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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2246 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?

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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.

People actually believe it though. I’ve legitimately had people tell me that queen was a black woman. But I’m not talking about that. Every movie now or television show that comes out has Black Anglo Saxons or Vikings or whatever. Look at the casting of a Gentleman in Moscow. They have dark black Slavs with dreadlocks and they play it 100% straight. I actually don’t care about that too much. It’s the no actually it’s true that comes out in mainstream publications afterwards.

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