‘Green, red, yellow, blue’? Beneath the surface, diaspora language is anything but Black and white
Black communities across the globe have large and complex vocabularies to describe race, shaped by their specific cultures and histories
One thing you might not know about this newsletter is how much it is shaped by behind-the-scenes chat. The Long Wave team, and its broader family at the Guardian, is a mini-diaspora in and of itself – one that is constantly in conversation. Often, during our meetings, someone will mention what was assumed to be a quirk of their specific background, only to discover that it is replicated almost entirely across the board. This week, we spoke about the fact that in many of our cultures, there is not just one word for “Black”.
“Green”, “red”, “yellow”, “blue”, “wheat”. These are some of the words many tribes in parts of Sudan use to describe complexion. There is no “Black”. I tripped over my words trying to explain to colleagues what these colours denoted – each category is infused with so much cultural depth. In fact, in some cases, they are not even descriptions of complexion, but of features, of broad ethnic background, and even of attractiveness. “Green” means dark, but also implies a sort of uniformity of colour, an even hue, and therefore almost a comeliness. Yellow is lighter, and comes with an unstated connotation of beauty. Blue is the darkest, and is sometimes pejorative, but other times just a description. “Wheat” is the one most likely to be a compliment, a shade that does not diverge too sharply into light or dark.
But honestly, I am on slightly thin ice here in trying to assign a clear definition to any of these colours. Their meanings are dependent on context and tone. They are also grounded in a specific culture – one that merges Arab and African histories and encompasses complex prejudices that do not map neatly on to western notions of racism.
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Language that is hard to translate
Morgan Ofori, Guardian reporter and subeditor for The Long Wave, chimed in with Ghana’s numerous words for Blackness. Ameyibɔ or ameyibɔr but Yibɔɔ, uttered with prolonged emphasis in the Ewe language, describes someone considered to be “beautifully darker-skinned”. Someone with a lighter complexion (whether or not of mixed heritage) is referred to as Kɔkɔɔ in Twi, which directly translates to “red” but also “ripe plantain”, connecting those individuals to the starchy fruit’s red-yellow hue. In Morgan’s opinion, these categories are by and large neutral descriptors; however, being of lighter skin is nonetheless seen as a class differentiator.
Another colleague Sundus Abdi points to similar descriptors of red and green in Somali, with maariin being used to describe deep brown skin, while white is used to refer to lighter skin.
This handful of words is nothing compared to the racial vocabulary found in Brazil, a behemoth of nuances. There are, according to a 1976 survey, a staggering 136 shades and variations in how Brazilians described their skin colour. They include “burnt yellow”, “sea blue”, “thistle” and “disappearing donkey” – a word used humorously to describe people whose colour is difficult to define. This is likely related to Brazil’s project of “racial whitening” or “Branqueamento” after abolition, contributing to the country’s heavily mixed present-day population.
Despite being separated by geography and history, there are curious similarities between these vocabularies – many of which use colours as metaphors or approximations. I’m also struck by how difficult it is to translate them to outsiders, who don’t understand the context or connotations. Another similarity appears to be that these descriptions are crucially distinct from racial slurs, despite sometimes having racial implications.
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What about in majority-white countries?
This vast array of descriptors vanishes in contexts where Black people are a racialised minority. In the US, for example, even very light-skinned people are often simply racialised as “Black” by a majority-white society. This identity is a political one, shaped by the use of the one-drop rule as a means of racial classification during slavery.
Globally, there is also a conception of Blackness that has come to shape a post-colonial identity, defined against the imperial core. Micha Frazer-Carroll, The Long Wave’s editor and assistant writer, grew up in the UK in the 90s with a clear sense of being “mixed race” (the predominant term of the era), but later realised that white British people simply identified her as Black. “This was partly to do with the local social context,” she tells me, “but I also think it was shaped by the cultural influence of the US and the ‘one drop rule’.”
But in her Caribbean family, her sister was described as being “red skin”, and Micha herself as “coolie” – a word used to describe the Indian indentured labourers who settled in Jamaica after the abolition of slavery (in some countries and contexts, it is considered a slur, in others, a neutral descriptor). “I now see both of these terms as being fraught with histories of racism and colonialism,” she says, “but they were also used light-heartedly and jokingly.”
For the Black diaspora, one’s Blackness as a political notion, grounded in campaigns for equality and enfranchisement, sits alongside a more layered and less fraught identity that is, as Micha says, at times almost playful. This is not to romanticise these descriptors – many of which cannot be separated from histories of colourism. These categorisations and differences can become sharpened and even turn deadly when civil conflict erupts along ethnic lines, and colour becomes a crude signifier of who is friend and who is foe.
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Describing Blackness on its own terms
But what broadly distinguishes these colour charts, for better or for worse, is that they are not exclusively defined by whiteness as a hegemonic political centre. Have standards of what is desirable been shaped by colonialism? Sure, one only has to look at the ubiquity of skin lightening creams and potions across the world. But colonialism is only one feature of many power dynamics that created this large colour palette. Class, immigration, religion, Arab and South Asian influences across Africa and the Caribbean all play a part in these colour categorisations.
In our conversations, what emerges is an important hesitation and nuance: these differing, humorous and even poetic descriptions are not necessarily an indication of benign expansive rainbow nations. Rather, they are a reality of Black life that is rarely reflected in global Black diaspora discourse, which is often situated in the context of oppression and activism. This is perhaps the natural result of Euro-American cultural and political projection and right wing resurgence.
But this is not the entire reality – there is more space to think of Blackness on its own terms. Sometimes, it is an identity that is political, economic, and related to power disparities, and legacies of colonialism. But at other times, it is something also rooted in longer histories, in wit, in innovations of language, and in universal experiences of relating to each other that, as our conversations revealed, exist across distance and difference.
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What culturally-specific words do you use to describe your identity or complexion? What do they mean to you? Tell us by replying to this, or emailing us at thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue.