Black people

"Black" is a term used as a form of ethno-racial classification. It can either be an ascription placed on multiple peoples based on subjective criteria of what Black is, or it can be adopted as an identity by individuals within the groups in question. The ascribed concept of Black was begun by Europeans attempting to classify peoples around the world, but with time many individuals within these populations have adopted the moniker "Black" to define themselves.

Though literally implying dark-skinned, "black" has been used in different ways at different times and places. It is somewhat of a misnomer in various parts of the world. While the extremes of human skin color range from pink to blue-black, all people have some level of the same melanin and medium brown skin tones are predominant around the world.

There are three distinct trends in identifying Blacks around the World. That of Eurocentric racialism of the last three centuries, that of Afrocentric racialism that has embraced the European concept and used it a s a sense of uniting pride, and that of those who embrace the terms based on racial beliefs and/or as an ethnic identity. When defining Black people, all three of these trends must be considered.

The Epistemological Challenge

The concept of a "Black person" (or a "White person") is scientifically useless. This does not mean that the terms are inaccurate, nor that there are no Black people nor White people in the world. It means that the terms cannot be defined objectively so that they can independently be tested. Like aesthetic terms such as beauty and balance, religious terms such as sin and grace, and political terms such as liberal and conservative, they apparently reflect something important in the minds of those who use them. Nevertheless, the claim that any specific individual is Black or White cannot be falsified—there is no way to demonstrate it to be an inaccurate depiction of factual reality. Hence, biology, genetics, physical anthropology, indeed the all of the hard sciences ignore the concepts of Black people and White people; they are as irrelevant to the scientific method as is the transubstantiation of the Eucharist.

Those who believe in the physical reality of "Black" as a replicable human category use three kinds of definition to advocate the notion: ancestry, appearance, and self-identity. All three definitions are underlain by a subtext of bigotry resulting from the slave trade and inter-cultural oppression resulting from the age of European colonization. All three are epistemologically untenable.

The ancestry definition applies the label to anyone with ancestors who were victims of the African slave, regardless of their appearance and regardless of how they self-identify ethnically. The appearance definition is applied to people who "look Black," whatever their ancestry or self-identity. And the self-identity definition applies to those who express a solidarity with Blackness as an ethno-political group, regardless of both ancestry and appearance.

A problem with the ancestry definition is that about one-third of White Americans (non-Hispanics who are members of the U.S. White endogamous group and check off "White" on the census) have easily detectable African DNA from the transatlantic slave trade that they inherited from recent ancestors who passed through the U.S. color line from the Black endogamous group to the White endogamous group. Similarly, about five percent of members of the U.S. Black endogamous group have no detectable African DNA, but self-identify as of African-American ethnicity by choice.

A problem with the appearance definition is that it is routinely demonstrated in college cultural anthropology classes that "racial" appearance is in the eye of the beholder. The same individual seen as White by a Dominican can be seen as Black by an American. Furthermore, such perceptions have changed dramatically over the centuries. In the mid-18th-century, Americans saw Germans as being physically too swarthy of complexion to ever pass for White. Similarly, encyclopedias of the time described mid-19th-century Irish immigrants as physically non-White, apelike, evolutionary throwbacks. Conversely, the Mississippi elite of the Jim Crow era saw Chinese immigrants as being physically White.

A problem with the self-identity definition is that no human society is monolithic. About 40 percent of Puerto Ricans living in the United States check off "White" on the census, fifty percent check off "other" and fill in something that the Bureau interprets as meaning "White," and ten percent check off "Black." Many individuals around the world choose to self-identify (or not) as "Black" in an ethno-political sense, some in obedience to local political leadership, some in defiance of it. A deeper problem is that many if not most individuals change their ethno-political self-identity over their lifetimes; some do so often.

The lack of an objective definition expels the very concepts Black person and White person from the world of physical reality. The terms reflect something in the minds of the users but the terms cannot be unambiguously matched to real-world phenomena. Hence, the following discussion is descriptive, not prescriptive. It adopts a neutral point of view to describe how people use the term. It does not suggest that any particular usage is "better" or "worse" than any other, much less does it suggest that Black people are "better" than White people or vice-versa.

