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File:Beautifulblackwoman.jpg
Black woman in Africa

This article presents the competing perspectives on what it means to be a black person based on a racial, socio-political, lexical, biological, and other viewpoints, and the historical context from which they emerged.

Historical background

The role of Ethiopians in defining ancient black identity

Although some scientists argue that Ethiopians resemble caucasoids more than negroids the term Ethiopian was originally synonymous with black, and they are widely considered Black today.

Professor Frank M. Snowden Jr. claims that terms like "Kushite", "Nubian", and "Ethiopian" were ancient synonyms for terms like "colored", "black, or Negro" and argues that Ethiopians were the founders of religion, and greatly influenced many of the customs of Egyptians who he argues, were descendants of the Ethiopians. "The experiences of Africans who reached the alien shores of Greece and Italy constituted an important chapter in the history of classical antiquity," he claims. Drawing on evidence from terra cotta figures, paintings, and sources like Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, Snowden contradicts modern assumptions, that Greco-Romans viewed Africans with racial contempt. According to Smowden, many Africans worked in the Roman Empire as musicians, artisans, scholars, and generals and also slaves, but Snowden argues that they were noted as much for their virtue as for their complexion which the Greeks described as a "burnt face" (from which the Greek name Ethiopian was derived)."

Although Ethiopians were the group by which the black race was originally defined and although Ethiopians have long been considered black because of their negroid skin and hair type, their racial status has recently been called into question. A 2001 Oxford genetic cluster study stated: 62% of the Ethiopians fall in the first cluster, which encompasses the majority of the Jews, Norwegians and Armenians, indicating that placement of these individuals in a 'Black' cluster would be an inaccurate reflection of the genetic structure. Only 24% of the Ethiopians are placed in the cluster with the Bantu and most of the Afro-Caribbeans. In addition some anthropologists have argued that their craniofacial features resemble those of Caucasoids. However the cause of their alleged genetic and physical resemblance to both Negroids and Caucasoids (terms not usually used by scientists today) may only partly be explained by admixture. Scientists believe that modern humans originated in Africa, and that all non-Africans carry a later mutation that occured in what is today known as Ethiopia. The man who first carried this mutation is known as the Eurasian Adam, and lived in what is today Ethiopia. .

According to Owen 'Alik Shahadah recent attempts to redefine Ethiopians as something other than black are Eurocentric: "Traditionally Europeans in their historical attempts to exclude Africa from civilization have hit upon an obstacle when Amharic exists in Ethiopia . To solve this apparent contradiction the argument moves to, 'it was introduced from another people.' At no point in time can Africans be allowed to be seen to have fostered anything, which Europe labels as artefacts of civilization. So either the invisible border comes into play and civilisations are assigned to North Africa ('non-Black') or alternatively, gifts given to Africans from external non-African sources."

Others argue that the type of prejudice Shahadah describes is a relatively recent phenomenon. Christian Delacampagne's L'Invention du racisme: Antiquité et Moyen-Age (1983), describes the origins of racism, and claims that most specialists agree with Snowden's view that neither the Greeks nor the Romans attached a special stigma to dark skin.

The role of the Bible in defining black people

Not everyone agrees that the ancient word was as color blind as Snowden suggests and some use Bible scriptures as evidence of racism in antiquity. 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 Christian, Jewish, 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.” Historians believe that by the 19th century, the belief that African-Americans were descended from Ham was used by Southern Christians 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.” A 1929 Jehovah’s Witnesses publication stated “The curse which Noah pronounced upon Canaan was the origin of the black race.” Despite such claims, author David M. Goldenberg denies that the bible is a racist document and blames such anti-black interpretations on post-biblical writers of antiquity like Philo and Origen who equated blackness with darkness of the soul. While scholars continue to debate how blacks were portrayed in the bible, many people believe that the tradition of dividing human kind into three major races: negroid, caucasoid, and mongoloid (now commonly called black, white, and Asian) is partly rooted in tales of Noah's three sons repopulating the Earth after the Deluge and giving rise to three separate races.

Age of Enlightenment: science defines the the black race

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach came up with the five color distribution of human races: White, Black, Yellow, Red, and Brown

Many argue that racism did not always exist, and that its origins can be traced to the Age of Enlightenment which gave rise to biological classifications and the theory of evolution.

