Scientists classified humanity into races during the second half of the 18th century;
Which formed in the imagination of Western researchers a fictional stereotype of the black peoples that did not change until the middle of the 20th century.
On the other hand, the term "Negro" has developed over the past centuries, and has taken many forms, and has mostly carried negative meanings and an arrogant view towards the black races.
In a previous report, the French "Mediapart" website said that the statements of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in which he equated "negroes" with "monkeys", embarrass the right-wing obsessed with competing with his party, which turns a blind eye to racism in its ranks.
On December 8, the Romanian international referee, Sebastian Coltescu, raised the controversy again over the racist term in the French match between Paris Saint-Germain and the Turkish club Istanbul Basaksehir.
The referee used the word "black", while addressing his assistant, in reference to the assistant coach of the Turkish team, Pierre Wibo, a former Cameroon international player.
This led to the withdrawal of the two teams from the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris, and they returned again to play the match the next day, wearing T-shirts that read "No to Racism", and sat down on one knee to express their rejection of what happened the previous day.
Negro or black
In another report published by the French newspaper "Le Monde", writer Anne Schumann says that the word "nigger" is not just an ordinary phrase that we use in our daily lives;
Rather, it is a term that carries with it a lot of racism, and hides the tragedies of slavery and colonialism.
The Afro-Canadian novelist, Danny Laverire, says the word "black nigger" has "a sharp sound that wakes you up like whips on sugarcane or cotton plantations".
The French novelist, Anne-Marie Garra, says that this phrase, which appeared in the 16th century, burns "the throat, tongue, palate, teeth, and throat of everyone who utters it."
According to Gara, the phrase is not only used as an insult;
Rather, it became part of the society’s culture of naming entertainment and fun patterns, such as naming the dark chocolate-covered crembo dessert “the head of the slave,” or calling the ballet dance invented by Marius Petipa in 1877 “the nigger dance.”
Because the children's faces are painted black.
The past of slavery
The writer says that these expressions are not just arbitrary linguistic choices;
Rather, they are terms closely related to the history of colonialism and slavery.
She asserts that the term "black" has become in common use in French literary circles since 1845, when Eugène de Mercure attacked the dark-skinned novelist Alexandre Dumas, and addressed him in one of his books, saying, "Open this leaflet, and you will find that savage. Choose any point in the world." civilized, and soon the nigger will show you his teeth.”
On a political level, the word, which meant children of slaves, appeared for the first time in 1714 in a decree issued by Moreau de Saint-Merry, deputy in the French Constituent Assembly, where he considered, based on studies on races and blood groups, that “the blacks were not of the same type as the whites.” ".
According to Aurelia Michel, professor of black American history at the University of Paris, the term "black" reminds us of European violence against slaves since the 16th century, and brings to mind a whole past of domination and servitude.
From the Niger River to the Atlantic Ocean
Researcher Myriam Kotias, director of the International Center for Research on Slavery and Post-Slavery, points out that the use of the word “Negro” (black), began 400 years ago, and has its roots in “Nigeria”, a region in Africa located around the Niger River, which has been associated with campaigns portuguese sailors;
To recruit and trade slaves across the Atlantic, they were called "Negroes".
According to historian and professor of political science, Bab Ndayi, the word “negro” or “black” appeared in 1529 in a book documenting the journey of the first French navigator to reach the island of Sumatra through the Cape of Good Hope, and then the word began to spread gradually among sailors and merchants, who supervised the expeditions of The slave trade in the Atlantic, and then in society in general.
After the term initially referred to the skin color of these slaves, it became, over time, synonymous with the word "slave", which later appears in French dictionaries.
This connection between the two terms was first recorded in 1771 in the Trivo Dictionary, composed by the Jesuits.
The word "black", according to this dictionary, refers to "all oppressed nations that fall - a disgrace on the forehead of humanity - on the list of commodities that can be traded."
A few decades later, the "Dictionary of Natural History" confirmed and justified that identification between the two terms, writing in 1803 by Julien Joseph Ferry defining the term "black is a slave and always will be", according to French Le Monde.
Prior to the transatlantic slave trade, slavery was associated primarily with prisoners of war or forced labor, not with the color of skin.
