not 'black'
The Campaign Against the Use of Race Color-Labels...
not 'black'
The Campaign Against the Use of Race Color-Labels...
The aesthetic (?) of the 'black' Star and the Land of 'black
Long before the ‘black’ star became decidedly a symbol of ‘African emancipation’ in Ghana’s flag, and long before Marcus Garvey created Black Star Line shipping company, the racial label ‘black’ was laden and fraught as an identifier of a type of humankind.
In Ghana, the adoption of ‘black’ iconography achieved a cult-like devotion immediately after independence; the first president of the new republic constructed a monument (see image) with a massive five-pointed star atop painted pitch-black; this is the Black Star Gate, next to the Black Star Square, not far from the Christiansborg Castle that used to be a slave trading depot.
Kwame Nkrumah also copied the name of Garvey’s shipping line; the national shipping company of Ghana is the Black Star Line. The nickname for the Ghana national men’s soccer team is the Black Stars. In an account of Nkrumah's life, Basil Davidson, the historian, described Nkrumah as Black Star. [1]
In Ghana, the 'black star' has achieved its own aesthetic - it is ubiquitous and emblazoned on walls, cars, jerseys.
We know that before and during the Common Era, some of the names assigned to the peoples of Africa have been associated with, or have suggested the color ‘black;’ many of the geographical names such as Niger and Sudan contain the roots of the word ‘black.’ The Greek word for ‘Ethiopia’ (Aethiops) is suggestive of the color of the people the Greeks and the Romans had encountered in East and North Africa. [2]
Professors Gates and Curran tell us that: "When the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Arabic peoples first described the inhabitants of Africa, it was Africans’ color that struck them most. Over many centuries, African “blackness” grew into an all-encompassing signifier that substituted for the range of reddish, yellowish, and blackish-brown colors that the skins of Africans actually express. The color black also became synonymous with the land itself..." [3]
Notes
1. Basil Davidson 2021 (reprint). Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah. Routledge.
2. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran 2021. Inventing the Science of Race. The New York Review. December 12.
3. Ibid.
The Flag
More than any other symbol, the 'black star' became a powerful metaphor of the emancipated African for Nkrumah. As Prime Minister and then first President of the republic, he influenced the adoption of this cultural artefact. The flag was designed by Theodosia Salome Okoh, a Ghanaian artist. The color palette is based on the Ethiopian flag, which features a five-pointed star in yellow on a blue disc.
The Public Square
The Black Star Square is close to the beaches of Osu in Accra; notice the five-pointed black star atop the pavilion at the Square. The Square was commissioned by Nkrumah and is typically used for public events.
The Coat of Arms
The 'Black Star' features prominently in Ghana's Coat of Arms - there are indeed three black stars in the Coat of Arms. The Coat of Arms was commissioned by Nkrumah in 1957 and designed by Nii Amon Kotei, a Ghanaian artist.
The Sinister Character of 'black'
We know now that Christian churches in western Europe beginning in the 12th century and 13th century were “stocked with images of unmistakable 'black' Africans as torturers, tempters, and executioners often in the scenes of the Passion of Christ.” There was a “long tradition (of portrayals) of black devils and torturers” in the European Christian church. [4]
This iconography was on display in many churches for all to see, and many Europeans may have “received their first subliminal impressions of so-called Negroes in a local church or a cathedral…”[5] There were some ‘positive’ images of 'blacks' in Europe in the late Middle Ages when European artists “tended to picture Egyptians as at least dark or black-skinned and to include recognizable Africans in scenes from the so-called Old Testament. There was also favorable portrayal of the wealthy 'black' king of Mali, based on the thirteenth-century accounts of Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca, laden with much gold.” [6]
We are also familiar with the image of Saint Maurice [7] who was supposedly from Thebes, but had become a 'black man' in armor by the mid-13th century, whose image was surpassed only by images of the black Queen of Sheba, and the black Virgin Mary. Within Christianity, the Europeans had accepted the idea of a black African as one of the "wise men," in the scenes of the Nativity by the early 15th century.
