This article is about negative sentiment towards people because of their darker skin. For negative sentiment towards African peoples and societies, and negative sentiment towards members of the African diaspora, see
Anti-African sentiment.
Anti-Black sentiment, also called anti-Black racism, anti-Blackness or Negrophobia, is characterized by prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination or extreme aversion towards people who are considered
Black people, such as
sub-Saharan Africans, as well as a loathing of
Black culture worldwide. Symptoms of this form of
xenophobia include, but are not limited to: the attribution of negative characteristics to Black and
Coloured people; the fear or strong dislike or
dehumanization of Black and Coloured men; and the
objectification (including
sexual objectification) of Black and Coloured women.[1]
Concepts
Anti-Black sentiment and identity
Psychiatrist
Franz Fanon was the first to introduce the concept of internalized anti-Black sentiment, pointing to the hatred of Black people and Black culture
by Black people themselves.[1] Indeed, he asserts that anti-Black sentiment is a form of "trauma for white people of the Negro".[2] Equivalent to internalised racism caused by the trauma of living in a culture defining Black people as inherently evil, Fanon emphasises the slight existing cultural intricacies caused by the vast diversity of Black people and cultures, as well as the nature of their colonisation by White Europeans.[1] The symptoms of such internalized anti-Black sentiment include a rejection of their native or ethnic language in favour of
European languages, a marked preference for
European cultures over Black cultures, and a tendency to surround themselves with lighter skinned people rather than darker skinned ones.[1]
Similarly, the pattern further includes attributing negative characteristics to Black people, culture, and things.
Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye (1970) stands as an illustrative work on the destroying effects of anti-Black sentiment among the Black community on themselves.[3] Indeed, the main character, Pecola Breedlove, through her non-reconciliation with her Black identity, her Black societal indifference and her craving for symbolic blue eyes, presents all the signs of an internalised anti-Black sentiment.[3] She develops an anti-Black
neurosis due to her feeling of non-existence both within the White and her own community.[3]
While the latter theoretical framework is academically debated, Fanon insists on the nature of anti-Black sentiment as a socio-diagnosis, thus characterising not individuals but rather entire societies and their patterns.[1] Fanon thereby implies that anti-Black sentiment is a cross-disciplinary area of research, justifying that its analysis and understanding may not be confined to the
psychological field.[1]
Anti-Black sentiment and law
The notion of involuntary anti-Black sentiment is highly debated in the academic and
legal arenas, specifically opposing
instrumentalists and non-instrumentalists. The former are favourable to the involuntary nature of a
post-traumatic stress disorder, thereby defending the uncontrollable nature of a defendant's actions.[4] This approach focusses on the personal culpability of the individual defendant,[4] thus disregarding any possible social implications. On the other hand, instrumentalists do consider such broader implications, viewing the law as an object of social change and claiming to promote the general
welfare by refusing to recognise legal claims damaging the integrity of the legal.[5] This view criticises non instrumentalists for equating anti-Black sentiment with
insanity by allowing a person's racial fear to legally justify and even excuse violent behaviour.[5] Following widespread claims that sane but guilty defendants may exploit the insanity defence to escape long
prison sentences,[6] a similar skepticism with respect to defences invoking anti-Black sentiment would result in significant distrust in the legal and
criminal justice system, thereby indirectly destroying the legitimacy of such courts.[6]
Anti-Blackness in education and organization studies
In response to
Black Lives Matter organizing contemporary scholars of education, human resource development, and critical management studies have begun focusing on anti-Blackness in schools and places of business.[7][8][9][10][11] These efforts build on established critical race discourses in their respective fields and incorporate concepts from
Afropessimism.[12][page needed]
Negrophobia
Since its earliest usage, the words negrophobe or negrophobia have referred to anti-Black racism[13] — i.e., a
discriminatory sentiment towards people who may identify with the Black race,[14] often because the person believes that his or her race is superior to the Black race through
xenophobia.[15][16]Internalized negrophobia refers to "internalized racism" among Black people who have been socialized to see themselves as inferior.[1] The term negrophobia was probably modelled on the word nigrophilism, itself first appearing in 1802 in Baudry des Lozières's Les égarements du nigrophilisme.[17] It likely preceded the term "racism" itself and, comparing it to xenophobia and homophobia, J. L. A. Garcia refers to it as "the granddaddy of these ‘-phobia’ terms".[13]
In December 1921, the term negrophobia was used to describe an outbreak of violent anti-Black "race hatred" in the
Dominican Republic by John Sydney de Bourg, a spokesman for the local chapter of the
Universal Negro Improvement Association in
