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Black people or blacks is a racial, political, sociological or cultural classification of people. No people are literally black, but many people who have dark skin color are considered black. A variety of sociopolitical and biological factors are used to define categories of black people.

Some assert that only people of relatively recent African descent are black, while others argue that black may refer to individuals with dark skin color regardless of ethnic origin.

The human race

Main article: Race and genetics

Early scientists such as Carlton Coon had initially believed the different races to have evolved separately over millions of years and that racial differences were thus extremely significant. In recent decades however, evidence has suggested that the major races had split less than 100,000 years ago, making all humans far more genetically related than previously believed.

Recent breakthroughs in science and the mapping of the human genome have helped dispel many of the previous myths about race. 99.9% of any one person's DNA is exactly the same as any other person regardless of ethnicity. Twins are an exception as the their DNA is a 100% match. Of the remaining 0.1% variation, there is an 8% variation between ethnic groups within a race, such as between the French and the Dutch. Only 7 percent of all human genetic variation lies on average between major human races such as those of Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. 85% of all genetic variation lies within any local group.Thus there is more genetic variation within a race than between the various "races."

Although skin color and appearance is an arbitrary way to classify race, and although most biologists believe that human racial differences are too small to qualify races as separate sub-species, some scholars argue that when modern humans spread out of Africa to populate the Earth, they bred for many generations in substantial isolation from one another, allowing genetic differences to build up between groups historically separated by deserts, mountains, and oceans, and that these differences have implications in medical science. Modern theories recognize several major genetic clusters: sub-Saharan Africans; Caucasians, including people from Europe, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East; Asians, including people from China, Japan, the Philippines and Siberia; Pacific Islanders; and Native Americans.

Much of human genetic variation is actually found in non functional DNA(junk DNA) which means that functional DNA has an even lower amount of variation. Scientists often use a selection genetic markers found in the non functional DNA to determine a persons ancestry. These genetic markers are deliberately selected as they cluster around the different population and are maximally informative. Thus they can be used to determine a person's intermixture proportions.

Single origin hypothesis

The low level of genetic variation across populations surprised many in the scientific community. Scientists believe the reason for this low level of variation is because the entire world population of 6.5 billion is descended from a small group of people, probably numbering no more than 2000, who lived in Africa 70,000 years ago. From this small group, an even smaller group left Africa by crossing the Red Sea and proceeded to populate the rest of the world. The differences in physical appearance between the various peoples of the world is as a result of adaptations to the different environments that the early pioneers who left Africa made in order to conquer the new lands they travelled to.

The African population retains the greater genetic diversity. Even though all Africans share a skin color that is dark relative to other peoples of the world, they actually differ significantly in physical appearance. Examples include the Dinka, some of the tallest people in the world and the Mbuti, the shortest people in the world. Others such as the Khoisan people have epicanthal fold similar to the peoples of Central Asia. A recent study found that Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest within population human skin color diversity.

Dark skin

Further information: ]

Scientists now believe that first humans appeared in Africa between 100,000 to 200, 000 years ago. Dark skin helped protect against skin cancer that develops as a result of ultraviolet light radiation causing mutations in the skin. Furthermore dark skin prevents an essential B vitamin, folate, from being destroyed. Therefore in the absence of modern medicine and diet, a person with dark skin in the tropics would live longer, be more healthy and more likely to reproduce than a person with light skin. Scientists point to the fact that white Australians have some of the highest rates of skin cancer as evidence of this expectation. Conversly, as dark skin prevents sunlight from penetrating the skin it hinders the production of vitamin D₃. Hence when humans migrated to less sun-intensive regions in the north, low vitamin D₃ levels became a problem and lighter skin colors started appearing. The people of Europe, who have low levels of melanin, naturally have an almost colorless skin pigmentation, especially when untanned. This low level of pigmentation allows the blood vessels to become visible and gives the characteristic pale pink color of white people. The difference in skin color between black and whites is however a minor genetic difference accounting for just one letter in 3.1billion letters of DNA.

Africans in the Americas

Approximately 12 million Africans were forcibly shipped to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade from 1492 to 1888. Today their descendants number approximately 150 million. Many have a multiracial background of African, Amerinidian, European and Asian ancestry. The various regions developed complex social conventions with which their multiethnic populations were classified.

