness as a social identity is difficult to universally define, as it varies from nation to nation. It is well documented that Equatorial populations of Africa, where modern humans likely originated, are the most genetically diverse in the world.
Although there is no single black phenotype, black people generally exhibit varying characteristics of Negroid, Veddoid, Capoid, or Australoid phenotypes, with a great range of variations, due to the overall diversities of black people. In some societies, even if one's complexion is as light as the average "white" person, other physical characteristics or family lineage will serve to identify one as black.
Areas of habitation
While black people are found on every continent, they are known to be indigenous to Africa, Australia, and parts of India. Although originally indigenous to North Africa as well, centuries of intermarriage with Asiatic and Caucasoid peoples have produced populations who exhibit varying degrees of their African (Black) ancestry, but who currently do not refer to themselves as black. This has also led many to believe that Black people had never inhabited the northeastern areas of Africa in antiquity.
In the Western Hemisphere, Black people also are found in high concentrations in the urban regions of the United States and the Bible Belt region of the Southern United States, the Caribbean and sizeable portions of Latin America, including Belize, Panama and Brazil, with Brazil having the highest proportion (and overall number) of Black people in the West (although a significant proportion of Brazilians of considerable African descent do not consider themselves to be Black).
In Asia, black people inhabit Yemen, some areas of Iraq (especially Basra), much of Nepal (especially Rana Tharu), the Andaman Islands ( Negritos ), the indigenous Dalit population of India (numbering 160 million) and the larger Dravidian population of India (though not all Dravidians consider themselves black, a sizeable proportion phenotypically reflect their African heritage and acknowledge it). There are more recent Afro-Indian groups, such as the small group of 20,000-30,000 black Siddis in the Gujarat province of India, the Kaffiri of the island of Sri Lanka, and small communities of Sheedis in the coastal districts of the southern province of Sindh and neighboring Baluchistan.
Thousands of Sheedis also inhabit Karachi, Pakistan's largest city. Black people indigenously inhabit the island of Papua , Aboriginals inhabit Australia, and Melanesians inhabit various islands of the Pacific Rim. In addition, there are black-jewish cultures in East India (see Bene Israel), Ethiopia, and Mozambique.
Origins
Darker skinned humans have existed as the default human type as far back as the human species (Homo sapiens) is known to exist. Whether through evolutionary changes or adaptation, tracking back the statistical patterns in variations in DNA among all known people sampled who are alive on the Earth today, scientists have concluded the following:
- from 1.2 million years ago until the last recent ice age the ancestors of all people currently living may have been as black as today's Africans,
- for that period of a million years, human ancestors lived with relatively little clothing
- the descendants of any people who migrate North from Africa to less tropical regions will develop changes in skin color over time because the enviromental factors (heat) that naturally work to keep Africans' skin black over the generations decreases generally as one migrates northward(Rogers 2004). Those remaining in Africa thus remain unchanged and despite the passage of time would remain indistinguishably Black by our own social norms, even though their phenotypes would vary, as modern human types vary today.
According to the Out-of-Africa theory of human evolution, prehistoric Africans evolved in Africa 200,000 years ago and are the ancestors of all modern humans. These Africans migrated throughout Africa, eventually moving across the Sinai Peninsula and into various regions, including Europe and beyond. The Aboriginal types in Australia may be considered an older type although this is still contested and open to interpretation. In all, the human race ultimately became distinguished (although not seperated entirely) into three supergroups: The Equatorial (Black Africans, Aboriginals, East Indians, some South East Asians and some South West Asians), The Mongoloid (North-East and most Central Asians, some South East Asians), and the Caucasoid (Most Europeans, some Central and West Asians). Nexus points, where these three groups mostly mix creating amalgrams of undeterminable ancestry would be in areas of Northern Egypt, Palestine, Northwest India, Central Asia, the Americas, and some areas throughout the Pacific.
Black people are believed to have expanded from Africa in two distinct groups. One created the Aboriginal Australians, Melanesians, Formosa based Negrito groups, and other Asians. Another group created the East Indian other varied Southwestern Asians. From this we have three distinct groups of Equatorial or "Black" people. Although the word Black would have varying significance to these groups (even to insignificance to some of them), the idea is that these groups are primarily non-Caucasoid, non-Mongoloid based. The Australoid, the Veddoid, and the Equatorial African are not people who were once Caucasoid or Mongoloid, but directly Negroid.
It is difficult to determine which of these groups contributed originally to the first non-Equatorial groups (Caucasoids and Mongoloids), however it is assumed that these groups came from the earlier migrations out of Africa, branching out over time before settling into the far East. Since the emigration out of Africa has also been sporatic, sometimes continious, and also interactive over many centuries, finding sharp distinctions is problematic.
