Blacks

Given the cultural histories of the dominant English-speaking communities, black people have consistently been seen as outsiders. Although initially perceived as exotic, they have been subject to various kinds of negative stereotyping, deriving from the roles in which they have been variously placed, as barbarians, heathens, warriors, mercenaries, colonial subjects, and slaves. The assumption that all blacks are the same, although they have major differences in culture and religion, let alone pigmentation, reinforces these stereotypes, as does the word-field. Virtually without exception, the major literary treatments of blacks focus on their status as outsiders or their problems of identity. The religious conflicts of the Crusades and the Moorish invasion of Europe clearly served to intensify these negative roles. However, the early terms in the word field, such as ethiop and blackamoor , suggest an exotic, even romantic quality. It was only from about 1800 that words such as nigger, kaffir, hottentot , and coon , which were originally only mildly insulting, started to acquire such animus and force that they have become genuinely taboo. In recent de-cades there has been a concerted reclamation of these stigmatizing terms and a reassertion of the positive qualities of black .

Although black is an Anglo-Saxon term, it was not used demographically. Charles II was described in “wanted” posters as “a tall black man, over two yards high”—a reference to his hair color. Furthermore, all the word’s modern negative associations of evil, wicked, portentous, malign, and so on are recorded later, from the sixteenth century. The earliest use of black to refer to “a black person” dates from only about 1625. In the American context the source term African had an early currency in New England, and was widely used in the United States in the nineteenth century, as was the compound African-American . The latter was resuscitated by Black Americans as the preferred term from the late 1960s.

An early European name for Africa was Ethiopia: in the first English atlas to show Africa, John Speed’s The Prospect of the World (1627), the continent is called “Aethiopia” and the Atlantic is termed “The Aethiopian Ocean.” Ethiop , deriving from Greek æthiopos meaning “burnt face,” had been used by John Wycliffe in his Bible of 1382: “The Ethiopian cannot change his skin” (Jeremiah 13:23). It survived, mainly as a euphemism, well into the nineteenth century: “There are [in London] 50 ethiopian minstrels,” wrote Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor (1852, III, 190). He was referring to “black-face” minstrels.

John Speed also introduced the more enduring term Colored in his curiously titled Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611), describing “their coloured countenances and their curled hair” (xxv, 49). The term was to have a long currency in America as a euphemism for black , institutionalized in the form of the N.A.A.C.P. (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), founded in 1909 by white Americans. The name has been kept, despite the preferences for African-American or Black in recent decades, as a continuing political reminder of the status of black people.

Moor , dating from the fourteenth century as a consequence of the religious wars against the heathen in North Africa and the Middle East, referred to dark-skinned people, often Muslims, originally from Mauritania, but was not originally a critical or hostile term. The first element of the related word blackamoor , which dates from the sixteenth century, is one of the first uses of black to refer to a person of African descent. Andrew Boorde in his Introduction to Knowledge (1547) noted that “there be whyte mores and black moors” (chapter xxxvi). According to the Shakespearean scholar Philip Brockbank, “The black or tawny soldier-hero was a figure in festivals [in London] long before he reached the Elizabethan stage…. These Moorish shows were resplendent, soldierly and sensual” (1989, 200). A similar sense of exotic power is found in the earlier martial portraits of Lycurgus and Emetrius in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (ll. 2129-84).

The plays of Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) and Shakespeare (1564–1616) provide an illuminating range of these exotic stereotypes. The barbaric hero of Marlowe’s Tamburlane the Great (ca. 1587), who immodestly styled himself “the Scourge of God and Terror of the World,” was historically a Scythian or Tartar warlord, but given the inexact geographical notions of the time, would be simply regarded as a foreigner of color. Aaron the Moor, the villain of the early Shakespearean tragedy Titus Andronicus (1592), is presented as a total outsider, showing exultant villainy, diabolical humor, and “motiveless malignity,” in the phrase that Coleridge applied to Iago. Aaron’s alienation is racial, social, and psychological. The Romans speak of his “satanic” blackness and of the “devil” child he has fathered on Tamora, the Queen of the Goths. He features in the only contemporary depiction of a Shakespeare play. In The Merchant of Venice (1596) the Prince of Morocco is a contrasting vignette role, an understudy for Othello. Presenting himself in the role of suitor to Portia after traversing “the Hyrcanian deserts and the vasty wilds of wide Arabia,” Morocco is proud but alludes defensively, albeit poetically, to his color:

Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun
(II i 1-2).

When he picks the wrong casket, he is distraught, exclaiming “O hell!,” but Portia is openly relieved: “Let all of his complexion choose me so” (II vi 76-77).

Othello (1604) is the classic study in racial stereotyping with tragic consequences. Styled as “The Moor of Venice,” the hero is a double cultural outsider, possibly based on Leo Africanus, a scholarly North African Arab whose History and Description of Africa Shakespeare evidently drew on. Throughout the play Othello is called “the Moor,” or simply “Moor.” The contemporary English view of Italy as a den of vice and deviousness is discussed further in the entry for Italians. Like the Prince of Morocco, Othello is open about coming from an alien and barbarous locale, peopled by “the Cannibals that each other eat, / The anthropophagi” (I iii 143-44). These stereotypes and myths have been the subject of research by Hall (1995), Loomba (2002), Hadfield (2003), and others. This “otherness” attracts Desdemona, but is exploited cynically and destructively by the “demi-devil” Iago, who dismisses the union as that between “an erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian” (I iii 362-63). Iago consistently uses and even thinks in stereotypes, claiming “these Moors are changeable in their wills” (I iii 350), then conceding that “the Moor … is of a constant, loving, noble nature,” then switching to the opposing view of the sexually potent, dangerous predator: “I do suspect that the lusty Moor / Hath leapt into my seat” [i.e. cuckolded me] (II i 301, 307-8). He rouses Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, in crude agricultural terms: “an old black ram is tupping your white ewe” (I i 88-89). Other stereotyping references are “the thicklips” (I i 66), similar to “the thicklipped,” used of Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus (IV ii 175) and still surviving in American English.