A brief history of the concept of Blackness

Since the dawn of recorded history humans have tried to classify each other with various descriptive names in an attempt to organize their environment. The early Greeks and Romans called various dark skinned peoples by various names: Aethiops, referring to their burnt colored skin. Melanogaetulians were dark skinned people in the north, Even the Leukaethiops which meant light burnt faces. On the West side of Africa, the Nigritae were named not for their color but for their proximity to a river. The Berber named Gher-n-gher, or River of Rivers. The Romans Latinized the Berber name to Niger or Nigris. And the people who lived around it as the Nigritae. The dark waters of the Niger and dark skin of the Nigritae would become synonymous would dark colors and the term Niger to refer to dark colored would evolve and the word Negro would evolve to describe these people. Negro would eventually also mean Black colored. And this term was applied to multiple peoples around the world that would subsequently be called Black as well.

Black populations by Self identification

Work in progress

African Populations

Niger-Congo populations In many of these populations where the term was first imposed, the term black is used to refer to themselves.

Nilo-Saharan populations Some populations do identify as Black, and some populations have people who do identify as black and others who don't.

Afro-Diasporic Cultures

Carribbean Some Afro-Diasporic populations in the Carribbean have adopted the term black, but others feel this term refers to Afro-Americans and not to them.

Afro-American This population has fully embraced the term Black to refer to their ethnicity.

Afro-Latino Many populations of Afro-Latinos call themselves negros as well.

Australia The Aborigines of Australia also were imposed the term black by the English, and by and large, refer to themselves as Black as well.

India

Sidi Still researching if the y refer to themselves as Black or not.

Dalits In India, the group that has suffered the most opression has been the Dalit outcaste class, and many have looked to the American civil rights movement for inspiration. Some Afrocentrics 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 represents 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 beleifs that they are African, and have formed organizations like the Dalit Panthers emulating the Black Panther Party of the USA.

Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism Compared and Contrasted

In the Eurocentric trend, the term "Negro" originally denoted the Niger-Congo speaking peoples of equatorial Africa. Then the usage would spread to the Nilo-Saharan and Cushitic speaking peoples of East Africa and would eventually spread to mean anyone that they felt resembled these people. Thus many other peoples in Asia were also called Negros or in some cases Negritos. When the English adopted the term and translated it to Black they applied the term even more liberally to peoples around the world including peoples from India, Australia, Melanesia and even Native Americans at different points in history. None of those people at the time considered themselves part of a global "racial" group. When early anthropologists tried to categorize humans into "races," these same lines were followed citing cranial and other anthropometric similarities along with skin color. Genetics has thoroughly discredited this crude approach and categorizing separate peoples in mega groups. But with colonialism many individuals within these groups adopted the early terms to refer to themselves and their groups.

As Eurocentrism weakened, many populations sought to overcome the stigmas imposed by centuries of colonialism. One approach, called Afrocentrism, seeks to take the stigmas and spin them into a positive light. Afrocentrists do not refute racialism, but instead seek to use it in a way that shows those referred to as "Black" by Eurocentrists and Afrocentrists were actually a global community and that the achievements of these multiple groups not only have been underrepresented, but that those achievements are a credit to the global Black population. In seeking to enlarge this Black sense they have gone seeking even more people to categorize as "Black."

As with early Eurocentrism, some of the peoples thus categorized by Afrocentrism have embraced this foreign concept and others have not. Not all of those who call themselves "Black" subscribe to a Global Black sense of identity, and some just call themselves "Black" in a local ethnic sense.

