Black people

Black, also referred to as Negro or Colored (which is generally considered offensive) (noun, black or blacks; adjective, black people), is a color-defined 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. The Spanish word Negro which came from the Latin word Nigris, which eventually came to denote the color black, originally was a geographic designation. The natives of what is today Nigeria were referred to by the Romans regarding their proximity to the River Niger. The Berber name of the river is Gher-n-gher. The Romans apparently Latinized the Berber name to Niger or Nigris. Hence, the people who lived around the river became known, in Latin, as the Nigritae. Eventually, the dark waters of the Niger and the dark skin of the Nigritae would combine in Roman vernacular to replace the ancient Latin word for black (ater). Negro eventually came to mean "black colored" in Latin and in its descendant languages. In the colonial era, this term was then applied in European discourse to multiple peoples around the world, who would subsequently be called black as well.

The English word was spawned by the European colonization and conquest of non-Europeans. It solidified into popular culture during the Enlightenment as one of the four major categories into which European philosophers tried to organize the newly discovered human diversity. The categories were based upon skin tone as perceived by Europeans of the time: Red (Native Americans), Yellow (East Asians), White (Europeans), and Black (Africans). Today, the term's usage differs slightly among former European colonies. Latin Americans, former members of the British Empire, and Americans (USA) all use the term differently. The term is most often applied today in three ways. First, it denotes people who are seen as part of the African Diaspora. Second, it is also applied to native non-European people lacking African ancestry but who were labeled as "Black" by their colonizers. Third, it has been internalized as an ethno-political rallying label by leaders of oppressed and marginalized populations in several regions around the world. A fourth criterion (who "looks black") is less useful because it is subjective.

The equivalent Biblical Hebrew term was "Kushite" (Hebrew: כושי), originally a georaphical term derived from Kush, the region roughly corresponding to today's Sudan, but it came to denote skin color (Jeremia 13, 23:"Can the Kushite change his skin, or the leopard his spots?").

In the Bible it was not a term of abuse, but in contemporary Israel came to have a pejorative meaning, espcially since the 1990's when there arrrived in the country both a considerable number of black-skinned Ethiopian Jews (who are full citizens in law but encounter prejudice from some other Israelis) and of migrant workers from various African countries (who both encounter some social prejudice and have a very precarious legal position, a considerable part being considered illegal aliens).

Currently, the more polite term is "Shahor" (Hebrew: שחור), Hebrew for "Black", adopted in conscious emulation of the English-language usage.

Usage differs among former European colonies

There are subtle differences among former colonial cultures in how the term is used. Once-colonial cultures, such as the Spanish and Portuguese, that lacked an endogamous barrier between the descendants of Europeans and the descendants of Africans seldom use the term as an ethno-racial label. Those with weak or three-caste endogamous barriers, such as the French, Dutch, and British distinguish between Black and Coloured. The only land with a single two-caste color line, the United States, uses the term to denote a semi-voluntary ethnic self-identity. (Semi-voluntary because if you "look White" to the average American you have a choice; if you "look Black" to the average American you do not have a choice.)

Former Iberian colonies do not use the label to denote groups

Latin American societies, including those of the Spanish Caribbean, have always lacked endogamous color lines. Every Hispanic resides on an Afro-Amerind-European continuum where status depends on wealth, breeding, education, and political power as well as phenotype. Latin American countries typically have three economic classes: A lower class of agricultural peasants and urban poor; a middle class of landowning farmers and urban craftsmen; and an upper class of wealthy professionals, educators, or the politically powerful. The structure has a strong hereditary component. It is rigid, offers little social mobility, and is often harsh or unjust. Nevertheless, despite significant class/skin-tone correlation, it has no color line in the sense of endogamy. Enforced Black/White endogamy is impossible in Latin America because nearly every Hispanic has immediate blood relatives who are more African-looking and others who are more European-looking than himself. Spanish contains about a dozen words to denote various blends of Afro-European appearance: prieto, criollo, blanquito, mulato, moreno, trigueño, mestizo, jabao, marrano, etc. Brazilian Portuguese has an equivalent set of terms. Yet, none of these terms has the denotation that "black" has in English, French, or Dutch. In fact, the word negro/a in many Latin American countries is seldom used to denote appearance. It is simply a common term of endearment, like the English honey. It is used by affectionate couples, even those who look entirely European.

Former British colonies apply the label to people darker than Europeans

In South Africa, Coloured denotes both an intermediate group between White and Black ("Mixed-race" people, in UK terminology), and the Khoisan who are lighter skinned indigenous southern Africans. During the Apartheid-era, for example, segregation and endogamy were enforced between each of its four groups: Black, White, Coloured and Asian. This often confused African-American visitors, who tried to associate with locals who were members of South Africa's Coloured group. The problem was that the Black group in the United States includes what South Africans consider two distinct groups: Black plus Coloured. In apartheid South Africa, association between members of the Black and Coloured endogamous groups was forbidden. Even today, after the ending of apartheid, South Africa's four endogamous groups, whose segregation was formerly enforced by criminal law, still maintain largely separate political allegiances, cultures, languages and customs. Nevertheless, South Africa's social barriers are more permeable than in the United States. During apartheid, South Africans routinely switched group membership by requesting it from their local Race Classification Boards. Although the bureaucracy was cumbersome and inconsistent, it enabled change. Individuals were often classified differently from their siblings and parents, and some people changed more than once. South Africans could appeal local reclassification decisions to the national Population Registration Board, thence to the Supreme Court. Like U.S. draft boards of the 1970s, South Africa’s local Race Classification Boards reflected local public opinion and often found it helpful to cooperate with those wanting to upgrade from Black to Coloured or Coloured to White. School principals of schools for children of the White endogamous group could keep up enrollments (and funding) by getting some Coloured children reclassified as White members, but if they pushed too hard, they risked having the whole school reclassified as a school for members of the Coloured endogamous group.

Coloured people in the British West Indies also form an intermediate group between Europeans and those of strong African appearance. Neither status within the group nor movement between groups was ever as institutionalized as in South Africa. Nevertheless, their membership criteria differ both from the United States and from South Africa. Europeans in the British West Indies often marry locals who physically appear to be European but have known partial African ancestry. Similarly, White clubs were closed to members of the Coloured group in the early colonial period, and members of this middle group were not allowed to vote, hold public office, hold military commissions, marry members of the White group, or inherit significant property from a member of the White group, but by the year 1733, these restrictions had been lifted for the intermediate group in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad. The restrictions continued in effect for Blacks until the twentieth century.

Legislation, court decisions, and social custom in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados treated members of the Coloured group as distinct from members of the Black group. According to one scholar, "The English… encountered the problem of race mixture in very different contexts in their several colonies; they answered it in one fashion in their West Indian islands, and in quite another in their colonies on the continent," and, "The contrast offered by the West Indies is striking." In post-emancipation Jamaica, the beleaguered White population allied with the Coloured elite (the descendants of the famous Maroons) to keep down the free Blacks. A Barbadian historian wrote, "In August 1838, some 83,000 blacks, 12,000 coloureds, and 15,000 whites, embarked on a social course which the ruling elite hoped to charter." A historian of Trinidad wrote, "The people of colour were marginal to Caribbean society: neither black nor white, neither African nor European…." Today, West Indian immigrants to England assimilate into mainstream society within a generation or two.

Another way that terminology in the former British Empire differs from, say, Iberian or U.S. customs, is in applying the term to populations that were not part of the African Diaspora of 1500-1900. Most former colonial cultures apply Black only to descendants of the African Diaspora of 1500-1900, but former British colonials, in contrast, apply the label to all colonial subjects of distinctly darker complexion than Europeans. Australian society labels Indigenous Australians as Black. There is some evidence that the Aeta of the Philippines have come to be known as "Black" since U.S. domination. The European name for the indigenous inhabitants of Asian locations such as the Andaman Islands and Malaysia as Negrito, implies their perception of them as Black, largely due to their Africoid phenotypes. It should be noted, however, that these populations are as long-separated from Africa as are the people of the Americas, Europe, or farther north in Asia. This was not known, however, before DNA science of very recent times. (More about these cultures momentarily.)