But these ‘positive’ images competed with plenty ‘negative’ images of 'blacks' as well which depicted “black death squads serving the devil, or the devil himself portrayed as an animalistic black man…”[8] The negative depiction of a 'black' man raising a stick to beat Christ, as 'white' Jews mock and denounce him in a mural by the Italian Giotto from around 1304-1305 is well known. See image.
It is clear that the negative portrayals of 'blacks' became the more widely accepted images in Europe over the few positive depictions. And it is these undesirable images that were reinforced during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Notes
4. David Brion Davis 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, page 59.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. See for instance, Ivan Van Sertima 1996 (editor). African Presence in Early Europe. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
8. David Brion Davis 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, pages 59-68.
Who is black? Kush, Aethiopia, Egypt
In his authoritative study, The Curse of Ham, Professor David Goldenberg reveals that the image of Kush, the "furthest southern reach of the earth," and the prevalent images of the African in biblical texts are not negative and indeed describe positive attributes.
"The patristic metaphorical representation of the black African as demon is not found in Jewish Literature," [9] writes Professor Goldenberg. There are no such images from Jewish culture. While the use of color black as metaphor is found in the biblical text, there is no application of that attribute to the Kushite due to their complexion. Moses married a Kushite.
Roman and Greek portrayals and attitudes toward the so-called Aethiopes have revealed that there were certain beliefs in these societies of the "congenital inferiority" [10] of some ethnic groups. But, "even at their most negative," [11] these beliefs were not based on ideas of racial formation and a race-based society.
And we know that tomb reliefs from the New Kingdom in ancient Egyptian society reveal a "population with various complexions, from light to dark brown, mirroring the diversity of the Egyptian society in Antiquity." [12] This relief is often copied in other tombs and is meant to demonstrate the "varieties of humankind as creations" of a deity. [13] See image.
The valence of physical types of humankind is manifest in the regions of the Egypt: the population is generally of darker hue in the south than in the north, and there are variations of complexion from north to south. The texture of the hair is curly or not based on location and the portrayals in the tombs do not depict abstract representations.
So, who is 'black'?
Notes
9. David M. Goldenberg 2003. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery In Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, page 196.
10. David Brion Davis 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, page 58.
11. Lloyd A. Thompson 1989. Romans and Blacks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, page 157.
12. Frank J. Yurco 1996. Two Tomb-Wall Painted of Ramesses III and Sety I and Ancient Nile Valley Population. In Egypt in Africa, edited by Theodore Celenko. Indiana: Indiana University Press, pages 109-110.
13. Ibid.
Image is from Frank J. Yurco 1996.
Conquest, 'black', Slave and the Curse
In the early Middle Ages, there was an exegetical change. All historians agree that after the Arab conquests of Africa, the number of African slaves increased in Islamic lands and there was palpable shift in linguistic reference to 'black.' The status of the people of darker hue of East Africa that emerged through conquest, wars and trade with Arabia was reflected in Islamic writings as the 'curse':
"The link of blackness and slavery is clear... an explicit link in the form of a dual curse of both blackness and slavery, begins to appear in seventh-century Islamic texts. From this time onward, the Curse of Ham, that is, the exegetical tie between blackness and servitude is commonly found in the works composed in the Near East, whether in Arabic by Muslims or in Syriac by Christians. The increasing reliance on the Curse of Ham coincides with the increasing numbers of 'blacks' as slaves." [14,15]
This is an emergent material and cultural change of what it is to be 'black.' The physical type, stereotype, was given as "curled hair, thick lips, red eyes, large phallus, nakedness." [16] The creep of the curse was becoming evident even in Jewish writings. Historians tell us that in "the twelfth century, Ibn Ezra, a Jewish writer in the Islamic world" made reference to the fact that 'blacks' are slaves because of Noah's curse on Ham. [17] There is of course no biblical text stating that blackness is a curse.
In Islamic texts, the tradition, the idea that Noah had issued a double curse (blackness and slavery) to Ham is widespread. In the Book of the Zanj, these beliefs are repeated.
By the 16th century when the trans-Atlantic slave trade was kicking into gear, "Christian use of the biblical curse became more important as defense" for enslaving the African. [18] In fact, there were variations of this curse based on biblical text (in addition to Ham's curse, there is the curse on Cain, and the curse on Canaan!) With this biblical justification, the "pagan, infidel and savage" 'black' African (depicted as demon, executioner, torturer, dark) can be enslaved to civilize him.
