Black Vikings: Difference between revisions

 

{{quote|'''Kida:''' His name's Simon. He's a Russian of African descent. He works as a tout for a Russian sushi shop here.

 

 

This is especially likely to happen when the writers don't know the actual ethnicities available, when they are aiming at a color-blind cast at all costs, budget costs or a myriad other reasons.

It is possible that when a Black Viking appears in film or TV, the character is not intended to be seen as the same race as the actor. The actor used might have simply been the best available for the role, and the writers are merely asking us to use our imagination to make the actor's physical appearance fit the character's. (This is actually standard doctrine for modern theatrical productions.) Whiteface would of course be unthinkable.

 

 

Subtrope of [[Politically-Correct History]]. See also [[Not Even Bothering with the Accent]], [[Race Lift]].

 

== Advertising ==

* [[OutKast|André 3000]] in the 2012 Gillette commercials "[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOQ6ifFMVgQ Masters of Style]". He describes how he feels about various forms of facial hair, near the end he mentions a long beard makes him feel like a Viking.

 

== Anime & Manga ==

* ''[[Sakura Taisen]] V'' features an African-American female lawyer in the [[The Roaring Twenties]]; while college-educated black professionals were far from unheard of since the early 1900s, what's odd is that this character never has to fight prejudice or racism in the series (which instead would have been likely). Even for an [[Alternate History]], this is just stretching it a bit.

 

 

* There's a whole [[Friendly Local Chinatown]] in ''[[Gangs of New York]]'', and half the story is set in a Chinese cathouse, which historians were quick to point out the Chinese population was nonexistent at the time.

* In ''[[Hoosiers (film)|Hoosiers]]'', the state championship game features the Hickory Huskers playing the "David" role to the "Goliath" South Bend Central Bears. However, South Bend apparently toppled a few giants as well. Look at the South Bend bench and their section of the stands. Racially integrated basketball team, racially integrated cheerleader squad, black head coach(!), and all this happening not in 1960s New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, but in Indiana, in 1952.

* Played for laughs again in [[Woody Allen]]'s ''Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were too Afraid to Ask'', with a black sperm standing among all the white sperm about to be ejaculated.

{{quote|'''Black Sperm:''' What am I doing here?}}

** Germany had had an African colonial empire until 1919 so there were a number of African-Germans long after that. This matter surfaces in Istvan Szabo's movie ''Mephisto'', taking place in the 1930s, in which the protagonist, a famous theatre director, has an African-German mistress and therefore gets chastised by an angry Hermann Göring.

** Even if pretty unexpected for a modern reader, the [[Those Wacky Nazis|Nazis]] held no special grudge against Blacks -- Nazi [http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005479 racism towards blacks] [http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/?lang=en&content=blacks is well-documented] and horrible, but it wasn't as systematic as their main targets.

* ''[[The Inheritance Cycle]]'' has two black characters living in a [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]] that's loosely based on medieval Europe, specifically Norse culture. It's eventually explained that "dark-skinned tribes" live in the desert to the southeast, and possibly the neighboring country - some of these join with the Varden in the third book. Before that, characters do sometimes consider them unusual for the colour of their skin, but they do not act as if it was completely unheard of.

* ''Day Watch'', the second book in [[Sergey Lukyanenko]]'s [[Night Watch (novel)|Night Watch]] trilogy ([[Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy|of four]]), has a group of Viking Others- blonde-haired, blue-eyed Teutonic types. Turns out that's just their Twilight forms- they're members of an old Norse cult, but ethnically there's quite a mix. {{spoiler|Turns out the fact that there's a black one, a white one, an Asian one and the other one fits some Ragnarok prophecies quite well...}} Did someone just say "[[Horsemen of the Apocalypse]]"? Note though, these are people in modern times who are members of such a cult (Neo Vikings?) rather than Norse people in Dark Ages Europe.

* Andromeda, the [[Damsel in Distress]] in the [[Greek Mythology|myth about Perseus]], is the daughter of the Ethiopian king Cepheus. But [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Persus_wiewael.jpg in most illustrations], [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Rembrandt_Harmensz._van_Rijn_011.jpg her skin colour] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/1840_Chasseriau_Theodore_-_Andromeda_Chained_to_the_Rock_by_the_Nereids.jpg is decidedly] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Paul_Gustave_Dore_Andromeda.jpg very un-Ethiopian]. (NSFW, if your boss doesn't like nipples!) [[Justified Trope|Although:]] According to the [[Tangled Family Tree]] of the Greek mythological characters, she wasn't ethnically Ethiopian anyway, at least not 100 %. (Her father's ancestry can be traced back to Poseidon, but there is no information about where her mother Cassiopeia comes from.) Also, some people speculate that Cepheus' kingdom wasn't ''that'' Ethiopia.

