Black people

Also See Africoid

A Masai man in Kenya

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.

African ancestry perspective

See also: Race, Race (historical definitions), Race and genetics, and Social interpretations of race

In a lexicographic analysis, philosophy professor Lansana Keita noted that the word "black", "negro", and "African race" are all defined in terms of one another and can be regarded as logically equivalent Although the earliest known references of the English word "black" with reference to African descent were in the year 1400, the term (especially when used in a racial context) was popularized during the transatlantic slave trade and the Age of Enlightenment, which gave rise to racial classification The first of these came from French doctor Francois Bernier who divided up humanity based on facial appearance and body type. He proposed four categories: Europeans, Far Easterners, Lapps, and blacks; who he described as having woolly hair, thick lips, and very white teeth. The concept of black explicitly as a proxy for African descent can be traced to the same era when Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist Carolus Linnaeus divided humankind into four main races, loosely based on geographic distribution: europeaus (white race), asiaticus (yellow race), americanus (red race) and afer or african (black race). According to Linnaeus' pseudo-scientific model, the black male could be defined by his skin tone, face structure, and curly hair. He assigned various fanciful attributes to each of his four categories, clearly favoring the "race" europeaus.

Agreement/Disagreement of Cultural and Physical Anthropologists with the statement that "There are biological races in the species Homo sapiens" 1985 vs. 1999
	Cultural %		Physical %		Combined %
	1985	1999	1985	1999	1995	1999
agree	30	14	50	24	39	18
neutral	17	6	10	7	14	7
disagree	53	80	40	69	47	75

Linnaeus's protege, Johann Blumenbach (considered the founder of anthropology) added the "Malay" brown race, which included the Polynesians and Melanesians of the Pacific Islands, as well as the aborigines of Australia. By the nineteenth century, Georges Cuvier's division of humans into Caucasian, Mongolian and Negro (the Spanish word for "black") achieved widespread acceptance.

By the time Carleton S. Coon published his more elaborate system of races (Capoids, Congoids, Caucusoids, Mongloids, Australoids) in The Origin of Races in 1962, anthropologists' adherence to theories of race were already in decline. By the end of the 20th century, race was widely dismissed as a social contruction by some, in part because the recent single-origin hypothesis implied that human groups had diverged too recently for significant differences to have evolved. However, some people still believe that human genetic variation is geographically structured, and that there is at least some validity in racial classifications. A few contemporary academics still allude to notions of race and/or evolutionary biology when defining black people:

Psychiatrist Sally Satel (of the conservative American Enterprise Institute) has 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).

University of Western Ontario psychology professor J. Phillipe Rushton (of the controversial Pioneer Fund) has stated:

In both everyday life and evolutionary biology, a 'Black' is anyone most of whose ancestors were born in sub-Saharan Africa"...between 4000 and (to accomodate recent migrations) 20 generations ago.

The company "DNAPrint Genomics" analyzes DNA to determine the exact percentage of Indo-European, sub-Saharan, East Asian, and Native American heritage someone has and assigns the to the categories White, Black, East Asian, Native American, or mixed race accordingly however the tracing of biogeographic ancestry needn't imply an endorsement of biological race.

Still, such exact definitions are frequently criticised. In a book review of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It, Youngstown State University English professor Stephen L. Sniderman criticized author Jon Entine for his lack of consistency in his definition of blackness:

The most significant flaw in Entine’s argument, though, involves his use of black, a problematic word that he should have handled much more carefully. From the title to the final sentence, that term, unfortunately, means whatever suits Entine’s purpose. He ostensibly defines the term in his introduction: "Elite athletes who trace most or all of their ancestry to Africa are by and large better than the competition" (emphasis added). But that's certainly not the definition he uses to identify black athletes throughout the book. When he includes superstars with light brown skin (such as Muhammad Ali, Maury Wills, Joe Louis, and O.J. Simpson) in the category he labels black, he offers no evidence that they "trace most or all of their ancestry to Africa."

U.S. sociologist Troy Duster and ethicist Pilar Ossorio have stated that: "Some percentage of people who look white will possess genetic markers indicating that a significant majority of their recent ancestors were African. Some percentage of people who look black will possess genetic markers indicating the majority of their recent ancestors were European."

Sub-Saharan Africa debate

Template:2000 Race US Census map As noted above, those who equate black with African descent often have a narrow range of Africa in mind, commonly known as black Africa or Sub-Saharan Africa and this perspective is very roughly reflected in American law. 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.

Mostafa Hefny is white under US law due to his place of origin, but self-identifies as black.

However self-identifying as black is not enough to be considered black under U.S. law if one does not originate in a strictly defined region of Africa. Egyptian immigrant Mostafa Hefny, who describes himself as dark-skinned with kinky hair, is legally white in the United states. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines blacks as having origins with the black racial groups of Africa, and whites as having origins with original peoples of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, including Egypt.