U.S. society equates the label with black African and African-American ethnicity

An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or black), is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. Many African Americans also have European and/or Native American ancestry as well. The term tends to refer to West African ancestries; not, for example, to white or Arab African ancestry, such as Moroccan or white South African ancestry. This is so even though there is huge genetic variation among the various inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa, as much if not more so as among the afforementioned groups. It is not clear if an American descendant of a Khoisan, Ethiopian, or Somali immigrant to America would be considered part of this community, as their ancestors were not brought as slaves to the Americas from Western Africa, like the majority of Americans of African ancestry, and they have distinct phenotypic characteristics from West Africans. Members of the African Diaspora from non-African countries such as Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba (although they are logically African Americans, since they are located in the Americas and are descendants of Africans, with some admixture from Europeans and native Americans as well) or the United Kingdom are theoretically referred to by their nation of origin and not African American (even when they come from a Latin American country) unless they immigrate to the United States, but once a person of the African Diaspora becomes a permanent U.S. resident, then it is generally assumed that they (and especially their U.S.-born children) are "African American."

The U.S. usage of Black is unique, in that it evolved as a preferred racial term in antithesis to the former term "Negro." Membership has been only partly voluntary because Americans of European appearance have often been identified as Mulatto, and/or White and/or Negro and/or Black by US Census officials, sometimes within the span of three decades. Persons like Walter White and Gregory Howard Williams, who were virtually as fair as any European, self-identified as "Negro" despite being of overwhelming European genetic admixture, like millions of so-called White Americans. Today the term "Black" and "African-American" are often used interchangeably by both Black and White. The 2000 federal census offered the option of choosing more than one preconceived designated ethno-racial identity. Also, U.S. traditions follow a one-drop rule that rhetorically claims that anyone with even the slightest trace of distant African ancestry is Black—a tradition found nowhere else on earth; but a tradition that African-Americans helped create in the 1830s North and have consistently embraced. (See African-American History#The Black Yankees.)

Many within the U.S. accept only people of recent sub-Saharan ancestry as Black. Even though the term Black does not strictly encompass sub-Saharan Africans (historically the word "black" relates more to dark skin than to regional affiliation), many do not consider people outside of the recent African diaspora as Black. For various reasons, Americans dispute the self-identity of Asians, Pacific Islanders, and others who claim to see themselves as Black.

Who is Black?

Because it is a social classification label with enormous cultural significance there is no universal consensus definition. Nevertheless, according to their explanations, those who use the label tend to employ three criteria: ancestry, self-identity, and appearance; usually very dark people.

Who is a member of the African Diaspora?

Most societies that apply the Black label on the basis of a person's ancestry justify it as applying to the descendants of the African Diaspora. Between 1500 and 1900, approximately four million African slaves were transported to island plantations in the Indian Ocean, about eight million were shipped to Mediterranean-area countries, and about eleven million were taken to the New World. Their descendants are now found around the globe. Due to intermarriage and genetic assimilation, just who is "a descendant" of the African Diaspora is not entirely self-evident.

At one extreme, in the United States it is relatively easy to tell who has such ancestry. British North America imported only about 500,000 Africans out of the eleven million shipped across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the United States has been astonishingly successful at preserving two distinct genetic populations: one of mostly African ancestry, the other overwhelmingly European. All other New World states (except Canada) that imported African slaves have unimodal Afro-European genetic admixture scatter diagrams. Indeed, two thirds of White Americans have no detectable African ancestry at all (other than the ancient African ancestry shared by all members of our species, of course). Only one-third of White Americans have detectable African DNA (averaging 23 percent) from ancestors who passed through the endogamous color line from Black to White. Furthermore, U.S. government's surveys continue to categorize on a strict color-line. The federal census has no provision for a "multiracial" or "biracial" self-identity and, until 2000, forbade checking off more than one box. The EEOC has strict regulations defining who is Black or White and implicitly denies the existence of mixed people.

