I hope this doesn’t offend anyone. It is not meant to. It is just an honest query that I have wondered about for some time.
The vast majority of African-Americans have skin that ranges from light tan to dark brown. However, when you look at pictures of native black Africans or see them on the street, it is striking how much darker they are than those born in the U.S. Their skin appears almost black-purple.
The standard explanation is that their was a tremondous amount of intermixing with whites during slavery and even more recently. For very very light skinned African-Americans, I can easily buy that. However, the relative dearth of extremely dark skinned African-Americans in the U.S. would mean that virtually all of them have a significant amount of white blood. Is this really the case? I find it implausable that their was THAT much intermingling but I could be wrong. Did the area of African from which slaves were imported (West Africa) have Africans that were more brown than black? Are there any other factors at play?
I took a class, once, on the history of Africa in which the statistic was given that the African-American population has about 26% white blood.
The extremes in light and dark are aggravated by an African-American internal class system, in which pale people tend to marry pale people, and vice versa.
Well, folks that live in North Dakota are going to be a little paler all around, but for the most part, yeah, it’s miscegenation. I don’t see what’s so implausable about it-- four hundred years is plenty of time to mix it up.
Have you compared people in the US to those in the part of Africa where slaves were stolen from? There is a pretty large variation in complexion across the continent.
There also happens to be a wide variation of complexion in non-African peoples.
Peace,
mangeorge
A related question of interest that might provide some insight: Do the (indigenous) peoples of West Africa (coastal and inland) exhibit a high degree of uniformity in skin tone?
The American slave trade pulled Africans from Senegal to Angola–and as far inland as present-day Niger through Congo and Rwanda/Burundi–with the majority concentrated in the present-day Ivory Coast through western Cameroon (especially present-day Ghana/Nigeria) region.
Stolen? How can you “steal” a human being? We each own ourselves. To take possession of a person with exchange of money is to buy that person.
Suggesting that people can be stolen is exactly as ridiculous as suggesting they can be bought. No more, no less. If people own themselves they can’t be stolen any more than bought.
Bob55’s reply questioned my use of the term “stolen”. I explained my use of the term. “Bought” implies legitimacy.
But I’m not going to argue the point here in GQ.
It’s not a grammatical error. The slave traders did in fact buy slaves from local groups of Africans. You might protest that human beings cannot be owned, but you’d be wrong. Should not be owned, certainly. But as history demonstrates all to often, humans can be bought and sold quite easily.
Its not too hard for me to belive, especially if you look at the intermingling between the Spanish and Indigenous central Americans, which is why, by the time they won their independence, Mexicans weren’t white anymore.
When Europeans first started colonizing Africa I believe most of the slaves were acquired financially, but it didn’t take them long to discover that they didn’t need to pay anymore. Once slavery become more popular most Africans saw what a threat widespread slave trading was and stopped selling their prisoners to whites. That is how it was explained on some TV show. Sorry no cite.
Yes, you can buy that. An African-American who is 100% African-blooded would be a rare find.
One ramification of the “one-drop rule” was that mulattos (or other light-skinned blacks) were neither socially nor legally permitted to make babies with whites. So most of these people stuck with blacks when it came to procreation, and had children that reflected their mixed genetics (e.g. light skin). If societal pressure hadn’t steered mulattos away from whites, perhaps African-Americans in general would look more like indigenous Africans, because “mulatto genes” would have dispersed more into the majority population instead of being channeled into the black gene pool. The wide variation we see in AA skin tones is probably due to the fact that mulattos were treated just like other blacks. Unless they passed, that is.
Remember also, that perception is EVERYTHING when it comes to race. Why do we often mention light-skin blacks but never dark-skin whites? Does that analog even exist in our racial consciousness? In that one question alone, you’ll find the answer to why American blacks are so much like lighter than Africans. You just have to think really hard about it.
Why do so many Americans of mixed race insist on categorising themselves as black? I understand that being proud of your heritage is one thing, but why concentrate on the ‘black’ part over the white part? Ok, fair enough, white people have done things that they shouldn’t be proud of, but that was in the past. I have found that in general people in the Caribbean who are mixed race don’t really care about categorising themselves. My bf, who is Trinidadian, couldn’t care less about what he is and where his ancestors came from. Can anyone enlighten me?
But why all the excitement?
Here’s my original statement;
“Have you compared people in the US to those in the part of Africa where slaves were stolen from?”
The people were indeed stolen from Africa. Inserting agents certainly doesn’t change that. They didn’t own these people, they kidnapped them. The slavers paid a bounty for the slaves. Like a ransom. When the locals quit cooperating, the slavers stole them too.
