Negro… an old Italian family name Part II

When Columbus first sailed on the Santa Maria, his navigator was a black man named Pedro Alonzo Nino, also referred to as el negro; on his last journey, he sailed with one Diego el Negro. Alessandro de' Medici (1510-1537), first hereditary duke of Florence, was called il Moro, moor being a word believed to be from the Greek mauros, meaning black or dark. Thus, at the time of the European encounter with the Americas, there were people of colour living as free men and women in countries north of the Mediterranean Sea. Did they grapple with what we call 'prejudice' because of the colour of their skins? Alessandro, presumably, didn't. Moors who crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa at the beginning of the eighth century, occupying the Iberian peninsula for hundreds of years, are no doubt responsible for folks in this heavily Portuguese neighbourhood who sport afros and who certainly consider themselves ‘white’. Moor, like Negro and Prieto, is a surname, and one quite common in the Caribbean where, I wager, most people don't associate it with colour. Wikipedia explains that the word “remains associated with the Morrocan immigrants in Spain, and is considered a pejorative word,” as in fsjl’s ‘blackamoor’ . The Wikipedia entry further explains that “the word remains associated with the Morrocan immigrants in Spain, and is considered a pejorative word.” One must wonder, is that the rub? Does the prejudice, and the pejorative usage of the word, follow from migration, voluntary or forced? Is skin colour an easy identifying marker when a people move place to place in large numbers? Might there have been a time when white immigrants who entered communities of brown and black, were so marked – when blanco, along with its cognates, was used as a pejorative? Wikipedia tells us that “in Spanish, the cognate moro is considered a racist and derogative term.” And in an instructive comment, the head entry concludes: “But the Spanish still use it and even think of it as a neutral word in local sayings such as no hay moros en la costa (lit. "there are no Moors on the coast," meaning "the coast is clear"). That this usage could be advanced as neutral, without equivocation, goes to show that one man’s pejorative is another man’s positive. Professor Mervyn Alleyne has done important research speaking to this topic. We look at it in a upcoming post.