Black in the United States

In the first 200 years that blacks had been in the US they commonly referred to themselves as Africans. With the end of the slave trade in 1807 the vast majority of blacks were US born therefore the term African became obsolete. Negro and colored became the more popular terms until the late 1960s. In the 1963 I Have a Dream speech Dr. Martin Luther King uses the term Negro 15 times and black four times. With the successes of the civil rights movement a new term was needed to break from the past and help shed the reminders of legalized discrimination. In place of Negro, black was promoted as standing for racial pride, militancy and power. Some of the turning points included Kwame Toure's (Stokely Carmichael) use of the term Black Power and the release of James Brown's song "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud".

In 1988 Jesse Jackson urged Americans to use the term African American because the term has a historical cultural base. Since then African American and black have essentially a coequal status. Surveys show that when interacting with each other African Americans prefer the term black, as it is associated with intimacy and familiarity. The term "African American" is preferred for public and formal use.

One drop rule

According to the United States' colloquial term one drop rule, a black is any person with any known African ancestry. The one drop rule is virtually unique to the United States and was applied almost exclusively to blacks. Outside of the US, definitions of who is black vary from country to country but generally, multiracial people are not required by society to identify themselves as black. The most significant consequence of the one drop rule was that many African Americans who had significant European ancestry, whose appearance was very European, would identify themselves as black.

The one drop rule originated as a racist attempt to keep the white race pure, however one of its unintended consequences was uniting the African American community and preserving an African identity. Some of the most prominent civil rights activists were multiracial but yet stood up for equality for all. It is said the W.E.B. Du Bois could have easily passed for white yet he became the preeminent scholar in Afro-American studies. He chose to spend his final years in Africa and immigrated to Ghana where he died aged 95. Other scholars such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass both had white fathers. Even the more radical activists such as Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan both had white grandparents.

Many people in the United States are increasingly rejecting the one drop rule, and are questioning whether even as much as 50% black ancestry should be considered black. Although politician Barack Obama self-identifies as black, 55 percent of whites and 61 percent of Hispanics classified him as biracial instead of black after being told that his mother is white. Blacks were less likely to acknowledge a multiracial category, with 66% labeling Obama as black. However when it came to Tiger Woods, only 42% of African-Americans described him as black, as did only 7% of White Americans.

Race in Brazil

Main article: Race in Brazil

Unlike in the United States race in Brazil is based on skin color and physical appearance rather ancestry. A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only two categories to choose from. Between a pure black and a very light mulatto over a dozen racial categories would be recognized in conformity with the combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and no one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred to appearance, not heredity.

In addition class plays role in definitions as one can move up the color ladder as one's economic status improves. In Mulato: negro-não-negro e/ou branco-não-branco, the author remembers going to take an exam in order to be admitted into a teaching establishment as a teacher and seeing the nurse mark on her file "branca". When she attempted to correct the nurse, telling her, "I am not white, I am black" the nurse became incensed and responded, "But you are a professor!".

Statistics

Demographics of Brazil
Year	White	brown	black
1835	24.4%	18.2%	51.4%
2000	53.7%	38.5%	6.2%

From the year 1500 to 1850 an estimated 3.5 million Africans were forcibly shipped to Brazil. An estimated 80 million Brazilians, almost half the population, are at least in part descendants of these Africans. Brazil has the largest population of Afro-descendants outside of Africa. In contrast to the US there were no segregation or anti-miscegenation laws in Brazil. As a result miscegenation has affected a large majority of the Brazilian population. Even much of the white population has either African or Amerindian blood. According to the last census 54% identified themselves as white, 6.2 % identified themselves as black and 39.5 % identified themselves as Pardo (brown)- a broad multiracial category.

A philosophy of whitening emerged in Brazil in the 19th century. Until recently the government did not keep data on race. However statisticians estimate that in 1835 half the population was black , one fifth was Pardo (brown) and one fourth white. By 2000 the black population had fallen to only 6.2% and the Pardo had increased to 40% and white to 55%. Essentially most of the black population was absorbed into the multiracial category by miscegenation.

Discrimination

Because of the ideology of miscegenation, Brazil has avoided the polarization of Society into black and white. The bitter and sometimes violent racial tensions that divide the US are notably absent in Brazil. However the philosophy of the racial democracy in Brazil has drawn criticism from some quarters. Brazil has one of the largest gaps in income distribution in the world. The richest 10% of the population earn 28 times the average income of the bottom 40%. The richest 10 percent is almost exclusively white. One-third of the population lives under the poverty line of which blacks and browns account for 70 percent of the poor.

