This is a word with a great and complex history, used in everyday language as
distinct from its racial and cultural meanings as an adjective to denote objects
that are chromatically black. In racial and cultural senses, the term could not be
more varied in its usages and meanings. To be black in Britain is not a monolithic
experience. As Lola Okolosie has observed, “My blackness is informed by whether or
not I am Nigerian or Jamaican or half-white, poor or middle-class. Blackness is not
one thing and it is not experienced as such.”25 Consultees have both acknowledged
the rich cultural heritage that is encompassed in the word and also expressed their
ambivalence about the term as a way of describing themselves.
It was only in the sixteenth century that the English word black started being
applied as a racial term to describe people from beyond the Mediterranean. Until
the age of exploration, calling someone black in England, generally meant they had
black or brown hair and eyes. This changed as Europeans began to travel and gain
colonies by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The complexity of Renaissance
usage alone is well demonstrated in Shakespeare’s play Othello where blackness is
not just a physical trait but a moral quality as is demonstrated by the slippage in the
following lines:
Othello: My name that was as fresh
As Dians Visage, is now begrim’d and blacke
As mine owne face. 26
Thus Othello laments the loss of his reputation, honour and character. Yet in the
play, he himself only uses the word black twice (it appears eleven times in the play,
and Iago is the character who uses it most frequently). Notably, on the other occasion
Othello describes himself as black, it also denotes in him a lack or shortcoming.
Recent scholarship has suggested that Shakespeare may have based the figure of
Othello on the Moorish Ambassador to the English court, Abd-el Messouad ben
Mohammed Anoun, who was in London in 1600-1601.27 Given that he looked
like what we would now think of as an Arab, this further complicates our notions
of historical blackness. It suggests that for Renaissance Londoners, to be black was
to be non-European. The subsequent history of blackness – and associated racial
terms (which were frequently used as terms of abuse) – as a reification of human
individuals and systematic tool of enslavement and exploitation is well documented.
Fortunately, generations of thinkers, artists and activists – from W.E.B. Du Bois to
bell hooks, Fanon, to Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, have forged varied notions of
political and cultural blackness. These ideas alongside movements of resistance and
equality are a source of pride, which has also attracted interest from groups which
may not traditionally have identified as black. This is related to the kind of postcolonial
solidarity brought forth in the Tricontinental movement and Bandung
conferences; for many Asians who have embraced the idea of political blackness it
has become a kind of proud subalterneity.28
For practitioners who might previously have been designated “Afro-Caribbean” the
term black is generally felt to be more open, direct and self-determined. Yet there
are thinkers, like Farhad Dalal, who insist that in English the associations of the
term black are inescapably linked with negativity, while the opposite is true of socalled
whiteness. As the discussion of race goes on to explore, just as no person is
literally black, nobody is literally white – the important concomitant realisation
being that these racial polarities are constructs.29