Mostafa insisted that he is more black than Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer and retired Gen. Colin Powell: "I was born and raised in Africa and they were not". "And yet they are classified as Black and I am classified as White." Although Mostafa admits the region of Africa he comes from is North of the Sahara, he claims that he is black because his ancestors were from the ancient kingdom of Nubia, now part of Egypt and Sudan. Mostafa has attempted to sue the U.S. government to get his racial identity changed.

Cultural writer and filmmaker Owen 'Alik Shahadah has agreed that sub-Saharan is too limiting when defining Africans:

The notion of some invisible border, which divides the North of African from the South, is rooted in racism, which in part assumes that sand is an obstacle for African people. This barrier of sand hence confines Africans to the bottom of this make-believe location, which exists neither linguistically, ethnically, politically or physically...Somalia and Djibouti are part of the same political Islamic alignment just like many so-called Arab countries

Shahadah argues that the term sub-Saharan Africa is a product of European imperialism:

Sub-Saharan Africa is a racist byword for "primitive" a Africa: 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.

More often, blackness as defined by ancestry is much less exact. Psychologist Arthur Jensen states, "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 professor R Bhopal, a black is

A person with African ancestral origins, who self identifies, or is identified, as Black, African or Afro-Caribbean (see, African and Afro-Caribbean). The word is capitalised to signify its specific use in this way. In some circumstances the word Black signifies all non-white minority populations, and in this use serves political purposes.

Black vs. multiracial

The amount of African ancestry required to be labeled black has varied enormously across time and space. Amereica's one drop rule and Latin America's reverse one drop rule occupy opposite ends of this spectrum, with former South African law occupying an intermediate position, and formalizing Afro-multiracial identity.

One drop rule in the United States

According to the United States' colloquial term one drop rule, a black is any person with any known African ancestry. In his 1991 book Who Is Black?, sociologist F. James Davis argued that this definition is

inextricably woven into the history of the United States. It incorporates beliefs once used to justify slavery and later used to buttress the castelike Jim Crow system of segregation. ... Most Americans seem unaware that this definition of blacks is extremely unusual in other countries, perhaps even unique to the United States, and that Americans define no other minority group in a similar way.

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 mulitiracial category, with 66% labelling 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.

Although the United States’ one drop rule originated as a racist attempt to keep the white race pure, in the 2000s, some of its biggest defenders have been African Americans, such as American studies and music professor Jon Michael Spencer. Spencer (who teaches at the University of Richmond) has argued that attempts to relinquish the one drop rule in favor of multiracial categories is "the postmodern conspiracy to explode racial identity". Spencer has claimed that blacks and whites in Africa view him as 'colored' rather than black because he has a brown complexion.

He has said that he worries that federal relief funds for blacks will dwindle if their officially registered population declines.. He has said that he also fears that new multiracial classifications will sap the black community of skill and vigor. In an New York Newsday article about the nascent multiracial movement, he stated: "If the multiracial movement had taken root, or a 'mulatto' category had been kept throughout the 20th century, black progress might have been no progress at all." Spencer has stated:

As some multiracialists begin down the road of racial bigotry by cock-a-doodling about their alleged specialness, certainly in part to bolster the identity and self-esteem of themselves or that of their mixed-race children, they subtly assault the identity and self-esteem of black Americans.

Jared Taylor's white nationalist publication American Renaissance has argued that the one drop rule serves Afrocentric interests, arguing that "without the one drop rule, not even the most brazen of them can claim that Nefertiti, Jesus, Rameses, and Beethoven were "black." Taylor has been criticized in the mainstream press as "the cultivated, cosmopolitan face of white supremacy."

Dinesh D'Souza cited the following as examples of how the one drop rule has been used to broaden the definition of blackness: Martin Bernal (a professor of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Cornell University), arguing that the ancient Egyptians were black in the sense that they wouldn’t be served coffee in a restaurant in the segregated South. and Cheikh Anta Diop arguing that the French, Spanish, Italians and Greeks may all be considered black.

Reverse one drop rule

Brazil

The one drop rule does not apply outside of the United States, and in other countries it sometimes applies in reverse. Just as a person with physically recognizable sub-Saharan ancestry can claim to be black in the United States, someone with recognizable Caucasian ancestry may be considered white in Latin America. Even individuals with enough African ancestry to make them as dark as Sidney Poitier can pass for white if they appear to have at least one physically visible trait commonly attributed to whites, such as straight hair or narrow facial features.

According to Jose Neinstein, a native white Brazilian and executive director of the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute in Washington, in the United States, "if you are not quite white, then you are black." However, in Brazil, "If you are not quite black, then you are white." Neinstein recalls talking with a man of Poitier's complexion when in Brazil: "We were discussing ethnicity, and I asked him, 'What do you think about this from your perspective as a black man?' He turned his head to me and said, 'I'm not black,' . . . It simply paralyzed me. I couldn't ask another question."