In the US blacks earn 75% of what what whites earn, in Brazil blacks and browns earn less than 50% of what whites earn. Some have posited that Brazil does in fact practice the one drop rule when social economic factors are considered. This because the gap income between blacks and browns is relatively small compared with the large gap between whites and non-whites. Other factors such as illiteracy and education level show the same patterns. Unlike in the US where African Americans were united in the civil rights struggle, in Brazil the philosophy of whitening has helped divide blacks from browns and prevented a more active civil rights movement.

Though Afro-Brazilians make up half the population there are very few black politicians. The city of Bahia for instance is 80% afro-brazilian but has never had a black mayor. Critics indicate that in US cities like Detroit and New Orleans that have a black majority, have never had white mayors since first electing black mayors in the 1970s. This has lead some to advocate for the use of the Portuguese term 'negro' to encompass both browns and blacks so as to renew a black consciousness and identity, in effect an African descent rule.

The Arab world

File:Sadat5.jpg

The mother of Anwar Sadat, Egypt's third President, was Sudanese

According to Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, Afro-multiracials in the Arab world self-identify in ways that resemble Latin America. Moore recalled that a film about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had to be canceled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. (In fact, the 1983 television movie Sadat, starring Louis Gossett, Jr., was not canceled; although the Egyptian government refused to let the drama air in Egypt, partially on the grounds of the casting of Gossett, the objections did not come from Sadat, who had been assassinated two years earlier.) Sadat, considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore claimed that black-looking Arabs, much like black looking Latin Americans consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry. Similarly, 19th century slave trader Tippu Tip is often identified as Arab despite having an unmixed African mother, in part because of patrilineality.

According to J. Phillipe Rushton, Arab relations with blacks whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1000 years could be summed up as follows:

Although the Koran stated that there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most respected, the "Zanj" (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.

In general, Arabs had a more positive view of black women than black men, even if the women were of slave origin. More black women were taken across the Sahara to North Africa than men, and some even gave birth to the children of Arab rulers. When an enslaved woman became pregnant with her Arab captor's child, she became “umm walad” or “mother of a child” , a status that granted her privileged rights. The child, however, would have prospered from the wealth of the father and been given rights of inheritance. Because of patrilineality, the children were born free and sometimes even became successors to their ruling fathers, as was the case with Sultan A˛mad al-Manßür, (whose mother was a Fulani concubine), who ruled Morocco from 1578-1608. Such tolerance, however, was not extended to wholly black persons, even when technically "free," and the notion that to be black meant to be a slave became a common belief.

Apartheid era in South Africa

Main article: Coloureds

This extended family has too much non-African descent to have been classified as black under South Africa's former apartheid laws.

In South Africa during the apartheid era, the population was classified into four groups: Black, White, Asian (mostly Indian), and Coloured. The Coloured group included people of mixed Bantu, Khoisan, and European descent (with some Malay ancestry, especially in the Western Cape).There is still much discomfort in publicly discussing the Coloured identity in South Africa. Even the use of the term coloured is quite sensitive. The Coloureds occupy an intermediary position between blacks and whites in South Africa.

The apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria in the Population Registration Act to determine who belonged in which group. Minor officials administered tests to enforce the classifications. When it was unclear from a person's physical appearance whether a person was to be considered colored or black, the pencil test was employed. This involved inserting a pencil in a person's hair to determine if the hair was kinky enough for the pencil to get stuck.

During the apartheid era the coloureds were also oppressed and discriminated against. However they did have limited rights and overall had slightly better socioeconomic conditions than blacks. In the post apartheid era the government's policies of affirmative action have favored blacks over coloureds. Some Black South Africans openly state that coloureds did not suffer as much as they did during apartheid. The popular saying by coloured south africans to illustrate this dilema is

Not white enough under apartheid and not black enough under the ANC

Other than by appearance coloureds can be distinguished from blacks by language. Most speak Afrikaans or English as a first language as opposed to Bantu tribal languages such as Zulu or Xhosa. They also tend to have more European sounding names than Bantu names.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is the term used to describe African countries located south of the Sahara desert. It is used as a cultural and ecological distinction from North Africa. Because the indigenous people of this region are primarily dark skinned it is sometimes used to indentify them from North African Arabs. Some criticize the use of the term in defining Africans because the Sahara desert spans across many countries such as Chad, Mali, Sudan, Niger, and Mauritania that belong to both North Africa and Sub-Saharan africa.