The Islamic texts became resources for the Christians whose influence had now reached the West Coast of Africa. Professor Davis tells us that: "the famous example of the transmission of 'the curse' from Islamic to Christian Europe came when Portugal's official royal chronicler...included a reference to Ham (spelled Cham or Cam) in his 1453 account of the Portuguese 'discovery' and conquest of Guinea." [19]
Islamic texts provide a certain 'specializing' of color terms as identifiers of human types. Professor Lewis thinks that three color terms are dominant in Islamic writing: 'black,' referring to the natives of Africa, south of the Sahara; 'white,' and occasionally 'red,' referring to Arabs, Persians, Greeks, Turks, Slavs and other peoples to the north and east of the 'black' lands. [20]
Notes
14. David M. Goldenberg 2003. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery In Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, page 197.
15. See also, Stephen R. Haynes 2002. Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. New York, Oxford University Press.
16. David Brion Davis 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, page 68.
17. Goldenberg 2003. page 175.
18. Davis 2006, page 69.
19. Davis 2006, page 70.
20. Bernard Lewis 2002. Race and Slavery in the Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press, page 26. See also image from Bernard Lewis.
Afriqa, Afriqi, African
The name Africa is not etymologically synonymous with 'black.' Like the biblical name Kush, the origins of the name do not have a color connotation. The General History of Africa cautions that the origin of the word is difficult to trace. [21]
The name has stuck from the Roman times, and there are many versions of the source. Professor Goldenberg explains that the "place name afriqa/i in targumic and rabbinic texts refer to North Africa, more precisely Carthage and the surrounding area." [22] In other texts, the place name refers to Phrygia in Asia Minor.
The General History of Africa also suggests that the name derives from the biblical Afer, progeny of Abraham. What we know is that, from the end of the first century before the Common Era, the name 'Africa' was applied to the entire continent and not just the North African region; this is what the General History of Africa tells us.
How can such a vast continent, with many kinds of populations and migrations, movements, and vectors of development and expression, be reduced to one color term as a descriptor of its inhabitants? The change in nomenclature seemed gradual, almost benign, and then evolved into a convenient ascription which embedded a certain social caste by the time the Arabs began their conquests and their trade in enslaved Africans.
We are reminded of what Professors Gates and Curran said: "When the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Arabic peoples first described the inhabitants of Africa, it was Africans’ color that struck them most. Over many centuries, African “blackness” grew into an all-encompassing signifier that substituted for the range of reddish, yellowish, and blackish-brown colors that the skins of Africans actually express. The color black also became synonymous with the land itself..."
Africa is replaced, ominously, over many centuries, by black Africa by about the 7th century CE. And the association is not a positive one.
Notes
21. J. Ki-Zerbo 1992 (editor). General History of Africa: Methodology and African Prehistory. London: Heineman Educational Books. UNESCO. See page 1.
22. David M. Goldenberg 2003. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery In Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, page 42.
Image is from General History of Africa Vol I: Methodology and African Prehistory. London: Heineman Educational Books. UNESCO.
Purity of Blood, and the New World
By 1500, the Islamic Moors had been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, where they had ruled for 800 years. The Arab African slave trade had brought many many 'black' Africans to Spain and Portugal, and there emerged a certain familiar concern among the Catholic Iberians about maintaining "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre). [23] This was perhaps some of the very early references to the ideas of biological race.
The ideas about "purity of blood" were expressed openly by the Christian Castilians because they were anxious about hearsay from all the forced conversions of the Jews (Conversos) after the expulsions of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497.
This fear was associated with "near paranoid depictions of Christians who were tainted by Jewish blood and ancestry and who engaged in subtle deals and machinations to gain control of both church and state." [24] The public suspicion and jealousy of the Conversos was so extreme that it led to a "notorious campaign...to spy on, torture, and burn at the stake thousands of Conversos." [25]
When the 'black' African presence became noticeable in the Iberian Peninsula, it revived all those fears that the "pure blood" was being polluted and stained. The 'blackness' of the African was as problematic as the Jews had been.
