“Blackness” in the meaning under discussion here is too elusive to consistently discern because it defies clear definition. For instance, it was not Africans who designated themselves as “black,” nor even as Africans, since their self-identification was with their own respective cultures. The concepts the term “blackness” evokes are mainly what others have associated with Africans and other people of Black African descent. In many respects the purveyors of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades committed the greatest identity theft in world history. When the concept of “blackness” is brought to earth, a common thread that runs through it is a struggle over personal and group identities. It is also at times cloaked in other cultural behavior such as xenophobia. The original European attitudes evincing “blackness” were significantly influenced by Christian tradition surrounding the so-called Curse of Ham, an age-old myth concerning human beings of darker complexion that was shared by the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religious traditions and came to foster racist concepts positing inherent inferiority of Black Africans in many modern societies. Especially pertinent here, the Russian Primary Chronicle of the early twelfth century begins with an overview of the genesis of nations based on this Hamitic myth.Footnote ¹ Therefore, because of shared Christian traditions, Russians and other Slavs spread this concept alongside western Europeans even in the period before close direct contacts with the west were established. This is the broader historical background of the themes treated in this timely collection of essays “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies.”

Defining Sub-Saharan Africans as Black was part of Europeans’ process of defining themselves as superior during the centuries often referred to as the Age of Exploration. While earlier there were many competing images of Africans, a set of overly simplified negative stereotypes would crystalize in the western hemisphere and around the world through Europe’s dominant role in the modern world. During their first centuries even in the Americas Black Africans enjoyed a more equal status to Europeans than would later be the case after the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery there attained their full magnitude. In time the claim that Blacks were naturally inferior became the prevalent justification for their enslavement, which was followed by having been enslaved becoming a cause for denigration even after they became emancipated, just as was the case for the Romani in the related article here.

The negative concepts about Blacks in parts of Europe prior to a significant presence of Black people there became reinforced through the aggressive commercial exploitation of blackness as black faces and bodies became frequent trademarks for all sorts of products, especially raw materials, foods, and cleansers, including brand names alluding to Blacks as exotic or erotic. Attractive features of black culture were appropriated, as in the case of the modern music industry, and to a lesser degree in European modern art.Footnote ² Items of furniture and other decorations such as paintings stressed servile roles, as discussed in Mina Magda’s “The Russian Image of the Black.”Footnote ³ There was also in recent centuries profit in blackface, as shown in the essay, “Our Blackface Sounds Familiar”; and at the same time a global, multi-billion-dollar skin-lightening industry has emerged. Meanwhile, as modern capitalism has found profit in popularizing debasing stereotypes modern science has often lent its prestige to further reinforce some racist theories concerning Black Africans.Footnote ⁴ Even multi-millionaire soccer players sometimes experience being called monkeys and having bananas thrown on fields all across Europe. The case presented in “Promises of Blackness in the State Socialist Public Sphere in Poland” about an African American basketball player experiencing chants of “Kunte Kinte” is a relatively positive stereotype, but one that shows how effective television can be in popularizing stereotypes.

On the other hand, in the midst of all such challenges, evidence of how difficult it can be to arrive at a simple definition of “blackness” is that the year 2011 witnessed both the election of the first Black official in Russia and the first of two Black members to Poland’s Parliament.Footnote ⁵ Further west, despite the continuing struggle against negative stereotypes, a Black woman has served as head of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, and scores of Black men and women have served in the European Parliament representing other European countries. While such feats remain misleading regarding the degree of ethnic status and inclusiveness in those societies, this confluence of negative and positive developments is a further caution against oversimplification about “blackness” in Europe, Eurasia, or any world regions.

