“Blackness” as a negative archetype

But does this justify racism?

“Blackness” is an archetype (ruling pattern emblazoned on our “collective unconscious”) of general negativity. Why? As entities embedded in the material world, in order to find our way about, and protect ourselves from physical threats, we need signals from the material world. The quickest is a form of energy that fills space and bounces off of objects, and then triggers receptors in our eyes, producing an image of all the physical items around us. We call this “light”. It’s obviously a good thing, and its absence is called “darkness”, in which we are vulnerable to objects we can’t see.
It does also become a “cover” for other people doing things that either threaten us, or might be otherwise opposed by other people (such as in society in general). So across the board, “darkness” (or “blackness”) took on a very negative connotation, and thus becoming such a universally negative archetype. (One notable exception is when it became opposed to redness, as in financial status, where “in the black” meant being out of the state of financial danger represented by “in the red”).

“Shadow” indicates a region where light is blocked by an object, and thus in relative darkness. So this became the archetype of what is negative and rejected and thus to be hidden out of view or suppressed into unconsciousness, as we try to put our “best foot forward” in the world of people, and even to ourselves, or even collectively as a “society” of people.

So this archetype eventually was unfortunately overgeneralized to skin color, and from there, as more justification (including “biblical”) needed to be made [particularly for the institution of slavery in the 1600’s], dark skin was assumed to be a “curse”. Seeking to find this curse in scripture, one was readily found, in Genesis 9, and on groups of people descended from the man believed to be the father of the “negroid” race. Some went further than that, and said it was the “mark of Cain”. Cain was before the flood, and according to the global flood theory most conservative Christians believe in, his descendants should have all perished. But they’ll probably say that while Noah and his sons were of Seth, Ham’s wife carried the genes.

(But now we’re getting further and further into extrabiblical speculation. As it is, the “curse” on Canaan was not on all of Ham’s descendants, even if it was in reaction to something he did, and most importantly, it was not uttered by God, but by Noah himself, in a hung over anger. God never claims to honor it).

“Blackness” took on a very negative connotation, and became a negative archetype — which got overgeneralized to skin color

Adding to this, since the lighter skinned people were quicker to both develop technologically, plus adopt the biblically based monotheistic religions that supposedly promoted more civility, the home of many of the dark skinned people, Africa, became known as “the dark continent”. Even though nearly all tribes of men outside the Abrahamic traditions naturally gravitated toward polytheism and ritual (and many within those traditions still fell back into it in different ways), “demonic religion” became specially tagged on these people.

And all of this would be used to justify the coralling of these people into inferior positions in “civilized” society. And the removal of this restraint blamed for the downfall of civilized societies (by misguided or even malicious “do-gooders” trying to make all “equal” just for the sake of equality without regard of “the facts”, or perhaps to purposefully bring down the civilization out of envy or whatever).

And then the resultant dysfunction of many of the people would be the ultimate validation of this. Then, people try to point to “other ethnic/immigrant groups” who suffered discrimination, but “pulled themselves up”, while blacks have never recovered, and then take this as proof of the original stereotypes of the blacks (“culture” replacing “genetics” now, to most) being lazy.
But what’s ignored, is this archetypical nature of “blackness”, where other groups were “white” skinned, and could hide their identity. This created what I’ve called a “hierarchy” of “whiteness”, where “black” is naturally at the bottom of every version of this list.
(The ongoing dysfunction was largely from the oppression put in place, yet defenders of that system under “exceptional America” conveniently turn it around so that “liberal” attempts at remediating the problem are what have caused all the modern problems in the first place, and that blacks were actually better off before the Civil Rights era! How ‘cursed’ must a group be, for that to be true? Meanwhile, the “give everything to the rich” policies that are more to blame for most of the economic problems are said not to work because of the government “meddling” in things — for these people’s sakes! So at every point they are made out to be the “scourge of the nation”).

So the people would then react in anger, and through intimidating stances (such as “gangsta/“thug”/“copkiller”), actually owning very negative stereotypes of themselves (including even the chief negative term taken from the racists), but then continue to suffer from the consequences of them.