San Pedro de Macorís.[18] It further reappeared in January 1927 in
Lamine Senghor's La voix des nègres, a monthly anti-colonialist newspaper. The term was later popularised by
Frantz Fanon, especially in his works Peaux noires masques blancs and Les Damnés de la Terre, in which he portrayed it as both an individual and societal illness, as well as an expression of racism.[17][1]
In France, Une Autre Histoire describes negrophobia as meaning "the most virulent form of racism targeting those who are perceived as 'blacks' by people considering themselves different from 'blacks'" (translation).[17] Adia A. Brooks, who developed the Multidimensional Negrophobia Index (MNI), describes it as a "thought system" and "the profound fear or hatred of black people and black culture".[19]
An alternative, less common usage remains closer to the clinical meaning of the suffix -phobia, where negrophobia would describe an involuntary psychological fear of the Black race.[20] This clinical meaning has been used as a legal defense to justify violent crimes against Black people, including murder, as a form of self-defense.[21][22] In July 2010, a segment on negrophobia was featured on The Rachel Maddow Show on
MSNBC.[23][24][page needed][25][26][27] As a psychiatrist, Fanon also originally described negrophobia as an individual and societal "neurosis", although he saw it as the psychological structure underpinning colonial racism.[28][29][30][31]
The
1911 South African census played a significant role in shaping the country's racial identities. The enumeration process involved specific instructions for classifying individuals into different racial categories, and the category of "Coloured persons" was used to refer to all people of mixed race. This included various ethnicities, such as
Khoikhoi,
San,
Cape Malays,
Griquas,
Korannas,
Creoles,
Negroes, and Cape Coloureds. What is particularly noteworthy about the classification of "Coloured persons" is that it included individuals of Black African descent, who were commonly known as Negroes. As a result, Coloureds or Cape Coloureds, as a group of mixed-race descent individuals, also have Black African ancestry and can be considered part of the broader
African diaspora.[39]
The racial category of Coloureds is a multifaceted and heterogeneous group that exhibits great diversity. Analogously, they can be compared to
Black Americans, whose population is composed of approximately 75%
West African and 25%
Northern European ancestry. However, the Cape Coloureds possess an even greater level of complexity due to the presence of
Bantu ancestry in their
genetic makeup, which is closely linked to the predominantly West African heritage of Black Americans.[40][41]
While Coloureds in South Africa do have Black African ancestry, it is important to recognize that they have a distinct identity and experiences that differ from those of Black South Africans. Despite this, there are instances where Coloureds may face discrimination and prejudice based on their mixed-race descent and Black African ancestry. Furthermore, some individuals who hold prejudiced attitudes towards Black people may also hold negative attitudes towards Coloureds, viewing them as inferior or less desirable due to their mixed-race heritage.
In April 2012, the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported that tens of thousands of refugees and African migrant workers who have come to Israel in dangerous smuggling routes, live in southern Tel Aviv's Levinsky Park. SvD reported that some Africans in the park sleep on cardboard boxes under the stars, others crowd in dark hovels. Also was noted a situation with African refugees, such as Sudanese from Darfur, Eritreans, Ethiopians and other African nationalities, who stand in queue to the soup kitchen, organized by Israeli volunteers. The interior minister reportedly "wants everyone to be deported".[42]
In May 2012, disgruntlement toward Africans and calls for deportation and "blacks out" in Tel Aviv boiled over into death threats, fire bombings, rioting, and property destruction. Protesters blamed immigrants for worsening crime and the local economy, some of protesters were seen throwing eggs at African immigrants[43][44]
In March 2018, chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel,
Yitzhak Yosef, used the term Kushi to refer to black people, which has Talmudic origins but is a derogatory word for people of African descent in modern Hebrew. He also reportedly likened black people to monkeys.[45][46][47]
In recent history, the hike in the African-Japanese population has been linked to the American occupation of Japan following the end of
World War II, where African-Japanese children were born through either prostitution or legally binding marriage. Thus, over the years, an increased number of African-American male/Japanese female unions has produced a culturally mixed African-American and Japanese population living in Japan. Once given preferential treatment during the American military presence in Japan, the currently biracial population faces some severe public backlash and marginalization due to the reemergence of ethnic-based nationalism in Japan.[48] These unions between Asian women and American G.I.s have also contributed to the increase of the Afro-Asian orphan population. In some cases many Asian wives accompanied their husbands in returning to and settling in the United States. Subsequently, many African-Japanese are products of unions between Native Japanese and continental Africans due to the increased numbers of immigrant Africans.
