Black people (ethnicity)

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Black people are an ethnic origin classification. The U.S. census for example, defines a black as a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "Black, African Am., or Negro," or provide written entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian. The Census Bureau however notes that these classifications are socio-political constructs and should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature.[1]

The English word used in an ethnic context was spawned by the European colonization and conquest of non-Europeans. It solidified into popular culture during the Enlightenment as one of the four major categories into which European philosophers tried to organize the newly discovered human diversity. The categories were based upon skin tone as perceived by Europeans of the time: Red (Native Americans), Yellow (East Asians), White (Europeans), and Black (Africans). Today, the term's usage differs slightly among former European colonies. Latin Americans, former members of the British Empire, and Americans (USA) all use the term differently. In the U.S., anyone with any known African ancestry is considered black (see one drop rule) however in countries like Brazil, even small amounts of white admixture exclude from the Black ethnic category[2]. This ethnic definition of a black person is clearly distinguished from other broader definitions of the term that focus on dark skin or hair, regardless of African ancestry. For example Merriam-Webster online defines Black as a : having dark skin, hair, and eyes : SWARTHY <the black Irish> b (1) often capitalized : of or relating to any of various population groups having dark pigmentation of the skin[3]. For a discussion of those who see the ethnic/racial definitions of Black as too narrow, see Black as a skin color identity.



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[edit] Who is a descendant of the African Diaspora?

Most societies that apply the Black label on the basis of a person's ancestry justify it as applying to the descendants of the African Diaspora. Between 1500 and 1900, approximately four million African slaves were transported to island plantations in the Indian Ocean, about eight million were shipped to Mediterranean-area countries, and about eleven million were taken to the New World.1 Their descendants are now found around the globe. Due to intermarriage and genetic assimilation, just who is "a descendant" of the African Diaspora is not entirely self-evident.

At one extreme, in the United States it is relatively easy to tell who has such ancestry. British North America imported only about 500,000 Africans out of the eleven million shipped across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the United States has been astonishingly successful at preserving two distinct genetic populations: one of mostly African ancestry, the other overwhelmingly European. All other New World states (except Canada) that imported African slaves have unimodal Afro-European genetic admixture scatter diagrams. Indeed, two thirds of White Americans have no detectable African ancestry at all (other than the ancient African ancestry shared by all members of our species, of course). Only one-third of White Americans have detectable African DNA (averaging 2.3 percent) from ancestors who passed through the endogamous color line from Black to White. Furthermore, U.S. government's surveys continue to categorize on a strict color-line. The federal census has no provision for a "multiracial" or "biracial" self-identity and, until 2000, forbade checking off more than one box. The EEOC has strict regulations defining who is Black or White and implicitly denies the existence of mixed people.

At an intermediate level, in Latin America and in the former plantations in and around the Indian Ocean, descendants of slaves are a bit harder to define because virtually everyone is mixed in demographic proportion to the original slave population. In places that imported relatively few slaves (like the Mascarene Islands or Argentina), few if any are considered Black today. In places that imported many slaves (like Arabia or Puerto Rico), the number is larger, but all are still of mixed ancestry.

At the other extreme, the millions of African slaves shipped to Europe promptly assimilated. African DNA is scattered throughout the European population today. The percentage is highest in Italy, Sicily, Spain, Greece and Portugal and lowest in Scandinavia. Although it is present everywhere in Europe, it is too thinly scattered, even along the Mediterranean coast, to affect physical features. Hence, despite this easily detected but diluted African ancestry, virtually no one considers today's Europeans to be descendants of the African slave Diaspora.

A few examples of populations who are seen as Black or who see themselves as Black because they descend from native Africans are: African Americans, some Latin Americans, and most residents of the Republic of South Africa.

African Americans — (see description above) or visit African American.

Afro-Latin Americans — Among the * Afro-Latin American populations in South and Central America there are populations that identify as negros. Some with high levels of admixture as well. The difference is that, contrary to the USA, membership in the Black ethnicity is usually by upbringing and not by an imposed concept of one-droppism.

[edit] Who looks Black?2

Probably the most controversial answer to the question "who is Black?" is "whoever looks Black." This is because, although most who use the label rationalize it in terms of physical appearance, there is little objective consistency in this regard. That different cultures can assign the same individual to opposite "races" may be hard to grasp. And yet North Americans, Haitians, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Barbadians, Jamaicans, and Trinidadians all have different subconscious and automatic perceptions of just what features define who belongs to which "racial" label.

