Anti-Black racism, also called anti-Blackness, colourphobia or negrophobia, is characterised by prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination or extreme aversion towards people who are racialized as Black (especially those from sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas), as well as a loathing of Black culture worldwide. Such sentiment includes, but is not limited to, the attribution of negative characteristics to Black people; the fear, strong dislike or dehumanisation of Black men; and the objectification (including sexual objectification) and dehumanisation of Black women.
First defined by Canadian social workers and scholar Akua Benjamin, the term anti-Black racism (ABR) originally described racism towards Black people of sub-Saharan African descent, as shaped by European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. The word black can also apply more widely to other groups, including Pacific and non-Atlantic Blacks (or Blaks), such as Indigenous Australians and Melanesians. As such, anti-Black racism has since been used to refer to racism against Black people more generally. The older terms negrophobia and colourphobia were terms created by American abolitionists to describe racism towards people of Sub-Saharan African descent, who were known at the time as Negroes or Coloured. The term anti-Blackness refers to racism against anyone racialised as Black."Anti-black, Adj." Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7595464650."Anti-blackness, N." Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4777283713.
Concepts
Terminology Anti-Black racism, sometimes called negrophobia or colourphobia, is discriminatory sentiment towards people racialised as Black,The Congregational Review, Volume 2. J.M. Whittemore. 1862. p. 629. Retrieved 10 December 2015. often because the person believes that their race is superior to the Black race. The terms Afrophobia (or Afriphobia) and melanophobia have also been used.Chinweizu, C., 2003. Afrocentric Rectification of Terms: Excerpt from: What Slave Trade? And other Afrocentric reflections on the Race War. TINABANTU: Journal of Advanced Studies of African Society, 1 (2).
Afrophobia Afrophobia, or Afriphobia, is frequently used to describe racism (particularly systemic racism) against Black people of African descent, such as by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR).Privot, M., 2014. Afrophobia and the 'Fragmentation of Anti-racism'. Visible Invisible Minority: Confronting Afrophobia and Advancing Equality for People of African Descent and Black Europeans in Europe, pp.31-38.Momodou, J. and Pascoët, J., 2014. Towards a European strategy to combat Afrophobia. European Network Against Racism, Invisible visible minority: Confronting Afrophobia and advancing equality for people of African descent and Black Europeans in Europe, pp.262-272. Others use Afrophobia to describe racism and xenophobia against people of African descent, especially racism and xenophobia against indigenous Africans, due to their perceived Africanness. This sentiment may also include prejudice against African traditions and culture. In South Africa, for example, Afrophobia is used to describe xenophobia against people of other African nationalities for being too racially Black, too culturally African, or both.Koenane, M.L.J. and Maphunye, K.J., 2015. Afrophobia, moral and political disguises: Sepa leholo ke la moeti. Td: The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 11 (4), pp.83-98.
Anti-Black racism Anti-Black racism was a term used by Canadian scholar Akua Benjamin in a 1992 report on Ontario race relations. It has been defined as follows:
The term quickly came to be used to refer to racism against other groups also considered Black, such as Indigenous Australians (who sometimes prefer the term Blak) and Melanesians.
Melanophobia Melanophobia has been used to refer to both anti-Black racismBiale, D., Galchinsky, M. and Heschel, S. eds., 1998. Insider/outsider: American Jews and multiculturalism. Univ of California Press. and colourism (prejudice against people with darker skin), especially in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.Madden, R., 2006. Tez de mulato. Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature, p.114.Torres-Saillant, S., 2003. Inventing the race: Latinos and the ethnoracial pentagon. Latino Studies, 1, pp.123-151.Mirmotahari, E., 2015. A Cloud of Semitic Mohammedanism: The African Novel and the Muslim Question in the National Age. Interventions, 17(1), pp.45-63.
Negrophobia and colourphobia The term racism is not attested before the 20th century, but negrophobia (first recorded between 1810 and 1820; often capitalised), and later colourphobia (first recorded in 1834),"Colourphobia | Colorphobia, N., Etymology." Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9131678901. likely originated within the abolitionist movement, where it was used as an analogy to rabies (then called hydrophobia) to describe the "mad dog" mindset behind the pro-slavery cause and its apparently contagious nature."Negrophobia, N., Etymology." Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5704106894. In 1819, the term was used in U.S. Congressional debates to refer to a "violent aversion or hatred of Negroes".
The term negrophobia may also have been inspired by the word nigrophilism, itself first appearing in 1802 in Baudry des Lozières's Les égarements du nigrophilisme. Noting the shift of -phobia terms to cover prejudice and hatred rather than mere fear or aversion, J. L. A. Garcia refers to negrophobia as "the granddaddy of these '-phobia' terms", preceding both xenophobia and homophobia.