"During antiquity and the Middle Ages, most slaves in the Mediterranean were white, and in the 15th century, slave markets in the Mediterranean, mainly in Malta or Cyprus, offered slaves of all races, some from Africa; but most of them," says Cotias. Turks, Russians, Romans, Bulgarians, or Greeks.
Slavery and the color black
The writer believes that the slave trade became associated with black people after the deportation of more than 12 million Africans to America between the 16th and 19th centuries;
To give Atlantic slavery the starting point for global racism against blacks.
"With the rise of this gigantic colonial trade based on the enslavement of Africans, a social system based on the demeaning of those called Negroes emerged," says Ndaye.
Europe, according to him, has established a hierarchy among the human races, with blacks at the bottom of the list, making them "automatically ready to become slaves."
Historian Catherine Kokori-Fedrovic says that the cultural hierarchy, according to the idea of "the beautiful and the sublime", coined by Emmanuel, was in the 1860s, placing the Germans, English and French at the top of the pyramid, while blacks come at the bottom.
According to Eric Misnard, a professor of history and a member of the International Center for Research on Slavery, Enlightenment philosophers believed in this racial division and Western superiority, despite their abolitionist rhetoric.
These thinkers believed - as Misnard says - that Europe, which embodies civilization and progress, must bring light to these uncivilized peoples.
All of these accumulations made violence a systematic behavior in dealing with blacks, including forced labor, torture, rape and murder, according to Michel.
Colonial campaigns and scientific racism
If the word "black" is associated with the history of the slave trade, it was supposed to disappear in 1848 with the abolition of slavery;
On the contrary, the term acquired a new dimension at the end of the 19th century, according to the French newspaper.
According to Cotias, the ethnic hierarchy, which arose during the enslavement campaigns, survived and emerged during the colonial period, the literature of the end of the 19th century and the speeches of public figures in the early French Third Republic.
According to her, with the beginnings of the European colonial campaigns on the brown continent, the blacks turned from slaves to savage peoples that Europeans should bring to the civilized world.
"During the second colonial campaign, after the Congress of Berlin (1884-1885), the European powers on the African continent faced radical differences, and the word black became a meaning that clearly indicates inferiority. It was no longer a question of slavery, but of the ethnic ideas born with the slave trade." It remained deeply embedded in people's minds, and Europeans believed that they had to control these uncivilized blacks."
Naday analyzes that transformation, saying, "The former slaves, who became free men, then posed a danger, because they could demand equality and social justice." Therefore, Europeans and Americans considered, based on theories fueled by anatomy and medicine, that "Negroes" do not possess the moral and intellectual capabilities to practice their freedom.
In this context, Paul Broca, a French anatomist who lived in the 19th century, considered "negroes" to be intellectually inferior to whites;
Because their skulls are smaller.
In his essay on the inequality of the human races, the French politician Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) says that blacks' ability to think is "modest or perhaps non-existent".
According to Michel, what happened in the 19th century was that "biological racism recast the human deviations caused by the slavery campaigns."
alluring exotic
The writer says that this view of blacks did not change until the beginning of the First World War, when nearly 200,000 Africans were conscripted into the French army, and some of them settled in Paris after the war.
The war turned those blacks, naive, lazy and perverted, into brave soldiers defending France.
According to Ndaye, the view of blacks gradually changed in France between the two world wars, and became associated with a love of learning about African cultures and customs, and what is known as Negro art reached its peak at that time.
However, African folklore has been viewed as racist, often associating blacks with sex, dance and brutality.
In the 1930s, a literary movement emerged that prided itself on "Negro", the black race, and African culture, exemplified by the poet and former Senegalese president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and the Martinique writer Aime Césaire.
Senghor argues that Negro is not a racial issue;
Rather, it is a culture, while Césaire believes that adherence to and pride in African origins expresses acceptance of "our destiny as blacks".
The writer mentions that this mixture between the love of acquaintance with African cultures, and the revolution of Africans against the inferior European view, in the period between the two world wars, was swept away by the crimes of the Second World War.
In 1950, UNESCO published a pamphlet declaring that "humanity is one", and that race is a "social myth" that has caused untold suffering.