Wow, you've shown me so many examples of people of color in medieval art, that i'm suprised that even professers of history seem to deny the there were POC in medieval europe! My question though, is this: has there been any research done as to when this white-washing of medieval europe began?

Actually, my next queued post addresses that in detail, particularly in regards to Art Education.

Quick-n-Dirty Version: it began during “The Enlightenment”, during colonization and the beginnings of chattel slavery. The idea of “White People” had just been invented, along with the idea of White supremacy. Basically, all the leading “scientific minds” directly benefited from genocide, kidnapping people an enslaving them, and stealing their land, resources, and skills.

And in order to justify this, it was very important to create this idea not just that “these people are in a subordinate position now”, it had to be retroactive. As in, “these people have never had any accomplishments, their culture is primitive, worthless, ugly, uninteresting, therefore whatever we do to them is okay/for their own good/helping them/better than leaving them to their own depravity” et cetera.

The amount of “science” devoted to proving that people of color were inherently inferior to white people was like…pretty much the ENTIRETY of “science” from the late 1700s to….well.

For example:

This asshat got his degree from Harvard on the premise that “Hispanics have lower IQs than American Whites” IN 2009.

And coincidentally, Arizona banned “Ethnic Studies”, specifically a Mexican-American Studies Curriculum, upheld by a judge as “constitutional” in March. 2013.

And the consistent disenfranchisement of specifically Mestiz@ and other “not white” Mexican Americans has been documented by sociologist Richard Shingles, who says:

Shingles concludes it is an American problem brought on by the history of the nation’s oldest and largest Mexican American communities, a history that started with conquest and has excluded generations from the benefits of development. “Our past cannot be separated from our future.”



See how that works?

No past, no history, no context, just a huge group of people that are somehow “inherently inferior”, and coincidentally not historically f*cked over for hundreds of years. It’s about blaming the victims of racism for suffering from the results of racism.

That’s why they teach whitewashed history.

