If Mediterraneans Are The “N*ggers of Europe”, Why Do Northern Europeans Want To Appropriate Their History?
If the world was divided into fraudulent spheres of “blackness”, deemed inferior, and “whiteness” referred to as superior, the process of decolonization shall be applied to both white and black Europeans, especially in the Mediterranean world. As ancient history highlighted it, both black Africans and Europeans, whether Egyptians, Romans, Greeks or Kushites, though they had their specific political vision, the issues related to race and skin color did not matter at all. If the ancient Romans were white, they also had a black and mixed-race minority. The latter were not slaves, and certainly not treated in an inferior state. Their skin color did not make them any less Romans since Roman identity was based upon shared values, beliefs and customs. This particular trait of identification was proper to all the ancient powers, whether they had a culture of race mixing or not.
The concepts of blackness tied to inferiority and whiteness to elevation saw the light in 1492 in the Western sphere, following the Moorish downfall. These ideas and the obsession for Christianity and white purity were spread by the Spanish Catholic royal family. However, the latter had been influenced in their thoughts by the Arab and Arabized thinkers and philosophers from the early medieval era. The Al Muqadima book published in the 14th century by Ibn Khaldun was influential in both the Atlantic and later the Ottoman world as the philosophy promoted by Khaldun contributed to the dehumanization of the black Africans. Indeed, it is thanks to slavery that the Arabs managed to build their wealth and structures as illustrated by the port of Basra, in Iraq.
The promotion of Christianity which was opposed to Islam in the 15th century was supported by the idea of racial purity. But it was not until the 18th century that these ideas of racial purity and elevation became the foundations of the Western world. Consequently, as the colonization of the Americas led to the modern day political domination of the West, the slave trade contributed to the financial prosperity of European leaders. But it was through pseudo-science and racist ideologies of superiority and inferiority that the Western power managed to hold history hostage, rewriting it through a despicable Eurocentric lens.
If black Western activists, as fraudulent as many of them can be, wish to speak against the legacy of the slave trade, the work of decolonization is often thought about for the black groups only. In reality, the process of dehumanization which was promoted against the black Africans by the West, were first applied towards white populations deemed inferior by the higher Western powers. The Romans held white populations in a status of inferiority they called Barbarians. They bullied, persecuted and tortured them at times. In other eras, the Brits tortured the Irish and the Scots, and while the French dominated, crushed the Corsicans, the northern Italians invaded and used scientific racism to destroy the Meridionali. The dehumanization of the Mediterraneans was one of the first step before the racial deconstruction of the Africans in the 19th century.
Cesare Lombroso, a Jewish-Italian doctor, who is now considered the father of Italian criminology promoted vicious and racist ideas towards the southern Italians. The latter were considered born criminals, and their high rate of savagery was justified by their black and Asian blood and thus, racial impurity. The Western European, especially in politics, are inherently violent and are incapable of building their society and structures outside of violence.
Both the Southern Europeans and the Mediterranean were exploited by the northern European powers to assert their domination. First, the southern Europeans were ones of the first to be psychologically attacked with false ideas of inferiority. They were also mocked, ridiculed and called the bottom due to their racial admixture and heritage. Indeed, if the Mediterraneans or southern Europeans are white, many of them still descend from black branches, but also from Afro-Asiatic ones (Afro-Asiatics/Semites). The Jews, Sicilians, Calabrese, Greeks and many other nations are made of black, mixed-race and white groups.
Left, Meghan Markle, and right reality TV star Melissa Gorga. Markle is a white woman with Afro-American roots while Gorga is of Sicilian descent. Where is the difference between the two? Especially when many modern Sicilians look like Meghan Markle, but the ancient Greek statues promoted by the northern European powers do not show any form of racial admixture. When both black and white people mixed in ancient times in the Mediterranean area.
In the ancient world, white Mediterraneans could settle in black African lands. When they did so, they embraced the culture they assimilated into. The same way, Kushites/Aethiopians and black Berbers could assimilate into white spaces. The ancient Greek mythology, through the story of the goddess Europa after whom the continent was named, was the daughter of Agenor, of Canaanite and Egyptian descent. By this image, the Greeks knew that their culture was also co-created, or at least made by black African branches. The medieval Jewish liturgy also spoke about the presence of pygmies in the Mediterranean Greek islands. Therefore, since the beginning, the Mediterranean space was never white, but rather multiracial blending white, mixed-race and black groups.
If ancient Mediterraneans were exploited, the statues promoted by the Northern European powers never look like the modern day populations. Actually, the faces shown are those of men and women who fit the northern European look and phenotype. However, plenty of other statues and artifacts remain hidden in museums as they highlight the reality of the ancient Mediterranean world. In these artifacts, one sees white Greeks wearing African hairstyles. These white Greeks are either white Hellens who assimilated black customs, or multiracial white Greeks who remained attached to African culture. Then, the black Aethiopian sculptures are presented as representation of foreigners who visited the Greek space. In reality, these Aethiopians were no longer Kushites in culture, but black Greeks who were a part of this society. The same way, the Romans displayed artefacts of mixed people wearing traditional African hairstyles, while dressed in Roman clothes.
How come the ancient Greek statues displayed everywhere do not look like the modern day southern Europeans, then? The answer is simple. The propaganda of the Great West had to be based upon the fraudulent principle of “pure whiteness”. There are many other statues from the Classics, and even before which debunk the racist whitewashing of the Mediterranean. The Greek mythology recognises black Africans are one of the three founders of the space, which means that the southern Europeans and Mediterraneans are white, but also descendants of black branches over time. Modern science proved that many Sicilians, even Ashkenazi Jews have a certain amount of black blood which dates back from that era and the centuries which came after.