** At several times throughout history, "Ethiopia" meant literally any place in Africa, so it's entirely possible she came from a northern pre-Muslim African nation -- the people there would have had skin and hair colors much closer to ancient Greeks, and when one factors in how many mixed marriages there were between the various cultures, it makes more sense. The problem is that there were text describing Andromeda's dark skin. Possibly not black, but not actually until later artists decided not to depict her as such.

 

 

 

== Western Animation ==

* In one bit on ''[[Family Guy]]'', Cleveland plays a Nazi, while trying to fake Quagmire's death. Of course, given that the scene also featured [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKURIVNNdLc a ninja, an "evil pots and pans robot" and an obviously-fake plastic dinosaur] (complete with [[Jurassic Park]] theme) that's quite probably a deliberate nod to this trope.

* ''[[The Simpsons]]''

{{quote|Archaeologists have discovered that wealthy black Africans lived in Roman Britain in one of the country's earliest examples of multiculturalism. "Analysis... contradicts assumptions about the make-up of Roman-British populations as well as the view that African immigrants were of low status... The link between slavery and Africans is an early modern one. In the Roman world this simply was not the case. Slaves in Roman times could come from any area." ... African men had immigrated to Britain, invariably with the Roman Army, and had brought their wives and children. "We're looking at a population mix which is much closer to contemporary Britain than previous historians had suspected. [[Aluminium Christmas Trees|In the case of York, the Roman population may have had more diverse origins than the city has now."]]}}

* Population mixing due to trading and warfare has been much more extensive during the last two millennia than popular media would leave us to know. For example, in southern Egypt and northern Sudan live, until our present day, [[wikipedia:Magyarab|tribes of either Black or Arabic-looking ''Magyars'']], thousands of miles away from Hungary... all [[For Want of a Nail|because the Ottoman Turks recruited a military unit of Magyars]] in the 16th century to fight in Egypt.

* This effect is certainly older than the past two millennia, it's just hard to see clear examples after that long. When the armies of Alexander the Great marched across Central Asia, they buggered everything in sight and left garrisons and deserters in their wake, drawn from every corner of the conquest, but most have disappeared into the population at large since then. But high in the Hindu Kush mountains, there still exist tiny villages of almost pure-ethnic Greeks in isolated valleys, wholly integrated with local culture but still instantly recognizable. Journalists who've encountered them remark that, even 2300 years on, they look like Europeans doing a poor imitation of Afghans.

* DNA analysis has recently suggested that not one but four or five African and Indian groups may be (as they claim) Lost Tribes of Israel. Besides the famous Ethiopian and Ugandan Jews who got airlifted by Israel in the 70s, a full-blown ''tribe'' in Tanzania recently got themselves tested to prove their claim that the tribe itself were a lost tribe of Hebrews, since the Roman era. (Being cut off, they didn't know any other Jews existed, so they adopted local language and customs.) And the Indian group had become a caste claiming Hebrew descent, although they had more contact with the west.

* In a more recent example, Victorian Britain is portrayed as being completly white, yet Carribean people have been have been [http://www.itzcaribbean.com/black_people_history.php living in Britain since slavery was abolished.] They are possibly overlooked because many people in power preferred not to mention them at all.

* African German [[wikipedia:Hans Hauck|Hans Hauck]] was a soldier in the [[Nazis With Gnarly Weapons|German Wehrmacht]] during [[World War Two]]. There were quite a few African Germans in Nazi Germany, either descended from people from the [[Imperial Germany|colonies]] or the children of black French soldiers from the 1923-25 Occupation of the Ruhr, so called Rhineland bastards. Indeed, as they were considered inferior and not fit for military service, but not a threat like Jews and Slavs, black Germans were more likely to survive the war than ethnic Germans.

* The Black Seminoles are a controversial section of the Seminole tribe who are descended from escaped American slaves who sought refuge with the Seminoles in Spanish Florida. Many interbred with the Creek descended natives, while others remain genetically separate. The debate continues today as to whether they count as a true part of the tribe as they have little or no genetic connection, but upwards of two hundred years of cultural connection.

* Russian poet Alexander Pushkin's great grandfather, [[wikipedia:Abram Petrovich Gannibal|Abram Petrovich Gannibal]], had been an ennobled Black Russian.