You're the one speaking nonsense and being offensive in this particular discussion. North Africans range from light skinned to brown. They are in no way black like Sub-Saharans.Oh gosh, well I guess if an African has comparatively pale skin then we'll just call them white then. I'm sure they'll be super grateful.
"Blackface" Discussion
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Sub-Saharan Africans also range from light brown to dark skinned, so it’s not that simple to paint with one generic brush either.
Some are, the Fula for example.
To be honest it doesn't really matter how light or dark North Africans were. The fact is they were still seen as Moors, or "others" and often portrayed as quite dark in imagery, which brings back to the original point that Spanish tradition of Blackface isn't wholly innocent.
Which isn't exactly surprising given the Spanish role in the slave trade.
Well, basically the term race is fake. Races does not exist as to be a different race we should not even be able to breed among us. So there is only 1 race. We should talk more about ethnicities. Fortunaltely is getting more and more diluted, but there is a ehtnogeographical pattern still and classification as animals as we are there is no problem in doing it from a scientific point of view. What is pathetic thing is that I have to be enough PC to say that I don't consider any ethnicity inferior or superior. FFS, the whole spain was fecked by greeks, romans, francs, germans, irish, cartaginese, moors and fecked the entire world. Myself I look more from magreb than caucasian and my mother was redhead and blueeyed
And I feel acused of racism, this is fecking nuts
We don't have to realize anything of the US racism, only the Spanish racism, Ok? we are bind by our society codes and what it might be racist here is not there. If I go to US I will act accordingly.
Yeah those damn Moors, coming to Spain and fecking it with their scientific and mathematical inventions and advanced culture..
Out of curiousity - how did you view the Suarez - Evra incident ? Was it racism or a cultural misinterpretation ?
So if Spain are a racist country, we just have to deal with it?
José Tapiro y Baro (Spanish, 1830-1913)
Head of a moor
Oil Painting of Moorish Woman
by Jean Baptiste Vanmour (1671-1737)
Paintings of Moors by Adolf Schreyer
Painting of Moors studying a painting
https://moorishsociety.wordpress.com/tag/moorish-paintings/
Yeah, it's amazing how Spain never had any black people. For fecks sake..
I can't see the pictures. But as I said in the 20th century, there was no blacks in Spain. Fighting moores even if black ones, it does not make that in Spain there was blacks and they were not considered inferior by race but by religion. Racism was installed in times of subsaharian slavery 3-4 hundreds years ago and Spain, as a nation used more amerindians than blacks, that was more in the early stage in the caribbean islands as they did not "discover" the amerindians that could be exploited and blacks, never went to the peninsule
Nothing against that. What is your point?
Spain is among the most tolerant countries in many ways. N 1 in same sex choices for example. That does not mean that there are racist everywhere.
Absolutely racist
This is exactly what I was trying to say @Annihilate Now!, there's a huge difference between a person dressing up as someone just to look like them and racist cnuts using blackface while being derogatory towards black people. I know it might not be the best example but I think it's pretty similar with black people calling eachother 'nigga'. Which by itself is a derogatory term but they don't mean it in the same way slave drivers did back in the day.
And while I actually agree that some backward traditions and customs do indeed need to change to fit the modern times and stop causing offense, trying to censor everything is a very slippery slope.
the well travelled is for the term blackface... never heard of it. Nothing to do about racism. A well travelled person can be racist
The north african got derranged by kentonio classifying them as black to prove that there is blacks in spain (as northafrican is a prominent ethnia of spain).
Well we probably shouldn't get into the ethnic cleansing that removed the Moriscos from Spain, as it doesn't exactly help your nice cheery vision of a racially harmoneous homeland. The idea that there were no blacks living in Spain in the 20th century is just nonsense though. A look at a damn map should be enough to tell you that unless you're still trying to stand by this idea that Northern Africans aren't considered black.
