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.
‘Green, red, yellow, blue’? Beneath the surface, diaspora language is anything but Black and white
Black communities across the globe have large and complex vocabularies to describe race, shaped by their specific cultures and histories
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I remember my Iranian friend Haleh Afshar amusing herself by filling in ‘complexion’ as Green on ID and visa forms. Iranian terms for complexion were Green, Wheat and Yoghurt apparently… More important, in Zimbabwe where complexions are called Black or Brown there seems to be a preference for Black which could be considered more beautiful. Metisse (mixed heritage) refugees I have met from Angola also showed a preference for fully Black partners. This shows how racial hierarchies are ever-changing and complicated. But I must admit to having difficulty in seeing how this article fits on the JVL site. Surely the Arab/Jew distinction is much more like the Serb/Croat distinction, where it is mainly a matter of patrolling national loyalties with often few discernible differences marked on the body?