One distinctive historical connection of Eastern Europe to the concept of “blackness” discussed here is that in the rest of Europe a paradigm positing Russian and Slavic inferiority can be traced back to the medieval derivation of the word “slave” used in Western societies from “Slav,” due to the Black Sea region serving as a major source of slaves for Europe prior to the Atlantic slave trade. Various Western sources all the way up into the twentieth century have referred to Russians, Poles and Slavs in general as a backward and servile “race.”Footnote ⁶ This means that the stigma mentioned in this collection of essays regarding the Romani due to their status as formerly enslaved people mirrored a larger historical shadow that has been silently looming over the entire region for centuries. In that sense, all of eastern Europe has been ascribed a collective form of “blackness” akin to Black Africans. Thus Slavs, whether aware of this prejudice or not, have had good reason to feel international solidarity with Black Africans quite apart from any passing Marxian or other theoretical dogma. Meanwhile, the practice of a prejudicial color spectrum within the Romani population in Europe also has its counterpart in the African-American community in the US, as well as other world cultures, most notably the Caste system in India. Olga Nechaeva’s observation in “Blackness and Soviet Creative Education” concerning a lack of solidarity between Blacks and Soviet minorities discriminated against also applies to their counterparts in Europe and the Americas.

As pointed out in the introductory essay, Russia’s dominance in the region in recent centuries does not mean the pattern of its experience with “blackness” was representative of what occurred in all the countries covered here. However, it is the country whose history justifies an allusion to “Black life;” the experience of some of the others as part of the tsarist and/or Soviet Russian empires, added to their regional proximity, directly exposed them to Russian life. This included the emphasis both Lenin and Stalin placed on the inclusion of Black Africa and Africans in their theories of worldwide communist revolution, as well as their targeting color-based racism in the United States in their propaganda campaigns. That is how some east European countries came to host Black African students during the period from the late 1950s to the 1980s when the USSR brought over tens of thousands on scholarships, hoping to capture some of the leadership of emerging new African countries in the wake of decolonization taking place during that period. The USSR and other Soviet bloc countries also hosted a series of International Youth Festivals that drew tens of thousands to their major cities, especially in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, mainly promoting Soviet propaganda, that always included Black youths from Africa and the Americas.

It is also worth noting here that Turkey, an often-overlooked part of eastern Europe, may actually have had the largest Black African population. The Black African immigrant population in Turkey is estimated by State media in the early twenty-first century to be around one and a half million. There is also a part of the population that may number as high as 100,000 that is designated as Afro-Turk, descendant from the enslaved African population under the Ottoman empire that became liberated after Turkey became independent at the end of World War I. People in both these Black populations complain of the types of discrimination treated here.Footnote ⁷

Returning now to the question of identity in the articles under discussion here, Alexandra Chiriac’s “Invisible Men,” describing the absence of an identity touches on patterns common in other societies as well. Alexa Kurmanov’s “On Blackness and Belonging in Kazakhstan,” quoting Yelena Khanga, is particularly poignant: “In spite of the many strands of my heritage, I am also Russian to the core…yet there is always a shade of difference.” This expression of heartfelt self-identity reveals exceptionally well the constraints on her self-identity, given the complexity of her parents, and grandparents, relationship to Russia. Her grandfather, Oliver Golden, a native of Mississippi whose father had been born into slavery there, first traveled to the USSR in the 1920s to study at one of the political universities established to indoctrinate international students charged to promote Soviet goals in their respective countries. He met his wife Bertha Bialek, a Jewish émigré from Poland, in New York City while both were engaged in Communist Party activities. Yelena’s mother Lily was born in Uzbekistan where the Goldens had located through a role the Party had assigned him to recruit African-American graduates from Black colleges, mainly specialists in agriculture, to help build the new Soviet economy. Her father was a foreign student in Moscow from Zanzibar. Yelena Khanga’s choice of identity is exemplary of the difficulties entailed not only because of her diverse heritage, but because she has admitted elsewhere that Russian society never fully embraced her as Russian.Footnote ⁸

The skin color associated with the concept of blackness has for centuries served as both a marker of social inferiority and a mask for an underlying, age-old quest for power and wealth in human societies usually facilitated by a large, cheap labor force. In view of the revolutionary changes now in motion due to the emergence of artificial intelligence—reminiscent of the communications and mass media revolutions over the past century—might one possible affect be less need for human labor and an end to the negative concept of “blackness”? Unfortunately, leading scholars, including the sociologist Ruha Benjamin, are citing persuasive evidence to the contrary. She describes what she sees taking place as “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are rooted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era, new discriminatory designs that can amplify hierarchies … and replicate social divisions that aim to fix racial bias but end up doing the opposite.”Footnote ⁹