I can't follow this argument between you and @4bars to be honest. Are you saying Spain has been a racist country in the past? Well, they did engage in slave trade, so they must have been. But 4bars point about a local tradition involving people blacking up for a long time now shouldn't be viewed as racist today has merit, at least for argument purposes. This entire 'Moors', 'North African black people' is a complete tangent.
I missed that point.
Tell my why a hundreds of years tradition that has nothing to do with race, nor black nor white. Not portraying nobody in particular, just an outfit is WRONG because racist cnuts copied?
To be fair, you’ve explained yourself well since I made that post.
Look, there's a lot of European traditions that might have a bit of an "iffy" history. Tribalism and racism was par for the course when many of these started 5-6 centuries ago, or longer. That obviously doesn't mean that the modern participants of those traditions do it to cause offence, or they share the same mentality with the people of 5 centuries ago.
Ultimately it's a discussion for the people of the country and how they feel about it. If the minorities of Spain feel that the custom mentioned is offensive, then it's worth reviewing to see if it's causing more harm then good. My guess is that many of these will be modified over the years as society becomes more multicultural. But then it's a risky business to be offended on behalf of somebody else based on a different historical context. What appears as offensive to me, for example the Zwarte Piet custom, might not appear so to the black people of the Netherlands. I doubt it, but then again it's not for me to tell, it's for them.
Ultimately it's a discussion for the people of the country and how they feel about it. If the minorities of Spain feel that the custom mentioned is offensive, then it's worth reviewing to see if it's causing more harm then good. My guess is that many of these will be modified over the years as society becomes more multicultural. But then it's a risky business to be offended on behalf of somebody else based on a different historical context. What appears as offensive to me, for example the Zwarte Piet custom, might not appear so to the black people of the Netherlands. I doubt it, but then again it's not for me to tell, it's for them.
Oh no, don't get me wrong Spain was one of the worst regime, but the moors and jewish were pursued, killed and tortured because of the religion, not because of the race
AS I said, racism is a term relatively new, a few hunfreds. Black people was not prominent in the mediterranian, that is absolutely true and you can insist as much as you want, but north african there are not in any way black
Spain has had racial problems for a long time, but Spanish people often have a mental block about it. It was only 13 years ago when Aragonas infamously said to Reyes "Show that you're better than that black shit" about Thierry Henry, and in the subsequent Spain-England game their fans were nice enough to make monkey noises every time a black England player touched the ball. And of course it was only 3 years ago that a Villareal fan threw a banana at Dani Alves.
Of course you could say these are isolated incidents, but it seems whenever the subject of race comes up with the Spanish, there's a refusal to even accept that there's a problem. Never mind that they were a major part of the slave trade, never mind that North Africans have played a hugely influencial role in Spanish culture, instead we get to hear things like 'In Spain in the 20th century we did not have black people. None'.
Sorry but it makes me fecking angry, so I'm going to leave the thread here.
They do have a mind of their own, defo not controlled by the brain....!
And that is why the 3 wise men thingy is reviewd accordingly and changed progressively. But black racism in Spain is not as prominent as in US because basically we barely had any black in the peninsule till the end of the 20th century and fortunately for them, we are more modern as society that it was US before they had to fight for their civil rights. Still a way to go
O no, belive me, it was criticised and well, there is racism and in football fields there are more stupidity than average. But at least we do not have spanish hunt day as my sister had to suffer in Cambridge when she was 15.
Spanish we are quite laidback, and we mostly darkhaired and brownish because our southern european ethnicity and we had 800 years the moors here. We don't believe much about the pale skin supremacy even if Franco made a racist movie called "RACE". northern european have way more issues in that matters. We are the door of Africa geographically speaking.
And assholes will always be everywhere
Thank you
There's no need to be condescending to someone with a different view than yours though.
It seems like some people actually enjoy the world being divided, which is sad.
As a slight aside, are the globetrotters ex pros and do they play real games or just do kids shows?
