This article is about negative sentiment towards Black people. For negative sentiment towards African peoples and societies, irrespective of race, see Anti-African sentiment.
Anti-Black sentiment, also called anti-Black racism, anti-Blackness, colourphobia or Negrophobia, is characterised by prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination or extreme aversion towards people who are racialised as Black people, especially those people from sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas,[1][2] as well as a loathing of Black culture worldwide. Such sentiment includes, but is not limited to: the attribution of negative characteristics to Black people; the fear, strong dislike or dehumanization of Black men; and the objectification (including sexual objectification) of Black women.[3]
Coined by Canadian scholar Dr. Akua Benjamin, the term anti-Black racism (or ABR)[4][5] applies specifically to racism towards Black people of African descent, as shaped by slavery and European colonialism.[1][2] However, the term Black itself can apply more widely to other groups.[6][7][8] Some scholars have called for more recognition of the shared experiences of Blackness for Pacific and non-Atlantic Blacks (or Blaks), such as Indigenous Australians and Melanesians, although this usage may be controversial.[9][10] The related terms Negrophobia and colourphobia (or colorphobia in American English) were terms created by abolitionists in America to refer specifically to racism towards people of Black African descent, who were known at the time as Negroes or Coloured (or Colored).[11][12][13][14]
Concepts
Anti-Black racism, colourphobia and negrophobia
Anti-Black racism, sometimes called negrophobia or colourphobia (or colorphobia),[12][13] is discriminatory sentiment towards people racialised as Black,[15] often because the person believes that their race is superior to the Black race.[16][17] Afrophobia or Afriphobia is sometimes used to refer to racism against Black people, but Afrophobia describes racism and xenophobia against all people of African descent, regardless of race, as well as prejudice against African traditions and culture.[18]
Anti-Black racism
Anti-Black racism was a term first used by Canadian scholar Dr. Akua Benjamin in a 1992 report on Ontariorace relations. It is defined as:
Anti-Black racism is a specific manifestation of racism rooted in European colonialism, slavery and oppression of Black people since the sixteenth century. It is a structure of iniquities in power, resources and opportunities that systematically disadvantages people of African descent.[1]
Negrophobia and colourphobia
The term racism is not attested before the 20th century,[19] but Negrophobia (first recorded between 1810–1820; often capitalised), and later colourphobia (first recorded in 1834),[20][12] likely originated within the abolitionist movement, where it was used as an analogy to rabies (then called hydrophobia) to describe the "mad dog" mindset behind the pro-slavery cause and its apparently contagious nature.[13][21][22][23] In 1819, the term was used in U.S. Congressional debates to refer to a "violent aversion or hatred of Negroes".[24]
The term negrophobia may also have been inspired by the word nigrophilism, itself first appearing in 1802 in Baudry des Lozières's Les égarements du nigrophilisme.[25] Noting the shift of -phobia terms to cover prejudice and hatred rather than mere fear or aversion, J. L. A. Garcia refers to negrophobia as "the granddaddy of these ‘-phobia’ terms", preceding both xenophobia and homophobia.[22]
Both at the time, and since, critics of the terms negrophobia and colourphobia have argued that, although their use of -phobia is rhetorical, if taken literally they could be used to excuse or justify the behaviour of racists as mental illness or disease. John Dick, publisher of The North Star, voiced such concerns as early as 1848 while legal scholar Jody David Armour has voiced similar concerns in the 21st century.[22][26] Nevertheless, negrophobia had a clinical and satirical edge that made it popular with abolitionists.[22][23] In 1856, abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe published Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, a novel which explored the fear of Blackness within negrophobia via the titular character Dred, a Black revolutionary Maroon.[27]
Changing terminology
After abolition, negrophobia continued to be used to refer to anti-Black racism, but terms based on race also appeared around the turn of the 20th century. Racism first appeared in print in 1903.[28] In December 1921, the terms negrophobia and race hatred were used to describe an outbreak of anti-Black violence 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.[29]Negrophobia further reappeared in January 1927 in Lamine Senghor's La voix des nègres (The Voice of the Negroes), a monthly anti-colonialist newspaper. The term became more widespread outside of North America and the English-speaking world when French Caribbean psychologist and philosopher Frantz Fanon included it in his works Peaux noires masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) and Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), again drawing on the rhetoric of racism as disease.[25][30] As a psychiatrist, Fanon explored negrophobia as an individual and societal "neurosis", although he saw it as the psychological structure underpinning colonial racism.[31][32][33]
By the middle of the 20th century, the term "Black" came to be preferred over "Negro", and so related terms became outdated.[14] However, negrophobia is still sometimes used to distinguish anti-Black racism from racism more generally. In this sense, Negrophobia may mean an especially strong, violent or transmissible form of anti-Black racism. 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).[25] Adia A. Brooks, who developed the Multidimensional Negrophobia Index (MNI) to measure anti-Black racism, describes it as a "thought system, or ideology" and "the profound fear or hatred of black people and black culture".[34]
The psychology of anti-Black racism
