By Rev. Dr. Horace F. Whittaker, Jr.

OTHERING/NAME CALLING'S RACIALIZED GENESIS 

The content within books, almost exclusively written initially by white males of European ancestry and Arab philosophers, promoted an idea of white superiority and black inferiority; a falsehood which has been part of the social fabric within these societies from the Greco-Roman period beginning approximately in 322 BCE to the present. It is precisely these ancient hateful dehumanizing words and ideas of Europeans and Arabs that were utilized to rationalize and justify picking up sticks and stones, spears and swords, guns and chains, caravans and ships, starvation and castration, rape, and the threat of death to enslave the mothers and fathers of humanity. 

Charles Mills (2015) would have us know that name-calling first appears in theological texts. Generally speaking, Mills citing Goldenburg (2003), suggests that characterizations of skin color within religious writing "is what shapes negative portrayals of blacks" during the pagan Greco-Roman period and afterward in the Christian world or middle ages. Again, relative to this pagan period, Mills (2015) suggests "[b]lack was associated with death and the underworld, the realm of the dead," and regarding the period of the Christian world notes "the patristic hermeneutic tradition saw biblical Ethiopian as a metaphor signifying any person who, not having received a Christian baptism, is black in spirit and without divine light" (p. 28). The repeated historical linking of the color black to all things negative is also demonstrated by drawings within Catholic iconography of a French Canterbury Psalter, c. 1200, which depicts the demon-possessed colored black, according to Heng (2011).

Healing of the Gadarene demoniacs. Psalter, fol. 3v (detail). From Canterbury, about 1200. Courtesy of the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France (Heng, 2011, p. 261).

On the other hand, white represents superiority and nobility, as Heng (2011) noted in Cursor Mundi. This 14th-century literary piece tells of blacks becoming white after kissing the rod of Moses, thusly translated, 'Their skin became as white as milk ⁄And they had the hue of noble blood' (p. 261).  

Returning to Mills (2015), he states "Muslim philosophers [...] adopted Aristotle's theory [of natural slavery]. [...] Blacks, Slavs, and Turks [were] the races historically enslaved by Muslims« and Arab [S]lave labor was recruited from more or less predictable places: Africa, the Balkans, the Russian steppes" (p. 29). David Gakunzi (2018) states in The Arab-Muslim Slave Trade: Lifting the Taboo "the Tunisian Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) wrote that "the only peoples to accept slavery are the Negroes, because of their lower degree of humanity, their place being closer to the animal stage." Gakunzi (2018) also noted that "[t]he Arab slave trade was characterized by appalling violence, castration, and rape" (p. 41). Men were systematically castrated to prevent their fathering children by Arab women. This inhumanity resulted in six out of 10 men being mutilated in this way dying from their wounds inflicted in Arab castration centers. Additionally, African women and girls were kidnapped and sold for use as sex slaves in the Arab sub-Saharan slave trade. Inhumane acts of rape and abuse of African women by Arabs, though transformed, still happen today through what was formally called indentured servitude but is now called the Kafala system, which is practiced by "Jordan, Lebanon, and all Arab Gulf states", according to John Kamau.

So, we see that racist name-calling and labeling existed long before the modern era, and it can be characterized as arising from embedded ideas within Greco-Roman, Arab, and Christian World cultures that religiously connected blackness with the demonic and death and whiteness with godliness and light. A result of this type of institutionally racialized religious framing is the view that GOD is identified with those of the light that colonize and enslave in HIS name, those dark bodies GOD created for slavery and dehumanization, thus, inferring GOD's will authorizes some people should be oppressed for the good of other people, as opposed to the view that oppression and murder are not GOD ordained but rather represents a dogmatized European, Judeo-Whiteanity and Arab theological hermeneutic that replaces human responsibility to treat others humanely with a racialized supremacist reading of scripture. 

OTHERING LIVING HABITATS

The literary and religious institutional interpretations of Europeans, Arab Muslims, and European Christian elites not only helped create overwhelmingly negative labels about black-skinned human beings in the minds of common people but also branded the native lands of enslaved black people as uninhabitable or bad places, i.e., 'the dark continent.' One such note raised by Sylvia Wynter (1995), was the Portuguese states' orders to identify a route around West Africa's Cape Bojador which had been characterized by early church geographers as the point separating the "habitable temperate zone of Europe and the inhabitable torrid zones." Having to accomplish this navigational feat in 1411, the Portuguese found the terrain of Senegal a flourishing habitat. Furthermore, according to Wynter (1995), their success also ushered in a destabilization of "Christian geography that had been based on the authority of the classical doctrines of the ancient Greco-Roman authorities" (p. 4). The result of this continuous negative branding of dark color onto places formed by mother nature was not only European and Arab colonization and exploitation of black's demonized lands but, as importantly, was the permanent psychic scarring caused by the lie of white superiority and black inferiority that burned into the collective consciousness, the minds, souls and cultures of our species for generations, even to this present day. 

The falsehood that GOD created some people to be enslaved was used as the justification for the Arab sub-Saharan slave trade that lasted for 17 centuries (652-1960), as well as the European and Euro-American expansion of the Atlantic slave trade, which lasted four centuries (1693-1884). Still, there is an argument that slavery never really ended but transformed, given slavery's exemption in the 13th amendment of the U.S. constitution. Thus, the supremacist keloid remains. 

In summation, name-calling was and is the basis for dehumanizing and downgrading dark skin, darker peoples, places of origin, and living spaces. Name-calling is used to rationalize the falsehood of superior and inferior human beings. The bogus ideology of white supremacy that creates racialization further dehumanizes blacks by supremacist association of blacks with apes or monkeys. The word for this is simianization. Simianization can be defined as the "disparaging comparison or likening of a member of a racial or ethnic minority group to an ape or monkey." For example, the Express Tribune published an article dated 12/25/2022 with a photo and analysis by Diet Prada of Lebron James.

above: https://tribune.com.pk/story/2245401/vogue-called-problematic-content-usingdeepikaprop. From this backdrop, let us turn from name-calling that progressed from the demonization of black bodies and lands to its usage in U.S. voting historically.