The well known quote from Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, Spanish historian and Benedictine monk, from about 1604 captures the mood of the Christian Iberians:
“Who can deny that in descendants of Jews there persists and endures the evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in the Negroes [there persists] the inseparability of their blackness. For if the latter should unite themselves a thousand times with white women, the children are born with the dark color of the father. Similarly, it is not enough for the Jew to be three parts aristocrat or Old Christian, for one Jewish ancestor alone defiles and corrupts him.”
The Spanish and Portuguese now controlled most, if not all, of the slave trade routes formerly operated by the Arabs. The Spanish had reached the Americas and the Portuguese had reached the West Coast of Africa. And the ideas about biological "blood" purity were calcifying into clear beliefs in the Christian world; these ideas were used to justify hatred of Jews and the enslavement of millions of Native Americans and Africans. These ideas persist.
Notes
23. David Brion Davis 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, page 70.
24. Ibid, page 71.
25. Ibid, page 72.
26. From the Historia de la vida y hechos del emperator Carlos V, vol 82. Biblioeca de autores espanoles (Madrid 1956), page 319. Cited originally in Davis 2006, pages 72, 348.
Image shows Portuguese traders making contact with the inhabitants of Cayor at Cape Verde around early 1500s.
Image is from General History of Africa, Vol IV: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century 1984. D.T. Niane, editor. UNESCO, page 320.
Inventing the 'black' Race
Around 1684, François Bernier, a Frenchman, published "Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l'habitent" ("New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or Races of Man that Inhabit It"), which is perhaps one of the early publications in Europe to use the term 'race' to sort humans into types.
In 1739, at the dawn of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, the Academy of the Bordeaux announced the subject of the competition for 1741: “Quelle est la cause physique de la couleur des nègres, de la qualité de leur cheveux, et de la dégénération de l’un et de l’autre?” (“What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?”).
According to Professors Gates and Curran, there were sixteen or so submissions that tried to provide some kind of enlightened or reasoned explanation for 'blackness.' [27] The trans-Atlantic slave trade was transporting thousands of enslaved Africans by this time. The English, Danish, French, had entered the slave trade and Portugal had been displaced as the major European slave trading country. The trade was making the Europeans very rich and the presence of 'black' Africans, many of whom were enslaved, was increasing in Europe and the New World.
European thinkers offered their views of 'blackness.' David Hume, the British philosopher, Voltaire, the French philosopher, and Immanuel Kant all generally indicted the negro, the 'black' as 'inferior' among the species or races of men. The list of 'enlightened' men and women who believed in the 'inferiority' of the 'negro' includes Thomas Jefferson. By this time, the word 'negro' was being used by European colonizers to describe 'black' Africans and the word took on racial connotations. 'Negro' has its origins in Spanish and Portuguese and is a word for the color black, which comes from the root the Latin word Niger.
Around 1758, Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish biologist, created a racial classification, which was later modified by his student, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anatomist. According to this classification, “niger, phlegmaticus, laxus” or “black, phlegmatic, relaxed” describes the African, and “albus, sanguineus, torosus” or “white, sanguine, muscular” describes the European. The classification for Asian is “luridus, melancholicus, rigidus” or “pale yellow, melancholy, stiff” and for the Native American “rufus, cholericus, rectus” or "red, choleric, upright.” Blumenbach's final taxonomy in 1795 had five groups, defined both by geography and appearance with the following varieties: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. However, the original classification of 1775 included only the first four of these five, and combined Malay with Mongolian.
This is the classification that became the basis for our current racial categories. This labeling of human types placed Europeans first on the rank-order, Asians, second, (Native) Americans, third and Africans at the bottom of the hierarchy. To this day, we still allude to this crude unscientific human hierarchy when we use racial color labels like ‘white’ or ‘black’ to describe ourselves and others.
What is notable is that Blumenbach is the first 'scientist' to use the term 'Caucasian' according to Professor Joe Feagin: "(Blumenbach) felt that the Europeans in the Caucasus mountains were the "most beautiful race of men." Ever since, Europeans have been called by a term that originally applied only to a small and unrepresentative area of Europe." [28]
As Professor Feagin tells us, the idea of race was never developed from diligent scientific observations of human beings. From it's beginning, the concept was based on "folk classification, a product of popular beliefs about human differences." [29]
Professor Stephen Jay Gould observed that this “shift to a hierarchical ordering of human diversity must stand as one of the most fateful transitions in the history of Western science.” [30]
Notes
27. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran 2021. Inventing the Science of Race. The New York Review. December 12.
