How long have the terms “white” and “black” been used on a global scale to describe people’s skin? What about “red”, “yellow” and “brown”? Who came up with the descriptions?
Remember before black was used, negro was used–and that the word “negro” comes from the Spanish and Portuguese adjective negro, meaning “black”.
Yep. And when did people start doing that?
My initial thought was Shakespeare and Othello, which is start of 1600s. However, a quick scrute at the Wikipedia entry outlines that his description as a Moor may cover a darker-skinned Mediterranean appearance as well as darker African peoples. When WS uses ‘black’ in the play its ambiguously emotional as well as chromatic.
Its certainly present (in my reading) from when Europeans arrive in Australia (1788), which then causes lazy people to lump all black people together as the same, and therefore trying to work out their unitary origin in biblical terms.
The predisposition to lump Asian people together as ‘yellow’ is not as strong, and comes up at a time of Chinese mass-migration in association with the goldrushes in the mid-19th century. There is a clear distinction drawn between people of Chinese, Indian sub-continent and Middle Eastern origin.
Thanks. My question came to mind while watching the PBS series The American Revolution and they had a quote from a Native American who referred to the Europeans as “white.” I was curious as to whether or not the NA people described Europeans as that in their own language initially, or the Europeans called themselves “white” or how far back the term was used. And of course other terms to describe skin color.
In his Histories, Herodotus described Egyptians as “melanchroes” which means dark-skinned or black-skinned.
People have probably always noticed that other groups of people sometimes did not have the same skin shade. An illustration of a carving from the time of Seti 1 of Egypt over 3000 years ago has become the symbol of this. This supposedly depicts from left to right a Berber (Libyan), a Nubian, an Asiatic (Levantine), and an Egyptian. Unfortunately, the actual tones are from a much later drawing. Even so, other similar depictions are known.
The question then becomes when skin color rather than the many other possible “alien” characteristics become defining. Language - the reason Greeks called others barbarians, customs, religions, clothing, hair color - the red hair of Northern Europeans was mentioned frequently in Rome, basic foods, tools, weapons, money… If any people wanted to make distinctions, they had a myriad of choices from which to pick. Shakespeare used color for the Moor, but his “blackness” was intensely symbolic for a variety of negative meanings that black had accrued, not because of skin color but because of light vs. dark. Othering black people at the time also invoked the longstanding enmity of Christians and Muslims.
To condense history into a generalization that I will assume others will nitpick, I’d say that the type of skin color distinctions that are common today came into prominence with the so-called and ironically named Age of Enlightenment. Although this era is now known to be far more contentious than unifying, it remains true that many Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries tried to use what they considered scientific reasoning to justify the exploitation of other races during the heyday of imperialism. Part of this was the hierarchy that put Anglo-Saxons and Teutons at the peak, where their white skin implied superiority. Those with darker skin of all sorts, from southern Europeans to Arabians, indigenous New Worlders, eastern and southern Asians, south-Saharan Africans and Australian aboriginies, could be assigned lower slots easily distinguished by their skin colors, which explained all their other failures without needing any deeper consideration.
It started with the Sumerian people at least 5,000 years ago. The Sumerians’ name for themselves was sag̃-gig₂-ga ‘black-headed ones’.
I’m particularly fond of Septimius Severus, a Roman emperor who died here in York. (Not the only one. I might add). He was born in Libya, and he was the father of two emperors himself. His sons are depicted in this painting, a tondo that also depicts his wife.
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Severus is distinctly darker than his wife, and that suggests to me that his children were mixed-race too. No-one in Rome seemed to notice.