I agree. For some reason which I don't fully understand, from the early modern period onwards, "moor" became associated with black in Central and Northern Europe. In the Iberian Peninsula where "moors" actually lived, that association never took on. The word "moreno" in Portuguese and Spanish means something like "swarthy" used to people that get tanned at the Sun, and is only used to black people as an offensive euphemism.
aka Fox
I have cut the real-life section because it was still there long after it was decided that the trope be NRLEP. I believe the examples should be spun-off into an individual trope that, like Oppressive States of America, restricts RL examples to before a certain period of time.
Please see the examples cut for NRLEP violation:
- Indo-European tribes had historically a larger settlement pattern in Eurasia before they became limited to Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and the Iranian Plateau. This explains anecdotes of fair-haired, fair-skinned, and light-eyed people in cultures neighboring them, such as Ancient China, which has multiple references to such traits in their literature, including the Records of the Grand Historian. Even today, Uyghurs now populating the Tarim Basin in Western China are sometimes born with blond or red hair and blue eyes, implying that the former peoples did not disappear outright, but rather became assimilated with the invading Turks from the north.
- Genghis Khan is sometimes said to have ginger hair.
- Yes, this means that light hair and eyes, while uncommon, are not unheard of in India and Iran. One of Gautama Buddha's 32 Signs of a Great Man/Chakravartin is in fact possession of blue eyes. Yes, this also means that casting a German man as Buddha is more historically accurate than casting him with, say, a Chinese.
- On the flipside, people with so-called "Mongoloid" features (usually epicanthic folds, though they aren't actually limited to people of Asian descent, either) have a much more expansive dispersion than many people give them credit for.
- The Bering Land Bridge opened colonization opportunities mostly for the Asiatic Paleosiberian peoples; Native Americans looking like Asians aren't an anomaly, that's how they should look like as they are descended from them, although millennia of separation has caused them to develop distinctive features. The rule is, the farther north one goes, the more "Asian" people would look like, culminating with the Inuit of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland, who look virtually indistinguishable with East Asians (their ancestors migrated from Asia to Alaska less than two millennia ago. By boat, as the Land Bridge had long been submerged).
- Similarly, Asiatic features are quite widespread in Central Asia (i.e. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), which clueless media tend to stereotype/lump together with the largely Caucasian Middle East due to a lack of research. It can even be said that people with the former features outnumber the latter, with Uzbekistan serving as the divider (mostly Mongoloid Uzbeks and mostly Caucasian Tajiks). And no, it's not because of Genghis Khan's invasions; the region, being largely flat steppe and desert, has long been a haven for nomads hailing from various different places (and incidentally also permitted the above-mentioned Indo-Europeans to settle the Tarim Basin).
- Interestingly enough considering the trope name, recent evidence suggests that there may have been Muslim Vikings
- actually quite likely considering how widely travelled they were.
- Historians have been arguing for decades as to whether Jesus might have actually been black or another ethnicity.
- There were Africans who served as conquistadors in the Spanish armies, one of the most known being Juan Garrido. The Spanish also granted titles, coats of arms, and the privileges of being able to ride horses and carry swords to collaborating indigenous nobles, so one could say there also existed Amerindian Conquistadors.
- The descendants of Aztec ruler Moctezuma were raised to Spanish nobility, and this lineage continues today.
- The descendants of Aztec ruler Moctezuma were raised to Spanish nobility, and this lineage continues today.
No serious historian has ever argued about Jesus being black. That was a trope invented by afrocentrists and repeated ad-nauseum by ignorant people. Jesus was a levantine Jew, from the Galilee, not a Subsaharan African. He would have looked like current Palestinians, Iraqi Jews or Samaritans.
This trope (or at least the way it's being used) feels pretty pointless and kind of racist. The existence of POC in a period setting isn't a trope, it's a historical reality that popular white supremacist narratives tend to erase. There has never been a time in history where only white people lived in Europe which is to be expected given how small and unisolated the continent is. For examples where a historically white person is cast as a POC, we already have Race Lift and Colourblind Casting
Hide / Show Replies
I see Masterofchaos created a TRS thread for this trope, but it was sent to the morgue without even a moderator post explaining why it wasn't opened.