Psychologists and sociologists have explored the individual and social psychology of anti-Black racism, often in reference to Fanon's work on negrophobia. Jock McCulloch explores Fanon's conception from a psychodynamic perspective, arguing that negrophobia requires psychological projection, and reveals "a certain psychic dependence of the European upon the black". He also points out that negrophobia, though it can be described as an emotional disorder, is theorised to come from the same "psychodynamic mechanism" as antisemitism, and stresses the importance, in Fanon's account, of negrophobia as inherently racist and a product of colonialism.[35][36] Despite this, the description of negrophobia as an emotional disorder or involuntary reflex has been used as a legal defense to justify violent crimes against Black people,[26] including murder, as a form of self-defense or involuntary reaction.[37][38][39]
Internalised racism
Psychiatrist Frantz Fanon introduced the concept of internalised racism, or internalised negrophobia, pointing to the hatred of Black people and Black culture by Black people themselves.[3] He asserts that anti-Black sentiment is a form of "trauma for white people of the Negro".[40] 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.[3] The symptoms of such internalised 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.[3]
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.[41] 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.[41] She develops an anti-Black neurosis due to her feeling of non-existence both within the White and her own community.[41]
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.[3] 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.[3]
Involuntary racism
In the book Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism, legal scholar Jody David Armour describes the term Involuntary Negrophobia as the legal precedent of defendants using a victim's Blackness as justification for violent crimes against them.[42] Typically, such arguments rest on the idea that racist revulsion and violence directed at Black people is an involuntary reaction, such as with PTSD, and thus not an intentional criminal act; or that it constitutes a form of self-defence based on their perception of the victim as a threat because of their Blackness. This approach focusses on the personal culpability of the individual defendant, and their state of mind. Armour critiques this view as equating anti-Black sentiment with insanity and allowing a person's racial fear to legally justify and even excuse violent behaviour.[42][37]
Anti-Blackness in education and organisation studies
In response to Black Lives Matter organising contemporary scholars of education, human resource development, and critical management studies have begun focusing on anti-Blackness in schools and places of business.[43][44][45][46][47] These efforts build on established critical race discourses in their respective fields and incorporate concepts from Afropessimism.[48][page needed]
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.[56]
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.[57][58]
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".[59]
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[60][61]
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.[62][63][64]
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.[65] 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.[66] Most Afro-Asians living in Saudi Arabia are Afro-Arabs, who occasionally face discrimination due to their dark skin.[67] Marriages between Saudi Arabs and Sub-Saharan Africans are quite common in Saudi Arabia.[68]
Europe
In Europe, anti-Black sentiment finds its roots in the 17th century due to its extensive historical colonisation and slavery.[69]
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.[69] 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.[69]
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.[70][71] 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.[70]
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.[72]
In a 2013 survey of 80 countries by the World Values Survey, Canada ranked among the most racially tolerant societies in the world.[73] 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".[74]
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.[75][76] 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.[76][77] In 1990, BADC was primarily responsible for the creation of Ontario's Special Investigations Unit, which investigates police misconduct.[76][78] Since the early 1990s, the relationship between Toronto Police and the city's black community has improved;[76] in 2015, Mark Saunders became the first black police chief in the city's history. Carding remained an issue as of 2016;[79] restrictions against arbitrary carding came into effect in Ontario in 2017.[80]
Throughout the years, high-profile cases of racism against Black Canadians have occurred in Nova Scotia.[81][82][83] 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.[84][85]
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][90] 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.[91]
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.[93][94] Research on the experience of African Australians began in the 2000s[95] and more has been conducted since the 2010s as more and more Africans, mostly from East Africa, have arrived in the country.[96]
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."[97] 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.[98]
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.[99]
Racial inequality is seen primarily through lower levels of education and income for non-whites than whites.[100] 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).[101] Overall, The salary of Whites in Brazil are, on average, 46% over the salary of Blacks.[97]
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.[100] 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.[102]
Though anti-Black racism specifically refers to people of Black African descent, there are other groups who are identified as Black and whose experiences of racism may share similarities to those of Black Africans.[1][9] These groups include Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders) and Melanesians.