Some also argue that it is a racist code word. Owen 'Alik Shahadah argues that the term sub-Saharan Africa is a product of European imperialism:

Sub-Saharan Africa is a racist byword for "primitive", a place which has escaped advancement. Hence, we see statements like “no written languages exist in Sub-Saharan Africa.” “Ancient Egypt was not a Sub-Saharan African civilization.” Sub-Sahara serves as an exclusion, which moves, jumps and slides around to suit negative generalization of Africa.

Map depicting the geographical origins of racial classifications as used by the United States Census Bureau in 2000. Self identification options also included "Some other race" and the option of selecting one or more races.

The U.S. census race definitions says a black is a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "Black, African Am., or Negro," or who provide written entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian. However, the Census Bureau notes that these classifications are socio-political constructs and should not be interpreted as scientific or anthropological.

Black as a controversial ethnic term

Owen 'Alik Shahadah has criticized the term black itself, saying:

As a political term it was fiery and trendy but never was it an official racial classification of peoples who have a 120,000 year old history. Indians are from India, Chinese from China. There is no country called Blackia or Blackistan. Hence, the ancestry-nationality model is more respectful and accurate: African-American, African-British, African-Brazilian, and African-Caribbean.

Shahadah has stated, "in addition, because it is a term placed on us, we have no bases for its control, and hence they are able to say; 'Ancient Egyptians weren't black.' Black has no meaning; except the meaning they place on it, if and when they chose."

Ethnic terms are usually capitalized but because they are modified versions of countries or continents, but because black is a "color" used to describe a geographic ancestry, there is some controversy as to whether the word black should be capitalized when referring to a racial group. Section 8.43 of the Chicago Manual of Style calls for the use of lowercase letters when referring to race by color (e.g. black people, white people). Some scholars feel that such racial terms denote a special significance, especially the term black, and thus elect to capitalize.

Afrocentric perspective

Afrocentric scholars provide a middle ground between those who limit blackness to African descent and those who extend it to all dark skinned people by arguing that both view points are correct in that all dark skinned peoples are fundamentally Africoid in phenotype, regardless of how long their ancestors may have lived outside of Africa. Senegalise historian and anthropologist Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop states:

There are two well-defined Black races: one has a black skin and woolly hair; the other also has black skin, often exceptionally black, with straight hair, aquiline nose, thin lips, an acute cheekbone angle. We find a prototype of this race in India: the Dravidian. It is also known that certain Nubians likewise belong to the same Negro type... Thus, it is inexact, anti-scientific, to do anthropological research, encounter a Dravidian type, and then conclude that the Negro type is absent.

Afrocentrist historian Runoko Rashidi has argued that all dark-skinned ethnicities are part of a "global African community"

Some genetic studies challenge Afrocentric theories that Australians, Indics and Papuans are Africoid. Other writers such as Ruggles Gates argued that such peoples were archaic Caucasoid offshoots. Modern DNA research challenges this categorizing however, and places peoples lilke Australoids closer to regions near Australia and India such as Southeast Asian populations, rather than Africa. A number of scholars have often noted phenotypical similarities between the Australoid and Indic peoples and those of Africa, such as skin color, hair texture etc.

While Afrocentric scholars don't deny that dark skinned peoples of India, South East Asia, and the Pacific Islands are part of the branch of humanity that left Africa perhaps more than 100,000 years ago, and are thus genetically much closer to Europeans and Asians than to sub-Saharan Africans, Afrocentrics still grant them membership in the black race because Afrocentrics believe they have retained and preserved the racial traits of Africa unlike other non-Africans who Afrocentrics believe morphed into other races.

Emphasis on racial classifications

File:East - Fulbe.JPG

Fulani Women in Africa

Although there is no defined genetic definition of race, let alone an African race, some researchers have claimed that the global human population can be divided into non-discrete overlapping sub-populations. The authors of one American research article identify six such sub-populations, and one of the regions corresponds to Africa. The authors do not claim that their research supports the concept of an African race. Their report only refers to geographic region of origin, and makes no claims for human subspecies or racial classification. The article states:

Our evidence for clustering should not be taken as evidence of our support of any particular concept of "biological race." In general, representations of human genetic diversity are evaluated based on their ability to facilitate further research into such topics as human evolutionary history and the identification of medically important genotypes that vary in frequency across populations.

