The idea that race is a skin color is an abnormality. A race of people were long identified as a culture, a nation, or any type of ethnic identification. With the rise of the nation of Judah in the 10th century B.C.E. it also took on a religious identity closely associated with its national identity and after its destruction as a nation that national religious identity took on an ethnic, racial identity.
This article is meant to trace the transformation of race as an ethnic group a people might identify with into an artificial classification of skin color. Mr. Kenyatta took umbrage at my comment and hopefully he will consider my response as both an apology and an explanation.
Color As Word
One of the issues Mr. Kenyatta raises is whether color exists or is only a European concept. He wrote in response,
Additionally, Semitic languages, that my ancestors spoke, existed long before the cave dwellers from Europe that spoke the dead language of "Latin" of which I am quite proficient. And in those languages, there was not a word for the, as you put it, "color " Negro; for there was, obviously, no need.
Having no clear understanding of what he means, i.e. that they had no identifying colors at all, no identifying color for “blacK”, or no identifying color for people’s complexion? If the latter there would be no argument from me whatsoever because certainly when vocabulary was in the process of development there certainly would have been little “need” to identify people as a color. I do not know any languages of what Mr. Kenyatta prefers to call Alkebulan language, so I only know what others have told me. These linguists indicate that Mr. Kenyatta is correct in that color was not an indicator, an adjective, or descriptive term in at least the primacy of West Alkebulan Krahn languages. But words for color do exist of course, they are used mostly as nouns, or in some of the language variants, as verbs. So certainly no one could possibly be described as a black person or any color of person because color itself is a noun and cannot be a description of a noun. A noun is, and it might be defined by identifiers, but cannot be described by itself. A giraffe may convey in your mind a tall animal with spots, but tall, animal, and spots describe giraffes but are not giraffe. So if colors are only lexiconically nouns that cannot be used to describe another noun, such as a person. A black person could not lexiconically exist because black, the color is not descriptive.
Now that is my understanding, but I don’t know any of those families of languages. I do know there is some school of linguistic thought that suggests words that we might use as descriptive, like colors may be neither adjective, verb, or noun but have a lexiconically distinctive classification of their own which we are incapable of relating to in these Alkebulan languages of which we are speaking. Of course that is one of the principal problems in any type of translating languages, the exact meaning will be lost. But whatever the case, people could not exist as a color in those languages. But similarly, Mr. Kenyatta is correct about (at least the languages that derived into later Semitic languages), and I do have reading knowledge of many of the proto-Semitic languages and they all lack not only descriptive elements of color, but almost all use of color. The brightness of the day is developed only by is it bright, is it cloudy, is it dusk, is it dawn, is it nightfall, is it after nightfall. An object could not contain a color either. As the languages developed, and certainly as Aramaic became more commonly used in large swaths of the area, replacing many of the local languages, color descriptions began to appear, but new words did not appear. Instead, to be yellow there was no term for yellow but an object could appear as ‘wax” (yellow) or the word for “leaf” could be used to describe something that was green.
Color As Identity
Now all of this arose because of my comment that the term “negro” was itself an abbrogation of a people, a classification of American slaves by a different human identifier that separated them from “European” or white identities as a different race that transformed the understanding of race from an ethnic identity of a people who identified themselves to an imposed identity defined merely by the color of a person’s skin. Generally speaking, the largest percentage of all those brought to America were from Western Alkebulan tribes, but those west Alkebulan identities did not themselves consist of a singular ethnic identity. European identities could still be Italian, Irish, English, French but slave identities were denied their ethnic affiliations and all became “black”.
The term “negro” is itself neutral. As far as I am aware, all European languages have descriptive words for colors. In Spanish, a book cover could be “azul”, “roja” “verde” or “negro”. They were not descriptive of people but of objects. The Spanish conquistadors did not bring a lot of women to the new world and therefore did not necessarily designate much by skin color, while the Portuguese, who initiated the western hemispheric transportation, did distinguish the identities in Brazil. So we did not borrow “preto” for black americans, but “negro” because in the Spanish conquered territories negro remained linguistically a non-human identifier, but merely a color identifier. (More on that later when I speak of conquering “class”.
When the Americans wanted to designate its slaves as an inferior race of people, they chose to do a linguistic non-starter in 17th century English and adopt a “foreign” word. It is not that modern English (which was becoming a language at that time) was not itself a linguistic hodgepodge of a centuries long development, but at that time was both around 5 centuries free of conquest, but was beginning to develop a strong sense of ethnic English national identity and therefore began to cast out new words of foreign origin as ethnically inferior to their own terminology. This has not really disappeared. If we use a foreign word today we frequently italicize it and try to separate it from common original English words (though a false distinction because almost all modern English words are rooted in non-original Celtic (or are all conquerors words). We have very very few pre-Roman words in our lexicon. So the very use of “Negro” was from the beginning a demeaning separation that devalued the identity of those brought in slavery from Alkebulan to the United States.