28. Joe R. Feagin and Clairece Booher Feagin 1999. Racial and Ethnic Relations, 6th edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, page 5.
29. Ibid.
30. Stephen Jay Gould 1994. The Geometer of Race. Discover, November, page 67.
Image is from General History of Africa, Vol V, Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. B.A. Ogot, editor. UNESCO, page 102.
The Early Census and the Hypodescent
In the United States, the racial label ‘black’ was adopted for official reporting of racial types for the first time in the 1850 Federal Census, almost sixty years before Marcus Garvey created his shipping line. The label replaced the designations ‘Slaves,’ ‘Free Colored Persons.’
The unqualified designation ‘white’ was also used for the first time to replace ‘Free White Females and Males’ in the 1850 US Census. Except for the period from 1930 to 1960 when the label ‘Negro’ was used, the ‘white’ and ‘black’ color-coded racial categories have remained in the U.S. Census classifications as the only racial ‘color’ types since 1850.
The two color terms or labels anchor racial consciousness worldwide. In the United Kingdom for instance, the racial categories of ‘black, ‘white’ are curiously called “high-level ethnic groups” including a category for Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean or African. [31]
In Europe, where the original concept of racial categories was developed, “whites were considered the superior race, white skin was the norm while other skin colors were exotic mutations to be explained, and differences in intelligence" and other traits were racial in character. [32]
The basis for codifying and enforcing the racial caste structure was the legal system which would define who was 'black' in American society based on some variation of the purity of blood idea - in the form of the one-drop rule. This racial system allowed for categorizing types of ‘black:' 'Mulatto' ‘Quadroon’ or ‘Octoroon.’
Notes
31. Office of National Statistics, Census. United Kingdom.
32. Michael Omi and Howard Winant 1986. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge, pages 16-20.
The 1890 US Census Questionnaire
Self-Naming
The acceptance of the ‘black’ label has to be placed in context of how the descendants of formerly enslaved people wanted to reclaim the self-naming process in the Americas and in the Caribbean and elsewhere. The African Americans and African Caribbeans had an ambivalent relationship with Africa. And under the new race caste system, the 'black' label seemed to be inclusive of all kinds of different peoples who were phenotypically of African descent, but would not necessarily identify as African.
From another gaze, the label 'black' was thrust on the Africans, African Americans, African Caribbean, and others of African descent by a crude human ranking system. A bogus racial science had created a perfect dichotomy between the ‘white’ perfect human standard and the ‘black’ sub-standard deviation. (It is curious that the label ‘yellow’ for Asians never caught on, like ‘red’ did for Native Americans).
And then the adoption of the label became counter-cultural; it was meant to infuse ‘black’ with “positivity and political power, to move away from a term thought to be introduced by whites to invoke negative images.” [33] Acceptance of the label was supposed to suggest racial pride.
In the 1960s, the label gained wide acceptance during the Black Power Movement (“Black is Beautiful”). James Brown's rhythmic song, in the genre of funk, with the refrain 'Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud' became a popular and powerful anthem.
Note that around this time, immediately after independence from the European colonialists, the intellectual effort to vindicate Africa and its cultural norms and forms, with themes like ‘African personality,’ ‘negritude’ and ‘African identity’ had hit its stride. The call for a pan African identity across all continents, dovetailed with the acceptance of ‘black’ even among the intellectuals who were writing stridently about the struggle for independence and fuzzy ideas like African ‘consciousness.’ It seemed like, in this immediate post-colonial milieu, the African narrative was corrective history; that which was meant to counter the colonial caricatures and stereotypes of a continent, and Nkrumah's Ghana became that Star of 'black.'
But, in the 1980s, there was a push by Reverend Jesse Jackson and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to shift the label from ‘black’ to ‘African American.’ Jackson argued that the label ‘African American’ provides cultural integrity and psychological benefit. [34]
This declaration was not a hollow exercise; it is the clearest attestation that there is community consciousness that the label ‘black’ is, at a minimum, an inappropriate identifier for people of African descent.