At an intermediate level, in Latin America and in the former plantations in and around the Indian Ocean, descendants of slaves are a bit harder to define because virtually everyone is mixed in demographic proportion to the original slave population. In places that imported relatively few slaves (like the Mascarene Islands or Argentina), few if any are considered Black today. In places that imported many slaves (like Arabia or Puerto Rico), the number is larger, but all are still of mixed ancestry.

At the other extreme, the African slaves shipped across the Mediterranean to Europe were promptly assimilated. As a result, sub-Saharan DNA is scattered throughout the European continent. Not every population has been studied yet, but enough have so that a picture is starting to emerge. The amount of black admixture in Europe today ranges from few percentage in Iberia to a greater percent around the Baltic. It seems to show a increasing clime from the southwest to the northeast, which corresponds with the areas most affected by the slave trade. For details, see Sub-Saharan DNA admixture in Europe.

Although African DNA is present everywhere in Europe, it is too thinly scattered, even along the Mediterranean coast, to affect physical features. Hence, despite this easily detected but diluted African ancestry, virtually no one considers today's Europeans to be descendants of the African slave Diaspora.

A few examples of populations who are seen as Black or who see themselves as Black because they descend from native Africans are: African Americans, some Latin Americans, and most residents of the Republic of South Africa.

African Americans — (see description above) or visit African American.

Afro-Latin Americans — Among the * Afro-Latin American populations in South and Central America there are populations that identify as negros. Some with high levels of admixture as well. The difference is that, contrary to the USA, membership in the Black ethnicity is usually by upbringing and not by an imposed concept of one-droppism.

Who self-identifies as Black outside of the recent African diaspora?

Some groups have also embraced a "Black" self-designation despite their lack of African ancestry (that is, despite having no more detectable sub-Saharan African genetic admixture than, say, southwestern Europeans). Due to the perceived success of the U.S. civil rights movement of 1955-1975 some oppressed and marginalized populations around the world, even without African ancestry, have chosen to label themselves as "Black." This is disputed by those who equate "Blackness" only with African Equatorial (Sub-Saharan) ancestry and argue that non-Africans cannot be legitimately Black.

Dalits, — In India, the group that has suffered the most oppression has been the Dalit "untouchable" caste, and many have looked to the American civil-rights movement for inspiration. Some Afrocentrists have been very pro-active in creating a mutual bond with these populations, considering them Blacks as well. Runoko Rashidi, who has been to India three times, [1] was contrite about the way he represented Dalits in the U.S. "I feel bad about it. I oversimplified to make it palatable to a Black constituency. I've given the impression that Dalits are Black people. Dalits, I now find, are a social and economic group, more than a racial group." Nevertheless, Rashidi holds that "large sections of the Dalits would be seen as Black people if they lived anywhere else" and that the connections between Africans and Dalits "go beyond phenotype." Many have adopted the Afrocentric beliefs that they are African, and have formed organizations like the Dalit Panthers emulating the Black Panther Party of the USA. Dalit leaders like V.T. Rajshekar have taken a less superficial approach in supporting an interpretation of Blackness that includes their own people. It should be noted that aside from similar cultural experiences, some of these people would generally be viewed as Black if they moved to the United States, simply because of their Africoid appearances. This however, does not apply to all Dalits, as only some have significant indigenous South Asian ancestry.

Aeta — The Aeta from the Philippines are, more or less, known as black in the Anglicized Philippines. Like the term Negrito, the term "Aeta" [2] was an imposed term by later migrations. Two major branches apparently made their appearance in the archipelago 30,000 to 20,000 years ago: one traveling up the eastern flank of the islands to end up on the Pacific side of the Sierra Madre and comprising the Alta, Arta and Agta groups; the second branch appears to have moved up the western side, with some groups similarly ending up in northern Luzon; this branch includes the Pinatubo Negrito, Dumagat, Ata, Ati, Atta, Sinauna and Batak. At least 25 groups are known, many sharing the same name (Ita, Aeta, Ata, Atta, Agta, etc. are thought to come from the general filipino word "Itom," meaning "black"). Many find this term to be offensive because it ignores their own tribal identification.