According to
The World Factbook, around 10% of
Saudi Arabia's population is of Afro-Asian descent.[49] Most Afro-Asians living in Saudi Arabia are
Afro-Arabs, who occasionally face discrimination due to their dark skin.[50] Marriages between Saudi Arabs and Sub-Saharan Africans are quite common in Saudi Arabia.[51]
Europe
In Europe, anti-Black sentiment finds its roots in the 17th century due to its extensive historical
colonisation and
slavery.[17]
France
In 2005, an anti-negrophobia brigade (BAN) was created in France to protest against increasing numbers of targeted acts and occurrences of
police violence against Black people.[17] The latter protest movements notably underwent severe police violence in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris during the 2011 and 2013 abolition of slavery commemorations.[17]
Black immigrants who arrived in Britain from the
Caribbean in the 1950s faced
racism. For many Caribbean immigrants, their first experience of discrimination came when trying to find private accommodation. They were generally ineligible for
council housing because only people who had been resident in the UK for a minimum of five years qualified for it. At the time, there was no anti-discrimination legislation to prevent landlords from refusing to accept black tenants. A survey undertaken in
Birmingham in 1956 found that only 15 of a total of 1,000 white people surveyed would let a room to a black tenant. As a result, many black immigrants were forced to live in
slum areas of cities, where the housing was of poor quality and there were problems of crime, violence and prostitution.[52][53] One of the most notorious slum landlords was
Peter Rachman, who owned around 100 properties in the
Notting Hill area of London. Black tenants sometimes paid twice the rent of white tenants, and lived in conditions of extreme overcrowding.[52]
Historian Winston James argues that the experience of racism in Britain was a major factor in the development of a shared Caribbean identity amongst black immigrants from a range of different island and class backgrounds.[54]
In a 2013 survey of 80 countries by the
World Values Survey, Canada ranked among the most racially tolerant societies in the world.[55] Nevertheless, according to
Statistics Canada's Ethnic Diversity Survey, released in September 2003, when asked about the five-year period from 1998 to 2002 nearly one-third (32 per cent) of respondents who identified as Black reported that they had been subjected to some form of
racial discrimination or unfair treatment "sometimes" or "often".[56]
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, a number of unarmed Black Canadian men in Toronto were shot or killed by
Toronto Police officers.[57][58] In response, the
Black Action Defence Committee (BADC) was founded in 1988. BADC's executive director,
Dudley Laws, stated that Toronto had the "most murderous" police force in North America, and that police bias against blacks in Toronto was worse than in
Los Angeles.[58][59] In 1990, BADC was primarily responsible for the creation of Ontario's
Special Investigations Unit, which investigates
police misconduct.[58][60] Since the early 1990s, the relationship between Toronto Police and the city's black community has improved;[58] in 2015,
Mark Saunders became the first black police chief in the city's history.