Here is what Reverend Jackson said:
''Just as we were called colored, but were not that, and then Negro, but not that, to be called black is just as baseless,'' Mr. Jackson said at a news conference Monday after the group met to discuss national goals.
''To be called African-Americans has cultural integrity,'' he said. ''It puts us in our proper historical context. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.''
''There are Armenian-Americans and Jewish-Americans and Arab-Americans and Italian-Americans,'' Mr. Jackson said. ''And with a degree of accepted and reasonable pride, they connect their heritage to their mother country and where they are now.''
And so, why does the NAACP still use the term 'colored' in its name?
Notes
33. Zenobia Desha Jaye Bell, 2013. African-American Nomenclature: The Label Identity Shift from Negro to Black in the 1960s. Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Afro-American Studies., University of California, Los Angeles, page 16.
See also T. W. Smith 1992. Changing racial labels: From “colored” to “negro” to “black” to “African American”. Public Opinion Quarterly 56(4): 496–514.
34. “Jackson and Others say ‘Blacks’ is Passe.” New York Times, December 21 1988, page A16.
Image of Marsha Hunt and her 'Afro' during the 1960s and 1970s - Black is Beautiful.
Race is Dead, Race is not Dead
The emergence of ethnicity as a paradigm in the 1920s and 1930s was due to the rejection of social theories that relied on the biological paradigm to explain human variation. This biological view held that racial inferiority was “part of the natural order of humankind.” [35] These so-called ‘scientific’ ideas about humankind and human phenotypes were based on a certain social Darwinist framework that the evolution of humankind is based on superior types.
This rejection of biologic hierarchies did not outrightly abandon race as a social construct. While the focus of cultural pluralism theories was on the study of cultural elements such as language, customs, religion, and ancestry, there was no attempt to topple, replace the language that people were divided into ‘races’ based on a hierarchy of human types.
The American Association of Biological Anthropologists declared unequivocally: “Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations.” [36]
Even as an honest and good-faith approach to categorize human identity for security or crime forensics or risk assessments, the use of complexion or skin color as the only descriptor (‘black’ or ‘white’) is too limiting for investigative work. Identification would require greater detail and differentiation than the unremarkably and absurdly broad racial designation of ‘black’ or ‘white.’ In crime forensics, sex/gender, height, and age also are key characteristics for identification. Ascription of ‘race’ in a case where investigators only have a decomposed corpse might be a matter of location and demographics based on what we know about where certain cultural groups live.[37] This begs the question: how are investigators able to determine a person’s so-called ‘race’ when phenotype or skin color cannot be established?
And yet, 'race' as an idea has not been abandoned in our language. It is a master status trait, and a social category of self-identity. Even though the racial/biological paradigm was effectively rejected in the 1930s by social theorists and social scientists, the language of cultural pluralism also used the vocabulary of ‘race’ to talk about cultural groups. Even sociologists, who are supposed to be critical observers of society have become inured to these terms that explicitly convey a human hierarchy.
Notes
35. Michael Omi and Howard Winant 1986. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge, page 14.
36. AABA statement on race & racism. 2019. American Association of Biological Anthropologists, March 27.
37. James Shreve 1994. Terms of estrangement. Discover. November, 57-63.
Image is from US Census Bureau https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/2020-census-dhc-a-race-overview.html
US Census Infographic: Measuring Race and Ethnicity Across the Decades: 1790–1950
US Census Infographic: Measuring Race and Ethnicity Across the Decades: 1950-2010
Dogma and Preference
From the infographic [38] we can see how the nomenclature has not changed for 'white' since 1850 in the US Census. Note that from 1900 to 2010, the label 'Negro' was used on the questionnaire. Note too that the term 'colored' has been used briefly. Indeed, former US Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt noted pointedly that the Census race categories are "remarkably, a discredited relic of 18th-century science." [39] It is interesting how the Census also allows for "other race." Are there other races?