In the various definitions of "Black" today, Eurocentrism categorizes Niger-Congo and Nilotic African, Australian, Melanesian Aboriginal, Negrito, and Indian populations and their descendants as Black. Some, like Australian Aborigines, many African populations and the Afro Diasporic populations through out the Western world have adopted this moniker. Afrocentrism has also promoted these names, but as indications of a global Black community and has actively recruited among other populations in Native American history, as well as aboriginal populations through out Asia. Some oppressed groups, empathizing with the Civil rights movement of Blacks in America have adopted the moniker as a sense of solidarity, as in the case of some of the Dalits of India.

It is well known that equatorial populations of Africa, where modern humans likely originated, are the most genetically diverse in the world [2]. Afrocentrism believes that this explains the variability of phenotypes among the world's diverse so-called Black groups. As they see it, although there is no single black phenotype, black people generally exhibit varying characteristics of what they call Negroid, Veddoid, Capoid, or Australoid phenotypes, with a great range of variations, due to the overall diversities of black people. (The terms themselves are obsolete categories of human variation, no longer used by physical anthropologists or geneticists because they cannot be falsified—see "The Epistemological Challenge," above.)

In the USA, Eurocentrism developed beliefs of hypodecent and one-droppism where people with any amount of ancestry from any of the groups believed as Black would be considered Black as well, thus increasing significantly the parameters of what phenotypes fall as Black. Afrocentrism uses these expanded parameters to define Blackness around the world. In other places, like South Africa and the antebellum lower South, admixture produced new populations with their own identity instead of Black, such as Creoles, Coloured, etc. In the United States of the Jim Crow era those populations split between families that were accepted as White and those absorbed into the Black identity and the various ethnic groups now using the term themselves.

Regions Affected by Eurocentrism/Afrocentrism

So-called black people are found in various regions based on which group is defining blackness. Eurocentrists and Afrocentrists define a huge variety of groups as Black; Self identified groups exist in parts Africa, the Americas, Australia, and even in some populations in India.

Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists believe that Black people are found on every continent, and are indigenous to Africa, Australia, and parts of India and Southern Asia. The belief continues that although originally indigenous to North Africa as well, centuries of intermarriage with Asiatic and Caucasoid peoples have produced populations who exhibit varying degrees of black ancestry, but who currently do not refer to themselves as black. But many people of Africa and other parts of the world with African descent may not see themselves as Black and not believe in Afrocentric racial beliefs or identify with a pan-africanist global Black identity. The Black identity varies by peoples and region.

In the Western Hemisphere, self identifying black people are found in high concentrations in the urban regions of the United States and the Bible Belt region of 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. Nevertheless, many individuals in these populations do not consider themselves to be black despite their acknowledging considerable African descent. Therefore, there is contention with both Eurocentrists and Afrocentrists over their identity.

People of recent African decent can be found in Yemen, some areas of Iraq (especially Basra. And on the North West Side of India, such as the small group of 20-30,000 Siddis in the Gujarat province of India, the Kaffiri of the island of Sri Lanka, and small communities of Sheedis in the coastal districts of the southern province of Sindh and neighboring Baluchistan. Thousands of Sheedis also inhabit Karachi, Pakistan's largest city. Some individuals of these populations do identify as Black.

Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism have also claimed much of Nepal (especially Rana Tharu), the Andaman Islands ( Negritos ), the indigenous Dalit population of India (numbering 160 million) and the larger Dravidian population of India (though most do not consider themselves black), because they "look Black," despite lacking recent genetic connection to Africa. Some Dalhits have adopted this belief).

Other groups claimed are the indigenous people of the island of Papua , Aboriginals and Melanesians that inhabit various islands of the Pacific Rim.

Other African groups claimed are afro-Jewish cultures in East India (see Bene Israel), Ethiopia.

Afrocentric and Eurocentric Views of Human Origins

We do not know what skin tone our earliest ancestors had, but based on our oldest relatives in the KhoiSan populations, we can deduce that they were of light-brown skin tone. Brown skinned humans have existed as the default human type as far back as the human species (homo-sapiens) is known to exist.