Recent archaeological evidence has refuted the notion that black Africans remained in Africa, outside of two specific migrations that founded the extra-African people. The overall archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic testament of human history confirm that black humans and Africans were present, in relevant proportions in Asia and within noted Asian civilizations as black people prior to being adapted into a non-black Caucasoid or Mongoloid type. It was once widely believed that the black presence in Asia was mostly the result of slave trading, but modern anthropologists now acknowledge that aboriginal black populations ranged throughout Southeast Asia, and some posit an ancient aboriginal black population in the Far East, as well. Some of these populations, such as the Negritos still remain.
Those who remained within Africa retained the distinctively black skin color, while over time, the Europeans and many Asians gradually lost their darker skin as an adaptation to the colder climates of the northern temperate zones. Others, in India, and across the southern areas of Asia retained their darker complexion due to the higher ultra-violet solar radiation and other factors, although their phenotypes changed in various ways, becoming the Veddic, Australian, and Negrito peoples.
Early Neolithic settlement patterns indicate that black people spread out to originally inhabit much of the Indian Ocean coastline, founding or contributing greatly to the Indian-Ocean cultures of the early historical period including the Dravidian, Vedda, and Harappan. One sculpture found in Harappa show the clear phenotype resembling modern day black woman. The societies of the Indus Valley Civilization, Indonesia, and the Middle East were known to have a strong native-black heritage.
As the legacy of both the trans-Atlantic and Islamic slave trades, many people of indigenous African descent can be found throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, as well as parts of the Middle East and South Asia. The majority of African slaves in the Americas came from either West Africa or Central Africa, and the slaves in the Arab world came from both East Africa and the Horn of Africa.
The second group would be theNegrito, Australoid and Melanesian populations. These include some South Asians, and yet other groups East Indians, and Melanesian populations of the Pacific Ocean. They developed distinctly from the Africans and first groups of East Indians around 100,000 years ago, and while maintaining the darker skin color, exhibited straighter hair on average, and eventually developed into the wider varieties of Asians.
In the past, scientists had attributed variations of people outside of West Africa to intermixing with Caucasoid or Sinoid people. However, Stephen Monlar, a leading anthropologist, has pointed out that even though many Nilotic people have narrow noses caused by environmental adaptations which are similar to, yet not derived from Caucasoid European ancestry.
Adaptations, as well as spontaneous genetic mutations, which are the cause of variations in human phenotypes, have caused Equatorial people to exhibit a variety of phenotypes, some of which resemble the phenotypes of other groups, which sometimes leads to the mistaken assumption that they are ethnically mixed with those non-Equatorial groups.
Defining characteristics
Throughout the Modern Period, blackness has been determined mostly by three criteria: Skin color, faciocranial phenotype and sometimes hair texture. Relative distance from Europe and proximity to Africa also have been considered as determining factors, but this criterion has been the most contentious and has caused the most confusion and conflict, due to the racist implications and stereotypes that invariably arise.
Depending on one's nationality or the region in which one lives, blackness can be based more on lineage than complexion. Very light-skinned individuals may consider themselves black, and very dark-skinned people may not. Often, the perceptions of society and of the individual will conflict. In Brazil, Mauritania, the U.S.,Sudan, Cuba, and parts of India, these issues remain unresolved.
Due to the lasting legacy of colonization, the definition of 'black' is often imposed on black people by a non-black government or ruling class. In these situations, the definition will either be embraced or rejected by the people in question, depending on their perceptions of their indigenous black heritage, again often reflecting the sentiments of the surrounding society in which they live.
Varying definitions of the term "black"
The definition of a black person changes from region to region and period to period. Often it is imposed at the convenience of the non-black ruling establishment of that nation or region. In other cases, as in Brazil, the name is synonymous with low social status. The use of the term "black" is divided into four sections.
Africans living in Africa (excluding those whose ancestors were not originally from Africa, like Afrikaners). This is applied intrinsically by those south of the Sahara. Along the desert, Tuareg,Berber, and Hausa people retain a sense of racial hegemony, with the darker skinned (and often more numerous) people being ruled and oppressed by the lighter skinned minorities. Relatively speaking, the people of Mauritania, Mali, Chad, most of Sudan and Ethiopia, and a significant minority of Egyptians consider themselves black, but struggle in various ways with disproportionate representation in their government by non-Black Arabs.
People whose ancestors have lived outside of Africa since historical antiquity. The various Asians,Negroid, Veddoid, and Australoid people fit this category. Blackness has been used to describe Aeta Filipinos, the original inhabitants of Taiwan, large groups of East Indian populations throughout history and various southeast Asians, Papuans, and Melanesians. Their experiences range widely and there is relatively less information regarding their self-perception in relationship to other Black people throughout the world, as they have had little contact with African and black people of the western hemisphere.
