America in 1956 (photograph by Gordon Parks)
Coloured, written as colored in America, is a word that has been applied to people who are not white. It has meant different things at different times and places. It is still current in South Africa and neighbouring countries, but in Britain and America it is somewhere between dated and offensive. That is why when Lindsay Lohan lately informed us that Barack Obama will be the first coloured president of America, she put her foot in her mouth.
In the 1700s the word meant anyone who was not white. It was close to what the terms non-white and people of colour mean now, but back then it took in Italians and Jews – anyone who was noticeably darker-skinned than an Englishman.
That is the meaning it had in Britain up until the 1950s, though at some point Italians and Jews crossed over to white (when and how?) and the word came to mean anyone darker than a European. This is how Winston Churchill used the word when he said too many coloured people were coming to Britain. He meant West Indians, Pakistanis and so on. After the 1960s the word began to seem dated and fell out of respectable use.
In America the word had a different history. Like in Britain, it started out meaning anyone darker than the English, but because America had a large number of blacks, in time it came to mean mainly just black people from the early 1800s onwards.
It was the main word Frederick Douglass used in the 1840s and that of most blacks from the 1860s to the 1960s, the first hundred years after the slaves were freed. That it how it became the C in NAACP: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
But Jim Crow whites used the word too, putting it on their signs that said, “Colored Only”. So by 1910 Negro began to take the place of coloured as the politically correct word for blacks, a position it held till the late 1960s when black took its place, which in turn was replaced in the late 1980s by African American.
That is at the level of political correctness. Most black people called themselves “coloured” up until the 1960s. Now most call themselves “black”. The words “African American”and “Negro” never had mass support among blacks.
You can still hear the word “coloured” in old Hollywood films and from very old people – much older than Miss Lohan.
In South Africa the word is still current but came to mean something else: those who were neither white nor black but mixed. There is no One Drop Rule in South Africa. Under apartheid there were four races: White, Black, Coloured and Indian, all with capital letters. Coloureds were above Blacks but below Whites. Most are part black and part white, but many are mixed with other things too, like Javanese. Some want the word changed to “brown”.
See also:
Abagond, where did you get your information from? I’ll gently say that I don’t think some of it is factual. I don’t have time to dig around for links, but reading Frederick Douglass, who wrote in the 1800s, and surfing the net for images of posters of slave sales would be helpful.
I read it here and there in different places. What part do you think is wrong?
Very insightful. Answers the question I posed in another post’s comment page.
One correction would have to be about South Africa’s “coloured” population. To be legally labelled a “coloured” in SA, you just have to have any non-Khoisan ancestry. I’d be considered a “coloured”, no matter how I looked, just because I have some traceable non-African blood. It’s a very weird, seperatist system they have going.
Also, the “coloureds” are at the absolute bottom of SA society. Even though, most would be considered black in the Western world and don’t look much different from Western blacks, they are regarded as their own race. South Africa is ran politically by the Khoisians (“pure bloods”) and finacially by the white minority, this leaves the “coloureds” out in the cold. Of course, the whites (mainly of Dutch ancstry) don’t accept them. Neither do the Khosians, because they don’t speak the same language and are discarded from the culture and not to mention the shameful legacy of colorism and elistism that that sector of the population has historically practiced towards the “pure” black majoriy.
mynameismyname, please cite your sources. We do not make such sharp distinctions between those with Khoisan ancestry and those who are not descended from Khoisan; anyone who is mixed is coloured. And we also do not use quotation marks when we use the word coloured. Doing so comes across as being racist. I also think you are confusing Khoisan with Xhosa and Zulu.
I said that in the previous post: anyone who has a trace of non-African blood is considered coloured.
My sources come from an actual South African acquaintance and most potently, from a 1997 visit to Johannesburg. (Second African country I visited).
Farai Chideya’s book,The Color of Our Future, is another good source on the racial classification practices that occur in South Africa.
The use of coloured in SA has been confusing to me lately. I’ve been reading SA books in which various characters are listed as coloured or black. It took me a while to figure out that these were separate groups and that the one-drop rule doesn’t apply there. It’s confusing but interesting to see how racial/ethnic groups are defined in different countries.
