Black people
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A "Black" is a person with a majority of ancestors that stayed in sub-Saharan Africa during Homo S. Sapians original exodus out of the continent some 70,000 years ago[[1]]. During the period of American slavery having any such ancestry defined one as Black while in contemporary Brazil having any other ancestry excludes one from the category. Both of these extremes are arbitrary and ignore biology.
Blacks are commonly defined by dark skin, tightly curled hair, and broad features. Blacks are the oldest and most genetically diverse race of human kind, including some of the tallest and shortest populations on Earth. Melanesians, Negritos, some South Asians, and Australian aboriginals often have darker skin than many black people and for this reason are incorrectly described as Black but their genetic history is very different.
Areas of habitation
In the Western Hemisphere, black people also are found in high concentrations in the urban regions of the United States and the Southern United States, the Caribbean and sizeable portions of Latin America, including Belize, Panama, with Brazil having the highest proportion (and overall number) of Black people in the West (although a significant proportion of Brazilians of considerable African descent they do not consider themselves to be Black).
In Asia, black people inhabit the Middle East (through the Arab/East African slave trade ) as well as India's Andaman Islands. There are more recent Afro-Indian groups, such as the small group of 20-30,000 black Siddis in the Gujarat province.
Origins
Darker skinned humans have existed as the default human type as far back as the human species (homo sapiens) is known to exist. Whether through evolutionary changes or adaptation, tracking back the statistical patterns in variations in DNA among all known people sampled, scientists have determined that all people alive today can trace their maternal ancestry to a dark skinned woman who lived in sub-Sharan Africa about 200,000 years ago. She is known as Mitochondrial Eve. However about 70,000 years ago, there was a major migration out of Africa as modern humans went on to populate the Pacific Islands, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and finally North East Asia. Many scientists believe those who migrated North gradually acquired lighter skin through natural selection, because those with dark skin could not absorb enough vitamin D in less sunny environments, and dark skin was less advantegous North of Africa. However the populations that stayed in sub-Saharan Africa long enough to retain their African genotype, gave rise to today's black race. These unchanged humans, through time would remain indistinguishably black by our own social norms, and their phenotypes would vary, as modern human types vary today. Scientists think that the first homo sapiens resembled the present day Khoi-San of Tanzania and southern Africa.
As the legacy of both the trans-Atlantic and Islamic slave trades, many people of sub-Saharan African descent can be found throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, as well as parts of the Middle East and India. The majority of African slaves in the Americas came from West Africa (although many came from countries like Angola and the Congo, some as far away as Madagascar or Mozambique )and the slaves in the Arab world came primarily from East Africa.
In the past, scientists had attributed variations of people outside of West Africa to intermixing with Caucasoid or Sinoid people. However, Stephen Monlar, a leading anthropologist, has pointed out that many Nilotic people have narrow noses, but this is not from intermixing with Eurasians, but from environmental adaptations. Adaptations, as well as spontaneous genetic mutations, which are the cause of variations in human phenotypes, have caused Equatorial people to exhibit a variety of phenotypes, some of which resemble the phenotypes of other groups, which sometimes leads to the mistaken assumption that they are ethnically mixed.
Defining characteristics
Throughout the Modern Period, race or phenotype has been determined mostly by three criteria: Skin color, facial features and hair texture. Relative distance from Europe and proximity to Africa also have been considered as determining factors, but this criterion has been the most contentious and has caused the most confusion and conflict, due to the racist implications and stereotypes that invariably arise.
Depending on one's nationality or the region in which one lives, blackness can be based more on lineage than complexion. Very light-skinned individuals may consider themselves black, and very dark-skinned people may not. Often, the perceptions of society and of the individual will conflict. In Brazil, Mauritania, the U.S., Sudan, Cuba, these issues remain unresolved.
Due to the lasting legacy of colonization, the definition of 'black' is often imposed on black people by a non-black government or ruling class. In these situations, the definition will either be embraced or rejected by the people in question, depending on their perceptions of their indigenous black heritage, again often reflecting the sentiments of the surrounding society in which they live.