Those who live in Latin America and in some islands of the Caribbean. Their relationship to Spain and Portugal create a distinct heritage. Their self perception is usually tied to their skin color and less to a sense of family heritage. Often those who are lighterskinned find little issue with being reclassified as non-black, even as other relatives in their family (even siblings) will remain classified as black.
Those who live in Haiti, United States, Jamaica and South Africa. These groups share a similar and unique experience of being ruled by English speaking colonizers and were legally separated into two groups blacks and coloreds. Finally these groups share the distinction of associating their blackness more with their descent than literal skin color, partially due to the one drop rule, and also to a moral stand against racism and discrimination. Most Black people of light complexion find it repugnant or illogical to renounce or dilute their black identity due solely to their skin color.
Self-identified and imposed blackness
There are two ways that a person can be defined as a black person. There is the impositional method, whereby political and social forces will label a darker skinned person as black. This has occurred in India, the Western Hemisphere, and throughout Africa. This method has been used to divide ethnic groups as well as to create a caste system of privilege and control in many colonized areas. The second, the intrinsic method, is where a person or group of people independently identify themselves as being black; the Aeta are one group whose first contact with Chinese mainlanders involved no subjugation, so they proudly identified themselves as black.
Family ties, the importance of solidarity against anti-black racism, resistance to colonialism, and opposition to perceived white supremacy or eurocentric philosophies motivate people with varying degrees of Equatorial lineage to identify solely as black. Since the 1940s, with the established viewpoint in the Western world shifting, many groups once considered "black" by colonizing powers—even as recently as a century ago—have now lost that identity in official policies, e.g. national census reports, established anthropological studies, historical and archaeological reports. In the United States, black people of mixed race groups had for the most part reintegrated with the fully black population, but recently, due to a new movement to recognize biracial children of black/white couples, the division of black and biracial people has been re-introduced into America's social identity.
As modern communication develops around the world, most of the varieties of black people have become aware of each other, and many self-identified black people (especially in the United States) are working to change the sometimes negative perception of black skin, culture, and heritage in order to increase the political,economic, and social well-being of black people around the world. Since the nuances of black identity have changed outside of the US, this message is received differently by the various groups in the world. Many modern societies attempt to observe no distinctions between human races or identities; others do exactly the opposite. Sometimes, those who have the core characteristics of dark skin and phenotype exclude those who lack it, even though both share ancestors and/or historical experiences.
Some countries, like Brazil, have begun to rediscover and celebrate their African heritage, while other countries like Egypt and the northern areas of Sudan tend to denounce it entirely whenever possible, holding on to Arabic or Semitic influences as their primary heritage. Arabization has been a major imposition on the native Africans of various areas of Africa throughout the 2nd millennium, affecting black identity even to the present day. The Caucasus peoples of Abidjan, and Crimea are sometimes called black because, relatively speaking, they are darker and less European in their appearance. The term has been used also to describe Southern Italians and some Arabs, almost always pejoratively, as these groups generally resent being labeled as black.
20th/21st Century controversies
There is a discontinuity between older historical accounts describing black people, and modern scholarly consensus. Many archaic literary accounts, including the Bible, describe black people clearly in Hebrew. However, scholarship took a brief paradigm shift in the late 20th century, with some indicating that Kushites and Ethiopians were in fact not Black, but merely dark skinned or tanned Caucasians.
Due to vague similarity in skull shapes with other Caucasoid types, they instead insist that Kushite described a dark-skinned but non-black person. Usually, East Africans from as far north as Egypt to as far south as Rwanda are variously recast by modern scholarship as non-black Caucasoids, whose heritage is not truly connected to the greater black populations of Africa, however, despite some twentieth-century European attempts to present them as dark Caucasians, Ethiopians are predominantly Negroid.
There has been a long held established view in Western culture that black people have not contributed substantially to Ancient Middle Eastern culture, civilization and history. The Middle East, being the cradle of civilization, encompass parts of Africa and Asia, and borders upon Europe and India. Although the Middle East holds the legacies of over a dozen ancient civilizations, most of the controversy centers around Egypt (but has recently expanded to include India, Greece, and Iran).
Egypt, being close to Israel, has the most reliable written record of Biblical events outside of the Bible itself and is also a reliable source of written history about Black people (and Jewish people prior to the 8th Century B.C.E.). This perspective has helped Black people find clarity on their relationship to Biblical events. Also, Egypt, being so geographically close to people who are unquestionably Black, would have the most reliable record of how black people related within it's own civilization.
By the mid 18th century, many Western theologians and intellectuals had concluded that one, black people had been cursed by God in the Bible to be no more than peripheral slaves, and two, Black people were incapable of generating a civilization worthy of respect by white historians.
