by zahlman | 2025-08-28 15:40:18+00:00
> with no such history to it.

You are correct.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/black

> The meaning "fierce, terrible, wicked" is from late 14c. The figurative senses often come from the notion of "without light," moral or spiritual. ... In English it has been the color of sin and sorrow at least since c. 1300; the sense of "with dark purposes, malignant" emerged 1580s (in black art "necromancy;" it is also the sense in black magic). ... The meaning "dark-skinned person, African" is from 1620s (perhaps late 13c., and blackamoor is from 1540s).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_exploration_of_Africa

> The Cape of Good Hope was first reached by Bartolomeu Dias on 12 March 1488, opening the important sea route to India and the Far East, but European exploration of Africa itself remained very limited during the 16th and 17th centuries. ... Exploration of the interior of Africa was thus mostly left to the Muslim slave traders, who in tandem with the Muslim conquest of Sudan established far-reaching networks and supported the economy of a number of Sahelian kingdoms during the 15th to 18th centuries.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/blackball

> The image is of the black balls of wood or ivory that were dropped into an urn as adverse votes during secret ballots.

All of the negative imagery associated with the colour black is completely intuitive: it represents an absence of light, which is essential to life. The Sun has been worshiped worldwide since antiquity. Nighttime was inherently dangerous in societies before the widespread artificial lighting made possible by electricity. It is exactly as you say.

The term https://www.etymonline.com/word/black%20box, meanwhile, is a modern invention.

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Of course, ultimately the root of all of this is in supposed colonialist attitudes as well as American slavery.

But in this medieval era when the language in question is first attested, the Europeans didn't establish any direct slave trade with sub-Saharan Africa; it's not clear to me that commoners in that society would have ever seen such a person. Slaves from sub-Saharan Africa would have come indirectly from the trade routes established by Arabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade), on the order of 10,000 people per year into a population of several tens of millions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography).

Of course, slavery in general dates to antiquity, and was well established in Europe in this era. But this largely picked up slaves from elsewhere in Europe and Asia Minor (Wikipedia has several articles on this). Going back further to ancient Roman times, north African slaves would have scarcely been any different in colour from the locals, having shared that same Mediterranean climate; and I'm pretty sure they also used to enslave "barbarians" from the northern regions.

This is nothing like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade (as a date reference: "In 1526, [the Portuguese] completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil.") This sent three times as many slaves across annually (with significant fractions of them dying in transit or shortly after arrival), into a smaller New World population, and also established the legal doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partus_sequitur_ventrem) enabling generational chattel slavery. Under these conditions the proportion of African slaves in the general population was able to hold at well over 10% for decades after the English shut the trade down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807).

And then, you know, colonialism came later. For example, David Livingstone's exploration of Africa (i.e., European scholars still didn't have a full picture of the continent) was contemporary with the Emancipation Proclamation, and he wrote strongly against the East African slave trade he encountered (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone#Livingstone_...). Colonization of Africa mainly occurred after that point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa).

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So, yes. Terms like "black box", "blacklist", "blackball" etc. clearly have nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, although "master/slave" terminology obviously alludes to slavery, it is frightfully US-centric to project that specifically onto American history; and anyway none of the people objecting to it have given any explanation of why simply writing the words should cause harm — they only ever re-state points about how awful slavery in the US was. And as for the "master branch" of repositories, the argument that this has anything to do with human slavery requires multiple leaps of logic; see e.g. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/21859 .

But activists of this stripe don't seem to care about what the history is, in my extensive experience.