One thing that largely characterizes Black people is their unique Afro textured hair (tightly curled hair also known as 'kinky'), however, not all so-defined Black people have tightly curled hair and some populations like East African Cushites have hair texture ranging from straight or wavy to curly or kinky.
Varying definitions of the term "black"
The definition of a black person changes from region to region and period to period. Often it is imposed at the convenience of the non-black ruling establishment of that nation or region. In other cases, as in Brazil, the name is synonymous with low social status. The use of the term "black" is divided into four sections.
Black Africans living in Africa .This is applied intrinsically by those south of the Sahara. The Arabs in Sudan are racially Black/African descended but generally forgoe the African identity for the Arab one. The same can be said for some Blacks in places like Lamu or Zanzibar where there is a social stigma to identifying as Black/African.
People whose ancestors have lived outside of Africa since historical antiquity. The various Negroid and Melanesian people fit this category. Blackness has been mistakenly used to describe Aeta Filipinos, the Semang of Malaysia and the Andamanese Negrito, all Negrito groups descended from the original inhabitants of South East Asia, as well as Melanesians of the Pacific. Their experiences range widely and there is relatively less information regarding their self-perception in relationship to other Black people throughout the world, as they have had little contact with African and black people of the western hemisphere.
Those who live in Latin America and Spanish speaking islands of the Caribbean. Their relationship to Spain and Portugal create a distinct heritage. Their self perception is usually tied to their skin color and less to a sense of family heritage. Often those who are lighter-skinned find little issue with being classified as non-black, even as other relatives in their family (even siblings) will remain classified as black.
Those who live in the United States and the non-Spanish Caribbean. These groups share a similar and unique experience of being onced ruled by English speaking colonizersand were legally separated into two groups blacks and Coloureds. Finally these groups share the distinction of associating their blackness more with their descent than literal skin color, partially due to the one drop rule, and also to a moral stand against racism and discrimination. Most Black people of light complexion find it repugnant or illogical to renounce or dilute their black identity due solely to their skin color.
Self-identified and imposed blackness
There are two ways that a person can be defined as a black person. There is the impositional method, whereby political and social forces will label a darker skinned person as black. This has occurred in the Western Hemisphere, and throughout Africa. This method has been used to divide ethnic groups as well as to create a caste system of privilege and control in many colonized areas. The second, the intrinsic method, is where a person or group of people independently identify themselves as being black; the Aeta are one group whose first contact with Chinese mainlanders involved no subjugation, so they proudly identified themselves as black.
Family ties, the importance of solidarity against anti-black racism, resistance to colonialism, and opposition to perceived white supremacy or eurocentric philosophies motivate people with varying degrees of Equatorial lineage to identify solely as black. Since the 1940s, with the established viewpoint in the Western world shifting, many groups once considered "black" by colonizing powers—even as recently as a century ago—have now lost that identity in official policies, e.g. national census reports, established anthropological studies, historical and archaeological reports. In the United States, black people of mixed race groups had for the most part reintegrated with the fully black population, but recently, due to a new movement to recognize biracial children of black/white couples, the division of black and biracial people has been re-introduced into America's social identity.
As modern communication develops around the world, most of the varieties of black people have become aware of each other, and many self-identified black people (especially in the United States) are working to change the sometimes negative perception of black skin, culture, and heritage in order to increase the political, economic, and social well-being of black people around the world. Since the nuances of black identity have changed outside of the US, this message is received differently by the various groups in the world. Many modern societies attempt to observe no distinctions between human races or identities; others do exactly the opposite. Sometimes, those who have the core characteristics of dark skin and phenotype exclude those who lack it, even though both share ancestors and/or historical experiences.
The Caucasus peoples of Abidjan, and Crimea are sometimes called black because, relatively speaking, they are darker and less European in their appearance. The term has been used also to describe Southern Italians and some Arabs, almost always pejoratively, as these groups resent being labeled as black.
