{"id":47245,"date":"2016-06-01T19:48:21","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T19:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47245"},"modified":"2016-06-01T19:48:21","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T19:48:21","slug":"the-idea-of-blackness-was-a-european-invention-designed-to-legitimize-the-oppression-of-africans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47245","title":{"rendered":"The idea of \u201cblackness\u201d was a European invention, designed to legitimize the oppression of Africans."},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>\u201cMost people think that it\u2019s obvious that races are real biological categories. However, most of the scholars who study race think that races are invented categories. When one group of people sets out to oppress another, they \u201cracialize\u201d them\u2014that is, they think of them as fundamentally different from and, importantly, inferior to themselves. Prior to the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Atlantic_slave_trade\" target=\"_blank\">trans-Atlantic slave trade<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sub-Saharan_Africa\" target=\"_blank\">sub-Saharan Africans<\/a> did not consider themselves members of a single, homogeneous \u201cblack\u201d race. Instead, they identified themselves as members of any one of a number of distinct groups\u2014as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Akan_people\" target=\"_blank\">Akan<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wolof_people\" target=\"_blank\">Wolof<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ambundu\" target=\"_blank\">Mbundu<\/a>, etc. The idea of \u201cblackness\u201d was a European invention, designed to legitimize the oppression of Africans.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The idea that races are invented will probably sound crazy to a lot of people. They\u2019ll think of it as a silly idea that only an academic who\u2019s out of touch with the real world could come up with. Surely, there are visible features such as skin color, hair texture, facial <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Morphology_(biology)\" target=\"_blank\">morphology<\/a>, and body build that set the races apart from one another!\u201d \u2014<a href=\"http:\/\/realhumannature.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">David Livingstone Smith<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Robert J. Benz, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47243\" target=\"_blank\">Race Delusion: Lies That Divide Us<\/a>,\u201d <em>The Huffington Post<\/em>, June 1, 2016. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/robert-j-benz\/race-illusion-its-all-in-_b_10095430.html\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/robert-j-benz\/race-illusion-its-all-in-_b_10095430.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cMost people think that it\u2019s obvious that races are real biological categories. However, most of the scholars who study race think that races are invented categories. When one group of people sets out to oppress another, they \u201cracialize\u201d them\u2014that is, they think of them as fundamentally different from and, importantly, inferior to themselves. Prior to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[23957,10108,23959,23958,2425],"class_list":["post-47245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-david-livingstone-smith","tag-huffington-post","tag-robert-benz","tag-robert-j-benz","tag-the-huffington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47247,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47245\/revisions\/47247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}