Afrocentrists claim that: 1) from 1.2 million years ago for a million years, the ancestors of all people alive today were as black as today's Africans and 2) the descendants of people who migrate North from Africa will mutate to become white over time because the evolutionary constraint that keeps Africans' skin black generation after generation decreases generally the further North a people migrates (Rogers 2004).

In fact, almost everyone on the planet is some shade of brown. The world-unique pale complexion and melanin-deficient hair common to Nordic adults is the exception. This phenomenon's cline is densest within a few hundred miles of the Baltic Sea and, unlike other Old World skin-tone distributions, is independent of latitude (the natives of lands at higher latitudes than the Baltic are invariably darker than Nordics). Mainstream scientists can only speculate on ancient hominid skin tone, but believe that the skin of early H. sapiens was probably of medium tone as of the KhoiSan, and with time some populations got darker through selective environmental processes, and other got lighter through different processes. See Human_skin_color for an overall explanation of skin-tone distribution. See The Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Tone for an explanation of the near-albino paleness of Nordics and the lack of variation in Native Americans.

Africans are believed to have expanded from Africa in two, possibly three distinct groups, the older Aboriginal Australians and smaller Negrito populations and recent Nilotic and Niger Congo population types. According to current thinking, H. sapiens evolved in Africa 200,000 years ago and are the ancestors of all modern humans. They spread throughout Africa, and a small band crossed the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb about 70,000 years ago. Their descendants colonized the rest of the planet. Those who remained retained their distinctive skin color or got darker, while over time, some Eurasian populations got lighter. The unique Nordic adaptation took place much later, about 5,500 years ago, and only within a few hundred miles of the Baltic Sea. The very dark skin tone of the Bantu-speaking peoples may equally recent. Others, in India, and across the southern areas of Asia either retained or independently developed dark brown complexion. They also have other features that Eurocentrists and Afrocentrists agree make them "look Black."

Early Neolithic settlement patterns indicate that descendants of these early migrations spread out to inhabit much of the Indian Ocean coastline, contributing greatly to the Indian-Ocean cultures of the early historical period.

Eurocentrists and Afrocentrists identify these people as Black and believe the societies of the Indus Valley Civilization, Indonesia, and the Middle East have Black heritage. Afrocentrists believe that prehistoric black Africans (however defined) were in fact present in Asia. Mainstream scientists disagree and point out to those early migrations of people who looked like Aborigines and KhoiSan, and not Black. Of course some of these peoples have adopted the term Black to define themselves. But even this does not mean they identify with today's Africans.

Modern anthropologists note these aboriginal populations have ranged throughout Southeast Asia. Some of these populations, such as the Negritos still remain.

As the legacy of both the trans-Atlantic and Islamic slave trades, many people of indigenous African descent can be found throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, as well as parts of the Middle East and South Asia.

Some Afrocentrists claim that Africans may have already been in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus. They base their claims on phenotypes of sculptures such as the Olmecs and certain indigenous groups. On the other hand, geneticists has found no link between Native populations such as the Olmecs and Africans. Indeed, DNA studies have persuasively shown that Native Americans descend from Mongolian mammoth-hunters who crossed Beringia shortly before the end of the last glaciation (about 20 kya), and this is the current scientific consensus.

The majority of African slaves in the Americas came from either West Africa or Central Africa, and the slaves in the Arab world came from both East Africa and the Horn of Africa.

Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists claim the Negrito, Australoid and Melanesian populations as well. These include some South Asians, a variety of East Indians, and Melanesian populations of the Pacific Ocean. These populations are distinct from Africans but show genetic similarities to the Khoisan and pygmy populations of Africa.

Eurocentrists have claimed that variations of people outside of West Africa are due to different degrees of intermixing among Negroid, Caucasoid and Sinoid people. (Again, these terms have no meaning in anthopology today.) Afrocentrists, on the other hand, believe that human variations do not spring from intermixing but from environmental adaptations.