This has all been like a runaway domino effect. So bad, that the negative connotation is even still evident in people’s attitudes toward skin tone even among “colored” people themselves (and especially younger females).

The Nation of Islam and others recognized this archetype; as one of the introductory things they taught (as you can see in the stories of Malcolm X and others) is how “black” is always “bad”, and white is “good”. This was blamed on “racism”, and as the Bible also recognizes the dichotomy, it was taken as proof that the Bible was just a “white control tool” (likely “corrupted” by both Jews and Christians as the rest of Islam teaches).

Of course, the “black is bad” stereotype had also spread to other things, such as cats; becoming a symbol of “bad luck”, and the ghoulish atmosphere of Halloween as the pets of its witches. (This has even led to some cruel treatment of them).
In this vein, these afrocentric forms of Islam influenced hip-hop, and one popular rap even linked all of this together:
Black cat is bad luck; bad guys wear black…
Must have been a white guy who started all that…
[Then eventually counters with a common Black Muslim reverse racist theory of white features such as blue eyes being a “disease created by leprosy”].

On the flipside, “white” became an archetype of “purity”, because the “color” indicates a state of light that stimulates all of our optical receptors (R, G, B cones equally, plus luminosity rods), and so is an absolute visual state that thus also (opposite of black, which hides) exposes any foreign objects, so that if you see something “white” or “clear”, it likely has nothing else in it.
(But of course, this is not always the case. As there are clear poisons. But exceptions like this generally aren’t considered in the development of archetypes).

It was still wrong to generalize this to skin. No human skin is truly black, nor white, not even that suffering from albinism.

Yet in religion, all biblical characters were traditionally drawn as Caucasians rather than as the medium brown-skinned people who actually live in that area. (Fostering this illusion, was that the Jews had largely intermixed in Europe, most taking on its “white” skin, and so added to the assumption that this was the original “race” of the people in the Bible, beginning with the first man, Adam, and only excepting the descendants of Ham and parts of Japheth. Many interpreters acknowledged Japheth as being divided between Caucasians and Asians, while some actually placed the Caucasians in Shem’s line like the Israelites!) Meanwhile, the Devil and demons were generally portrayed in colors, including black, in black and white drawings.

All of this figures in the “implicit bias” or “commonsense racism” discussed by Ian Lopez in Dog Whistle Politics (see https://erictb.wordpress.com/2015/11/01/book-review-dog-whistle-politics), where he cites the “Implicit Association Test”, where people pair words like white with good, and black with bad (p.44), which “shows that racial discrimination often results from unconscious thought proceses, and need not stem from intentional malice, or indeed, any conscious purposes at all”. He points out “It’s true that we’re ‘hardwired’ to unconsciously assign meaning to perceived differences. But it’s false that we’re automatically programmed to think in terms of race. Rather, notions of race come from a shared culture steeped in racial stereotypes, as well as from material arrangements like segregated cities that make race a supremely salient social category”. He then cites a race scholar who points out “the unconscious is largely social” [i.e. “collective unconscious”, which is where archetypes spring from], and that the environment is what creates the negative associations and uses them in priming our psyches.

Here is a standard example of implicit bias, using girls and dolls:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1126163260810060

This archetypal concept really came to light a few years ago when I saw an article on the old “wartime” early drawings of Dr. Seuss, who was known for his poetic children’s books, which I and many others grew up on. Anybody who knows anything about wartime media, such as film and cartoons (including beloved “golden age” classics as the works of Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones at Warner Brothers, and the other studios Disney, Paramount, MGM, etc.), know it was characterized by two things that have been largely censored in modern presentations of these productions: racial caricature and stereotype, and portrayals of Hitler, the real life political archvillain bent on exterminating whole groups of people, behind the symbol of his Nazi swastika.

Cartoonists apparently saw more humanity in the madman trying to exterminate many of them, than they saw in people of color

Theodore Giesel aka “Dr. Seuss”, as much as we associate him with the childhood “innocence” of his later works, had participated in these as well (though officially renouncing racism by the time of his popular works, including the familiar anti-racism story “The Sneetches”).

