Abstract
In An Introduction To African Civilizations, Willis N. Huggins writes that “one of the earliest flares of the race and color question” is recorded in hieroglyphics on a hugh granite stele erected about 2,000 B.C. by the Egyptian Pharoah of the Twelfth Dynasty, Usertesan III. In India, race prejudice may be as much as 5000 years old. Here we see blackness, as a contemptible color, being rejected by Indra, the God of Aryas. During the Middle Ages Talmudic and Midrashic sources sought to explain Blackness with such suggestions as “Ham was smitten in his skin” or that Noah told Ham “your seed will be ugly and dark-skinned,” or that Canaan was “the notorious world-darkener.”3 These and other evidences of color prejudice from very ancient times seem to cast doubt upon the allegation of some Western historians that prejudice against black skin color and African ancestry is of recent origin.