Invention of the white race

[Charles Brown]

See _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ or the movie by Spike Lee in which Malcolm investigates the words "white" and "black" in a standard English dictionary. Need I tell you competent English speakers that the former is consistently good and the latter bad. For example, a "black day"
or "Black Monday"  on the stock exchange, is what ? Or derivatively , a "dark side of solidarity" is the good or bad side of it (even though we were talking about what white workers were doing bad to black workers among other prejudices). How about "negative" or "niggardly".  "enlightened", "lighthearted", a "black heart". 

Othello contained some proto anti-Black or "dark" ideology. Focussed anti-African and Black ideology developed in a consistent logical trope out of that proto-modern racist ideology.

Charles Brown


>>> Tom Condit <tomcondit at igc.apc.org> 05/28 7:36 PM >>>
At 02:12 PM 5/28/1998 -0400, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>Social stratification has always been justified as 'natural' and linked to
>some biological features.  European feudal mythology portraying aristocracy
>as a different 'breed' than peasantry ('blue" and 'red' blood, mythical
>tribal ancestry, etc.) is no different than American mythology portraying
>the dominant class as different 'race' than the underclass.  Perhaps the
>Europeans did not use the word 'race,' but the principles of racism were
>already there -- the peasant was seen as belonging to a biologically
>different, and 'inferior,' species than the lord. 

[snip]
I think this is especially true in the culture of England, where there is a
constant comparison of the blonde Saxons and Normans with the darker Welsh,
to the point that the word "fair" (meaning, essentially, blonde) is
synonymous with "equitable" -- or, as southern whites would put it in a
blunter version, "That's might white of you."

Tom Condit