20th/21st Century controversies
There is a discontinuity between older historical accounts describing black people, and modern scholarly consensus. Many archaic literary accounts, including the Bible, describe black people clearly in Hebrew. However, scholarship took a brief paradigm shift in the late 20th century, with some indicating that Kushites and Ethiopians were in fact not Black, but merely dark skinned or tanned Caucasians.
Due to vague similarity in skull shapes with other Caucasoid types, they instead insist that Kushite described a dark-skinned but non-black person. Usually, East Africans from as far north as Egypt to as far south as Rwanda are variously recast by modern scholarship as non-black Caucasoids, whose heritage is not truly connected to the greater black populations of Africa.
There has been a long held established view in Western culture that black people have not contributed substantially to Ancient Middle Eastern culture, civilization and history. The Middle East, being the cradle of civilization, encompass parts of Africa and Asia, and borders upon Europe and India. Although the Middle East holds the legacies of over a dozen ancient civilizations, Most of the controversy centers around Egypt (but has recently expanded to include India, Greece, and Iran).
Egypt, being close to Israel, has the most reliable written record of Biblical events outside of the Bible itself and is also a reliable source of written history about Black people (and Jewish people prior to the 8th Century B.C.E.). This perspective has helped Black people find clarity on their relationship to Biblical events. Also, Egypt, being so geographically close to people who are unquestionably Black, would have the most reliable record of how black people related within its own civilization. Many of the distinctive Ancient Egyptian social customs (hair styles, shaving habits, burial practices) and quirks are also found among black people but absent in Semitic and European people of that period and the modern one.
By the mid 18th century, Western theologians and intellectuals had concluded that one, black people had been cursed by God in the Bible to be no more than peripheral slaves, and two, Black people were incapable of generating a civilization worthy of respect by white historians. Black scholars chose to place emphasis on Egypt in order to decisively refute these erroneous conclusions, in order to end slavery, then to overturn Jim Crow laws, and finally to end the established order of teaching history. Egyptian history presents, at the very least, an abundant first hand account of the presence of a wide variety of black people in the region, and depending on the perspective one takes, Ancient Egypt was itself a black civilization.
This latter assertion generated a new wave of racialized Afrocentric debate between established scholarly critics of Afrocentric fallacies and Afrocentric scholarly criticism of erroneous assumptions by Eurocentric scholarship. Despite the fact that 18th century European writers and excavators like Champollion and Lepsius had concluded that the Egyptians were a Black people, Afrocentric critics have faulted poor scholarship on the part of Black scholars for the lowered quality of education in America resulting from on overemphasis on Afrocentricity (irrespective of the accuracies it has presented).
Until the early 1990s, Black people have been portrayed in American media as being mutually exclusive (or excluded) from authentic and legitimate Latino, Jewish, Asian and Middle Eastern culture and history. This was mostly due to commercialized imagery of the people, which followed American demographic trends to portray Latinos, Middle Easterners, and Asians as almost devoid of black characteristics, while America itself was portrayed in foreign media to be equally sanitized of Black habitation (outside of musicians, sportsmen, and criminal elements). Those who are or have been defined as being black have not been asked what black means, but instead have been told what it does not mean, as a method of social exclusion. In how they are defined, blacks, much more than any other group have been excluded from defining themselves officially. Because of this, some of the most awkward controversies arise in historical contexts.
Gradually, the connections between black and Asian cultures has created more cultural awareness between the two groups. During the 20th Century, the Afrocentric and Negritude movements had opened the minds of black people to their historical heritage throughout the world. Many black scholars have exposed ancient writings and 19th century observations and republished them. Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese historian, made the most profound impact by presenting a wide variety of information and evidence showing the acute black presence in Egypt and elsewhere. In addition, Ivan Sertima, a noted Africanologist made a strong impact with African presence in Early Asia. Many Asians have participated in the founding of various black movements, including Wallace Fard Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam.