Australian Aborigines — Indigenous Australians are the first inhabitants of the Australian continent and its nearby islands, continuing their presence during European settlement. The term includes the various indigenous peoples commonly known as Aborigines, whose traditional lands extend throughout mainland Australia, Tasmania and numerous offshore islands, and also the Torres Strait Islanders whose lands are centred on the Torres Strait Islands which run between northernmost Australia and the island of New Guinea. Since colonialism, the English have referred to them as Black (not related to African 'Blacks') due to their darker complexion, and they have adopted the name as an ethnic term, much like Afro-Americans:

• Wimbledon champion Evonne Goolagong, of the Wiradjuri people of New South Wales, is described as "the first black woman sporting hero in Australian folklore" [3] and included in lists of "black" athletes, as in the book "Black Gold." [4]
• Anthony Mundine has been nicknamed "the black superman." [5]
• Oodgeroo Noonuccal/Kath Walker [6], of the Noonuccal people of Moreton Bay, east of Brisbane, referred to herself and other aboriginals as "black." [7] She quoted her father as calling her "black." [8]
• Half-aboriginal Charles Perkins was subjected to discrimination against black aboriginals and subsequently has involved himself in black politics. [9].
• Aden Ridgeway, of the Gumbaynggir people of New South Wales is described as "a black politician." [10]

The phrase, "people of color," is sometimes used as a euphemism for "Black" in exhortations of global non-White solidarity in the face of global Whiteness, but this specific usage is apparently not widespread. According to one researcher, "The use of this term [people of color] appears to depend strongly on context and location, being largely confined to the USA (alongside the term ‘black’) and increasingly in a radical political context."

Virtually every student of the emergence of a global Black identity agrees that it is crafted politically to unite diverse groups by racializing the experience of discrimination. "When the empirical referent of many of these umbrella terms is explored, both theoretical and methodological problems become apparent, as exemplified by the generic use of the term ‘black’ to delineate a common experience of discrimination based on physical appearance. This is a meaning not shared by a substantial proportion of the people so described in such usage, amounts to third party imputation of meaning and strengthens the perception of highly diverse groups in racial terms."

The converse is also true. Some peoples today who are clearly genetic descendants of the African Diaspora do not see themselves as "Black" in any ethno-political sense, and instead adopt self-identities aligned with religion or language. Among these are the people of the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean and the inhabitants of highland Madagascar.

For African paternal and maternal genetic lineages and other lineages, see: [11] and [12]

Who looks Black?

Probably the most controversial answer to the question "who is Black?" is "whoever looks Black." This is because, although most who use the label rationalize it in terms of physical appearance, there is little objective consistency in this regard. That different cultures can assign the same individual to "opposite" races may be hard to grasp. And yet 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.

According to Harry Hoetink, one can predict where each New World culture draws the color-line based upon its own colonial history. He suggests that three similar socioeconomic classes formed in most settlements during the New World colonial period. Once the importation of African labor became widespread, Western Hemisphere colonies that lacked significant numbers of Native Americans tended to fall into a three-tiered social structure. The top layer comprised a small number of European land-owning planters who produced agricultural products for export using large numbers of African slaves. The slaves themselves made up the bottom layer. Finally, in most European colonies (Barbados being the exception), an intermediate group arose, composed of free subsistence farmers, who were allowed to opt out of the plantation economy in return for serving as militia in the event of slave insurrection. In each colony, the color line came to be defined by the appearance of typical members of the intermediate class. Anyone more European-looking was seen as White; anyone darker was considered Black. Historical contingency decreed that this intermediate group would have a large admixture of African appearance in Santo Domingo, less so in Trinidad and Brazil, even less in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and be completely European-looking in Virginia and South Carolina. Hoetink demonstrated that, "One and the same person may be considered white in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, and 'coloured' in Brazil, Martinique, or Curaçao; this difference must be explained in terms of socially determined somatic norms. The same person may be called a 'Negro' in Georgia; this must be explained by the historical evolution of social structure in the Southern United States."