The trope is neither pointless or racist, but you're right about its usage, possibly stemming from its unfortunate naming. It seems to be hardly applicable to Europe, exactly as suggested, although lack of Sub-Saharan Africans among, say pre-Roman Britons or 9th-century Ruthenians makes a lot of sense, the aforementioned Vikings could believably include some black people given their travels and contact with diverse areas, such as southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. But in other areas, such as Americas before 15th century or pre-Sengoku Japan, existence of Europeans (in the latter case precisely said not to be Ainus) or Africans in any serious capacity might be seen as improbable.
In other words, I think that the trope might seem pointless and redundant (because of Race Lift trope), but only from Eurocentric perspective.
You are wideley mistaken. First of all "poc" is a very wide and imprecise term, also being restricted to American contexts. Are Arabs poc? What about Tatars? Greeks? Armenians? Berbers? Romani? Jews? Spaniards (American media actually laughably made that claim)? If by poc you mean any person who is not a Northern European, than sure, Europe was filled with such people. Despite the fact that South Asians (with the exception of the Roma), were very rare in Europe before the 19th century, most lighter skinned South Asian actors can easily fit in, and play characters of Mediterranean origin (though even them were a rarity in Scandinavia for example).
But black people, for example, were not common in Europe before the 20th century. To believe that Europe in the past was as multiracial as today after decades of mass migration of people from other Continents, and the a gigantic increase in the interconnectednes of the world and in transport is a completely anachronistic and a-historical thought.
Maria Graham, early 19th century British travel writer, reports being scared to see so many black people in Brazil. Sure in Britain in the early 19th century, there were some black people living in major towns. But they were always a small minority (Black people in Britain were only 1.63% of the population in 1991!)
You can also easily find countless examples of black people that travelled to samll towns in Europe (some of them fairly recently) and reported that the native inhabitants had never seen a black person.
The Brazilian player Pelé reported that he was the first black person many Swedes had seen in 1950. In the same decade James Baldwin had the experience of visiting a small town in Switzerland (where his lover had a cottage) and reporting that the inhabitants had never seen a black person. In 1927 Grandfather was impressed when he saw his first black manon ship coming to the New World. He had 15 years old than, and had lived in Kharkov and Bialystok, two fairly large industrial cities in the Russian Empire. Gloria Maria, a black Brazilian reporter talked about meeting an old woman in an isolated village in Serbia who had never seen a black person (that was like 30 years ago).
Most black people in Nazi Germany were actually not particularly mistreated. Why is that? Is it because Nazis were tolerant of racial difference? No. It was because they were such a small minority, that they had no relevance to Nazi national discourse (Jews were around 2% of the German population as a comparison).
All of those stories happened in the 20th century. Imagine Europe hundreds of years before.
Surely black people can appear in many historical periods of Europe (though not all, and not in all places), but that has to be done with care. You can make a movie about a black servant in Tudor England, but than you cannot simply portray black people on the background of every scene. The arrival of black servants to Queen Mary I (from Spain), was actually seen as an event.
Also, historical people were NOT colour-blind, they did associate phenotype with geographical origin and culture.
Edited by Knoterification
The mention of Alfred Samson Bell as being whitewashed on the History Channel program about the Civil War seems fishy. First, if true, it’s a real life example. Second, I can’t find any mention of such a person. Given that every aspect of the Civil War has been studied to ribbons, it’s hard to believe that such a person, if real, wouldn’t pop right up in a Google search. CSA apologists would have a field day over a black, slave-owning Confederate. Proving a negative is difficult, but it sure seems like someone is hoaxing TV Tropes.
