To understand White racism, which I call vengeance, toward Black people we must step outside of our modern context into the broad sweep of history and study an ancient and medieval world that was largely dominated by Black Africans—the parents of the human family.
For at least three thousand years Black Pharaohs and generals raided, invaded, conquered, dominated, colonized, oppressed, civilized and enslaved various European populations.
The story of the Moors i.e. , Black Africans and Negroid Arabs of the Islamic faith, who conquered and ruled most of the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) between 711 A.D. and 1492 A.D., is the most recent, longstanding and notable of the recorded periods of African domination of White populations.
In the words of historian Edward Scobie, the Moors provided for “not only Portugal and Spain, but the rest of emerging Europe a powerful economic, scientific, artistic, [and] political impulse; an impulse which led to European domination of the world.” Nevertheless, during Black rule the indigenous Spanish launched several wars of liberation against the Moors that finally resulted in King Ferdinand’s and Queen Isabella’s ascension to the throne in 1492. (Some Black scholars contend that the Spanish bull fight and bull run are symbolic reenactments of the medieval Spanish / Moorish wars and the ultimate expulsion of the Black conquerors from the Iberian peninsula.) The Spanish were so resentful of Moorish occupation, domination and influence that, after they regained power, they wiped out much of Moorish culture. “At the beginning of the Colombian Era, [ 1492]” wrote historian Jan Carew, “thousands of books that the Moors had collected over centuries – priceless masterpieces that their geographers, scientists, poets, historians and philosophers had written, and tomes their scholars had translated- were committed to bonfires by Priests of the Holy Inquisition.” The Spanish and Portuguese also expelled over three million Moors (killing fifty thousand in one day in 1570), and sought to expunge their memory. The latter continues today as White historians write volumes about the Middle Ages with only scant reference to Europe’s indebtedness to its Moorish benefactors.