There is not just one word for “Black”

JVL Introduction

Nesrine Malik does well to remind us how complicated are vocabularies to describe skin complexions and how limited and racialised are the categories we use in the West and in Britain in particular.

As she makes clear, the meanings of terms used in different societies – say the Sudanese descriptors “green”, “red”, “yellow”, “blue”, “wheat” – are dependent on context and tone, grounded in specific cultures

So many of them are neutral terms without pejorative content, descriptions that are crucially distinct from racial slurs, despite sometimes having racial implications.

In white-majority countries, however, “This vast array of descriptors vanishes in contexts where Black people are a racialised minority”…

This article was originally published by The Long Wave newsletter, the Guardian on Wed 7 Oct 2026. Read the original here.