Stanford University human genetics professor Neil Risch and three other scientists have argued that human populations in their research clustered into five continental groups. One of those groups was the African branch, which includes three sub-Saharan populations: "CAR pygmies, Zaire pygmies, and the Lisongo". They stated:

More recently, a survey of 3,899 SNPs in 313 genes based on US populations (Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics) once again provided distinct and non-overlapping clustering of the Caucasian, African-American and Asian samples...The results confirmed the integrity of the self-described ancestry of these individuals"

Several writers have called for a wider view of black genetic diversity, similar to that followed with other populations, although they focus on African peoples and do not include Australoid or Indic groupings. Studies in this area should acknowledge the wide range of variation within the "black" group, argue Kittles and Keita in The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence as opposed to putting them into apriori groupings. On a broader scale, part of this call challenges all racial categorizing (including that involving Australoid or Indic populations) given the claim that human genetic variation accounted for by race is a low percentage (6-10%).

As Brown and Armelagos (2001) put it: "In light of this, the low proportion of genetic variance across racial groupings strongly suggests a re-examination of the race concept. It no longer makes sense to adhere to arbitrary racial categories, or to expect that the next genetic study will provide the key to racial classifications." Such approaches challenges some traditional schools of racial categorizing, as well as some Afrocentric formulations.

Diop states on the dynamics of the Black race:

But it is only the most gratuitous theory which considers the Dinka, the Nuer and the Masai, among others, to be Caucasoids. What if an African ethnologist were to persist in recognising as white only the blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians, and systematically refused membership to the remaining Europeans, and Mediterraneans in particular--the French, Italians, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese? Just as the inhabitants of Scandinavia and the Mediterranean countries must be considered as two extreme poles of the same anthropological reality, so should the Negroes of East and West Africa be considered as the two extremes in the reality of the Negro world. To say that a Shillouk, a Dinka, or a Nuer is a Caucasoid is for an African as devoid of sense and scientific interest as would be, to a European, an attitude which maintained that a Greek or a Latin were not of the same race.

Biblical perspective

Further information: ]

According to some historians, the tale in Genesis 9 in which Noah cursed the descendants of his son Ham with servitude was a seminal moment in defining black people, as the story was passed on through generations of Jewish, Christian and Islamic scholars. According to columnist Felicia R. Lee, "Ham came to be widely portrayed as black; blackness, servitude and the idea of racial hierarchy became inextricably linked." Some people believe that the tradition of dividing humankind into three major races is partly rooted in tales of Noah's three sons repopulating the Earth after the Deluge and giving rise to three separate races.

The biblical passage, Book of Genesis 9:20-27, which deals with the sons of Noah however makes no reference to race. The reputed curse of Ham is not on Ham, but on Canaan, one of Ham's sons. This is not a racial but geographic referent. The Canaanites, typically associated with the region of the Levant (Palestine, Lebanon, etc) were later subjugated by the Hebrews when they left bondage in Egypt according to the Biblical narrative. The alleged inferiority of Hamitic descendants also in not supported by the Biblical narrative, nor claims of three races in relation to Noah's sons. Shem for example seems a linguistic not racial referent. In short the Bible does not define blacks, nor assign them to racial hierarchies.

Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that blacks were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery. According to Benjamin Braude, a professor of history at Boston College, "in 18th- and 19th century Euro-America, Genesis 9:18-27 became the curse of Ham, a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery."

Author David M. Goldenberg contends that the Bible is not a racist document. According to Goldenberg, such racist interpretations came from post-biblical writers of antiquity like Philo and Origen, who equated blackness with darkness of the soul.

Population information and distribution

There is no agreed upon definition of who is black so few current global estimates of the black population are available. The population reference bureau has the population of sub-Saharan Africa at 767 million in 2006. Currently there are a number of non-indigenous peoples who living in sub-Saharan Africa. Examples include 4-5 million of European descent, 1 million of Indian descent in South Africa, and 800,000 of Indian descent in Mauritius. Information from country profiles of the CIA fact book shows that the total non-indigenous population of sub-Saharan Africa is no more than 10 million.

In the Americas there may be as many as 150 million people living in the Americas who are part of the African Diaspora, no more than half identify themselves as Black. Many Afro-descendants, particularly in Latin America are multiracial of black, Amerindian and white lineage. In Brazil for instance, only 5.4% of the total population identify themselves as black.

Some consider the dark skinned peoples of Oceania black. Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and surrounding islands have indigenous populations of approximately 6 million. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated the population of Indigenous Australians to be 469,000 in 2006.

In Israel about 110,000 people are either members of the black Jewish group known as the Beta Israel, or Falasha Mura, as well as a few thousand members of the black Hebrew movement (see Jewish ethnic divisions).