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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2243 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 5, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there any evidence of black people in Europe prior to the Age of Discovery in anything other than essentially zero? I don't mean non-white people such as Berbers or Arabs. I mean sub-Saharan blacks. From everything I've read by experts, there were basically none. Due to the Saharan desert being a massive barrier, there was almost zero gene flow, especially into Northern Europe which have close to 0 sub-Saharan African DNA. The British Isles are slightly higher at like 0.1% due to some North African traders (almost exclusively not black) during the Roman Empire.

On top of the genetic evidence, there's the fact that most of Europe was 99% plus white within living memory. It wasn't until after WW2 and the Windrush generation in England that they saw significant non-white people move in. But even in 1950, it was over 99% white.

Yet anytime someone chud complains online about black people in Medieval England in video games or film, you'll get academics coming out saying that it was actually more diverse than we thought and that black people have always been present in England. I can't really find any evidence of this. Even sources that want to tell this story will say something like there were 15,000 black people in England during the height of the African slave trade out of a population of 8 million and they were mostly in port cities.

Are these people just straight up lying? Are they so influenced by ideology they can't see what is obviously true or false? I honestly don't know what evidence they are looking at that makes them think what they think. And just for reference, in 1991, the UK did its first racial census. It was less than 1% black then after 40 years of mass immigration. I think England had the highest at 1.5%, but again, that's where the Windrush generation settled as opposed to Scotland or Wales. But you play BG3, and 15% of it is black and if you say this is kind of ridiculous you're a chud. Is there any even remotely convincing argument for this kind of representation?

We do have multiple letters from Queen Elizabeth I to the Lord Mayor of London complaining about the large numbers of “negars and blackmoores” in London and demanding that they be deported (they weren’t). I’m not sure if the people she is referring to would be what are now considered black people, or if they were more northern African.

That is post Age of Discovery though. The Atlantic Slave Trade had started by then and the Medieval ages ended over 100 years ago by then.

Sure, and iirc there was allegedly a substantial population of black people in Lisbon by perhaps 1510, which is not wholly unbelievable given the already substantial Portuguese trade with West Africa around that time. But that’s well into the “age of discovery”, so not really applicable to the question.

There’s a few scattered references to ‘Ethiopians’ or some other description of clearly ‘black’ people in Europe before the age of discovery, but definitely no reason to think they were a major presence.

My guess is that the sight wouldn’t have been shocking in a port town, although it might be unusual, but they would have been in random villages.

Just to point out BG3 is a bad example. The RPG setting it is based on: the Forgotten Realms is explicitly designed to be much more diverse than Europe at the same rough time frame would be, which is called out in universe in the setting, outside of BG3 itself.

"There was a time when any fool could have told you where the folk of this land or that came from, but now we sail or ride so far and often that we’re all from everywhere. Even the most isolated villages hold folk who hail from they know not where. Yet you can still tell something of where someone hails from by their hair and build and skin and manner, though any traveler knows not to assume too much from a quick glance. Remember that, and hearken"

This is from a Doylist perspective so that DnD players who want to play a Chultan halfling shaman or a Kozakuran samurai or whatever on the Sword Coast (the Europe equivalent and most popular part of the setting) don't have to have convoluted back stories to justify it. From a Watsonian perspective the historical presence of portals from the Realms to different areas of Earth plus being a high magic setting with fairly easy access to teleportation, flying ships and even spacecraft to visit different worlds is a justification. Bits of the planet were also exchanged with nations on an entirely (but not really, it's complicated) world which led to random cultures popping up elsewhere as well.

On top of all that Baldur's Gate and environs is called out explicitly as being the most multi-cultural place on a very multi-cultural world due to being the biggest and most cosmopolitan city (no matter what Waterdhavians might say). And had absorbed several huge waves of refugees from various nations in the prior several hundred years.

"Baldurians took great pride in the inclusiveness of their city. It was a place anyone could call home, or start a new life within, regardless of race, creed or personal history."

Something like The Witcher or similar may be a better example.

As for the rationale? It's simple (which doesn't mean correct of course!) games and books and movies are made to entertain people as they are at the time they are created. A deliberate choice can be made to portray historical (or pseudo-historical) situations with more modern demographics to make it more palatable or relatable or attractive to a modern audience. My wife greatly prefers shows or games which have (or allow to be created) a black woman character, In RPGs I am almost always a white man with red hair. Even outside of any social engineering one might want to do, having the broadest set of characters is probably the way to go unless you are appealing specifically to the accuracy of your historical setting as a specific selling point.

My wife loves Bridgerton, she is aware it is not historically accurate but it allows her to watch and enjoy people like her in pretty dresses dealing with English high society in a way that really never happened. Then she buys Bridgerton themed coffee creamer (which is quite good actually), and so on and wants to attend a fancy tea party in costume, so buys corsets and lace and learns to sew. It creates an aspirational fantasy of a sort.

Europe is a bad unit of analysis that lends itself to Motte and Bailey play by your opponents. Specific to the interior of England the number is probably zero, specific to east-Mediterranean port towns it probably isn't.

Ditto "black", there plenty of references to Nubians and Moores in the Eastern Roman Empire and wider mederteranian but the fact that the op specifically excluded Berbers makes me think they're ones planning the motte and bailey rather than opening themselves up to it.

That's the nature of any motte and bailey argument.

And all arguments about race are inevitably motte and bailey arguments. Just ones, taking ethnonationalism seriously, with horrible consequences for those in the bailey.

