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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2253 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 5, 2025

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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.

Stuff like Bridgerton is openly alt-history if that’s what you’re referring to. It’s explicitly alt-history even.

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