The concept of “black” as a metaphor for race was first used at the end of the 17th century when a French doctor named Francois Bernier divided up humanity based on facial appearance and body type. He proposed four categories: Europeans, Far Easterners, Lapps, and finally Blacks who he described as having wooly hair, thick lips, and very white teeth. The first major scientific model was created in 18th century when Carolus Linnaeus recognized four main races: Europeanus which he labled the white race, Asiatic, which he labled the yellow race, Americanus, which he labled the red race, and Africanus, which he labeled the black race. According Linnaeus the black male could be defined by his skin tone, face structure, and curly hair. Linnaeus belived blacks were cunning, passive, inattentive, and ruled by impulse. To Linnaeus, black females were apparently shameless, because "they lactate profusely". Linnaeus' protege, anthropology founder Johann Blumenbach completed his mentor's color coded race model by adding the brown race, which he called "Malay" for Polynesisians and Melanesians of Pacific Islands, and for aborigines of Australia. According to Dinesh D'Souza, "Blumenbach's classification had a lasting influence in part because his categories neatly broke down into the familiar colors: white, black, yellow, red, and brown." Gradually the "yellow" and "red" races got lumped together, and the brown race ignored because of its small population, yielding just three races commonly known as mongoloid, caucasoid, and negroid. The last term is derived from Negro which is a Spanish adjective for black. Some anthropologists added the brown race back in as an Australoid category (which includes aboriginal peoples of Australia along with various peoples of southeast Asia, especially Melanesia and the Malay Archipelago), and viewed it as separate from negroids (often lumping Australoids in with caucasoids) despite the fact that their skin is also dark. By the 1970s the term black replaced negro in the United States.. Debate continues to exist over whether the term black should be capitalized or not as are other ethnic labels like Hispanic. Responding to the issue, Norm Goldstein, stylebook editor for the Associated Press stated “African-Americans, Hispanics, Arabs, and similar descriptions are considered nationalities (or dual nationalities), while 'black' and 'white' are the more commonly used terms for the Negroid and Caucasian races."

Current definitions

Because of the ancient, international, and often controversial history of labeling some human beings by the color black, defining who is black is not as easy it seems. Here are some recent attempts:

Socio-political definitions

  • The U.S. census say 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 provide written entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian."
  • South Africa's Black Ecomomic Empowerment Charter stated: "'Black people', 'black persons', or 'blacks' are generic terms which mean Africans, Coloureds and Indians who are South African citizens by birth or who have obtained citizenship prior 27 April 1994. This term does not include juristic persons or any form of enterprise other than a sole proprietor. However during apartheid, Blacks were defined by the pencil test, in which a pencil was speared through one's hair, and if it failed to slip out, one was categorized as Black.
  • According to psychologist Arthur Jensen, "American blacks are socially defined simply as persons who have some degree of sub-Saharan African ancestry and who identify themselves (or, in the case of children, are defined by their parents) as black or African-American"
  • According to activist Nirmala Rajasingam "I think the idea of a Black identity, was inspired by the Civil Rights movement in the US. Unfortunately, now Black is identified with people of African origin only, but it didn’t used to be that way. It was used as a political term of people of color uniting to fight racism. "
  • According to Frank W. Sweet, the most controversial answer to the question "who is black?" is "whoever looks black." He writes that although most who use the label rationalize it in terms of physical appearance, there is little objective consistency in this regard, and that different cultures can assign the same individual to opposite "races": North Americans, Haitians, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Barbadians, Jamaicans, and Trinidadians all have different subconscious and automatic perceptions of just what features define who belongs to which "racial" label.
  • "In this country, if you are not quite white, then you are black," said Jose Neinstein, a native white Brazilian and executive director of the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute in Washington. But in Brazil, he added, "If you are not quite black, then you are white."
  • According to America's one drop rule a black is any person with any known African ancestry.