In addition, researchers in the cognitive sciences have shown that cultures do not ostracize out-groups because they look different; they look different because they are out-groups. Children of each culture can "correctly" (for their own society) categorize strangers by age three. They can reliably match each "racial" category with its social term or word by about age five. Most American children (about 70 percent) internalize the hypodescent rule by about age ten. And they can confabulate a rationalization for hypodescent by early adulthood. Although the number and meaning of "racial" categories and of the traits that delineate them vary dramatically among cultures, children learn their own culture's rules and categories shortly after learning to walk. Clearly, the cognitive system employed is as adaptable to culture, and yet is as hard-wired in the brain, as is language itself.

A series of experiments conducted by Robert Kurzban, subsequently confirmed by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides show why this is. Sex, age, and "otherness" are the three fundamental attributes that the mind encodes in an automatic and mandatory manner. For example, long after all memory has been lost of the occupation, name, clothing, or hair of a stranger to which one was briefly exposed, one can recall that the individual was "a White woman" or a "Black male child." But age and sex are independent of culture. "Otherness" is not. Kurzban and later investigators demonstrated that the ability to recall a stranger's "otherness" actually detects a culture's social coalitions or alliances. Over the past hundred millennia or so, humans have become adept at detecting competing social groups. The discrimination of facial features enables a child to identify whether a stranger is genetically related (a member of the child's extended family). This ability is strongly selected because one is less likely to be killed and devoured by a relative than by a member of an opposing group. Recall that we (genus Homo) evolved as hunting apes for two million years before our brains expanded five-fold in the past 120 millennia (species sapiens). One must take the long view when studying adaptive cognition.

Skin tone, hair kinkiness, and the like are the clues with which Americans (and, to a lesser extent other Europeans, especially British) identify a stranger's "otherness" and so determine whether a stranger "looks black" to them, but other cultures use clues that are unrelated to the U.S. endogamous color line: height, hair-length, clothing, facial features (such as hooked nose versus straight nose or the shape of the eye), even a person's smell (which relates to diet). This point is easily misunderstood and has even been reported as suggesting that humans are hard-wired to recognize "race." The fact is that in no culture does the need/ability to recall a stranger's "otherness" correlate with Americans' unique perception of "race," unless one stretches the meaning of "race" to denote simply "otherness." In the United States, for example, where the term "race" is applied to differentiate those of Asian ancestry, subjects quickly forget whether the stranger was Japanese, Native American, Hindu, Irish, Italian, or Pakistani, but Americans (only) do not forget on which side of the U.S. endogamous color line he seemed to be. In short, it is easily demonstrated within minutes that subjects notice and subconsciously remember even the most apparently insignificant differences in facial features if they happen to correlate with "otherness." On the other hand, even glaring facial differences, such as skin-tone darkness, are quickly forgotten if they are irrelevant to "otherness." In short, "who looks black" is answered differently by different people.

See also

• African diaspora
• Black Consciousness Movement and Steve Biko
• Colored people in the United States
• Coloured people of South Africa
• Creole peoples
• Race
• Race and Intelligence
• Racial segregation
• Negrito
• Negro
• Nilotic
• White (people)
• Negroid

Groups

• African American
• Afro-Brazilian
• Afro-Cuban
• Afro-Ecuadorian
• Afro-German
• Afro-Irish
• Afro-Latin American
• Afro-Mexican
• Afro-Peruvian
• Afro-Trinidadian
• African American culture
• African American music
• Black British
• African Caribbean
• Black Canadian
• Siddi
• Dalit
• Black People

External links

• PBS Africans in America series
• National Geographic pictures of the Rana Tharu of Nepal
• Sheedi people of India and Pakistan
• Siddi people of India
• Black Iraqis and African heritage in an Islamic State.
• India's Lost Africans BBC News of African oriented people in east India and Pakistan
• Gullah culture of South Carolina.