Hide / Show Replies
I came here to ask about this. It doesn't cite an actual name for said documentary and I cant find any evidence the dude existed. So I'm gonna go ahead and remove it
Doubt that the Les Miserables film example really fits. While there is a Race Lift involved, France was always 'easier' on the race aspect than other western countries and already cosmopolitan by the beginning of the 19th century - there was even a black Revolutionary general if I remember correctly, for example - so it's not really hard to believe that there is a black man in an underground Republican ring. Compare Scorsese's Gangs Of New York, coincidentally set around the same time: while it is obvious that the black character is only there so there can be a black character in the movie, no watcher bats an eye at the fact that he is black because there were black people in real life 19th century New York and the script doesn't try to pass him as an ethnic Irish despite him hanging most of the time with Irish immigrants. The same happens in the Les Miserables film: This Enjolras is black, but there were black Frenchmen at the time, so what?
Edited by NaramSin Hide / Show Replies
I concur. I removed the Miserables example. Unlike the Wild Wild West example, France already had black men as commissioned officers in the army all the way back to the revolution. Alexandre Dumas' father was a respected General in the revolutionary armies. A black Enjolras isn't traditional casting, but there is no particularly historical reason why a rebellious student in 19th century Paris couldn't be a black man.
Isn't described Enjolras blonde with curly hair? Kinda like the angelic archetype?
Lord Akbar Ironoak, The Loquacious
Should Marvel Team-Up #174 be brought up? It's referenced that Garret Morris, a black actor is dressed up as Thor and yet the baddies he interrupts seem not to notice. Either way, it's the first thing that comes to mind when I read the trope title.
I am torn; which is the greatest card game of all time: Magic: the Gathering or Cards Against Humanity?
Why does this trope page exist at all, there used to be a long Real Life section talking about how there WERE indeed black vikings and a lot of other examples. This whole page is really stupid.
Edited by Golondrina
Removed:
- Movies about Ghengis Khan, or the Mongolian Hordes, or the Scythian's bothering Rome, or what-have-you, tend to cast people who look Mongolian (or are meant to, at least). However, Ghengis Khan had red hair and green eyes. All the plains-tribes of the area currently known as Mongolia (and the plains from the Caucasus east) had a massive variety of ethnicity as they intermingled with each other and the societies they raided. While the first Asian people the Romans met were tribes from this vast area, so too were the first Caucasian people the Chinese met. These tribes were from everywhere, genetically. Mongolians as they are now are fairly recent as a dominant people in the area.
- To be fair, the red hair and green eyes depiction is up for debate, and more historians side with him not having red hair and green eyes. Still no one is 100% certain what he looked like.
- Nor does possessing either of those characteristics necessarily imply that he was Caucasian; Mongols are a relatively diverse people in terms of such physical characteristics compared to other Asian peoples, and Central Asian "Mongoloid" individuals with red or blond hair and blue or green eyes, while rarer than among Europeans, are far from unknown.
- It's not helped by the fact that Genghis outlawed anyone drawing a picture of him under penalty of death. He subscribed to the "get your picture taken, lose your soul" belief.
- To be fair, the red hair and green eyes depiction is up for debate, and more historians side with him not having red hair and green eyes. Still no one is 100% certain what he looked like.
The ambiguity around Genghis Khan's actual appearance makes this a bit moot. Plus, it's not really in the spirit of the trope, which is about obviously out-of-place races.
Hide / Show Replies
1) Red hair and green eyes are supah doopah cool. 2) Jinghiz Khan's heirs and officers made a big effort to bury him secretly. 3) Officers said the secrecy was to stop Peasants stealing Jinghiz' treasure.
5) Maybe, Khan really waa cool and conquered Asia by Rule of Cool 6) Maybe, Khan's spin doctors said he was cool.
The Chinese historically depicted nomadic tribes to their north and to northwest as having red hair and green eyes. While there is some truth to this (as per the famous mummies uncovered along the Silk Road), it seems that there is hardly a clear consensus as to what Central Asians looked like at different periods.
It's super effective.
- In The Curse of Fenric, one of the Russian soldiers led by Captain Sorin was played by a black man (he's the one who spends most of the story under the sea, having been the first victim of the Haemovore). However, his character being a Russian soldier in 1942, he also spends the episode under several millimetres of heavy white pancake make up.. ) The actor was actually one of the technical crew, and is part Dutch.
Was this character portrayed as white or fair-skinned due to the pancake makeup? I've not seen the episode (at least not for years and years) to tell.