In 1600 Dutch SA, people from India, Java, and the Ivory Coast were considered black by the Dutch if they were dark-skinned but the natives were simply Khoisan. However, being baptized as Christians could immediately change their status as they were then citizens protected by Dutch law and could not be held as slaves, could marry, inherit property, etc. Isn’t that interesting?
Here is an interesting book excerpt on this subject:
http://books.google.com/books?id=od49AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=dutch+east+india+company+khoisan+marriage&source=bl&ots=7CQWNe3nwu&sig=S0qE4EwxsuV-hKZziUgyYhVnrOo&hl=en&ei=7aKlSq2LINme8QbTjvHNDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Oh, wonderful! I am thinking of doing a post on the Cape Coloureds.
It’s a fascinating topic. “Islands” was a good intro to the topic. You can get it at most libraries.
Islands
I’m a black South African and have lived and gone to school with a lot of coloured people.
I see in the post you state that some coloureds do not like the word. I have never encountered a coloured person who took offence to being called that.
You have to understand that SA has a totally different history to the USA, even though we do share some similarities.
Apartheid divided people up so early on. Through the years the coloured community, the biggest being in the Western Cape, grew into it’s own race with it’s own traditions and identity.
We just don’t have the One Drop rule over here. If you’re mixed, then your coloured. It’s not an insult.
Thanks for pointing that out. I thought I had brought up the lack of a One Drop Rule in South Africa. From what I have read some do want to change the word to “brown”.
I am coloured, born and bred in Cape Town, and proud of it. Every coloured person in South African, and particularly Cape Town, has a mixture of ancestors, starting when Jan van Riebeeck came to the Cape. We are a total mixture of black, khoi, Dutch,English, Malaysian, West African, North African, you name it. My particular ancestors are English and Madagascan on my mothers side, and German and Khoisan and English on my fathers side. My paternal grandfather was part English and part coloured, and was registered as European, even though he was raised as coloured. Some coloured people have more white in their blood, and some have more black. We have all been created in Gods image, and we should be so proud of our South African history, as this is what makes us the Rainbow Nation.
Abagond,thanx for a interesting website.
I’m a Brown South African from Cape Town and the world “coloured” in the S.A context means non person(according to my research we did not choose the term to define ourselves but were given it by white colonialists) there are quite a few of us so called “coloureds” who find this term degrading.
Just a piece of advice please do more research when dealing with colour in South Africa.
Also we are NOT a white and black people combined creating “coloured”
We are the indigineous people of South Africa.
Khoigirl:
1. I know not everyone is happy with the word. That is why I noted in the post:
“Some want the word changed to ‘brown’.”
2. From what I understand they are mixed – neither black nor white nor simply indigenous. In fact they are the most mixed people on the face of the earth:
“The so-called “Cape-colored” population of South Africa has highest levels of mixed ancestry on the globe, a blend of African, European, East Asian and South Indian, Tishkoff said.”
Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30502963/
In the 1800s US, “colored” was the polite term for someone of mixed race. Apparently, “mulatto” was considered offensive even back then despite appearing on US Census forms. As the One Drop Rule became more pervasive, though, “colored” came to be applied to anyone of African descent. I suppose the phasing out of the ambiguous “colored” term and the rise of the assertive “black” necessitated the development of new terminologies for mixed race people (e.g. biracial, multiracial).
What about half-white half-asians in SA? Let’s say, half-white half-Chinese?
I am coloured and from South Africa. Coloureds are a Creole peole, with a Creole culture and speak a creole langauge called Afrikaans. Creolizations is a social process and does not just refer to ‘race mixture’. Creolization first started as a process of cultural fusion and creativity by people on the margins of slave society living in a colony. From 1652 slaves were brought to Africa(Yes – slaves were brought to the Cape Colony) from various places in South East Asia, South India, Madagscar, East Africa and West Africa. The indigene Khoi and San people were dispossed of their land forced to work as indetured labourers. Coloured identity has been shaped by colonialism, slavery, segregation and apartheid. Personally, i detest the term Coloured. It is too flimsy and is simply understood to mean people of ‘mixed-race’. I am South African Creole – this term describes my true and whole identity.