Black Culture > Blackness: On the Invention of "Whiteness"
“Blackness” does not belong to Black people because Black people did not call it upon ourselves. Prior to the Trans Atlantic Slave trade and the older Indian Ocean Slave Trade, the indigenous peoples of Africa were simply various individuals of different ethnicities and cultures who interacted at their own discretion and on their own terms.
The concept, terminology and construct of “Negroness” (which is the Latin precursor to “Blackness”) was put upon people from the continent of Africa as well as their descendants who, when forcefully removed and robbed of their ancestral and cultural heritage by enslavement, were assigned “Blackness” by the descendants of Europeans who gave up their cultural heritage largely by choice.
At the crux of colonization, Europeans of the time wanted a means to justify the displacement and genocide of the Indigenous Peoples of what we now call the Americas as well as a means to validate the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans.
Essentially, they felt so compelled to live anywhere else but Europe that Colonial Era Europeans were more than willing to systemically oppress and murder any other cultures they encountered to ensure what they imagined as their freedom. Their freedom from their homelands, their freedom from the lands of their ancestors and their freedom from their birthplace of socialization.
How terrible did Europe have to be in the 1400s to create a mass exodus of people from all over the continent for over 300 plus years? Where did Colonial Era Europeans learn their atrocious behavior from if not Europe--the continent that raised them?
Let’s do a brief review:
The fall of an abusive and violent Roman Empire in 476 AD after 1000 years of rule
Into the Dark Ages of Feudalism from 476 until 1000 AD.
Only to end up being subjected to Nordic, Germanic and British Anglo-Saxon colonization of the continent persisting from before 1000AD to the 1900s
Which gave way to the Roman Catholic Crusades from 1095 until 1291
Followed by the Bubonic Plague in 1346 (taking 50 million lives over a 10 year period)
Only for the 1400s to usher in the Spanish Inquisition, Monarchic Wars spanning the entire continent, the births of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci
All to be topped off by England’s defection from the Roman Catholic church in 1532 and the advent of the “Divine Right of Kings” from 1597
Colonial Era Europeans were ruled under an ageist, gendered, religious and physical caste system of warrior nobility, which they inherited from their Nordic, Anglo-Saxon and Roman colonizers. This system was compounded by the “Divine Right of Kings,” an extension of Feudalism equally maintained by patriarchal, economic and hereditary oppression. But this time with a different head of monotheism as the Pope no longer reigned supreme.
When these Europeans chose to invent the identity of “Whiteness” as a means of claiming a dominance and superiority that their culture or heritage did not afford them back home in Europe because of their age, gender, religion, disability, lineage or economic condition; please understand it was because these people decided that they would rather live anywhere else but Europe.
They couldn’t make it at home, so Europeans fled in the millions from their home countries, abandoning their entire lineages as and when it could afford them better positioning, opportunities and privilege than their cultural heritages provided them in their own homelands.
So, “Whiteness” is a fear-based defense mechanism against previously constructed forms of classist oppression. Colonial Era Europeans and their ancestors had barely survived in Europe, if they did at all. To ensure they never had to go back there and that they could defend themselves against their former societies; these expatriates needed to invent a new form of classist oppression that they could use against the completely different cultures they were encountering, who fundamentally did not relate to their belief systems.
The invention of “Blackness” was created by desperate Europeans who abandoned their fealty to the monarchies of their homelands while also securing themselves in the only position of power that they understood: The Oppressors. In an act of true mythology building, “White” people have chosen to believe that melanin can determine a human being's consciousness awareness. They believe this because it was made up by them and deemed necessary to believe in the first place.
“Whiteness” is a mythological culture descended from the mythological continent of “Whitelandia,” where the “White” peoples of “Whitelandia” were always united in their ideas of smartness, goodness and socio-cultural practices. When you accept your inheritance of the construct of Whiteness, a magic wand of ignorance is waved and gone are the thousands of years of ageist, gendered, religious, physical, cultural and economic warfare that Europeans committed against one another.
This mythology necessitates the system of race. Where “Blackness/Darkness” is the assignations, stereotyping and assumptions ABOUT African people (and their descendants) CREATED by European/Slavic peoples (and their descendants) as a negative “counterpart” to their allegedly better “Whiteness.” While “Black Culture” is the assignations, understanding and resilience OF “Blackified” peoples of African lineage and how we regard our own humanity.
Black culture is what the descendents of Africans have created of and for ourselves DESPITE the systemic oppression created by European people and perpetuated by “White” people. “Blackness” is what Colonial Era Europeans and all prolongers of Whiteness created FOR Africans and their descendants in order to defend the hoarding of resources, abuse of rulership, claim to obliviousness and a dependency on receiving privilege.
“Blackness” is White people’s ideas about Afro-Diasporic peoples. Black culture is Black people’s ideas about ourselves.