Black scholars chose to place emphasis on Egypt in order to decisively refute these erroneous conclusions, in order to end slavery, then to overturn Jim Crow laws, and finally to end the established order of teaching history. Egyptian history presents, at the very least, an abundant first hand account of the presence of a wide variety of black people in the region, and depending on the perspective one takes, Ancient Egypt was itself a black civilization.
This latter assertion generated a new wave of racialized Afrocentric debate between established scholarly critics of Afrocentric fallacies and Afrocentric scholarly criticism of erroneous assmuptions by Eurocentric scholarship. Despite the fact that 18th century European writers and escavators like Champollion and Lepsius had concluded that the Egyptians were a Black people, Afrocentric critics have faulted poor scholarship on the part of Black scholars for the lowered quality of education in America resulting from on over-empathsis on Afrocentricity (irrespective of the accuracies it has presented).
Until the early 1990s, Black people have been portrayed in American media as being mutually exclusive (or excluded) from authentic and legitimate Latino, Jewish, Asian and Middle Eastern culture and history. This was mostly due to commercialized imagery of the people, which followed American demographic trends to portray Latinos, Middle Easterners, and Asians as almost devoid of black characteristics, while America itself was portrayed in foreign media to be equally sanitized of Black habitation (outside of musicians, sportsmen, and criminal elements).
This had lead many Americans of the X Generation to believe that Black people only lived in Africa and the inner cities of America. This trend followed a new wave of demographic shifting in America, where Middle Easterners, Latinos, South-East Asians and Africans immigrated more to the U.S.
Those who are or have been defined as being black have not been asked what black means, but instead have been told what it does not mean, as a method of social exclusion. In how they are defined, blacks, much more than any other group have been excluded from defining themselves officially. Because of this, some of the most awkward controversies arise in historical contexts. For example, the average black person today certainly resembles the average resident of Ancient Egypt. Many of the distinctive Ancient Egyptian social customs (hair styles, shaving habits, burial practices) and quirks are also found among black people but absent in Semitic and European people of that period and the modern one.
Despite the emphasis on Ancient Egypt as the great black civilization, there were many great West African civilizations. While the Moors were re-civilizing Europe, great empires were thriving in Western Africa and frequently traded with the Moors. These included the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, which prospered between 700 AD and 1600 AD.
Gradually, the connections between black and Asian cultures has created more cultural awareness between the two groups. During the20th Century, the Afrocentric and Negritude movements had opened the minds of black people to their historical heritage throughout the world. Many black scholars have exposed ancient writings and 19th century observations and republished them. Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese historian, made the most profound impact by presenting a wide variety of information and evidence showing the acute black presence in Egypt and elsewhere.
In addition, Ivan Sertima, a noted Africanologist made a strong impact with African presence in Early Asia. Many Asians have participated in the founding of various black movements, including Wallace Fard Muhammad, founder of theNation of Islam. Some Black people born in the United States are adopting a new term, "Afrimerican", which denotes African ancestry but a native birth in America and as American. Introduced in 1989, Afrimerican is growing as a distinct term of description for black people born in America.
Great Black Civilizations
Again, disagreement on who was or was not Black is the primary difficulty in defining whether or not a civilization in antiquity was Black. The Ancient Egyptian Race Debate is the pre-eminent controversy in this regard, as Egypt, being at the very least a substantially mixed (with black) civilization is not included by many scholars as a black civilization. Nevertheless, the social and cultural structure of Ancient Egypt followed that of the other Nilotic civilizations, and differed sharply from Semetic and other exclusively Caucasoid mediterranean civilizations. The appearances of Ancient Egyptians included in high proportions, those people who would be viewed casually today as a black person, whether in Africa, America or elsewhere. Throughout Egypt's history, many types of people settled and intermarried within Egypt, yet the linguistic, cultural, and social orientation of Egypt during all three Kingdom Periods came from the South, in Thebes, and drew heavily from cultural links from the Upper Nile. The original dynastic unification and both restorations also originated from southern dynasties reconquering northern rulers (TheHerakleopolis Magna) and the foreign Semetic Hyksos). It has been demonstrated the Middle and Upper Egyptian people exhibited considerably more black and Nilotic characteristics than the Semetics.
"The conquering nations throughout history have always rewritten or destroyed the history of the conquered nations. Racism and the brutal and devastating effects of slavery only intensified the need to change African history. It was argued that Africans were pagans, savages, and heathens in need of salvation because blacks lacked the intellectual capacity to succeed. What was ignored however, is that blacks had thriving civilizations long before Europeans colonized Africa. While the Moors were re-civilizing significant portions Europe, great empires were thriving in Western Africa and frequently traded with the Moors. These included the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, which prospered between 700 AD and 1600 AD.