Both at the time, and since, critics of the terms negrophobia and colourphobia have argued that, although their use of -phobia is rhetorical, if taken literally they could be used to excuse or justify the behaviour of racists as mental illness or disease. John Dick, publisher of The North Star, voiced such concerns as early as 1848 while legal scholar Jody David Armour has voiced similar concerns in the 21st century. Nevertheless, negrophobia had a clinical and satirical edge that made it popular with abolitionists. In 1856, abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe published Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, a novel which explored the fear of Blackness within negrophobia via the titular character Dred, a Black revolutionary Maroon.
Changing terminology
After abolition, negrophobia continued to be used to refer to anti-Black racism, but terms based on race also appeared around the turn of the 20th century. Racism first appeared in print in 1903."Racism, N." Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1101660185. In December 1921, the terms negrophobia and race hatred were used to describe an outbreak of anti-Black violence in the Dominican Republic by John Sydney de Bourg, a spokesman for the local chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in San Pedro de Macorís. Negrophobia further reappeared in January 1927 in Lamine Senghor's La voix des nègres (The Voice of the Negroes), a monthly anti-colonialist newspaper. The term became more widespread outside of North America and the English-speaking world when French Caribbean psychologist and philosopher Frantz Fanon included it in his works Peaux noires masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) and Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), again drawing on the rhetoric of racism as disease.Judy, Ronald AT. "Fanon's Body of Black." in Renee T White, ed, Fanon: A critical reader (1996) As a psychiatrist, Fanon explored negrophobia as an individual and societal "neurosis", although he saw it as the psychological structure underpinning colonial racism.Yokum, N. (2024). "A call for psycho-affective change: Fanon, feminism, and white negrophobic femininity." Philosophy & Social Criticism, 50(2), 343-368. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537221103897Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 22.Mary Ann Doane, "Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema", in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2013/1991: 209–248), 217.
By the middle of the 20th century, the term "Black" came to be preferred over "Negro", and so related terms became outdated."Negro, N. & Adj." Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2341880472. However, negrophobia is still sometimes used to distinguish anti-Black racism from racism more generally. In this sense, Negrophobia may mean an especially strong, violent or transmissible form of anti-Black racism. In France, Une Autre Histoire describes negrophobia as meaning "the most virulent form of racism targeting those who are perceived as 'blacks' by people considering themselves different from 'blacks (translation).
Psychology
Psychologists and sociologists have explored the individual and social psychology of anti-Black racism, often in reference to Fanon's work on negrophobia. Jock McCulloch explores Fanon's conception from a psychodynamic perspective, arguing that negrophobia requires psychological projection, and reveals "a certain psychic dependence of the European upon the black". He also points out that negrophobia, though it can be described as an emotional disorder, is theorised to come from the same "psychodynamic mechanism" as antisemitism, and stresses the importance, in Fanon's account, of negrophobia as inherently racist and a product of colonialism.McCulloch, Jock (16 May 2002). Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon's Clinical Psychology and Social Theory. Cambridge University Press. . pp. 72–3. 233.Burman, E. (2016). "Fanon's Lacan and the Traumatogenic Child: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Dynamics of Colonialism and Racism." Theory, Culture & Society, 33(4), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415598627 Despite this, the description of negrophobia as an emotional disorder or involuntary reflex has been used as a legal defense to justify violent crimes against Black people, including murder, as a form of self-defense or involuntary reaction.Bauerlein, Mark (2001). Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906. Encounter Books. . p. 3, 238.
Internalised racism
Psychiatrist Frantz Fanon introduced the concept of internalised racism, or internalised negrophobia, pointing to the hatred of Black people and Black culture by Black people themselves. He asserts that anti-Black sentiment is a form of "trauma for white people of the Negro". Equivalent to internalised racism caused by the trauma of living in a culture defining Black people as inherently evil, Fanon emphasises the slight existing cultural intricacies caused by the vast diversity of Black people and cultures, as well as the nature of their colonisation by White Europeans. The symptoms of such internalised anti-Black sentiment include a rejection of their native or ethnic language in favour of European languages, a marked preference for European cultures over Black cultures, and a tendency to surround themselves with lighter-skinned people rather than darker-skinned ones.
Similarly, the pattern further includes attributing negative characteristics to Black people, culture, and things. Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye (1970) stands as an illustrative work on the destroying effects of anti-Black sentiment among the Black community on themselves. The main character, Pecola Breedlove, through her non-reconciliation with her Black identity, her Black societal indifference, and her craving for symbolic blue eyes, presents all the signs of an internalised anti-Black sentiment. She develops an anti-Black neurosis due to her feeling of non-existence both within the White and her own community.