Black identity embraced and rejected
Over time the term black has come to refer to those who identify themselves as black by virtue of their family's shared cultural heritage with Equatorial Africa, slavery, and experiences of oppression based on their Equatorial lineage and skin color. Black has also been a term imposed by lighter-skinned people on various darker-skinned people to take advantage of and exclude them. Many times this label of blackness has been embraced by the oppressed for the sake of moral solidarity against the oppressors.
Despite this, many non-Blacks work to de-emphasize the blackness of non-African blacks by contrasting their differences towards the black African. Often, the word "black" or the idea of being "truly black" becomes synonymous with being a "West African oriented person".
Criticisms of the term
Most criticisms against the term are based on either a Eurocentric fear of its inclusion of others in the world outside of Africa and North America, or the use of hypodescent rules to try to classify anyone as black, due to the theory that somewhere down the line, everyone has a black ancestor no matter how far back in time one goes, even to the earliest prehistoric human days.
Many scholars criticize the hypodescent rule. Although others theorise that their motives for doing so are often to limit any social movement towards economic self-determination among black diaspora. The One Drop Rule, now villified by many Eurocentric scholars (especially when applied to ancient cultures by Afrocentric scholars), had been established by white politicians generations ago, to prevent racial mixing. This one drop rule, which white American, Australian, and, to a lesser extent, other colonies had established for the sake of upholding white society's perceptions of purity with its own identity, became the de facto social experience for black people across the United States.
For the sake of moral solidarity against the presumed immoral oppression, this rule was embraced by black people in America, especially in a Christian context, and the effect has become a permanent aspect of black identity. Once black literature and intellectual expression experienced a boom in the beginning of the 20th century, the hypodescent rule is said to have become a new threat to European colonial ambitions, and to white racial-social controls.
As time passed, so the theory goes, and Jim Crow laws of racial segregation were outlawed in the 1960s, some educated whites felt more and more that the significance of the one drop rule should also be de-emphasized due to the changing times. Their fear, it is claimed, was that the outcome of maintaining the hypodescent rule would cause every interracial union with a black person to lower the longterm population of whites in America, and Europe, whose population rates are flat for the projected future.
It is also claimed that the U.S. Census multiracial category was rejected as an outright attempt by the federal government of the United States to divide black people into subgroups similarly like Haiti and South Africa, where "coloured" would be replaced with "bi-racial". Many Afrocentric movements reinforced the importance of the hypodescent effect within the borders of the United States for this reason, but reject applying the rule to others elsewhere, due to the ambigious identity of many mixed groups (Latinos, Arabs, some Asians). Some contend that this has been part of a generalized plan by white academics, feeling the need to remove the monolithic perspective of black identity in America and fearing a spread of black identity across the world through the media, especially in hip hop culture and Afrocentrism, to continually undermine the hypodescent rule.
The Classical Negro vis-a-vis Afrocentrism
Much of the commentary about the blackness (or lack thereof) of a society or civilizaion revolves around the ideology that the most legitimate kind of black person should come from West Africa and have very specific negroid features. This "Classical Negro" argument for legitimacy is rooted in a Eurocentric philosophy that nebulously defines a person's blackness solely in contrast to their difference from an idolized variety of the Northeastern European.
This European look, blonde hair, very aquiline nose, thin lips, round eyes of blue, angular features and a pronounced chin, has been the status quo standard that has created such a psychological impact upon the world, because it was forced upon so many as a social means of respectability, it became a subconscious standard for which most other cultures have tried to emulate. Eurocentric scholars, most notably those supporting a variety of Social Darwinism, tend to create a polar view of humanity, with the stereotypical view of the West African, large lips, black kinky hair, very wide nose, rounded features and an overbite, in opposition to the European idealized look.
This polarized propaganda in all of its varieties has been designed to support the Eurocentric view that all other groups in the world have contributed to the development of society and civilization proportional to their proximity to the Northeastern European type. Since the West African is viewed as the opposite of the idealized European type, the West African is considered the least contributive to world history.