I get what you're trying to say and I agree with you but labelling north Africans (Magrebi) as closer to whites really isn't offensive when the vast majority of Magrebi would instinctively refer to themselves as white anyway.
Actually it wasn´t easy to see black people until recently. Always considering blacks as sub-Saharan. In that part I agree with 4bars.
If there is racism with someone it is with Maghreb. That racism is evident and undeniable.
It is. AS with southamericans
Hope you are not offended, but it's a leap saying 'Spain is a racist country and has a mental block about it' by quoting isolated incidents. Although I've never been to Spain and my views are purely academical. I've read some history about Moors and their conquest of Europe but my limited understanding on this subject was Moors were present in the Iberian area long time back from 700 AD to 1200 AD.
I'm still struggling to see the connection between Moors and the presence of Black people in Spain and the argument of 'can a local tradition be racist even if it involves blacking up white people's faces'.
Pun intended?
No!Not to defend any notion that black people were not present in Spain before the 1970s, but regarding the term 'Moor', it's not necessarily as clear-cut as how you imply though, since the term is not clearly defined and has changed considerably throughout history. The 'original' Moors (as in the muslim population of the Al-Andalus empire) could have been different than those called 'Moor' in the times of the slave trade. The original Moors are generally considered to be composed of Berber and Arabian people. Genetic analysis of the Berber people shows that at some point in time, there must have been quite some variation in skin colour in these people, ranging from fair skinned (even blond and red-haired) to really dark skinned. The Berber were considered to span an area from the Mediterranian to Mali and Niger, so that would make sense. Whether this was also still the case in Medieval times, I don't know. The whole of Northern Africa (which is considered to have been populated originally by much darker skinned people than nowadays, as far as I know) had been integrated in the Roman Empire for centuries before and by Arabs later, which might have changed the demographics of the Berber people by then.
The Moors depicted in the paintings above could have come from anywhere, as in those days muslims from any region of the world (India, Philippines, Africa, etc.) were also called Moors.
So, in short, it's definately possible that there was a big variation in skin colour in Spain between the 9th and 14th century. But it's also possible that the population looked more homogenously like the current inhabitants of North-Africa. I'm not sure if there are any historical sources on that.
That's the definition of species-level actually. 'Race' is a socio-cultural invention that has little or nothing to do with biology. Dogs from different races can perfectly breed with each other for example.
The reason why the 'race' term applied on humans is ridiculous, especially the classical 3/4/5 races distinction, is because there is no biological basis to make this clear distinction. There is no genetic basis for it, and there is also no anatomical basis for it. The human population is not divided in black, white and yellow people. There's a whole spectrum inbetween those shades of skin colour. The discussion about Moors and North Africans proves it. In fact, there is often more genetic diversity to be found within what used to be called a race, than between these different races.
Ethnicities might indeed be a better term, although that one also often implies cultural aspects. I think if you do want to classify, talking about geographical origin or genetic ancestry might be a better way. That probably makes more sense in a biological/genetic context and are terms used nowadays in anthropology I believe.
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Okay, so far in this thread we've had:
- People implying they largely found It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Tropic Thunder's use of blackface funny because blackface is funny and not because they were satirical deconstructions of blackface itself
- Someone citing the obscure, critically lambasted American comedy vehicle Soul Man as a defence of blackface
- Someone citing the ancient history of the swastika as a reason why it would (hypothetically) be okay for certain people to walk around Jewish neighbourhoods wearing Nazi imagery
- Someone defending blackface by going off on some weird tangent about penises causing rape
- Someone blaming black people for Chattel Slavery
- Someone justifying the dehumanisation of said slaves because of cannibalsism
- Someone telling a black poster that the racial abuse they've suffered was their fault and that their opinion on racism in general holds no weight because they're sitting on a plastic chair in a "dirty ghetto"
- Some people laugh and challenge folks, including black people, to come check out Zwarte Piet and various other archaic European traditions to test their tolerance for offensive shit
- People trying to erase black North Africans from European history