Black History Month Special (Part 2)
AI - The Truth Exposed!
The Black Spy Podcast 216, Season 22, Episode 0007
This week, host Carlton King continues his headfirst dive into the meaning of Black History Month — asking seemingly none provocative questions of Chat GPT such as Why do you and other LLM continue to use terms such as the Middle East" and why does this matter?
Carlton argues that while race is a biological nonsense, it remains a powerful political reality shaping lives, identity, and history itself. To illustrate this, Carlton explores the true financial and political objectives and consequences of the British Empire, including how Britain came to rule world finances. Carlton also uncovers how AI is finally challenging a racist, euro-centric manipulation of history with true and evidenced fact, yet strangely Carlton notes that these answers are not provided questionaries in the first instance and he wants to establish why?.
Carlton examines who decides who's "Black" and who's "White," and how these definitions have been weaponised throughout history to dumb down Africa and it's diaspora's real historical legacy.
Once again we hope you enjoy this week's episode and learn from it. So, please don't forget to subscribe to the Black Spy Podcast for free, so you never miss another fascinating episode.
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Those wishing to study the Moors should read below entreaties:
Rewriting the Colour of Empire: The True Faces of the Moors
For centuries, the story of civilisation, conquest, and empire has been told through the prism of whiteness — a selective historical lens that obscures the true racial complexity of the past. Few examples demonstrate this distortion more clearly than the story of the Moors, the African and Afro-Arab peoples who ruled the Iberian Peninsula from 711 to 1492. Their legacy has been bleached by time, politics, and the anxieties of Eurocentrism. Yet when we interrogate the terms "Arab" and "North African," and when we examine who the Moors truly were, it becomes clear that their identity — viewed through the modern racial constructs of Europe, the Americas, and the wider world — would have been understood as Black.
1. The Political Language of Race
Before we proceed, it's vital to recognise that "race" itself is not a biological truth but a political technology — a tool developed in Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries to justify slavery, colonialism, and hierarchy. The concept of "Blackness" as a fixed identity did not exist in the early medieval period. However, if those earlier peoples were assessed through the racial systems later used to define African-descended peoples in the Americas and Europe, the Moors would unmistakably fall on the "Black" side of that divide.
The problem lies in terminology. The modern labels "Arab" and "North African" obscure far more than they reveal. They create a convenient distance — a linguistic whiteness — between the African reality of these populations and the European imagination of them. "Arab" today is used as an ethnic descriptor, but in origin it was cultural and linguistic, not racial. Likewise, "North African" has been racialised to mean something distinct from "African," as though the Sahara were a racial border rather than a desert.
2. The True Peopling of North Africa
Before the Arab conquests of the 7th century, North Africa was home to a complex tapestry of peoples — Berbers (Imazighen), Nubians, Garamantes, Numidians, and others — many of whom were described by classical authors as Ethiopians, meaning dark-skinned or black. Roman and Greek writers regularly referred to North Africans as people of "dark hue" and "woolly hair." In early Christian iconography and Byzantine records, the inhabitants of Mauretania and Cyrenaica were also depicted with distinctly African features.
The Berbers themselves were not monolithic. Populations in the Sahara and southern Maghreb, particularly among the Sanhaja, Lamtuna, and Zanata confederations, were dark-skinned Africans. Others in the northern coastal regions exhibited varying degrees of mixture, reflecting centuries of movement between Africa, Europe, and the Near East. What unified them was not "race" but language and geography. When Islam reached North Africa, these diverse African peoples were among its first converts and its most dynamic missionaries.
3. Arabisation, Not Arab Origin
The Islamic conquests did not result in the mass migration of Arabian tribes into Africa. Instead, what took place was a process of Arabisation — the adoption of Arabic as a lingua franca, the spread of Islam as a unifying faith, and the alignment of local elites with the new Caliphate. Thus, calling the North African Muslim conquerors of Iberia "Arabs" is historically misleading. They were predominantly African Muslims who spoke Arabic, just as many later Africans would speak French or English under colonial rule without becoming "French" or "English" in race or origin.
Early European chroniclers were clear on this point. The Chronicle of Alfonso III and other medieval Spanish sources describe the Moors as "black as night" or "of the colour of pitch." Even Islamic historians such as Ibn Khaldun, writing centuries later, acknowledged the Africanity of many Berber tribes, describing them as descendants of the "Sudanese" — the peoples of the great black belt stretching across the Sahel.