Indigenous peoples of Australia, comprising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples, have lived in Australia for at least 65,000 years[110][111] before the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. The colonisation of Australia and development into a modern nation, saw explicit and implicit racial discrimination against Indigenous Australians.
Indigenous Australians continue to be subjected to racist government policy and community attitudes. Racist community attitudes towards Aboriginal people have been confirmed as continuing both by surveys of Indigenous Australians[112] and self-disclosure of racist attitudes by non-Indigenous Australians.[113]
Since 2007, government policy considered to be racist include the Northern Territory Intervention which failed to produce a single child abuse conviction,[114] cashless welfare cards trialled almost exclusively in Aboriginal communities,[115] the Community Development Program that has seen Indigenous participants fined at a substantially higher rate than non-Indigenous participants in equivalent work-for-the-dole schemes,[116] and calls to shut down remote Indigenous communities[117] despite the United Nation's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples specifying governments must facilitate the rights of Indigenous people to live on traditional land.
In 2016, police raids and behaviour on Palm Island following a death in custody were found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act 1975,[118] with a record class action settlement of $30 million awarded to victims in May 2018.[119] The raids were found by the court to be "racist" and "unnecessary, disproportionate" with police having "acted in these ways because they were dealing with an Aboriginal community."[118]
^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."[89]
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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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^ abcdHouston, Gregory (2022). "Racial Privilege in Apartheid South Africa". In Houston, Gregory; Kanyane, Modimowabarwa; Davids, Yul Derek (eds.). Paradise Lost: Race and Racism in Post-apartheid South Africa. Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies. Vol. 28. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. pp. 35–72. doi:10.1163/9789004515949_003. ISBN978-90-04-51594-9. ISSN1574-6925.
^ abcdefBradshaw, Debbie; Norman, Rosana; Laubscher, Ria; Schneider, Michelle; Mbananga, Nolwazi; Steyn, Krisela (2004). "Chapter 19: An Exploratory Investigation into Racial Disparities in the Health of Older South Africans". In Anderson, N. B.; Bulatao, R. A.; Cohen, B. (eds.). Critical Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Differences in Health in Late Life. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press on behalf of the National Research Council Panel on Race, Ethnicity, and Health in Later Life. pp. 703–736. doi:10.17226/11086. ISBN978-0-309-16570-9. PMID20669464. NBK25536.
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^Reicheneker, Sierra (January 2011). "The Marginalization of Afro-Asians in East Asia: Globalization and the Creation of Subculture and Hybrid Identity". Global Tides. 5 (1). Retrieved 4 July 2012. The products of both prostitution and legally binding marriages, these children were largely regarded as illegitimate. When the military presence returned to America, the distinction between the two was, for all practical purposes, null. As the American military departed, any previous preferential treatment for biracial people ended and was replaced with a backlash due to the return of ethnically-based national pride.
^ abcUne Autre Histoire (13 January 2015). "Négrophobie". une-autre-histoire.org. Retrieved 6 May 2020.
^ abCloake, J. A.; Tudor, M. R. (2001). Multicultural Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 38–39. ISBN978-0199134243.
^Phillips, Deborah; Karn, Valerie (1991). "Racial Segregation in Britain: Patterns, Processes, and Policy Approaches". In Huttman, Elizabeth D. (ed.). Urban Housing Segregation of Minorities in Western Europe and the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 63–91. ISBN978-0822310600.
^Lowe, Lezlie (29 January 2009). "Halifax's hidden racism". The Coast Halifax. Retrieved 26 February 2023.
^Discrimination Against Blacks in Nova Scotia: The Criminal Justice System, by Wilson A. Head;
Donald H. J. Clairmont; Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr., Prosecution (N.S.) State or province government publication, Publisher: [Halifax, N.S.] : The Commission, 1989.
^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.
^Pastore, Jose (1982). Social Mobility in Brazil. University of Wisconsin Press.[page needed]
^ abMonk, Ellis P. (August 2016). "The Consequences of "Race and Color" in Brazil". Social Problems. 63 (3): 413–430. doi:10.1093/socpro/spw014. S2CID6738969.