> The example is misleading. The curious thing about Othello is that while we
> get a lot of info about the hero's color, we get nothing about his race as the
> concept would be understood according to modern American racial ideology.
Well, Shakespeare isn't using modern US racial ideology. But there are continuities. Iago plays on stereotypes about the lasciviousness of the Moor ("the gross clasps of the l. Moor."); his animal-like nature, his sexual prowess, his supposed stupidity or simplicity; and so forth,. and also counts on his passions overcoming his reason.
> I.e. there is nothing about the kinkiness of his hair, the thickness of his
> lips, etc., etc.,
Wrong. Iago refers to him as "the thick-lips." And if I do recall he does say something about his hair.
all of which are more significant in the contemporary U.S.
> actual skin shade. After all, David Dinkins and former Manhattan Dem Chairman
> Denny Farrell were both quite light skinned, more so, for ex., than many
> Indian immigrants. Yet they were (are) "black" whereas the latter are not.
All thsi said, yes, Shakespeare is not operating with a biologized ideology of race, not surprising, since biology as a science and biologicization as a pseudo science, avvordingly, didn't exist. But the attitudes towards Blacks with which Shakespeare has Iago play--I emphasize taht we know nothing about what S himself may have thought, of course, and there's no particular reason to suppose that Iago actually believes anything he says; moreover Othello is portrayed quite sympathetically and gets some of the most gorgeous lines of poetry in the English language--have more than a structural similarlity to modern racism. Shakespeare wrote Othello withina few years of when the first Black slaves arrived in Virginia, and as Winthrop Jordon and others have shown, these attitudes made it easier for whites to establish Black slavery as an institution. Btw, see also the depiction of Caliban in the Tempest, who also embodies a lot of these features.
--jks