Yet over time, the language shifted. European imperial historiography began to lighten the image of the Moors, recasting them as "swarthy Arabs" or "dusky Mediterraneans." This process mirrored the broader whitening of antiquity, in which Egypt, Carthage, and even Ethiopia were reframed to fit European racial hierarchies.
4. The Iberian Experiment and Its Aftermath
When the Moors crossed into Spain in 711, they brought with them a civilisation that outshone much of contemporary Europe. Al-Andalus became a beacon of learning, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy. The libraries of Córdoba contained hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, while much of Christian Europe was still in intellectual darkness. This flourishing was not the work of a "white" Europe but of a Black and brown Africa in partnership with the Islamic world.
Over nearly eight centuries, the Moors transformed Iberian society. Their architecture, agriculture, and intellectual traditions still shape southern Europe. Yet when the Christian Reconquista triumphed in 1492, it did so under a new ideology: purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). This doctrine sought to cleanse Spain of its African and Jewish ancestry — not because it was religiously impure, but because it was racially tainted. Here lies the tragic irony: the very people who would go on to colonise the Americas and establish rigid racial hierarchies were themselves of mixed African descent.
Genetic studies today confirm what history suggests: the modern Iberian gene pool, especially in Andalusia and Portugal, carries significant North African and sub-Saharan markers. Spain's first global explorers, conquistadors, and settlers — the so-called "Spanish" who arrived in the Americas — were not racially homogenous. Many would, by modern standards, have been considered mixed-race or "Black."
5. The Transatlantic Consequence
When these Iberian peoples carried their empire across the Atlantic, they exported not only technologies and languages but also the racial anxieties born from their own African heritage. The obsession with "blood purity" in Spain and Portugal became the template for the rigid colour hierarchies of the Americas. The cruel irony is that those who enforced whiteness and slavery in the New World often did so while suppressing or denying their own African lineage.
To acknowledge that the founders of the transatlantic empires were themselves products of African–European intermixture would upend the ideological foundation of colonial modernity. It would dismantle the myth of a purely "white" Europe civilising a "black" world and reveal instead that the global order was built by peoples whose histories, bloodlines, and cultures were profoundly entangled.
6. The Erasure of Africa's Intellectual Legacy
The erasure of the Moors' Blackness is not simply a question of pigmentation; it is an erasure of African intellectual authority. European historians have long portrayed Africa as the recipient, not the source, of civilisation. To admit that Black and African peoples once governed, taught, and civilised Europe would overturn centuries of racial narrative.The architectural grandeur of the Alhambra, the philosophical inheritance of Averroes and Ibn Tufayl, and the scientific advances in navigation, medicine, and mathematics all owe their existence to this Afro-Islamic synthesis. Yet in Western textbooks, this heritage is often attributed vaguely to "Arabs" or "Muslims," never explicitly to Africans.
7. Reclaiming Historical Truth
To reclaim the Moors as Black is not to impose anachronistic labels on the past, but to reclaim Africa's stolen place in the global story. It is to say that the civilisation which once illuminated Europe was African-led; that the intellectual seeds of the Renaissance were sown in the soil of Al-Andalus by scholars whose ancestors came from across the Sahara; and that the very concept of "Europeanness" was forged in contact and contrast with an Africa it could not truly separate itself from.
Acknowledging this truth would profoundly reshape how we understand empire, race, and power. It would expose the myth of a white Europe as the sole architect of modernity and instead reveal that the world we live in today — from its science to its politics to its racial categories — was born out of Africa's engagement with the world, not its exclusion from it.
8. The Final Reckoning
The story of the Moors is not merely a footnote in European history; it is a mirror held up to the racialised consciousness of the modern world. To call them "Arabs" or "North Africans" without acknowledging their Blackness is to continue the colonial erasure that began with the Reconquista and reached its zenith in the transatlantic slave trade.
In truth, the Moorish conquest of Iberia was the first great African empire in Europe — a testament to the power, sophistication, and humanity of a civilisation the West has spent centuries trying to forget. Restoring that truth is not an act of revisionism; it is an act of liberation.