The founders of Ghana were known as the Soninkes, and they are experts in making tools and weapons with iron. In fact, their iron weapons helped them to conquer the neighboring tribes and to form their empire. They are also said to have had an inexhaustible supply of gold. It was so plentiful that the emperor passed a law, which said that all gold in nugget form belonged to him and that the people could only use gold dust. It was said that without this precaution, gold would have become so plentiful that it would have lost its value. One gold nugget was so large that it was used as a hitching post for the ruler's favorite horse. Ghana was also famous as a trading center where locally produced metal tools, jewelry, leather, and cotton clothes were traded for imports from Moorish Spain and Morocco.
The Mali Empire began in 1230 AD with King Sundiata. He gained control of all the trade that had been monopolized by Ghana. In 1342, Mansa Musa made a pilgrimage to Mecca, which made the Mali Empire world famous. He took a caravan of 60,000 people to Mecca and gave away so much gold as presents that the gold market in the world was devalued for 12 years. When he was asked in Cairo how he became emperor, he said that his brother, Emperor Abubakari II took 2,000 ships in 1311 AD, sailed west, and never returned. Ivan Van Sertima in his book They Came Before Columbus, acknowledges Abubakari II as one of the discovers of America who preceded Columbus. The Mali Empire had a standing army of 100,000 men and is said to have included an area the size of Western Europe.
The Songhay Empire rose to supremacy approximately 1457 AD and eventually became as large as the United States of America. The Songhay Empire was also a prosperous trading center but became world famous as a center of advanced culture and higher education. Famous universities were established in the cities of Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu, which employed thousands of teachers who offered courses that included astronomy, mathematics, medicine, hygiene, music, and many others. Jenne also had a medical school that was especially famous for training surgeons in difficult operations such as cataract surgery. Professor Ahmed Baba, who was chancellor of the University of Sankore in Timbuktu, was the author of more than 40 books and had a personal library of 1,600 volumes; which he said was small, compared to the library of his colleagues. During the slave trade, many of the slaves from the former Songhay Empire were highly educated and were credited with teaching Caribbean and American farmers successful agricultural techniques. They also invented various tools and equipment to lessen the burden of their daily work.
The Songhay Empire prospered until 1591 when it was finally conquered by Moorish invaders from North Africa."
Refocusing of black identity
Due to the Internet, worldwide news reporting and various media outlets, black identities throughout the world are interconnecting in a way that the Pan-African and Afrocentric movement had not anticipated, but in such a way that eclipses practically any international identity, including whiteness, Jewry, Arab, and Latino identity (the four largest ethnic identities in the world).
Since black people throughout the world share the same experiences of exclusion and marginalization even within the Latino, Jewish, and Arab identity, there is a renewed intellectual interest, bolstered by the access to the Internet, to share these experiences. Many Africans (Runoko Rashidi), Asians (Paul Manansala), Latinos (Ivan Sertima), and even Caucasians (Joel Freeman) are taking roles, through the new media outlets of today, promoting the human scope of black identity, refocusing the context of history in order to clarify that black identity is as meaningful and integral to human identity as any other.
Although there are constant accusations of Afrocentric bias by non-blacks, these intellectuals have taken a step of introducing a plethera of information and insight from a variety of unexpected sources that, until recently, were virtually unknown to the modern world. These new and valid historical perspectives are allowing people to be comfortable to view the world, to take an interest, and to find interaction with other black people without any social stigma and without the tell-tale assumptions and social status-quo ignorance that permeates the world.
So that ultimately black people from India, Africa, Latin America, and the United States can interact on a social and economic level without the kind of nationalistic boundaries that had been designed during the colonisation process starting in the 17th century and ending in the 20th century to divide and weakean their self-determination. One recent example was the former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, taking refuge in South Africa after being removed from power in 2004.
The impact of African Americans on worldwide black identity
There has been a strong position by African Americans that regional proximity to Africa proper is and should be the third defining characteristic of blackness. This belief has been bolstered by the Afrocentric, Negritude and Negrisimo movements of the 20th century, which focused on socio-economic unity between Africa and black people of the West.
Driving these movements is a desire to improve the perception of the West African diaspora (most black people in the Western Hemisphere originate from West Africa), whose contributions to the history and culture of the West have often been maligned or ignored.
Certain aspects of African American culture and history, especially the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements and the international cultural phenomena of various African American musical expressions have played a role in increasing the pride of people of black identity around the world.
Black identity embraced and rejected
Over time the term black has come to refer to those who identify themselves as black by virtue of their family's shared cultural heritage with Equatorial Africa,slavery, and experiences of oppression based on their Equatorial lineage and skin color. Black has also been a term imposed by ligher-skinned people on various darker-skinned people to take advantage of and exclude them. Many times this label of blackness has been embraced by the oppressed for the sake of moral solidarity against the oppressors. The Jewish diaspora also through their shared religious history maintain a similar commonality of identity that universally transcends any other differences, although black Jews are experiencing the same amount of prejudice in Israel and often are looked at with less legitimacy than whiter Jews strictly due to their skin color.
