In case you don’t wanna click the link, it’s idioms by color in many languages. And before you all nitpick the crap out of me, I do know that black people aren’t actually the color black and white people are not the color white. In most cases.
It looks like all the Romance languages have a white night/ insomnia connection. And when my husband tells me long stories about work that involve a dozen acronyms, regulatory agencies and Robert’s Rules of Order, I’ll smile politely and say “purple” in Russian. He’ll never know!
Before making a race connection it might be worth it to have more African languages represented. All they have is a few Swahili phrases, none of which reference black. Besides, the connection to black representing night, and the terrors within is ancient and universal beyond current racial connotations.
Which is the exact same reason why “a night in the white” is a sleepless one in Romance languages: if the night had kindly been black as it ought’a, you would have gotten some sleep. “Getting in the white/drawing a blank” (they translate that as “stay in the white”) is a reference to written exams: if the page stays white, it’s because you couldn’t even remember your own name.
Doesn’t stop people from connecting the dots from night>scary>dark>dark people. Also, like I said, black people aren’t black but that still doesn’t stop the comparison(see Irish-- black man = devil).
There’s no need to rail against it or pretend it doesn’t exist. Or try to run a P.R. campaign to change language and how people interpret it. It is what it is.
That fucking rant about “the white man having a language where black almost always means something negative” is childish in the extreme and contributes to making blacks look immature (well, blacks that use that line anyway).
It is what it is, but “drawing a blank” is an actual English expression, where “blank” comes from the same root as the Spanish “blanco” and which means the same as the Spanish expression quedarse en blanco, whereas the translation in that webpage is of the “grab a dictionary and pick the first word” variety.
The interpretation (the translation) changes that line from something which makes sense in the language of reception into something meaningless.
The “black man = devil” thing isn’t just Irish—it’s all over Europe, and it’s pretty old. Certainly before the discovery of the Americas. I’ve often thought that the choice of “black” for people of sub-Saharan Africa / African descent was partly to demonize them (literally) with existing concepts rather than a ham-handed attempt to say “brown.”
Anyway, we’re stuck with it now, I think. Better to focus on eradicating real racism through education than worrying about unfortunate connotations that are rooted so deep in the language, since it’s pretty easy to dissociate them. I have cousins with the surname Black and the negative connotations of the word have never bothered them.
It’s insidious and annoying at times but, really, what can anyone do about it? Now we should get to the root reason why ‘purple’ means ‘I don’t care’. That’s gotta be more interesting than why black is bad.
Because it’s the color of kings*, and kings, like the honey badger, just don’t give a fuck.
That’s my theory anyway.
*it’s considered the color of kings because in order to get the purple dye, you had to send like a zillion of your peons to squeeze it out of snails, and snail squeezing costs lots of money and/or oppression. Yeah, snails, really - Murex snails. This part is true.
I think the peoples of middle earth tend to use this kind of racist connotation, too. Well, in most Fantasy-worlds there is little chance for a black pride movement there, with all those lords of darkness and black valleys of death and black towers and so on.