The Washington Post described a Brazilian-born woman named Martins, who for 30 years before immigrating to the United States considered herself a morena. Her skin had a caramel color that is roughly equated with whiteness in Brazil and some other Latin American countries. "I didn't realize I was black until I came here," she explained. "'Where are you from?' they ask me. I say I'm from Brazil. They say, 'No, you are from Africa.' They make me feel like I am denying who I am."

The same racial culture shock has come to hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned immigrants to the United States from Brazil, Colombia, Panama and other Latin nations. Although most lack the degree of African ancestry required to be considered black in Brazil, they have enough to be seen as black the second they set foot on U.S. soil. According to the Washington Post, their refusal to embrace the United States' definition of black has left many feeling attacked from all directions. Many African Americans believe the Latino immigrants are denying their blackness; white Americans discriminate against them as if they were black; and lighter-skinned Latinos dominate Spanish-language television, even though a majority of Latin people possess some African or Native American ancestry. Many of these immigrants feel it is hard enough to accept a new language and culture without the additional burden of transforming from white to black. Yvette Modestin, a dark-skinned native of Panama who worked in Boston, said the situation was overwhelming: "There's not a day that I don't have to explain myself."

Professor J.B. Bird has said that Latin America is not alone in rejecting the United States' notion than any visible African ancestry is enough to make one black: " In most countries of the Caribbean, Colin Powell would be described as a Creole, reflecting his mixed heritage. In Belize, he might further be described as a 'High Creole', because of his extremely light complexion."

The Arab world

File:Sadat5.jpg

Anwar Sadat's mother was a sub-Saharan African

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 cancelled when Sadat discovered that an African-American had been cast to play him. 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. Similar identy are mirrored in the 19th century slave trader Tippu Tip who was supposed to be of African and Arab ancestry, but identified as Arab, especially by those he enslaved.

According to J. Phillipe Rushton, Arab relations with blacks whom the Mulims 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

Apartheid era in South Africa

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 Europeean descent (with some Malay ancestry, especially in the Western Cape).

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 coloured 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.

When asked to explain the difference between Blacks and Coloureds, a South African official replied: "Well, Coloureds are always mixed bloods ... and you know them by their language and by their looks." When it was suggested that Blacks can also be mixed, he replied:

Er, yes but ... not really. They may be mixed with other Black 'tribes,' but they are not mixed with whites, because if they were mixed with white they would be classified as 'coloured.' ...and up until now a person with any mixed blood would certainly 'go' for the coloured classification. It would be impossible for him to pass as white, and there would be no reason to try and pass as Black because being colored naturally gave a person more opportunities — better schooling, better housing, social mobility...

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.

A Vanuatu man making fire using a stick

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%). However, some such as A. W. F. Edwards claimed in 2003 that such a conclusion is unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors.

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: [[:Hamitic myth]]

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.

Dark skin and appearance perspective

Further information: [[:Human skin color]]

Scientists now believe that first humans lived in Africa between 100,000 to 200, 000 years ago. About 80,000 years ago a group of them crossed the Red Sea and proceeded to populate the rest of the world. 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 a B vitamin, folate, from being destroyed. In short 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. code

The above character was called Little Black Sambo, despite being of non-African descent

Because Africans are not the only ethnic groups who possess dark skin, some prefer to define black in terms of skin color, and reject African ancestry definitions as too narrow. Although proponents of this perspective sometimes resemble Afrocentrics when they call a diverse range of dark skinned peoples black, they do not necessarily endorse the view that all dark-skinned peoples are Africoid :

Psychiatrist Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye has argued that "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".

Sri Lankan activist Nirmala Rajasingam has stated "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". Rajasingam 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.

Lewis R. Gordon, director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Temple University, has said

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.

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.

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 factbook 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.

Gallery

The following individuals are black by virtually all definitions cited in this article.

• 
  Wangari Mathai
• 
  Michael Jordan
• 
  Oromo Ethiopian boys
• 
  Kofi Annan
• San woman
  San woman
• Portia Simpson
  Portia Simpson
• 
  Condoleezza Rice
• 
  Dionne Warwick

The following individuals are considered black by some, multiracial by others:

• Barack Obama
  Barack Obama
• Corinne Bailey Rae
  Corinne Bailey Rae
• 
  Blasian girl
• Hugo Chávez
  Hugo Chávez

The following individuals are black to some who define the term by appearance rather than ancestry

• Carteret Islands man
  Carteret Islands man
• Papua New Guinean children
  Papua New Guinean children
• 
  Tazmanian aboriginal William Lanne
• Indian schoolgirls
  Indian schoolgirls

See also

• African American
• Brown people
• Human genetic variation
• Recent single-origin hypothesis
• Race
• Race (historical definitions)