Despite this, many non-Blacks work to de-emphasize the blackness of non-African blacks by contrasting their differences towards the black African. Often, the word "black" or the idea of being "truly black" becomes synonymous with being a "West African oriented person". In Kerala for example, many Jews who are dark skinned identified themselves as being black and were considered such by the "white" Jews that lived among them. However, the recent white established view is that theseCochin Jews are black but not as black as a Negro or a black African. Nevertheless, the "white" Jews of Cochin had engaged in the same racial prejudice and slavery and exclusionary principles against the black Jews of Cochin over the centuries of their inhabitation there.
The white Jews limited the educational and litergual access that the black Cochin Jews were able to obtain, and due to the establishments from the European regions, they were able to consolidate power based on their skin color. Only recently now has there an interest in disassociating blackness from these Jews due to lighter-skinned Jews (and Europeans) generally find disdain in harmonizing blackness, especially African blackness with their culture and heritage.
Criticisms of the term
Most criticisms against the term are based on either a Eurocentric fear of its inclusion of others in the world outside of Africa and North America, or the use of hypodescent rules to try to classify anyone as black, due to the theory that somewhere down the line, everyone has a black ancestor no matter how far back in time one goes, even to the earliest prehistoric human days.
Many scholars criticize the hypodescent rule. Although others theorise that their motives for doing so are often to limit any social movement towards economic self-determination among black diaspora. The One Drop Rule, now villified by many Eurocentric scholars (especially when applied to ancient cultures by Afrocentric scholars), had been established by white politicans generations ago, to prevent racial mixing. This one drop rule, which white American, Australian, and, to a lesser extent, other colonies had established for the sake of upholding white society's perceptions of purity with its own identity, became the de facto social experience for black people across the United States.
For the sake of moral solidarity against the presumed immoral oppression, this rule was embraced by black people in America, especially in a Christian context, and the effect has become a permanent aspect of black identity. Once black literature and intellectual expression experienced a boom in the beginning of the 20th century, the hypodescent rule is said to have become a new threat to European colonial ambitions, and to white racial-social controls.
As time passed, so the theory goes, and Jim Crow laws of racial segregation were outlawed in the 1960s, some educated whites felt more and more that the significance of the one drop rule should also be de-emphasized due to the changing times. Their fear, it is claimed, was that the outcome of maintaining the hypodescent rule would cause every interracial union with a black person to lower the longterm population of whites in America, and Europe, whose population rates are flat for the projected future.
It is also claimed that the U.S. Census multiracial category was rejected as an outright attempt by the federal government of the United States to divide black people into subgroups similarily like Haiti and South Africa, where "colored" would be replaced with "bi-racial". Many Afrocentric movements reinforced the importance of the hypodescent effect within the borders of the United States for this reason, but reject applying the rule to others elsewhere, due to the ambigious identity of many mixed groups (Latinos, Arabs, some Asians). Some contend that this has been part of a generalized plan by white academics, feeling the need to remove the monolithic perspective of black identity in America and fearing a spread of black identity across the world through the media, especially in hip hop culture and Afrocentricism, to continually undermine the hypodescent rule.
The classical Negro vis-a-vis Afrocentricism
Much of the commentary about the blackness (or lack thereof) of a society or civilizaion revolves around the ideology that the most legitimate kind of black person should come from West Africa and have very specific negroid features. This "Classical Negro" argument for legitimacy is rooted in a Eurocentric philosophy that nebulously defines a person's blackness solely in contrast to their difference from an idolized variety of the Northeastern European.
This European look, (blonde hair, very aqualine nose, thin lips, round eyes of blue, angular features and a pronounced chin), has been the status quo standard that has created such a psychological impact upon the world, because it was forced upon so many as a social means of respectability, it became a subconscious standard for which most other cultures have tried to emulate. Eurocentric scholars, most notably those supporting a variety of Social Darwinism, tend to create a polar view of humanity, with the stereotypical view of the West African, large lips, black kinky hair, very wide nose, rounded features and an overbite, in opposition to the European idealized look.
This polarized propaganda in all of its varieties has been designed to support the Eurocentric view that all other groups in the world have contributed to the development of society and civilization proportional to their proximity to the Northeastern European type. Since the West African is viewed as the opposite of the idealized European type, the West African is considered the least contributive to world history.
The actual motivation of this view is based on residual prejudice against those of West African origin (Mainly African-Americans) who have been most effective in speaking out against Eurocentricism and white prejudice. Due to the influence of West African and African American intellectuals in the 20th Century, the white established racial views were under threat of being disassembled by the virtue of the ubiquitous one-drop rule, and by the fact that many ancient civilizations that were spoken of in the Bible, and respected in European society, had been discovered to be of substantial black and/or black African origin.