Hide / Show Replies
That's actually even rather odd, considering black russians, while few, aren't unheard of. Pushkin was descended from ethiopian aristocracy and the eastern slave trade did extend to Russia.
If it is 1940s, black Russians are even more plausible. USSR did welcome a decent number of people of African descent—from US, Europe, and Africa itself—who embraced communism in 1920s and 30s.
Edited by 71.226.42.108
I pruned most of the Catherine Zeta Jones section because it's mostly aberrant nonsense that sounds like badly rehashed Oppenheimer
- There are multiple ancient iberian peoples - For the most part, North African origins are utterly dubious, besides the berber are extremely diverse - Based on historical linguistics, Tartessian is almost certain to be Q-celtic (i.e. the same group as gaelic and ancient celtiberian, also an iberian culture). - The iberian people the highly confused person who wrote the blurb was probably thinking of is the Basques,for whom a north african origin is extremely dubious. Basque's closest theorized languages are either Caucasian or the Athabaskan languages and even that is highly doubtful.
Anyone up for making Norse Of A Different Color an alternate title?
Hide / Show Replies
Racism only caught on with the slave trade? There was no racism in the time period Othello was set? Aside from the fact that there were slaves back then too... The concept that other races were just "rare" and so just a curiosity is rather naive.
Hide / Show Replies
The slave trade WAS starting when the play was written. And "racism" had always existed, but it had more to do with xenophobia and ignorance than a belief in the superiority of broad racial groups. Ethnic and political identity was far more important than race in the ancient and medieval world. Also, back then, plenty of slaves were white. The connection of slave=black, slave=inferior, thus black=inferior was not made until the Atlantic slave trade.
In short, intolerance extended to all outsiders, not just to different races.
A thought occurs to me whenever I see this trope. Whenever I see someone who doesn't fit the appropriate racial profile in TV or film, I make the assumption that the *character* is still the appropriate race, if not the actor portraying them. I assume that the actor was the best choice for the role, and that the writers are asking us to use our imagination to make the race (or sex) of the actor fit the character. I have no idea how realistic it is of me to believe that to be the reason for many Black Vikings, but it's been the assumption I've made ever since I've heard Gene Roddenberry's explanation of Klingons without ridges (taken from http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Klingon_augment_virus over at the Star Trek wiki):
Gene Roddenberry himself reportedly believed any "explanation" was unnecessary; the makeup seen in the films and the later series would have been too expensive during the 1960s. Roddenberry felt it was best to simply imagine that Klingons always had ridges.
Since I have yet to see a trope name for this perceived phenomenon, I think I'd call it Roddenberry Klingons. Thoughts?
Hide / Show Replies
I remember that explanation from a DS9 episode involving the crew time-traveling to Kirk's ship (or the station it was docked; I forget which) to deal with some agent in the past. That happened after Gene Roddenberry died, and doesn't really address his original intent regarding it.
I don't think that's rather here nor there, now that I think about it. The phenomenon I'm perceiving involves quality actors filling roles where the characters are a different age, sex, and/or race from the actor. That Klingons had two different distinct make-up types based primarily on cost doesn't seem to fit, and now feels like a poor choice on my part to suggest a name for this phenomenon.
Edited by loracarol
On Berbers and the idea that they wouldn't look black, quite a few Berbers are actually African black. Some of them look like black Africans with blue eyes, even. They're very diverse.
Edited by 76.87.37.254
I'm not really sure that the reference to 'Othello' is really warranted here. The African origin of the eponymous character, although taken for granted now, has become widespread only in 19th century. As many earlier illustration attest, Othello was generally associated with what the term 'Moor' primarily meant in the time when Shakespeare wrote his drama (especially in the context of being a commander of Venetian navy), i.e. a man from Northern Africa, meaning Berber, Arab or Turk (though the latter is an unlikely event, as Turks generally were and are not characterized by significantly darker skin tone that is mentioned frequently in the play).
Thus, it is definitely not a given that Othello must be played by a black (Sub-Saharan African) man. Of course, an light-skinned European would be out of place, but the role can be also believably given to any dark-skinned person of Northern African extraction.
Hide / Show Replies