Left, rapper Luchè (Loo-kay) and right, actor Arturo Muselli. Both men are Neapolitan but one is darker, while the other, though a Mediterranean man, favors a northern European phenotype. It is thus impossible to consider Mediterraneans as a monolith, when they were always heterogeneous and descendants of various lineages. Luchè expressed in interviews how many times New-Yorkers either mistake him for a Dominican or a mixed person, since he is surely mixed-race in ancestry. The same way, a fair skin Neapolitan like Muselli could also descend from black branches too.
The ancient Europeans were much more progressive, intelligent and clairvoyant regarding race than their modern descendants whose thoughts were nurtured by the damaged image of the black Africans.
The northern European powers which dehumanized the southern Europeans had no issue stealing the history of the ancient Greeks, and thus the Mediterranean as a whole to build the propaganda of the Great West. The Classics, considered as the epitome of European grandeur and superiority, was as whitewashed and taken advantage of as the Roman era. The racist modern far-right groups, influenced by racist ideologies which dated back to the 18th century, hold onto the Greco-Roman era to feel a certain white pride. The Western political leaders consider the Classics to be the foundation of their political, social and cultural elevation. Therefore, the Western powers managed to establish a separation between the modern southern Europeans seen as lazy and backwards, and the northerners who are synonymous with elevation. The latter simply stole and appropriated a space, and a history which was never truly theirs since it belonged to populations deemed inferior.
Two issues represent a problem. First of all, the European identity is always synonymous with whiteness and Western identity. In reality, ancient history proves us that Europe was a crossroads where black, mixed-race and white people interacted for centuries. The 1492 Moorish downfall supported the idea that black people are an anomaly in Europe, when the ancient ancestors always proved that they were always there. Even today, European identity was tied to the West and Christianity. Actually, it is plural since Europeans can be Christians, Jews, or even Muslims. Indeed, if the Caucasus mountains are perceived as one of the most important places regarding the pure Caucasoid heritage, the people of Chechnya are Caucasoids but also Muslims.
Then, the Classics were used by the northern European powers to explain the root of their superpower. The Western European domination was shaped by and through brutality, barbarity and violence, not by the Classics in terms of philosophy. The Classical era was used to justify both whitewashing and Eurocentrism. It was with the Greek identity that this whitewashing took form. No ancient writer from the Classical era ever stated that Greek identity is synonymous with whiteness in terms of race. The Hellens were the people which defined Greek-ness. Before their arrival, the Greek islands and space were populated by proto-Greek groups, many of which descended from black Egyptians, black north Africans and Canaanites (another black group).
The only trait which defined one’s Greek identity was the language spoken. He who spoke Greek was Greek. Consequently, the Greeks were made of various races, lineages, as waves of immigrants blended with black groups too. It is thus more than probable that the black Aethiopians in sculptures or paintings dating back from the Classics were not visitors, but black Greeks, and their presence in arts just revealed the multiracial and multicultural heritage of Greek culture. Yet, the 1492 Moorish downfall caused a form of amnesia even within the white groups living in the Mediterranean. The latter, including the most despised, perceived the black Africans as inferior in everything due to the trauma left by the slave trade.
The dehumanization of the southern Europeans carried on through the prisms of immigration. In the early 20th century, theories linked to racial purity which were tied to the context of European immigration to the United States and South America, encouraged the American institutions to classify the white Europeans even more. If the northern European immigrants, except for the Irish, were considered white and pure, the southern ones were treated like Mulattoes and called the “N*ggers of Europe”. This racist qualification was a reference to both their lower economic status (a poverty caused by northern colonialism and exploitation of southern European finances) and to the ancient and medieval racial background of the Mediterraneans. The latter could fit in the idea of progress and avant-garde for being the most primitive individuals to have walked the earth.
Therefore, the Italian immigrants in the United States, especially the southern ones, were not perceived as white at all. This rage led to further racist actions; in order to prove their elevation and whiteness, Italian-Americans could attack, crush and even murder black Americans to assert their domination and closeness to whiteness. If some Sicilians were lynched in the south of the US for being who they were, the case of Yusuf Hawkins, a young black American teenager murdered in 1989 by an angry crowd of Italians, illustrate this reality. Even today in southern Europe, some southern Europeans can express their hatred and disdain towards the black immigrants they crush so as to feel superior and better.
Until this day, the northern Europeans still want to make a clear distinction between them and the southerners. Southern European presidents can prove to be even more racist towards the black Africans in order to attach their sphere to the idea of progress and elevation supposedly represented by the north. But they also need these same Mediterraneans to exploit in order to maintain a political propaganda as displayed by the fraudulent myth of the Great West.
Mediterranean history is still tied to the horror of Eurocentrism, as the historians and authors still want to attach, understand and evaluate the extent of this region through a corrupt Northern European approach which makes no sense. In other words, the south needs to remain white. In this dynamic, no effort was ever made by the northern European historians to put an end to the dehumanization of the Mediterraneans, whether black African or not who built the Mediterranean heritage since the Bronze Age.
This propaganda not only manipulates the modern white population into believing that black people were never a part of their sphere, but it also blocks the Blacks within a sphere of inferiority as they wrongly think that they never built anything in history. Worst, that no one ever interacted with them over time.
The modern black immigrants even think that European history is not even theirs, when black Africans are ones of the three foundations of the Mediterranean Basin.
If any import matters, Mediterraneans should be the ones to help decolonize their space and rewrite it through their heritage only.
By Victoria “V.K.Y” Kabeya, All Rights Reserved, 2023
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VKY 