Most notably, the Egyptian society was viewed as a black society by Jean-François Champollion in his book "L'Egypte" in the mid 19th Century, and many black intellectuals had expounded on this observation. As time passed, more and more civilizations within Africa were discovered with indications that they colonized some areas of Asia and interacted with other ancient civilizations as equals. This realistic possibility became an educational threat to the perceived moral sensitivies of the white European caste systems throughout the world, as colonization was morally justified by Europeans based on their perceived civilized or technological experience.
These revelations, once discovered by black intellectuals, began a cascade effect in the 20th century of re-evaluating world cultures from an Afrocentric perspective. Eurocentric scholars responded by noting that West African societies, which the majority of American blacks are descended from, have not been a part of any intercontinental civilization and contributed very little towards any artistic, social or philosophical acheievement. Therefore, the "classical negro" became synonymous with "truly black" and used as a lightning rod against redefining Asian and ancient civilizations as "black".
Unfortunately many Afrocentric scholars, following this same faulty logic, tend to respond by finding any possible trace of West African heritage in any civilization. Both sides ignore the variations in West Africans and their very complex histories. Because of this, the issue deterioriates into a moral tug of war between Eurocentric scholarly view that stands morally against hypodescent, and the Afrocentric view, that morally emphasizes the founding and continual contributions of black Africans to Ancient Egyptian, and other societies, cultures and history.
Both views resort to diffusionism and the nebulousity of blackness to either include or exclude Ancient Egypt (and most East Indian, Asian, and East African cultures), by resorting to an extreme stereotype of the West African as the legitimate standard to determine "how" black a civilization or group of people are. In Ivan Sertima's defense of his thesis that black African people came to the West before Christopher Columbus, "Reply to my critics", he laid out 10 myths that he responds to, with the second addressing these misconceptions about West Africans and Egyptians, noting that the critics supporting the classical negro as a West African standard are ignorant of the variations of features of "pure blooded" West Africans.
In addition, it is clear that these critics do not apply the same standards of facial phenotype upon Europeans. A European with a large nose, curly hair, or tanned skin would not be considered "less" European, white, or Caucasoid than any other, but instead be considered another type of European. In the same manner, it is understood that Africans have a variety of features, none owing to a European, Arab or non-Black progenitor.
Renouncing blackness
Those who wish to be identified by either their national origin alone, or by a color term other than black are often considered "sellouts" by those who embrace their own black identity. It is often feared that these "sellouts" wish to socialize primarily with the colonizing elite and hide their own black heritage.
In the West, this is usually the root cause of recent divisions within Latino culture that are manifesting themselves politically (most notably in Cuba). Some may choose to suppress or renounce their black heritage for economic reasons, but the social effects are almost always the lowest common denominator: acceptance into the dominating elite earns respect and prestige and a feeling of meaningful accomplishment. By passing into white identity, those who renounce their blackness often feel that they are achieving a self-respect and dignity not possible within a black identity. The novel "Black No More" by George Schuyler exposes this underlying motivation, and is still considered an up-to-date commentary on the issue, and it also tackles the larger issue of recognizing race as a social construct and not a biological reality.
Some black individuals and some cultures of black African origin may take great effort to renounce their identity as well as to renounce or play down their own African ancestry while emphasizing the other heritage or cultural background present in their society. Latinozation and Arabization are the two most potent forces of de-Africanization, due to the lingering effects of colonization and racism imposed on their cultures by the colonial rulers of the past few centuries. The colonizing elite of Latin America, North Africa, and East Africa had universally applied the skin-color caste-system throughout their dominions, which emphasized the supposed virtues of the lighter-skinned peoples, and generated a shame of darker-skinned identity.
The ruling elite of the Middle East also encouraged this social policy, although to a lesser degree, and had been known as far back as the 8th century for enslaving black Africans. The Zanj Rebellion of Iraq (869 - 883) was an early slave insurrection that led to the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate. These rebellions had been caused by inhumane treatment of black African slaves sent to Iraq to drain salt marshes.
Over the centuries, lighter-skinned people were taught by the ruling powers to view themselves as one step above their darker-skinned countrymen. The policy to marginalize and exclude black people from equal and mutual respect, educational opportunity, and self-reliance became nearly a subconscious social policy throughout European-dominated societies. Because of this, throughout the modern era, black people, whether self-identified or not, are on average economically marginalized or at the lower rungs of the political and socio-economic structures of the countries they reside in. Although this is changing at a more rapid pace, black self-identity is constantly being re-evaluated in light of the economic impact it can have on one's well being.