The special horror of Othello’s tragedy is that as Iago torments him with the suspicion of his wife’s infidelity, he becomes so enraged that he starts to conform to the stereotype of the barbarian and the savage. Samuel Taylor Coleridge put the case with amazing crudity in 1848: “A similar error has turned Othello into a rank, wooly-pated, thick-lipped nigger” ( Essays I, 64). Othello’s furious threat “I will chop her into messes … Cuckold me!” (IV i 211) possibly implies cannibalism, since messes means “gobbets,” echoed in King Lear in relation to “the barbarous Scythian” (I i 119-20). Likewise, the theme of witchcraft and magic returns disturbingly, from Brabantio’s original accusations (I ii 65, I iii 64), leading to Othello’s denial (I iii 169), but resurfacing in the nature of the handkerchief, the crucial evidence. Originally an innocent love token, it becomes an object of sorcery: “‘Tis true, there’s magic in the web of it.” (III iv 68-73). Its making incorporates mummy , a liquor supposedly derived from embalmed bodies (used only here and in Macbeth IV i 23). The final act is full of polarized images. Othello speaks of Desdemona’s skin as “whiter than snow / And smooth as monumental alabaster” (V ii 4-5), while Emilia is more outspoken: “The more angel she / And thou the blacker devil” (V ii 131). Othello’s theatrical and problematic suicide is a final re-enactment of a brutal “service” to the state, when another outsider, “a malignant and a turbaned Turk,” beat a Venetian and criticized Venice, whereupon

I took by the throat the uncircumcised dog,
And smote him thus. [stabs himself]
(V ii 344-45)

Part of Othello’s “strange eventful history” is being “sold to slavery” (I iii 138). Although slave is rooted in slav , during the seventeenth century the term came to connote a black. Furthermore, slavery was increasingly regarded as an acceptable practice in Britain and its colonies, and in Restoration times it became quite fashionable to own Blackamoor slaves. It seems that the Quakers were the first religious group to object to slavery, in 1741. Socially there are some signs of genuine affection and attraction, although patronizing attitudes abound, and subsequent references are increasingly to black servants and slaves. Samuel Pepys, a considerable flirt, wrote affectionately on January 23, 1667, of “Mrs. Hall, which is my little Roman-nose black girl, that is mighty pretty,” while John Aubrey noted that Sir William Davenant “got a terrible clap of a Black handsome wench” and hints at a liaison between John Selden and “my Lady’s Shee Blackamore.” Generally speaking, it is only from the eighteenth century that words like nigger start to be used consistently as expressions of contempt.

Within the American provenance, by far the greatest lexicon of nicknames and ethnic slurs relates to blacks. In his major study, The Language of Ethnic Conflict (1983), Irving Lewis Allen lists some 240 such terms, arranged under eleven headings. These are the name Negro and its modifications (e.g., nigger); black and its modifications (e.g., black fellow ); other color allusions (e.g., blue —also found in Francis Grose’s dictionary of 1785); ironic color allusions (e.g., spook ); allusions to physical differences (e.g., burr-head ); given personal names (e.g., Leroy ); occupational stereotypes (e.g., cotton picker ); allusions to African origin (e.g., zulu ); other cultural allusions (e.g., jim crow ); animal metaphors (e.g., jungle bunny ); stereotypes of low intelligence (e.g., rock ); status diminution (e.g., boy ).

The reclamation of Black as a positive and unifying term was part of the program of Black Consciousness during the 1960s (although the formulation originally referred to a religious movement in Jamaica in the 1930s). The movement generated the American semantic correlatives Black Power (1966), Black Panther (1965), and Black Caucus (1967), recorded in this encounter; “When I tried to get into the black caucus, they said, ‘No peckerwoods allowed in here, Sonny’” ( New York Times , September 7, 1967). All these formulations were given wide currency in the writings of Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X (Malcolm Little).

In the United States perceived racial disloyalty is increasingly stigmatized among Blacks. Thus Jim Crow became popularized as the title of a song by “the father of American minstrelsy,” Thomas Dartmouth Rice, in 1828, but took on the sense of “a turncoat” from as early as 1837. The name became highly politicized, denoting segregationist legislation from 1904. Uncle Tom in the “disloyal” sense emerged still later, about 1921, seventy years after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel. In American literature, ethnic slurs for Blacks have continued to feature both in themselves and in effects on the critical reputations of important works. The entry for Mark Twain covers the continuing reactions to the term nigger in Huckleberry Finn . More recently, the plot of Philip Roth’s acclaimed novel The Human Stain (2000) stems from the devastating effects on the career of an academic of the casual use of the term spooks .

In other predominantly Anglo-Saxon communities there are fewer terms—for example, Aborigine in Australia—but they often carry great animus. Two important witness-words stigmatizing and stereotyping blacks as aliens on religious and racial grounds are kaffir and hottentot , which have their own entries. The curious semantic history of coon is also treated separately. In recent decades all these terms have became taboo.