On March 29, 2024, the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released revisions to the definitions of ‘race.’ To sidestep the problem of race as a discredited biological idea, the OMB makes clear that “the race and ethnicity categories set forth are sociopolitical constructs and are not an attempt to define race and ethnicity biologically or genetically.” [40]
The new directive changes the definition of ‘white’: no longer are people in Middle East or North Africa (MENA) to be called ‘white.’ According to OMB there is a “new minimum reporting category for MENA separate and distinct from the White category.” The new ‘white' category now includes only people with origins in Europe including, for example, English, German, Irish, Italian, Polish, and Scottish.
So, what is 'white'? Who is 'white'? (This is a topic for another website.)
In fact, we may ask: on what original scientific basis was MENA categorized as ‘white’ to begin with? (Even as ‘sociopolitical construct,’ race is a nitwitted idea!) For me, it is a curiosity that sociologists and scholars of race studies, as critical observers of society, do not actively deconstruct and problematize racial labels which embed crude ideas about human hierarchy. Why do sociologists encourage the usage of such obscene terms?
While it is important to study ‘race’ as a social construct and the effects of racism, it is equally important to consistently draw attention to the fact that the color racial labels and language we use as shorthand for describing ethnic and cultural groups are vulgar and based on discredited science.
We need to know that race is not a Jewish concept. In the Jewish Bible, all references to skin color in relation to people are descriptive. Race is not an identity. Classical Hebrew as well as Talmudic Aramaic do not have words for “race.” When the Torah categorizes nations, it does so to depict familial, linguistic, and geographic relationships. Race is not an Akan concept and the Census demographic designations used by the Ghanaians for ethnicity have no racial categories - the data are parsed by ethnic groups (e.g., Akan, Ga-Dangme, Ewe, Guan, etc.) Among the Akan, there is no representation of the five-pointed black star in any proverbs or aphorisms in the Adinkra symbols. So why did Nkrumah choose it to represent the 'liberated' African?
Or, is it simply a matter of preference?
In 2021, Gallup reported that, "Most Black Americans, 58%, do not have a preference between the terms 'Black' and 'African American' when asked which term they would rather people use to describe their racial group. Equal proportions (17%) expressed preference for either term.[41]
The survey also found that if they had to choose, "most black adults had a slight preference for "Black" (52%) over "African American" (44%). [42] But Gallup also tells us that, based on historical analyses of their surveys, "societally accepted terms do change over time."
So, what would it take for us to abandon racial labels?
Notes
38. https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/race/MREAD_1790_2010.html
39. Yanan Wang 2015. One graphic traces how racial and ethnic labels in America have changed since 1790. Washington Post, November 4.
40. Federal Register, Vol. 89, No. 62, March 29, 2024, p 22182.
41. https://news.gallup.com/poll/353000/no-preferred-racial-term-among-black-hispanic-adults.aspx
42 Ibid.
Repair the language, repair the World
Let us remember Professor Gould's observation when it comes to the 'science' of race: the “shift to a hierarchical ordering of human diversity must stand as one of the most fateful transitions in the history of Western science..." During the so-called 'Age of Enlightenment' in Europe, the esteemed scientists, experts and thinkers reduced the valence of our geographic, national, cultural, ethnic, familial and religious identities and markers to simple, color-coded terms and labels, and human types based on fake science, 'folk' science!
These labels give way and energy to a mythical 'black' race juxtaposed with a mythical 'white' race. One world in black and white!
The vexing historical gnosis is the embeddedness of this fake and dead science in spoken language and nomenclature. It seems difficult to undercut the ideology of supremacy of ‘whiteness’ when there is always its opposite, 'blackness.' Both terms are embraced by many as uplifting even as the terms reinforce a hierarchy of human types in spoken language.
And what is white supremacy when there are no races, no 'white' race?
I have a dream that one day the Black Star Gate will become the African Star Gate in Accra. I dream that the official name of Black Star Square will be changed to Independence Square. I have a dream that one day, Black History Month will become something like, ‘African American History Month.’ I have a dream that one day, my children and their children will not identified as 'black' or 'white.' I have a hope that this website will inspire conversations about repairing our spoken language.
Notes
Image is from Science News: "Why experts recommend ditching racial labels in genetic studies." https://www.sciencenews.org/article/race-label-genetic-stigma-diversity