Non-black perspectives
The term black is often used in the West to denote race for people of predominantly Sub-saharan African ancestry. The anthropological term for these peoples, now considered somewhat archaic, is Negroid; 'Africoid' is increasingly used instead. The U.S. Census racial definitions of white, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American use "original" to describe the ancestry. The black racial definition group omits the word 'original'. This exclusion of black people from recognition of an original heritage has kept the foundation of defining black people nebulous, and keeps the door open to misunderstandings and manipulation of black identity.
In the U.S., for example, a black person was defined by non-black white policymakers as one who had any visibly substantial black ancestry (whether familial or phenotypic), and virtually all of Africa, Egypt included, had been defined as black. Other peoples were classified as black in European-colonized countries.
Although once considered black or at least substantially black, the Philippines, Australia, India, Central America, Samoa, part of Italy and the Horn of Africa have now been removed, by the faulty reasoning of the same ruling establishments: that their proximity to West Africa is the primary factor in determining how black they should be considered.
Therefore a very dark-skinned Filipino, or an East Indian who may or may not be of African descent, is considered "less black" than an African American or an African whose skin color is lighter in complexion. Because of the vocal and social strength of African Americans, their identity has become the dominant standard outside of Africa, to which all other cultures outside of Africa are compared. This invariably causes problems in other cultures whose experiences are no less valid, yet whose relationship to the West African culture is not as strong, and whose cultures are not as polarized.
Many people think that a completely different, diluted use of the term is appropriate for other peoples who happen to have a dark skin, such as Indigenous Australians, New Guineans, Tamils, other darker peoples of the Indian subcontinent, some southeast Asians (namely of mixed or full Negrito descent) and various South Pacific Islanders and others. In Russia the name chornyye (чёрные, blacks) applies mostly not to Africans, but to people from the Caucasus, who are indeed dark skinned, contrary to what one might think given the use of the term Caucasian in the United States.
In many countries, there is still a strong (though weakening) social stigma against those persons identifying themselves as part of more than one perceived racial category. Hence, it may be truer to say that people who perceive themselves or are perceived by others as a member of a black cultural group often are called black. As noted above, this perception can be imposed by others or intrinsic and celebrated by those who perceive themselves to be black.
In the United States the term Negro (from negro, Spanish and Portuguese for 'black') was widely used until the 1960s, and remains a constituent part of the names of several Afro/African American organizations. Another term given currency at the time was coloured. However, following the black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the terms Negro and coloured usually were deemed derogatory and inappropriate. By contrast, "black" (which some considered a pejorative when 'Negro' was in widespread use) has gained increasing acceptance worldwide. In the United States, it is often used interchangeably with African American, a newer term preferred by many leaders and commentators. In Canada this is also used, as well as black Canadian. Some people find the term black offensive when used as a noun (a black) as opposed to an adjective (a black person).
In the United Kingdom, the term black Briton is sometimes used but it is more common to use an adjectival rather than a noun term and write about black British people. Occasionally, the term is loosely used to include British people of south Asian descent; additionally, the Arab based bank BCCI was perceived by many black British as a "black bank". See also: British Afro-Caribbean community. Very rarely the term has been used (e.g. in local government) to include all potential sufferers of racial prejudice — even white Irish immigrants — though this is seen by some as an example of political correctness.
In South Africa, the term blacks is used for the general black population, but since the country consists of different ethnic groups, they are often called by their ethnic names, e.g. Zulus, Xhosas, Basutos etc. In the Netherlands, something similar is often done, by naming blacks after their country of origin, e.g. Somaliër, Senegalese, Nigerian, Antillian or Surinamer, though it should be noted that the latter two can also refer to whites from the Netherlands Antilles or Surinam.
References
- Brandon S. Centerwall, "Race, Socioeconomic Status and Domestic Homicide, Atlanta, 1971-72," 74 AM. J. PUB. HLTH. 813, 815 (1984)
- Darnell F. Hawkins, "Inequality, Culture, and Interpersonal Violence," 12 HEALTH AFFAIRS 80 (1993)
- Jerome A. Neapolitan, "Cross-National Variation in Homicide; Is Race A Factor?" 36 CRIMINOLOGY 139 (1998)
- Ivan Van Sertima, "They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America
- Chancellor Williams, "Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.
- Quickfacts: US Census
- http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Black+race
- "Black Fella, White Fella", a song by The Warumpi Band, an Indigenous Australian rock band from Papunya, Northern Territory
- Dalit: The Black Untouchables of India, by V.T. Rajshekar
External links
- Black People and their place in World History
- Definition of African American from MedicineNet
- Article detailing the problems of defining African American
- Black men quietly combating stereotypes
- "Of Arms & the Law: Don Kates on Afro-American Homicide Rates"
- Scientific American Magazine (June 2006) Trace Elements Reconnecting African-Americans to an ancestral past.
- A Look Back at Slavery: Ivan Van Sertima On Cultural and Scientific Achievements in Africa