My contention with Mr. Kenyatta is not that Europeans did not begin classifying inferiority by skin color, only that race as an identifier and a category of humanity was first developed in America and transferred back to Europe (and welcomed quite eagerly by the Europeans.). But I certainly did not intend to contest that Europeans (& the nationalities therein) did not already feel a “superiority” to those they were conquering, or that as they began to spread their culture across the globe that they did not feel their superiority over those they conquered as totally inconsequential to their own European identity of being lighter skinned. Only that it was not yet defined as races by colors. The “black” Indians (on the subcontinent); the Chinese, the Indonesians, the Malays and other southeastern Asians were all defined by the Europeans as lesser ethnic races, and were of course, defined as differing colors to separate them, but their cultural ethnicities were not classified as “one” singular inferiority defined by a “race” of inferior coloring but by many races of inferior culturally distinct ethnicities. The only point I was attempting to make to Mr. Kenyatta was that the idea that the skin color of a person was itself a race originated in the colonies that became the US and was one of the first ideological imports to Europe that then jumped upon the idea that it was not merely a European ethnic superiority to the lands they conquered but a European racial superiority that became a justification for those conquests.
One further response to my response to Mr. Kenyatta’s thought-provoking article. I apparently used the term “our own black slaves” and he queried what I meant. I think the answer is partially in what I’ve already written, that slavery in what was to become the United States, though not unique in human history, became unique in its ideological practice. First of all slavery, was always about the conquered being forced to serve the conquerors. The slaves brought to this country were never directly conquered. They were apparently already conquered and there is a lot of discussion on that issue which I will try to address later, but for now, let us just point out the Europeans bought slaves who had already been conquered. But eventually slaves, historically speaking, became assimilated, freed, or separated from their slavery. It was not a generational concept, per se, beyond the degrees that class itself might dictate. But “our slavery” refers to the uniqueness of American slavery that became an ethnic marker of skin color that remains well beyond whether freed or not. In fact a whole new concept of what it meant to be “free” or “slave” developed. A “freed” black person remained an unassimilated anomaly in a no-man’s world being neither free nor slave as DuBois pointed out. Likewise, a white person could be “free” while pursuing occupations generally considered peasant or slave in the historical framework, and neither had ever been thought of as free. That America diffused this into an egalitarian concept has not made the “freedoms” it professes any more true as freedoms than it would be if it did not proclaim such egalitarian ideas. For the formerly enslaved there has still not opened a path to freedom and cannot be until we no longer few them as a separate (free but identified as don’t-qualify-to-be-freed to a large extent) identity only because of the color of their skin.
This, to me,is “our slavery”, a multi-generational and continued slavery no matter the declarative adornment of freedom. And in this sense it is unique historically, a slavery of the unconquered put into a perpetual classification identified by color as a race, and a continued effort to often deprive those unconquered of any freedom. In other words, the American institutions have had a continued need to conquer those they never did in the first place.
And just note, by institutions, I am not referring to institutions necessarily mandated by government, but the institutions that this perversity has seeped into the consciousness of the society.
If I misconveyed this, I apologize to Mr. Kenyatta. If he disagrees of course that is his prerogative and he could certainly be more correct than I. At this point, I will refer you to Mr. Kenyatta’s article. My response was deleted, but the article is still worth reading. Following are some links he sent to me in response.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/Hereditarian-ideology-and-European-constructions-of-race https://blogs.hope.edu/getting-race-right/our-context-where-we-are/the-history-we-inherited/what-is-the-history-of-race-in-america/
A few sources of my own:
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=english_fac_pubs
https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/historical-foundations-race
The next couple of articles are intended to further look into the issue of ethnic-race identity and the pre-American history of slavery. But first I want to begin with how I think the concept of race began to be perverted in America. I have written to some extent on the issue before but I want to explore it in greater length.
When I was in college in the 1960's I took a class in physical anthropology. At that time in the world of science there were three recognized races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. It was thought the oldest race was Negroid, I'm sure the scientific thinking has changed by now, as more and older fossil remains of early hominids are found. However one thing has not changed. There remains ONE genus and ONE species. All and every animal we call human in the generic world is a Homo sapiens. No subspecies and only cosmetic variations. Race is a irrelevant as the color of fur on cats, dogs, horses, or rabbits.
You need not apologize, Mr. Taylor for steel sharpens steel, and I have great respect for both the maxim and the fact.
Your writing is getting better and better and I remain a fan.