Lexical definitions

  • Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines the term ‘black’ with regard to race as follows: "a person belonging to a dark-skinned race or one stemming in part from such a race; esp. Negro".
  • YourDictionary.com defines Black with regard to race as "Of or belonging to a racial group having brown to black skin, especially one of African origin: the Black population of South Africa"

Biological definitions

To those who define black genetically, the Sahara desert divided the human gene pool into blacks and non-blacks.
  • According to Michael Levin "Ordinary speakers acquainted with the out-of-Africa scenario are most charitably construed as intending 'Negroid' to denote individuals whose ancestors 15 to 5000 generations ago (with Harris & Hey, 1999, counting a generation as 20 years) were sub-Saharan African...Hybrid populations with multiple lines of descent are to be characterized in just those terms: as of multiple descent. Thus, American Negroids are individuals most of whose ancestors from 15 to 5000 generations ago were sub- Saharan African. Specifying 'most' more precisely in a way that captures ordinary usage may not be possible. '> 50%' seems too low a threshold; my sense is that ordinary attributions of race begin to stabilize at 75%." University of Western Ontario professor J. Phillipe Rushton states "a Negroid is someone whose ancestors, between 4,000 and (to accommodate recent migrations) 20 generations ago, were born in sub-Saharan Africa.".
  • Sally Satel of the Policy Review stated “The entities we call ‘racial groups’ essentially represent individuals united by a common descent — a huge extended family, as evolutionary biologists like to say. Blacks, for example, are a racial group defined by their possessing some degree of recent African ancestry (recent because, after all, everyone of us is out of Africa, the origin of Homo sapiens).".
  • Page 42 of the abridged version of "Race, Evolution, and Behavior" states: "In both everyday life and evolutionary biology, a 'Black' is anyone most of whose ancestors were born in sub-Saharan Africa".

Alternative view points

File:Owenshahadah.jpg
Owen Alik Shahadah finds both the term "black people" and "sub-Saharan" offensive

Many people feel that being Black is too complex an issue to be adequately captured by any of the standard definitons:

  • Lewis R. Gordan (Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Temple University) says "Not all people who are designated African in the contemporary world are also considered black anywhere. And similarly, not all people who are considered in most places to be black are considered African anywhere. There are non-black Africans who are descended from more than a millennia of people living on the African continent, and there are indigenous Pacific peoples and peoples of India whose consciousness and life are marked by a black identity".
  • Psychiatrist Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye says "being dark skinned is a widespread phenomenon which does not define any specific group of human beings. The tendency to reserve the designation black to sub-Saharan Africans and people of their extraction is manifestly misinformed".
  • Cultural writer and filmmaker Owen 'Alik Shahadah adds "the notion of some invisible border, which divides the North of African from the South, is rooted in racism, which in part assumes that a little sand is an obstacle for African people. This barrier of sand hence confines/confined Africans to the bottom of this make-believe location, which exist neither politically or physically". Shahadah argues that the term sub-Saharan Africa is a product of European imperialism, "Sub-Saharan Africa is a byword for primitive African: a place, which has escaped advancement. Hence, we see statements like 'no written languages exist in Sub-Saharan Africa.' 'Egypt is not a Sub-Saharan African civilisation.'"
  • Activist Nirmala Rajasingam also considers most standard definitions of Black too narrow: "It was a failure because it divided the Black community into its constituent parts.. into Jamaican or Punjabi or Sri Lankan Tamil and so on, rather than build up Black unity.. But you know, there are young Asians who would like to call themselves Black, but the African youth will say 'You are not Black, you are Asian. We are Black'. Similarly, there are young Asians who will say 'We are not Black, we are Asian.'. So it has all become diluted and depoliticized."
  • Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop also feels that the standard conceptions of Black people fall short stating: "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."

Criticism

There are objections to the standard definitions of black people, as well as criticisim of the term itself. Owen 'Alik Shahadah says "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." But that's not his only objection:"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".

Gallery

See also

References

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  16. The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza pg 123, 1995
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  19. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, pg 402, 1996
  20. The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza, pg 124, 1995
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  31. Lines. August 2002. Retrieved on 2006-10-08.
  32. This section was adapted from Chapter 3 of Frank W. Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule (Palm Coast FL: Backintyme, 2005) ISBN 0939479230, which contains the citations and references. An abridged version, with endnotes is available online at The Perception of "Racial" Traits.
  33. [[http://www.raceandhistory.com/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid1041125920,38891,.shtml
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  43. African-American Philosophy, Race, and the Geography of Reason
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