The actual motivation of this view is based on residual prejudice against those of West African origin (Mainly African-Americans) who have been most effective in speaking out against Eurocentrism and white prejudice. Due to the influence of West African and African American intellectuals in the 20th Century, the white established racial views were under threat of being disassembled by the virtue of the ubiquitous one-drop rule, and by the fact that many ancient civilizations that were spoken of in the Bible, and respected in European society, had been discovered to be of substantial black and/or black African origin.
Most notably, the Egyptian society was viewed as a black society by Jean-François Champollion in his book "L'Egypte" in the mid 19 Century, and many black intellectuals had expounded on this observation. As time passed, more and more civilizations within Africa were discovered with indications that they colonized some areas of Asia and interacted with other ancient civilizations as equals. This realistic possibility became an educational threat to the perceived moral sensitivies of the white European caste systems throughout the world, as colonization was morally justified by Europeans based on their perceived civilized or technological experience.
These revelations, once discovered by black intellectuals, began a cascade effect in the 20th century of re-evaluating world cultures from an Afrocentric perspective. Eurocentric scholars responded by noting that West African societies, which the majority of American blacks are descended from, have not been a part of any intercontinental civilization and contributed very little towards any artistic, social or philosophical acheievement. Therefore, the "classical negro" became synonymous with "truly black" and used as a lightning rod against redefining Asian and ancient civilizations as "black".
Unfortunately many Afrocentric scholars, following this same faulty logic, tend to respond by finding any possible trace of West African heritage in any civilization. Both sides ignore the variations in West Africans and their very complex histories. Because of this, the issue deterioriates into a moral tug of war between Eurocentric scholarly view that stands morally against hypo-descent, and the Afrocentric view, that morally emphasizes the founding and continual contributions of black Africans to Ancient Egyptian, and other societies, cultures and history.
Both views resort to diffusionism and the nebulousity of blackness to either include or exclude Ancient Egypt (and most East Indian, Asian, and East African cultures), by resorting to an extreme stereotype of the West African as the legitimate standard to determine "how" black a civilization or group of people are. In Ivan Sertima's defense of his thesis that black African people came to the West before Christopher Columbus, "Reply to my critics", he laid out 10 myths that he responds to, with the second addressing these misconceptions about West Africans and Egyptians, noting that the critics supporting the classical negro as a West African standard are ignorant of the variations of features of "pure blooded" West Africans.
In addition, it is clear that these critics do not apply the same standards of facial phenotype upon Europeans. A European with a large nose, curly hair, or tanned skin would not be considered "less" European, white, or Caucasoid than any other, but instead be considered another type of European. In the same manner, it is understood that Africans have a variety of features, none owing to a European, Arab or non-Black progenitor.
Renouncing blackness
Those who wish to be identified by either their national origin alone, or by a color term other than black are often considered "sellouts" by those who embrace their own black identity. It is often feared that these "sellouts" wish to socialize primarily with the colonizing elite and hide their own black heritage.
In the West, this is usually the root cause of recent divisions within Latino culture that are manifesting themselves politically (most notably in Cuba). Some may choose to suppress or renounce their black heritage for economic reasons, but the social effects are almost always the lowest common denominator: acceptance into the dominating elite earns respect and prestige and a feeling of meaningful accomplishment. By passing into white identity, those who renounce their blackness often feel that they are achieving a self-respect and dignity not possible within a black identity. The novel 'Black No More' by George Schuyler exposes this underlying motivation, and is still considered an up-to-date commentary on the issue, and it also tackles the larger issue of recognizing race as a social construct and not a biological reality.
Some black individuals and some cultures of black African origin may take great effort to renounce their identity as well as to renounce or play down their own African ancestry while emphasizing the other heritage or cultural background present in their society. Latinozation and Arabization are the two most potent forces of de-Africanization, due to the lingering effects of colonization and racism imposed on their cultures by the colonial rulers of the past few centuries. The colonizing elite of Latin America, North Africa, and East Africa had universally applied the skin-color caste-system throughout their dominions, which emphasized the supposed virtues