afrocentrick

Someone just mentioned in my class that the negative connotation to Blackness has little to do with race. In fact it predated “race” and even before English itself was invented. The negative connotation comes with the innate human fear of darkness, of how we fear the unknown, thus then making the idea of blackness more scarier than the idea of “light, or color” which is the reflection of light itself. The oldest definition of Blackness documented, I presume was in the 700 written by Beowolf who stated it was “the total absence of color.” In the 1300, it was labeled “soiled with dirt” by 1500, took on a meaning of “death”. In the 18 century, a Moroccan Sultan, Moulay Ismail, raised an army of 150,000 men, most of which were “black” slaves whom he labeled as his “black guard” My thing is, why do we claim a word we didn’t invent. A world that was already plagued with a negative connotation and then labeled onto people, of which has now taken on a definition of it’s own.

by c a l l u m

TBT 

@afrocentrick | @urartbae 

www.afrocentrick.com