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To: showme_the_Glory

No, North Africa is not chocolate. It’s more cafe au lait. It’s a combination of Berbers and Arabs who are not typically black but brownand because so many Europeans also mixed in with North Africans in North Africa, some are quite light skinned. Others are quite dark. They were calleld Moors in the time of Shakespeare and that were not Negroes. They were Berbers and other brown people in North Africa.


22 posted on 06/05/2013 2:03:45 PM PDT by WashingtonSource
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To: WashingtonSource
I think Othello is represented as a black man, but Shakespeare is at best representative of popular opinion in England in his day, not a scholarly source of information.

The term Moor comes from the Latin Mauri, a term for the inhabitants of ancient Mauretania (roughly modern Morocco, not the country now calling itself Mauretania).

I've never been to North Africa but my impression is that most of the people are "Mediterranean" in appearance (like the people on the European shores of the Mediterranean). Perhaps there are some individuals who would be considered "black" in the US. During the Middle Ages and later, there was an ongoing slave trade across the Sahara, so any Sub-Saharan African element in the population today could be from medieval or modern times.

The Spanish called Muslims "Moros" wherever they encountered them--like in the Philippine Islands.

23 posted on 06/05/2013 2:30:45 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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