It was when seeing this that something suddenly dawned on me. Blacks are typically drawn as what I call “goons”. They have dark round faces with big light colored lips that often take up the entire lower half of their face, (like a second tone of their face, which of course usually also serve as the protruding jawline). I realized at some point that if you were to reverse the colors of the lips and face, it would be a straight-up classic clown face! The airheadedness of the characters was bad enough, but the faces then barely looked human! With the very first Warner Brothers cartoon character, called Bosko (“the talk-ink kid”), it was never even totally clear whether or not he was a little black boy or a monkey. (And east Asians are drawn with not only the common stereotypical slanted or squinted eyes, but also generally these oversized buck teeth, looking like some sort of “uber-dorks” or something. I first took note of this when thinking of the publicity card of an old WB cartoon called “The Ducktators”, shown in books on the Golden Age, and this was one where the three enemies of WWII were portrayed as birds, and the large teeth of the one representing the Japan leader really stood out, and Hitler was just distinguished by the familiar mustache. Mussolini was portrayed with a big brutish looking face, but nevertheless, still “human” looking, even for a bird).

So then also shown in the article were Dr. Seuss’ portrayal of Hitler. Like in the cartoons, he was portrayed as a villain, for the purpose of him being defeated in the story.
But what I suddenly noticed, seeing him next to the blackface characters, was that he was drawn perfectly human-looking, basically! I’m there looking at the blackfaces, annoyed as usual, especially now that this is Seuss of all people, and then it’s “…like wait! Why does Hitler look so OK?” (As he did in all the cartoons).

In all these his face looked pretty much like real life, only drawn instead of photographed (unless characterized by an animal character, as mentioned), and perhaps showing a goofy face, only in certain gags like him being konked out by the heroes of the story, or whatever; and (of course) often yelling like a lunatic. But he looked perfectly human, while black characters, who usually weren’t even bad guys, looked sub-human.

What was that about?
It was then that it became clear to me that this is all “archetypal” (and as such, is largely unconscious! They didn’t even realize the implications of what they were doing. It was like people apparently had more respect and saw more humanity in the madman trying to exterminate many of them, than they did for these other people with no power in the world, who had already been largely swept aside by the society they were apart of!)
The ultimate example came during COVID, where institutions (such as McDonald’s) in the country the pandemic erupted in, proceeded to essentially take it out on the African expatriates there with no less than classic Jim Crow-like restrictions, even though they had nothing to do with the outbreak!
Clearly, “blackness” was just seen as bad, whether the people did bad (as the typical conservative “colorblind” arguments go) or not.

Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine, even mentioned the concept of “Africanized bees” (aka “killer bees”) that were believed to be set to swarm the US from the tropical regions to the south.

While, yes, Africanized bees, or killer bees, are a more aggressive hybrid of African and European bees, the way it was reiterated countless times while using the term “Africanized,” while subtly comparing it to the docile European bee, imprinted in the viewer’s mind that anything that comes out of the continent is inherently violent — even human beings (Hedding). The main idea to be pointed out here is not that the term “Africanized” was used to portray violent beings. It was the fact that that’s what the people perceive it as. If it weren’t for the internalized stereotyping and dehumanization of POC, the thought of connecting killer bees with black people would not have entered a viewer’s mind. But unfortunately society has been hardwired to see POC in a certain way and to never deviate from that idea of them.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/143557590/Bowling-for-Columbine-Racism-and-Fear

So it is incorrect to blame the Bible or even whites for the existence of this; it’s an archetype that has been taken out of its original context and misapplied to justify oppression.

The archetypal (unconsciously engrained in the human psyche) nature of this dynamic makes me wonder if we’ll ever be able to completely eradicate all negative connotations of “blackness”.
But we should all recognize this archetype (as a product of the unconscious) and how it influences our views of blacks, (they themselves, and everyone else, of course, often through what’s called “commonsense racism”). Then, it would be easier to eliminate unfair discrimatory attitudes in ourselves.

Originally published on Eripedia