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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

Etymology is sketchy, but most likely that isn't that case. Using light and dark to mean good and evil goes back millennia and is almost certainly unrelated to race. There are records of the term nigromancy (literally black magic) being used to refer to communicating with the dead, summing demons etc. since the middle ages.

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The middle ages started after the fall of the western Roman empire.

So there was more exposure to different races that what's conventionally thought by people in the time periods.

Like a across the Mediterranean from Greece and Italy is Africa.

Conquering Northern Africa have been a goal for centuries before that.

Also the middle East has also been a goal to capture.

So for millennia in Europe the idea of conquering the lands of darker skinned people has been a thing.

I'm not disputing any of that. I'm just not necessarily convinced that the mapping of light and dark to good and evil was connected to skin color.

And the 'black magic' traditions of the middle ages almost certainly drew their inspiration from the rituals of the Hellenistic mystery cults and related groups rather than any African tradition or cultures.

All the being said, I'm straying quite far out of my area of expertise here, so I'm certainly open to be proven wrong.

That's because it has nothing to do with skin colour and everything to do with the age old religious concept of light and darkness. However people will find a reason to get upset about anything so at this point it might as well be.

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