The latter (Afrocentrist) belief is more correct, given that everyone is of 100 percent African ancestry (from the band that crossed the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb about 70,000 years ago). Nevertheless, genetic admixture and inter-population gene flow have been remarkably constant and of large volume throughout the past. Genetic studies have shown admixture on the East side of Africa between Eurasian populations, KhoiSan, and even back migrations from India. Thus admixture is still considered at least partially a factor in Nilotic features.

Defining Characteristics of Black People

Throughout the Modern Period, blackness as a belief of racialism has been determined mostly by three criteria: Skin color, faciocranial phenotype and sometimes hair texture.

On other places hypo descent beliefs and/or ethnic identification have led to blackness 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, and parts of India, 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 heritage, again often reflecting the sentiments of the surrounding society in which they live.

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.

1. Africans living in Africa who have adopted the term black from colonialism(excluding those whose ancestors were not originally from Africa, like Afrikaaners). Many populations have not adopted the concept of Black to describe themselves, but with the growth of Pan-Africanism, many groups have adopted a sense of Blackness as equated to being African.
2. People claimed by Afrocentrists and/or Eurocentrists whose ancestors have lived outside of Africa since historical antiquity. The various "Black-looking" Asians fit this category. Blackness has been used to describe Aeta Filipinos, the original inhabitants of Taiwan, large groups of East Indian populations throughout history and various southeast Asians, Papuans, and Melanesians. Their experiences range widely and there is relatively less information regarding their self-perception in relationship to other people who see themselves as Black throughout the world, as they have had little contact with African and black people of the western hemisphere.
3. Those who live in Latin America and in some 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 see themselves as non-black, even as other relatives in their family (even siblings) label themselves black.
4. Those who live in the United States, Jamaica and South Africa. These groups share a similar and unique experience of being ruled by English speaking colonizers and were legally separated into two groups blacks and coloreds. But with hypo descent beliefs and one drop rules incorporated many associate 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.

Self-identified and imposed blackness

There are two ways that a person can be defined as a black person. There is the imposed method, whereby political and social forces will label a darker skinned person as black. This has occurred in India, the islands, 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; African Americans have adopted and accept the concept of Black to describe themselves.

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 Niger-Congo and Nilotic 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; 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. The one-drop rule and hypodescent have been weakening, and like other cultures, Americans are becoming more willing identify with all their ancestries.

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 non-European looks, culture, and heritage in order to increase the political, economic, and social well-being of black people around the world. Many also approach this role with an Afrocentric approach which seeks to uplift Black identified people by reversing the stigmas and identities placed on them through Eurocentrism instead of combating the identities themselves. 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.

Some countries, like Brazil, have always celebrated their African heritage, while other countries like Egypt and the northern areas of Sudan tend to denounce it entirely whenever possible, holding on to Arabic or Semitic influences as their primary heritage. Arabization has been a major imposition on the native Africans of various areas of Africa throughout the 2nd millennium, affecting African identity even to the present day.

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 African people, and modern scholarly consensus. Many archaic literary accounts, including the Bible, supposedly describe black people in Hebrew according to the centrists. 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. and instead insisted 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 were variously recast by modern scholarship as non-black Caucasoids, whose heritage was not truly connected to the greater populations of Africa.

Currently, the mainstream scientific belief is that admixture and population adaptations have led to clines where populations slowly vary from one group to another such that there are no set divisions in these populations. East Africans are as closely related to people of the Middle East as to their neighbors to the west.

See also

• African diaspora
• Colored people in the United States
• Coloured people of South Africa
• Creole
• Race
• Race and Intelligence
• Racial segregation
• Negrito
• Negro
• Nilotic
• White (people)

Groups

• African American
• Afro-Argentinian
• Afro-Brazilian
• Afro-Cuban
• Afro-Ecuadorian
• Afro-Latin American
• Afro-Mexican
• Afro-Peruvian
• Afro-Trinidadian
• African American culture
• African American music
• Black British
• Black Canadian

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
• Various works describing the complex relations between East Indians, Blacks, and Latinos across the Caribbean.
• Gullah culture of South Carolina.
• What race were the ancient Egyptians?
• Egypt–the world's first melting pot