Carding remained an issue as of 2016;[61] restrictions against arbitrary carding came into effect in Ontario in 2017.[62]
Throughout the years, high-profile cases of racism against Black Canadians have occurred in
Nova Scotia.[63][64][65] The province continues to champion human rights and battle against racism, in part by an annual march to end racism against people of African descent.[66][67]
From the arrival of the first Africans in early colonial times until after the
American Civil War, most
African Americans were
enslaved. Even free African Americans have faced restrictions on their political, social, and economic freedoms, being subjected to
lynchings,
segregation,
Black Codes,
Jim Crow laws, and other forms of discrimination, both before and after the Civil War. Thanks to the
civil rights movement, formal racial discrimination was gradually outlawed by the
federal government, and gradually came to be perceived as socially and morally unacceptable by large elements of American society. Despite this, racism against Black Americans remains widespread in the U.S., as does
socioeconomic inequality between black and white Americans.[a][72] In 1863, two years prior to emancipation, Black people owned 0.5 percent of the national wealth, while in 2019 it is just over 1.5 percent.[73]
As Africans only began to migrate to Australia in larger numbers much later than Africans were brought to the United States as slaves, and those who settled in parts of Europe, African Australian status is largely a new challenge for Australian authorities, and it is acknowledged that widespread racism against Africans is not uncommon in Australia.[75][76] Research on the experience of African Australians began in the 2000s[77] and more has been conducted since the 2010s as more and more Africans, mostly from
East Africa, have arrived in the country.[78]
Many Brazilians still think that race impacts life in their country. A research article published in 2011 indicated that 63.7% of
Brazilians believe that
race interferes with the
quality of life, 59% believe it makes a difference at work, and 68.3% in questions related to police justice. According to Ivanir dos Santos (the former Justice Ministry's specialist on race affairs), "There is a hierarchy of skin color: where blacks, mixed race and dark skinned people are expected to know their place in society."[79] Although 54% of the population is black or has black ancestry, they represented only 24% of the 513 chosen representatives the legislature as of 2018.[80]
For many decades, discussions of inequality in Brazil largely ignored the disproportionate correlation between race and class. Under the racial democracy thesis, it was assumed that any disparity in wealth between white and non-white Brazilians was due to the legacy of slavery and broader issues of inequality and lack of economic mobility in the country. The general consensus was that the problem would fix itself given enough time. This hypothesis was examined in 1982 by sociologist José Pastore in his book Social Mobility in Brazil. In his book, Pastore examines the 1973 household survey and compares the income and occupations of father-son pairs. Based on his findings, he concluded that the level of economic mobility in Brazil should have been enough to overcome inequality left from slavery had opportunities been available equally.[81]
Racial inequality is seen primarily through lower levels of education and income for non-whites than whites.[82] Economic inequality is most dramatically seen in the near absence of non-whites from the upper levels of Brazil's income bracket. According to sociologist
Edward Telles, whites are five times more likely to be earning in the highest income bracket (more than $2,000/month).[83] Overall, The salary of Whites in
Brazil are, on average, 46% over the salary of Blacks.[79]
Additionally, racial discrimination in education is a well documented phenomenon in Brazil. Ellis Monk, Professor of sociology at Harvard University, found that one unit of darkness in a student's skin corresponds to a 26 percent lower chance of the student receiving more education as compared to lighter-skinned students.[82] Further, a study on racial bias in teacher evaluations in Brazil found that Brazilian math teachers gave better grading assessments of white students than equally proficient and equivalently well-behaved black students.[84]
^In his 2009 visit to the US, the [UN] Special Rapporteur on Racism noted that "Socio-economic indicators show that poverty,
race and
ethnicity continue to overlap in the United States. This reality is a direct legacy of the past, in particular, it is a direct legacy of slavery, segregation and the forcible resettlement of Native Americans, which was confronted by the United States during the
civil rights movement. However, whereas the country managed to establish equal treatment and non-discrimination in its laws, it has yet to redress the socioeconomic consequences of the historical legacy of racism."[71]
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^Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 22.
^Mary Ann Doane, ‘Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema’, in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2013/1991: 209–248), 217.
^Burman, E. (2016). "Fanon’s Lacan and the Traumatogenic Child: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Dynamics of Colonialism and Racism." Theory, Culture & Society, 33(4), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415598627
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^CERD Task Force of the US Human Rights Network (August 2010). "From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Implementing US Obligations Under the International Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD)". Universal Periodic Review Joint Reports: United States of America. p. 44.
^Henry, P. J., David O. Sears. Race and Politics: The Theory of Symbolic Racism. University of California, Los Angeles. 2002.
^U.S. Human Rights Network (August 2010). "The United States of America: Summary Submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review". Universal Periodic Review Joint Reports: United States of America. p. 8.
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