ezeagu:
What do you think about the identity of being 'black'? Is it something you think about or are affected by in your day to day life? Is it something you choose to identify with or something you just have to go along with. In case your may be confused, the 'black' identity is a product of European imperialism and the people who called certain members of the human race black identified themselves as white. Before this nobody called themselves 'black'.

What I am to achieve with this thread is to see how people who are not affected by white people directly in Nigeria or even of Nigerian ancestry/identify more with Africa, how do they see themselves in relation to a 'black' identity? I always thought it was forced and didn't really mean anything for people in Africa who already know their ancestry and can relate to specific ethnic groups. It's to the point that many don't think of being 'black' at all.

What do you see yourself as?

Lovesdaisied:


I understand that it is how I am viewed in modern society but I have stopped attaching much to it (used to but not anymore). I am more of an individual of Igbo origin than anything else. Being Black is just a happenstance, a label that I hope will be obsolete one day, as "Yellow" or "Red" is for Asians and Native American.

Identifying myself as black does two things:

1. What you already said - It spins off a racial classification given to us by White enslavers as something powerful when it really isn't. "Black" in and of itself is a European word imposed on us and within its context has a lot of negative connotations. The average African did not really see himself as Black, left to his own devices.

2. It creates a weird racial dichotomy of "us vs them" where the only enemies of a Black individual are Whites or others. As an Igbo person, I know how contradictory this myth of White oppression is to my current realities. Whites have not done more harm to my people than others who I should be viewing as "fellow" blacks. Dig deep and see that "Black" is an illusion.

"White" people have killed and oppressed each other even before they encountered us too.

Honestly, this race thing is just an additional opportunity for humans to exercise their proclivity for conflict and division.

oluwalfa:
U sound like a victim of classification
Black identification is not against you even though the term black is filled with negativity
It is only a term to differentiate us from others, it is not our exact colour (though some people in Senegal will make you think twice)
As much as we didn't identify ourselves as black before meeting other races, others, like the Whites didn't identify themselves as such neither
We needed these identifications
What would you have called us? Dark Brown? Black was easier and if we are suffering any discrimination it is our fault (Fela) not because of whatever colour we are identified with

ezeagu:


I'm talking about the political and historic context of black. 'Black people' didn't call themselves black, black is a very loose term that can mean anything form a Somalian to a pacific islander. Europeans used these terms as a tool of racial classification and is rooted in slavery and colonisation. It is meant to be in contrast with 'white', therefore many people in Africa do not really know about being black, do people in your village identify as 'black people'? That is why I ask if you identify as black.

oluwalfa:


Did white people call themselves white?

IsraeliAIRFORCE:
You mean somebody is actually Black in colour?


May be few thousands but yet, why not brown?

ezeagu:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people#Modern_racial_hierarchies

oluwalfa:


exactly!

Whites had no need to identify themselves as "whites" until they met other races.

nwadiuko1:
I be IGBO man

ezeagu:


So you wouldn't identify as black in the sense of voluntarily or apart from any kind of reason to do so like when you are targeted for being black. What I mean is that there are some (westernised) Africans who identify with black as part of 'Pan-Africanism' or "racial pride", but others understand that black is something that they have to deal with and only identify with it out of necessity.

ezeagu:


It's gone way over your head. The idea of 'races' by skin colour is an invention of Europe. The idea that a Somalian and Nigerian are one race is of European doing. The fact that you can't see out of this paradigm means you are unable to identify the conditioning you've undergone.

Your original question was 'did white people call themselves white?', which I'm assuming was an assumption that white people were named so by members of other so called races, and the fact is that they weren't. White people called themselves white people and called others black, brown, and so on.

Now the simple question is (it's really quite simple), taking the 'exonymic' history and sociopolitical slant of 'black' into account, do you identify as a black person?

oluwalfa:


I understand where you are coming from but you seem to be confusing a few things
It is true that there is no single unique "black race" as even in Nigeria, I have nothing in common with Musa. But this difference is not readily seen by an outsider. Likewise, a Danish is very different from a Spanish even though we call them whites.
Moreover, other people did call them white. In my language, we had always called them "ndi ocha" which means white or bright people. And we call ourselves "ndi ojii" which means dark or black people. We never called ourselves "ndi ojii" until we met other races. And white europeans did not invent Igbo language.
Now to answer your last question, I am a black man but I am not black.

ezeagu:


I'm inclined to think ndi ocha and ndi oji were introduced via the discourse on race, I say this because of, 1. Albinos, and 2. historically terms such as oyibo and beke were used for 'white people' by Igbo people, even in the West Indies. But I see that your argument is that naturally people would see the difference of the so called races via skin colour, which may be true, but then we have to actually question if these were seen as 'races' in the European sense.

oluwalfa:
U sound like a victim of classification
Black identification is not against you even though the term black is filled with negativity
It is only a term to differentiate us from others, it is not our exact colour (though some people in Senegal will make you think twice)
As much as we didn't identify ourselves as black before meeting other races, others, like the Whites didn't identify themselves as such neither
We needed these identifications
What would you have called us? Dark Brown? Black was easier and if we are suffering any discrimination it is our fault (Fela) not because of whatever colour we are identified with

oluwalfa:


Even if it is beke, oyibo, or onye ocha, the fact remains that we use these terms to differentiate them from ourselves. And we use these terms collectively for people that are racially and geographically so far from each other, from the japanese man to the european to the south american, they are all "onye ocha" to us just as we are Africans are all "black" to them.
So I see it as ignorance not prejudice.

delishpot:
I am African. I am not Black. Maybe brown but deff not black.do we realy have black people? Maybe its time for so called black people to reject that term black.