People of Color in European Art History

You’re the same person who sent me the ask, “Given that Deiniol was born in Wales, How likely is it that he was a person of color?”

I take it you did not read any of the 19 books I referred to you? Otherwise you’d probably be able to better understand your own question.

I don’t know why you keep sending me these vaguely race-baiting asks.

Phrases like “how likely is it” and “not ethnically Italian" don’t really make any sense in the context of this blog, or history in general. You seem to have this really weird idea that somehow in some far-distant past, Europe was full of exactly one race that you consider to be White. I mean, are you trying to say, Proto-Indo Europeans? That’s completely in the realm of linguistics, and has nothing to do with race. I mean, here’s a simplified mockup of Italy from 400 B.C., 400-ish years before Terentius Neo died in Pompeii:

Here’s some Etruscan art from around that time:

Like, how far back do we have to go to find people you’d consider “ethnically Italian"? When does this question start making sense?

Tarquinia?

Wait, did you mean when it was part of Ancient Greece, Crotone and all that?

Did you mean like, 8000 B.C.? Are these people “ethnically Italian"?

WHAT ANSWER ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to best answer your question, and the only real answer is this.

Pretty much the entirety of Enlightenment Europe was the use of philosophy and “science" as a means to justify chattel slavery and the subjugation of literally everyone not a white male.

If you want to get an idea of “the cultural flavor of the times" read this really unfortunate 132-page thesis by Dana Aliva Levy in which, among other horrors, Montesqueiu “apologetically" (!) justifies chattel slavery with “Climate theory" (p. 20):

put a man in a hot, enclosed spot, and he will suffer, for the reasons just stated, a great slackening of heart. If, in the circumstance, one proposes a bold action to him, I believe one will find him little disposed toward it; his present weakness will induce discouragement in his soul; he will fear everything, because he will feel he can do nothing. The peoples in hot countries are timid like old men; those in cold countries are courageous like young men.

Or page 36, where you can read about how Carl von Linne decided humans were actually TWO species: Homo Sapiens, which consisted of whites, and “Homo Monstrous” in which “Mountaineer, Patagonia, Hottentot, (indigenous) American, Chinese, and (Indigenous)Canadian" people were categorized.

Or page 51, where you can read about Jean Riolan performing medical experiments, inflicting chemical burns on a HUMAN PERSON who is described as a “black specimen".

Or page 93, the dawn of the “medical, enlightened, and scientific" persecution, pathologization, and attempted eradication of gender and sexual minorities, with a great slathering of “anything not a white man with a penis is a sad, defective deformity". And yes, that includes cis or cis-passing white women.

Check page 101 for the invention of the white, western gender binary (about 1750-ish).

In context, what you’d be writing about a time right at the cusp of when the throat of the world was cut and history was re-written in blood by white European men.

The Enlightenment sprang from Descartes, Hume, Locke, Bacon, and their contemporaries. The late 18th and 19th centuries were spent inventing every -ism that currently plagues this earth. The Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant’s assertion:

The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. [David] Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man.

That’s your “cultural flavor of the times".

That’s also your “cultural flavor" of contemporary America. White men are still earning doctorates from Harvard writing papers about the “genetic inferiority" of Black and Brown people.

My advice is: your writing exists in this context. Think about what that means before you start writing.