According to Harry Hoetink, one can predict where each New World culture draws the color-line based upon its own colonial history. He suggests that three similar socioeconomic classes formed in most settlements during the New World colonial period. Once the importation of African labor became widespread, Western Hemisphere colonies that lacked significant numbers of Native Americans tended to fall into a three-tiered social structure. The top layer comprised a small number of European land-owning planters who produced agricultural products for export using large numbers of African slaves. The slaves themselves made up the bottom layer. Finally, in most European colonies (Barbados being the exception), an intermediate group arose, composed of free subsistence farmers, who were allowed to opt out of the plantation economy in return for serving as militia in the event of slave insurrection. In each colony, the color line came to be defined by the appearance of typical members of the intermediate class. Anyone more European-looking was seen as White; anyone darker was considered Black. Historical contingency decreed that this intermediate group would have a large admixture of African appearance in Santo Domingo, less so in Trinidad and Brazil, even less in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and be completely European-looking in Virginia and South Carolina. Hoetink demonstrated that, "One and the same person may be considered white in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, and 'coloured' in Brazil, Martinique, or Curaçao; this difference must be explained in terms of socially determined somatic norms. The same person may be called a 'Negro' in Georgia; this must be explained by the historical evolution of social structure in the Southern United States."

In addition, researchers in the cognitive sciences have shown that cultures do not ostracize out-groups because they look different; they look different because they are out-groups. Children of each culture can "correctly" (for their own society) categorize strangers by age three. They can reliably match each "racial" category with its social term or word by about age five. Most American children (about 70 percent) internalize the hypodescent rule by about age ten. And they can confabulate a rationalization for hypodescent by early adulthood.3 Although the number and meaning of "racial" categories and of the traits that delineate them vary dramatically among cultures, children learn their own culture's rules and categories shortly after learning to walk. Clearly, the cognitive system employed is as adaptable to culture, and yet is as hard-wired in the brain, as is language itself.

A series of experiments conducted by Robert Kurzban, subsequently confirmed by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides show why this is. Sex, age, and "otherness" are the three fundamental attributes that the mind encodes in an automatic and mandatory manner. For example, long after all memory has been lost of the occupation, name, clothing, or hair of a stranger to which one was briefly exposed, one can recall that the individual was "a White woman" or a "Black male child." But age and sex are independent of culture. "Otherness" is not. Kurzban and later investigators demonstrated that the ability to recall a stranger's "otherness" actually detects a culture's social coalitions or alliances. Over the past hundred millennia or so, humans have become adept at detecting competing social groups. The discrimination of facial features enables a child to identify whether a stranger is genetically related (a member of the child's extended family). This ability is strongly selected because one is less likely to be killed and devoured by a relative than by a member of an opposing group. Recall that we (genus Homo) evolved as hunting apes for two million years before our brains expanded five-fold in the past 120 millennia (species sapiens). One must take the long view when studying adaptive cognition.

Skin tone, hair kinkiness, and the like are the clues with which Americans (and, to a lesser extent other Europeans, especially British) identify a stranger's "otherness" and so determine whether a stranger "looks black" to them, but other cultures use clues that are unrelated to the U.S. endogamous color line: height, hair-length, clothing, facial features (such as hooked nose versus straight nose or the shape of the eye), even a person's smell (which relates to diet). This point is easily misunderstood and has even been reported as suggesting that humans are hard-wired to recognize "race." The fact is that in no culture does the need/ability to recall a stranger's "otherness" correlate with Americans' unique perception of "race," unless you stretch the meaning of "race" to denote simply "otherness." In the United States, for example, where the term "race" is applied to differentiate those of Asian ancestry, subjects quickly forget whether the stranger was Japanese, Native American, Hindu, Irish, Italian, or Pakistani, but Americans (only) do not forget on which side of the U.S. endogamous color line he seemed to be. In short, it is easily demonstrated within minutes that subjects notice and subconsciously remember even the most apparently insignificant differences in facial features if they happen to correlate with "otherness." On the other hand, even glaring facial differences, such as skin-tone darkness, are quickly forgotten if they are irrelevant to "otherness." In short, "who looks black" is answered differently by different people.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Pier M. Larson, Reconsidering Trauma, Identity, and the African Diaspora: Enslavement and Historical Memory in Nineteenth-Century Highland Madagascar, William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 335-62.
  2. This section was adapted from Chapter 3 of Frank W. Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule (Palm Coast FL: Backintyme, 2005) ISBN 0939479230, which contains the citations and references. An abridged version, with endnotes is available online at The Perception of "Racial" Traits.
  3. The term hypodescent was coined by the late University of Florida anthropologist, Marvin Harris in Patterns of Race in the Americas (Westport CT, 1964), page 37. It means that, to the extent that blood fraction influences perceived U.S. endogamous group membership, the dividing line is not 50-50. Even a slight fraction of known Black ancestry usually consigns an English-speaking American to the Black group. This contrasts with other New World countries where one is categorized by preponderance of appearance—you are White if you look mostly White. The original experiments on childhood internalization of the "race" notion are reported in Lawrence A. Hirschfeld,"The Inheritability of Identity: Children’s Understanding of the Cultural Biology of Race," Child Development, 66 (no. 5, October 1995), 1418-37.

[edit] See also

[edit] Groups

[edit] External links

[edit] Historical links

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