this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
720 points (99.3% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
39938 readers
3918 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I genuinely don’t even understand what this means. Black people aren’t charcoal black.
While skin tones can vary, and in sun drenched parts of Africa, tones can get so dark brown that they look charcoal in appearance, It was just the book being written by a white man, for white kids, in an country where 99% were white that caused them to make the unwarranted comparison.
If you have never actually seen a person with dark skin that's how you might imagine one. Or so I did when I was a kid, growing up in a bunghole village in the impenetrable forests up in northern europe where the darkest skin I'd seen was that greek girl (not very dark at all).
My friend is also charcoal black, so that's definitely a possibility too, human skin is amazing, it can be black-blueish, chocolate, white or red (me in the summer).
According to old-timey racists, they are.
Exactly ... according to old-timey racists in the 1950s ... this is what they imagined about black people
I mean I'm terrible with names but like, skin tones vary. Go back three generations and my great grandparents look very different from each other, only one of them is all that white but godsdammit they are the whitest shade of white that ever whited white. Albinos put on sunglasses when I walk by, I inherited it somehow from gamgam. You'd think it would have been recessive not dominant but here we are. I blame all the cheese we eat, gamgam loved cheese like I love cheese.
My point was there's this gorgeous actress/model (I think she was a bond girl) who has an amazingly dark skin tone.
You mean Halle Berry?
No like two decades earlier. Opposite Connery or Dalton
I was kind of kidding, as like a “duh” response because I didn’t want to look it up.
Yeah I could look it up too but that would defeat the purpose
Grace Jones?
I think so? Like I said, horrible with names
It'll be her. She's very dark skinned, extremely striking, and definitely had a role in at least one Bond film
In the 1950s ... to average white people who might have never seen a black person before ... they would imagine this
I can promise you that the vast majority of white Americans had seen a black person in the 1950s.
This is a British book, though
With the war and influx of American GIs in Britain, not to mention their colonies, I stand by my statement for Britain as well.
What helps in the case of the UK is a larger percentage of their population lives in cities than the US too. Just by the math living in urban areas you're just going to see more people and more people from outside your community will be come in.
True. A decade or two earlier might have been different: All the historical examples in this thread had my mind locked in to the twenties or thirties, not the fifties!
I don't think minstrel shows with black face were common in Britain?
It's more likely that white British people took it as "much darker than the skin we're assuming for people" which is enough to make the simile work.
You'd be wrong on that I'm afraid:
and that was the problem .... the Brits loved the idea of a minstrel show in black face because it had everything they loved about it ... presenting black people as comical caricatures to be made fun of while also being presented and performed by white people ... because they never thought of hiring and paying for actual black people to do these things.
What the fuck‽ Until '78‽
:(
I'll hope that it was still less common than in the US
I know it's difficult to grasp the idea that the world is larger than just the US. But you'll just have to try.
lies, lies! foreign countries are just made up for the movies
I mean let's be real minstrel shows are explicitly a western concept, and were huge in the US. Go down another comment and I addressed the UK as well, but really that's going to apply anywhere Americans were during WW2 as well.
Anywhere that minstrel shows were popular by the 1950s most of those people would have at least seen a black person. America or otherwise.
The whole idea of minstrel shows was to mock africans. Seeing a white guy in blackface is not equivalent to seeing a black person.
What the fuck are you talking about?
My whole point was by 1950 most white people had seen a black person and that their only idea wasn't a minstrel show
What makes you think "most white people" in Europe had seen a real black person in 1950?
Idk maybe all the black Americans actively fighting in some of Europe's most populous countries during WW2 and the following American presence after the war.
And that's ignoring the interactions between European nations and their African colonies. I'll ignore the human zoos as well
Wow. I don't even know where to begin.
Black US troops (which were segregated from the white troops) did not exactly run around on vacation in the french countryside.
Most French, Dutch, Englishmen, (among others) did not go to any colony. They stayed home... working their normal jobs. Farming the land, making shoes, sewing clothes, building houses. Etc.
And while we're just starting to grasp the concept of US not being the entire world. I have to inform you of the next class, which will cover the fact that France and Germany is not even close to "most of europe".
Vacationing lol okay, I suppose all of the civilians left when any military was around so they never saw each other, oh wait that's ridiculous.
I said the most populous countries in Europe. Germany, France, Italy and the UK all had very heavy military presence during and after the war. After is kinda key since soldiers were allowed to leave base and go to the towns.
Of course there are other European nations they were in too. Of the most populous nations they met the Soviets in Germany, but did not obviously make it to Russia. Not a majority of the Russian population but not insignificant. These troops would interact a bit during the occupation of Germany but that was limited as the cold war intensified.
In colonies you seem to forget people did travel both ways. Obviously more European based nationals traveled there, but people flowed both ways.
Btw troops were desgregated in 1948 during a period where the US was expanding military presence across most of western Europe. And even during the war do you think the battlefield was segregated? That's crazy talk
Certainly some very interesting and interpretive takes though
Except for the fact that the vast majority of black soldiers went home and were not deployed in Europe after Germany surrendered.
What does it matter if they were segregated on the battlefield or not, you think there were civilians on the battlefield?
Contrary to what you might believe. Natives in the colonies were not exactly rich. Even in France, during the 50's the amount of black individuals was measured in a couple of thousand. Not exactly a lot compared to the roughly 40 million french.
Your statement was that the majority of europeans in the 50's had seen black people with their own eyes. And that's just not true. I sure plenty had heard about them. Maybe seen pictures. But that's another thing.
I did not see a black person in real life until i was 16 in 2010 and traveled to Florida. And by then i had already traveled around Germany and France. I do not imagine the probability of bumping into one was higher in the 50's
I'm sorry, but I doubt this. I live in Germany myself and see several black people a day. Not usually something I track, but this conversation got me thinking so I paid extra attention during my normal commute. Germany does not collect racial demographics for obvious reasons, but France does. They've expirenced roughly a 3% increase in their black population from 2010 to today. Going from 3 to 6%.
If we assume at least a similar increase I find never real hard to believe. Like I don't really want to just call you a liar, but it's just statistically unlikely unless you avoided urban areas all that time.
Also this is an interesting read and touches on the exact solider relations I was talking about at least for Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Germans
Remember the meme about the guy being immune to BnW filter?
Alright, that’s actually pretty funny.
I'm just spitballing here but maybe back in the 1950s and earlier there wasn't as much mixed race couples or children from those interracial marriages? Like today we have so many shades of "black" that maybe wasn't as popular nearly 100 years ago.
Just a random thought
They « were » in theatre and movie production at the time. Black American weren’t allowed to play a role so they used white male with charcoal and shoe shine
Fun fact they were some black actor that did black face as a kind of protestation IIRC