Berbers weren’t and aren’t black sub Saharans. You have the motte and bailey reversed. The bailey is there were black Africans in Europe when the motte is that they were North African Berbers, Phoenicians, and Arabs for the most part. But they use the fact that they are “African” to make them black Africans. Obviously there would be Mediterranean people in the Mediterranean. I said black specifically as in Black sub Saharan Africans, not non white people period.

the fact that the op specifically excluded Berbers makes me think they're ones planning the motte and bailey rather than opening themselves up to it.

What does this mean? Berbers are not black. As far as I can tell, none of the major Berber tribal groups have major Sub-Saharan admixture; whatever admixture they do have comes through their interbreeding with Gulf Arabs, who themselves have some African ancestry via the history of the slave trade. Ancient depictions of Berbers, and medieval depictions of groups like the Guanches, consistently show them as fair-skinned with pale hair and beards. Arguably the most famous modern person of Berber ancestry, soccer player Zinedine Zidane, could pass for a white Italian guy.

Yeah this is an example of what people will do. There were Berbers in Europe who are African. Yes, and? Berbers aren’t black sub Saharan Africans so you didn’t show anything. It’s irrelevant. They are completely different genetically and culturally.

The argument is dull. The likelihood is that a handful of sub-Saharan people made their way to Northern Europe before the age of discovery for various reasons at various times. Certainly educated people were aware that black skinned people existed and lived far south of the Mediterranean, which makes sense because they participated in the trans-Saharan trade with places like Mali and therefore would have been present as a small minority in some North African port towns which European merchants also on occasion visited. There would have been people in Northern European ports in 1400 who would have seen black people, for sure.

Anything beyond that is (pointless) speculation.

Why is it pointless speculation when there is overwhelming evidence against how it’s represented today? It seems pretty clear to me there is an agenda behind pushed and people are distorting the facts. If people accepted what you said is true then that would be one thing, but there are people who want to open up this debate so if they want to open it up then we should have it. It seems to me there is essentially a conspiracy to prove places like England were always diverse. And that’s just obviously not true. We know which groups migrated there in large numbers, and those people weren’t black. This should be settled, but there’s a lot of people who are lying and they should be called out for it and have their reputations destroyed as serious academics.

Of course there’s an agenda behind it. But that agenda has nothing to do with any actual academic question on this subject and so can’t be disproved by it. It would be like disproving BLM with real research on police brutality, or disproving communism with basic economics. It isn’t going to convince anyone who believes this stuff.

Most people who believe that stuff believe because people who are considered experts say it’s true. Then that gets pushed downstream. It’s actually an extremely small group of people pushing this revisionism. If some extremely motivated people cared about this, the only response they would have is why do care and to call them weird. I’ve actually gotten people who pretend to believe it admit it’s not true by saying that a multicultural black England with a large black upper class would mean that blacks were largely responsible for the European side of the Atlantic slave trade. There’s just not a will to call people out on obvious bullshit.

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They're not above lying and some of them are clearly aware that's what they're doing.

Others give themselves more plausible deniability because maintaining credibility serves their allies' goals.

But it's all in service of the goals Moffat laid out, not truth.

Are these people just straight up lying? Are they so influenced by ideology they can't see what is obviously true or false? I honestly don't know what evidence they are looking at that makes them think what they think

My understanding is that it goes something like

MOTTE: There were a nonzero number of black people in England and so we should represent them. Look, here's a document from the 16th century that says "Lord Featherstonhaugh's goode and faithfull servant, Thomas, was a manne of darke complexion hailing fromm the distant continents" which clearly means that there was at least one person who was quite possibly a sub-Saharan African living on the island of Great Britain in the last 500 years.

BAILEY: There were probably lots of black people toiling away in England but the bigoted white English whitewashed them or refused to record them in history so we don't have any evidence, but we do know that's just the sort of thing the racist English would do, so we're justified in additing a lot of extra black characters to media. And even if that turns out not to be true, it's the right thing to do, because English history is the story of racist colonialists who abused the rest of nonwhite world, and so we should dilute, subvert, and erase history in revenge and to ensure that Never Again will whites threaten innocent POCs.

Or, more likely, they don't have an explicit theory, but think the more black people the better, and so use your motte as an excuse.

There were certainly a few black slaves and freedmen in imperial Rome. Most were probably Nubian, as travel along the Nile is easier than across the Sahara. I would not take lack of genetic traces in modern populations as clear evidence of absence, as modern Italians bear essentially no imprint of the cosmopolitan population of the classical Mediterranean. Parts of Europe under Muslim rule such as Sicily and Iberia would have continued to host some number of sub-Saharan African slaves into the medieval period and I'm sure some made their way to Constantinople as well. I have also come across the claim that Lisbon was 10% black just a few decades after the Reconquista.

If we are limiting our scope to say northern European states under Catholic rule between 550 and 1400, then I think the presence of even a single black individual there would be highly unusual and noteworthy, but the argument that some part of Europe has been inhabited by a non-zero number of individuals we would call black at most points within the last two thousand years forms a motte from which the bailey of "here are some black vikings or knights in medieval England" can be defended. I won't pretend to know the motivation of everyone making these claims, but I imagine the most informed and introspective among them believe that they are presenting scenarios from within the realm of possibility that, while not the most likely, are the ones with the greatest expected social utility in the present day.

This is the correct answer. The Almoravids were mostly Arab/North African, but had a significant number of sub-Saharan soldiers with them, and North Africa was historically the diversity region Pre-Colonialism, but this was still rare. IIRC, a black worker was among those working on Hadrian's wall (which we know because it freaked out the emperor who thought black people were bad luck). And there was Saint Maurice. And these are the motte to the "therefore, blackwash European history" bailey.

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