Thanks, this is good. The chart essentially shows when the earliest certain genes showed up in various regions. It would be easy to misunderstand and think that genetic “development” stopped at each arrowhead. (If we absurdly persist in grouping humans by race, it follows that Africans should be split into several more races.) This will help me in arguments about what “ethnicity” means. I think people use it when they are trying to use the word “race” in polite company.
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In this case, it was not a neutral bit of humans trying to better understand the world. It was a willful misunderstanding of Darwin’s theories to justify brutal oppression of people who did much of the productive labor in America (and in European colonies). It was a system of power deployed to justify murder and exploitation.
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Certainly, by most measures there is more human variation within Africa than outside it. For example, both the tallest populations of human beings and some of the shortest populations of human beings hail from subsaharan Africa (white guy included for size comparison):
It just so happens that whatever dumb-dumb came up with the idea of the so-called “Negro race” decided that skin color was the only thing that really mattered.
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Well, in the U.S. it’s mostly been used to distinguish certain (that is, “lesser”) whites from normal ones, or from WASPs. It’s mostly been an intra-white term.
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Hmm, I had a previous response to this, but it appears to have disappeared…
Yeah, I’ve seen those in the African diaspora use the term to refer to: anyone of similar complexion (regardless of origin), those of the African diaspora or ancestry, or those of parallel experience and common cause (regardless of origin). I’ve also seen those outside the African diaspora claim it or reclaim it, usually because British colonialism imposed that label on them.
On the other hand, I’ve seen recent African emigrants and their children, perhaps particularly those who weren’t from West Africa, reject “Blackness” and the whole notion of any sort of commonality in the African diaspora. Which also seems totally reasonable, given that people from different parts of the continent have no genetic or cultural commonalities, nor even necessarily the same experiences with colonialism and racism.
So it seems problematic both to use the term to exclusively refer to the African diaspora but also use the term to entirely encompass it, because it starts conflicting with how various people identify themselves (or not).
The politics of labels is sooo much fun. (Let’s not even get into the politics of “Eskimo,” though at least there, the people to whom it has been applied seem to uniformly reject it.)
I was confused, because my previous comment went into this explicitly, until I realized my comment had disappeared into the void and that’s not what you were responding to.
But yeah, I’ve seen “black,” “Black” and “Blak” used by Indigenous Australians, and even apparently there’s some attempt to reclaim “blackfella” (but it sounds like it’s somewhere between “queer” and the n-word in terms of its offensiveness when used by out groups)…
Elsewhere in the Anglophone world “Black” is reclaimed by a number of groups who got labeled such under English colonialism. I just wonder how wide-spread that usage is in the US. I’ve seen at least some, specifically African-American, usage of “Black” to refer to people of diverse origins around the world. The “Black Power” movement apparently encompassed people in Australia, New Guinea and even New Zealand. I’ve also seen the label used for Dalits, in the process of identifying a shared struggle between them and African Americans.
It’s an interesting difference between the US and Haiti, for example. In the US, enslaved people came from a number of different groups with different languages and cultures, and often ended up distributed in North America in ways that meant even when they were with other people from Africa, they didn’t share a language or culture, and so it was almost all lost, except as echoes in folktales. (There are a few highly regional exceptions to this, but in general…) In Haiti, on the other hand, people with shared cultures and language got to remain in proximity to each other, so cultural roots going back to Africa are retained. (And, the argument has been made, shared culture and languages - sometime including literacy - helped them successfully plot and execute their rebellion from slavery.)
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I get - and use the capital B for Black where I can, ditto Whites, it’s a race, needs to be capitalised I guess - that’s less important to me though.
I didn’t get the slave comment at all, I watched the video a few times and still don’t get it. Slavery is dehumanising, horrible etc. Not sure hiding that process makes progress, I guess the idea is to give the enslaved agency, but enslaved man/woman/people feels clunky and weirdly distanced?
I dunno, I am afaik not descended from slaves/enslaved people so I have no dog in this fight, but would like to hear a perspective on it…yes I googled, it seems rather up in the air and indeed, historians are putting the same point as my first reaction, that it feels like it is sugarcoating something that should never be sugarcoated - and indeed probably was people who were slaves/enslaved who grew that sugar… :-/
TL;DR - to say ‘they had agency’ when they pretty much effectively didn’t is a weird way of remembering their past. No, they pretty much had zero agency, that is the utter horror of slavery. They had no freedom, no voice, no rights…
Also as commented above - slaveholder sounds cutely genteel, like something you buy for your iPhone. No, slave-owner or slaver because you could own people as archaic as that sounds now and grates with modern ideas. They were like your iPad, toaster or your Nikes. Things to be bought and sold like livestock. True they were humans and had individual identities, dreams, hopes and inner lives, but at the time that was secondary/unimportant to their owners, they were property. And they had little way of acting on any of those unless they escaped.
Not sure downplaying that fact is useful to convey how evil slavery is and was?
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That’s a great article that I think sums up my personal views pretty concisely.
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I capitalise Black (and Indigenous); I occasionally capitalise White when I’m wanting to make a specific point about the distinction between skin colour and socially-assigned racial hierarchy, but I normally just leave it as white. Because fuck white people, basically.
It’s important not to decontextualise and draw a false equality between whiteness and Blackness. Blackness was created as a response to cultural genocide and oppression; it is a justifiable and often admirable thing. Whiteness, OTOH, was created as a means of facilitating genocide and plunder. There is no common cultural bond linking white people apart from collaboration in the subjugation of non-white people.
They aren’t equivalent.
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I wasn’t saying they were equivalent? I use both although oddly White looks odd to me, but as bell hooks might tell you, using lowercase can be an expression of power as much as capitalisation. aka ‘I don’t need to capitalise this, it’s white people, they get that privilege’. Making them equal might be a better thing, but I don’t care either way.
Saying that Whites ugh whites - that’s better - are not a group and Black is is a bit strange though. I am another minority -queer - and the idea that you become somehow bonded by shared horror is a noble fantasy, a cute one but is frankly not true. Can’t speak for the Black experience, but I know how different and dysfunctional the LGBTQ* are - we can never decide on ANYTHING usually - and I suspect other groups are the same. The automatic ‘brotherhood’ of oppressed is bullshit. People are dicks in every minority and movement and seem to share more with other dicks than the people in their ‘tribe’.
And don’t get me started on cross-minority empathy, had to bail one BLM group here cos apparently saying Black Trans/Queer Lives Matter is hijacking the movement according to some black cishet people…even though queer people started it specifically to be intersectional. sigh
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