Pierre Dominique Toussaint L-Overature was a gifted military leader and law giver who transformed a slave revolt in the French sugar colony of San Domingo into a revolutionary movement resulting in the creation of the Republic of Haiti in 1803. The slave revolt in France’s most lucrative colony began in 1791 when news of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man began to reach the Caribbean Islands. The Black slaves of African ancestry at San Domingo believed that the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity applied to them as much as to any White European. Toussaint L-Overature was drawn to this liberation stuggle giving it military discipline and constitutional articulation. Eventually the Black leader was captured by the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte, the General who sought to reinstitute Black slavery in France’s sugar islands. Toussaint L’Overature died of exposure in a jail in the French Alps in 1802. Nevertheless the movement he led was sufficiently effective to create Haiti, the second republic of the Americas. The leadership of Toussaint L’Overature in guiding his people away from slavery helped inspire many engaged in the struggle to oppose imperialism and oppression of all kinds. In 1938 the Trinidadian activist C.L. R. James helped explain Toussaint L’Overature’s accomplishments in his classic text, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overature and the San Domingo Revolution.

Descriptions of the human race based on racial characteristics go back to the late seventeenth century. In 1684, a French doctor, François Bernier, published “Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l’habitant” which proposed four different face and body types: Europeans, Far Easterners, Lapps and Blacks.

In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus made specific reference to skin colour in his system of categorization: Europeanus (white), Asiaticus (yellow), Americanus (red) and Africanus (black). Linnaeus’ pupil Johann Blumenbach, sometimes described as the founder of modern anthropology, added a fifth grouping, Malay (brown).

The idea of categorizing people according to their colour – “colour taxonomy” – greatly interests Trevor Phillips. A prominent member of the Afro-Caribbean community, Trevor wants to know how and why this system took hold. He wants to know why a system based on skin colour should have had such a profound impact on relations between races. He wants to understand what role these categories might have had in shaping modern day racial prejudice, belief and behaviour.

Trevor asks: “What is it about colour that matters so much? We know what lies beneath the skin – melanin. But this isn’t just a chemical thing. This is about something deeper and more atavistic. It caught on because it corresponds to some human need or maybe some human memory. But it’s hard to say why, especially when most people’s colour isn’t actually what the word says. White people are really pink or cream, black people are brown, red people are bronze etc. And within every group, there’s a massive range of colour.”

At the same time, Trevor recognises that a combination of political liberalism and mobility is transforming our racial concepts. Trevor wonders whether a taxonomy based on differentiation by colour is still sustainable.

He says: “For a whole series of reasons there is a fundamental sea change going on in our heads that might spell the death of the Linnaean classification. We are mixing more than ever before. Britain is a leader – mixed race is the largest, youngest and fastest growing group. Many of our brightest stars are mixed race. With more and more people living and loving all over the globe, surely this is the future. No simple system of racial categorisation could survive this kind of mixing.”

If colour ceases to be a meaningful description, what happens to racial identity? Does it wither away? At what point does racial mixing signal the transformation of both communities into something new?

Trevor doesn’t have answers to these questions. But he’s very keen to investigate them

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00smbbr/Colour_Coded_Episode_1/

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Ian Hancock is a marginal man. Like all Romani intellectuals, he has had to live torn between the pariah status of his people and the embrace of a dominant culture which can hardly conceive of such a monster as an educated Gypsy.

Some Gypsies in this position accept this, and pass as non-Gypsies, keeping at a distance all their Romani relatives, and keeping silence at who knows what cost, to them and their own children, on all of their family’s past. But a sprinkling of such people find a personal liberation by joining Romani organizations where intellectuals can make a political contribution to winning a better place in society for their people. They have to face incomprehension by non-Gypsies, and often rejection by assimilated relatives, and the constant accusation that they are not “true Gypsies.” Face to face with the divided reality of their identity, they are like the man in Yevtushenko’s poem, strung out on a high-wire “between the city of yes and the city of no.”………………….

Foreword to the Patrin Web Journal edition

This book was the first in English to deal with the enslavement of the Romani people in Romania. When it first appeared in 1987, no one expected that massive political and social changes would begin to take place in Eastern Europe just two years later.  With the death of Ceaucescu in 1989 and the shift to democracy in Romania, many more documents concerning those more than five terrible centuries have come to light, and our knowledge of the nature of Gypsy slavery, and the implications it has for our understanding of the world view and character of those descended from it — the Vlax Roma — are just now beginning to be understood.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080802212237/http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/pariah-contents.htm

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http://www.crossingthewhiteline.com/index.htm

The Black Presence in Britain website was set up in 1998 due to a lack of information about Black people in Britain to be found on the Internet.

I was studying politics at the time, the course included a history module called; ” The black Presence in Britain 1550-present day”.

Whilst doing my research I found a serious lack of Black British info online. So, I decided to build my own site where this information could be documented. The site has had many incarnations since then. ?I built the first version of it using Netscape composer, later moving on to Dreamweaver. Today the site uses comtent management software.

http://www.blackpresence.co.uk/

The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada

http://canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/

For more than 2,000 years people in many different parts of the world have forced their fellow humans into slavery. Between about 1500 and 1900, Europeans forcibly uprooted millions of people from throughout West Africa and West Central Africa and shipped them across the Atlantic in conditions of great cruelty. To refer to the Africans who were enslaved only as ‘slaves’ strips them of their identity. They were, for instance, farmers, merchants, priests, soldiers, goldsmiths and musicians. They were husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. They could be Yoruba, Igbo, Akan or Kongolese.

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/

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Go to most museums, libraries and schools and nothing about our history and culture is kept or taught. The result is a widespread ignorance about who we are, which sometimes turns to hatred, fear and misunderstanding. In schools, children learn more about the Romans, Vikings or even fairies than they do about our cultures and what we have contributed to this world.

http://www.grthm.co.uk/index.php

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