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.
I found this paper (warning PDF) that gives some examples, all colour based references, black, negro etc, are Tudor period or later. The middle age examples are Ethiopian or Saracen, i.e. ethnicities rather than colour specifically.
The color and race terms Americans use has always seemed puzzling to me. Black and white seem to be the only acceptable color uses for races, at least these days. But referring to people as brown, red or yellow is usualy seem as offensive so not done much. Instead they are called by their race: Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, etc.
Black people are sometimes referred to as African Americans, but I rarely here White people referred to as Euro-Americans. Asian seems like too broad a term because it encompasses people of very different skin colors and ethnicities. I think Russia is part of Asia, especially the part East of Moscow which is most of the country. Should Russians be called Asian?
Shakespeare did have characters who were black, both good and bad. One of Portia’s suitors is a Moor, and it does not seem to make much of a difference that she might marry a black man; at one point she says his complexion is irrelevant, although when he fails, she says:
A gentle riddance! Draw the curtains, go.
Let all of his complexion choose me so.
And like Shylock, he makes the comparison that his blood is the same red as theirs.
IIRC the religious difference, which would have been far more relevant in those days than race, is not even mentioned. Similarly Othello was a Moor, also married to a white woman, and he is a high-ranking Venetian nobleman. He’s the good guy and the central character of the play. Whereas Aaron in Titus Andronicus is the bad guy, although why a Moor is among the Goths is not clear. Besides being the villain, he is there for one of the first “the baby came out black” jokes. But generally, there is no implicit racial heirarchy other than a nationalistic one.
I suspect having a Moorish character was simply a theatrical device that made it easy to distinguish at least one character for the others with simple non-PC make-up. Certainly there seems to have been no more and no less issue than with someone from any foreign country. For a guy who wrote plays about Romans, Egyptians, Venetians, Danes, Greeks, and assorted other foreign exotica, it was just one more character from an exotic location.
There are murals on the wall of the temple of Hapshepsut in Luxor depicting the expedition she sent to the Land of Punt - the natives are depicted as curly-haired and the skin tone that survives on the mural is definitely darker that traditional Egyptian tones, but not solid black.
As for North American natives, I also recall reading that “red man” came from the tendency of some of the earlier-encountered tribes to cover themselves with red earth as makeup, not their basic skin colour.
In the Irish language, using colour terms such as “black” and “white” to refer to a person was traditionally a reference to their hair colour. “Éamonn Dubh” was black-haired Eddie, not black-skinned; Seán Bán was blond Johnnie. Similarly for donn (brown), buí (yellow), and rua (red).
When I was in school half a century ago, the word used for a black person was “duine gorm” (literally “blue person”) and for a white person was “duine geal” (bright person).
Nowadays usage has shifted to “duine dubh” and “duine bán” (using the colour terms for black and white), under influence from English. Using the term “geal” for white people is especially deprecated because the word “geal” meaning “bright” has really strong positive connotations of beauty.
I once knew a gentleman from Sudan (who would be seen as Black in America) who told me: “In Sudan, when someone is my color, we say of him rajul akhḍar, which means ‘green man’.” In Sudan, “green” is the dark brown shade we’re used to calling Black. This is a distinction from the really dark Nilotic peoples, who are “blue.” Also in Sudan, “red” refers to what we call “White.” Whereas “white” means light brown people, like in Egypt.
FWIW, in the 1660s Samuel Pepys uses “black” to describe both black-haired English people and people of African descent; you just have to figure out which is which from the context.
Our one surviving contemporary illustration of a Moorish character from a Shakespeare play certainly suggests these characters were depicted as black, although the play is Titus Andronicus rather than the more famous Othello.
There are 2 different questions lurking in the thread title vs. the OP. How long has color been used to describe “race”, vs how long have people used colors to describe each other. The distinction is very important.
People have always noticed each other’s physical characteristics and used simple words to describe them. None of that is new, and it’s not particularly interesting IMO.
However the concept of “race” is an innovation from the early colonial period.
To be clear, there’s nothing new about lumping people into “other” categories. But prior to colonization, it was all about nationality, or royal allegiance, or ethnicity, or religion, or perhaps language or habitual style of dress.
During colonial times, Europeans needed a rationalization to explain why it was permissible for them to kidnap people and steal their labor. The original rationale was religious - they’re not Christian, we are, so we’re actually doing them a favor by bringing them into the Lord’s light to let them secure their salvation via piety and hard work.
This rationale apparently failed to consider that the enslaved might actually take them up on the offer. And they did, converting to Christianity in large numbers and demanding their freedom. This is where the slavers came up with the idea of race - we’re going to create this category called “black”, who are fundamentally undeserving of freedom, and “white”, who deserve freedom, and get to decide the categories. Entire structures of law sprung up around this, and schools of pseudo-scientific thought, all to prop up the idea that one’s physical appearance determines whether one deserves slavery or freedom.
Later on as different cultures came into contact with another, there was some attempt to extend the metaphor to include other non-Europeans, but it mostly fell flat. Although Europeans & Americans did (and still do) refer to Asian people as “yellow”, and Native Americans as “red”, the phrasings “yellow race” or “red race” never really took off. Because again, the concept of race was never intended as simply a generically convenient classifier. The specific and complete purpose of the concept of race was to justify why Africans deserved to be enslaved by Europeans.
So although you can find pre-colonial references to a man who is “black”, it was never in the sense of “black man” as a racial category, or a constructed ethnicity of people who could be enslaved. Racism is the belief that there is a valid category called “race” which determines which people can be oppressed, and that it can be determined just by looking at them, and it originated in the colonial era to justify enslavement of Africans.
I agree with the rest but not with this. Race as we know it came out of Europe. Americans absolutely seized upon the notion to justify chattel slavery, but they had two centuries of experience also denigrating Indians as inferior whenever it was convenient for them to do so. The reasons vary from lack of Christianity to lack of civilized aspects to innate inferiority. All of which were also applied to other peoples of various skin tones around the world as justification.
Justified exploitation by skin color preceded justification of black chattel slavery. It’s just that our American society is so steeped in that aspect that the wider movement is mostly neglected.
I don’t think that’s right, for 2 reasons. First is just the timeline, Indian colonization started roughly contemporaneously with American colonization. Secondly, European othering of Indians was little do with color. They were Hindu or Sikh or Indians or just plain heathens, as the case may have been.
Of course physical appearance is always a component of othering. No doubt there was the concept of “brown people aren’t us, they’re not civilized, we can do what we want”.
But no concept of a “brown race” emerged from that. I’m sure the ideas cross-pollinated between India and America since similar things were happening at once. But the idea of race was American in nature, probably invented by Spaniards, perfected by the English, intended to oppress Africans, and never really developed beyond that apart from a few tendrils of “red people” or “yellow people”.
I believe “Indians” is referring to the indigenous people of the American continent, not people from India.
Yes. Americans did not have two centuries of experience otherizing Asian Indians.
What is now called scientific racism can be traced back to 17th century Europe.
François Bernier
François Bernier (1620–1688) was a French physician and traveller. In 1684, he published a brief essay dividing humanity into what he called “races”, distinguishing individuals, particularly women, by skin color and a few other physical traits. The article was published anonymously in the Journal des Savants, the earliest academic journal published in Europe, and titled “New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or ‘Races’ of Man that Inhabit It”.[19]
In the essay, he distinguished four different races:
- The first race included populations from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, south-east Asia, and the Americas
- The second race consisted of the sub-Saharan Africans
- The third race consisted of the east- and northeast Asians
- The fourth race consisted of Sámi people.