melanophobia

English

Etymology 1

From Ancient Greek μέλᾱς (mélās) +‎ -o- +‎ -phobia.

Noun

melanophobia (uncountable)

1. Fear, hate, or dislike of black people.
   • 1867, John Wesley Thomas, “Blackwood and the Blacks”, in Poems on Sacred, Classical, Mediæval, and Modern Subjects, London: Elliot Stock, […], page 190:

     The sympathy of Maga with white oppressors of black men, has been shown in several recent articles, in which it classes negroes with monkeys and gorillas; as inferior to the whites as white men are to angels.—Vol. xci, p 4; and xcvii, 34, 152. This, and its unjust and bitter invectives against the anti-slavery party, as hypocrites and ultra-radicals,—xcix, 589, 590—are among the most melancholy instances of Melanophobia with which we are acquainted.

   • 1893, Rufus L. Perry, “Color of the Egyptians”, in The Cushite or the Descendants of Ham as Found in the Sacred Scriptures and in the Writings of Ancient Historians and Poets from Noah to the Christian Era, Springfield, Mass.: Willey & Co., pages 52 and 54:

     Modern commentators and preachers explain the first four verses of the first chapter as referring to the “Church’s love unto Christ” and the fifth verse as “the Church’s confession of her deformity.” Surely this illegitimate idea was hatched in a brain diseased with what Dr. Edward W[ilmot] Blyden calls “melanophobia.” […] Edward W. Blyden, LL.D., writing from Liberia, says: “ […] The cure for American colorphobia, or more accurately, melanophobia is in the heart of Africa.”

   • 1903, The Medical News, page 414, column 1:

     […] papers of the last two months, arising from every section of the country, that a glance into the medical aspects of melanophobia cannot be devoid of interest and should not pass unobserved. In the leading journals from the North and South there have appeared editorials of great acumen and power, but none seem as yet to have dealt, except in a superficial manner, with the race problem as seen from a biological, ethnological or medical standpoint.

   • 1921, Israel Zangwill, “Afterword”, in Works of Israel Zangwill: The Melting Pot; Chosen Peoples, American Jewish Book Company, section III, page 206:

     Melanophobia, or fear of the black, may be pragmatically as valuable a racial defence for the white as the counter-instinct of philoleucosis, or love of the white, is a force of racial uplifting for the black.

   • 1922, The Missionary Herald, page 135:

     Robert has hair a shade lighter than your lady’s, Nannee’s a shade or two darker. Both have black eyes. I am blacker than either. But I ought not to tell you so, for having become Yankee now, of course you are being steeped in their melanophobia.

   • 1968, Fernando Henriques, Family and Colour in Jamaica, 2nd edition, Macgibbon & Kee:

     Our press tells us daily of outrages and stupidities committed under pressure of melanophobia.

   • 1970, Marston Bates, A Jungle in the House: Essays in Natural and Unnatural History, New York, N.Y.: Walker and Company, pages 191 and 193:

     Restaurants and bars could put up signs saying “Only Leucoderms Will Be Served,” which would look appropriately ridiculous. And it might be possible to work out a quarantine for real-estate agents infected with melanophobia. […] It is odd that a beautiful skin should be a handicap; and I, at least, find the darker human skins more attractive than the pale ones. This must be generally true if one can judge by the amount of time paleface people spend in trying to darken their skins. This leucoderm preoccupation with getting dark must look ridiculous to a melanoderm; it certainly makes melanophobia seem odd.

   • 1972, Plural Societies, page 24:

     Acculturation and assimilation (“Creolization”), and their solvent action on traditional cultures and values, are under-emphasized; a broody melanophobia prevails.

   • 1976, Proceedings of the Central States Anthropological Society, page 33:

     Although Anglophilia is still powerful and melanophobia still exists, nowadays people also recognize achieved status independent of color and within color groupings.

   • 1980, The Journal of Anthropology, page 125:

     Other studies (Ellis 1957; Henriques 1968; Miller 1969; Rogler 1943) emphasize the continuing existence of the black and white West Indian's feelings of melanophobia [hatred of blackness].

   • 1984, Lord Rothschild, Random Variables, William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, →ISBN, page 78:

     Union bashing and Union beatification, Hyper-taxation, Melanophobia (a new word coined for this occasion), and the creaking, groaning and crumbling […]

   • 1988 January 24, Jean-Pierre A. Maldonado, “No Surprise”, in The Arizona Republic, 98th year, number 251, Phoenix, Ariz., page C6, column 5:

     [Evan] Mecham’s melanophobia is such that anyone with a dark skin is automatically disqualified from even being near him.

   • 1992, Dissertation Abstracts International: The Humanities and Social Sciences, University Microfilms International, page 1960, column 1:

     The “black but beautiful” passage from the Song of Solomon provides the base for examining traditions in the synagogue and the church dealing with melanophobia.

   • 2002, Tinabantu, page 80, column 1:

     Acts of racism are White supremacist acts in the general race war; acts of Negrophobia/Melanophobia are White supremacist acts against Blacks in that race war.

   • 2004, ALA Bulletin: A Publication of the African Literature Association, page 29:

     Raphael Confiant has just responded angrily to the comments of Alain Finkelkraut whom he accuses of melanophobia – a form of Negrophobia.

   • 2006, Jerome C. Branche, Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature, University of Missouri Press, →ISBN, page 114:

     Given the overvaluation of whiteness and the accompanying melanophobia of colonial Latin American society, it is not surprising to find in the nineteenth century a perhaps paradoxical valorization of of mulattoness even in the creative writing that purported to promote the abolition of slavery.

Synonyms

• Blackophobia
• Negrophobia

Translations

fear, hate, or dislike of black people — see Negrophobia

Etymology 2

From Ancient Greek μέλᾰν (mélan) +‎ -o- +‎ -phobia.

Noun

melanophobia (uncountable)

1. (rare) Fear of ink.
   • 1840 February 28, Thomas Whytehead, [Letter to F. W. H⸺]; republished as Poetical Remains and Letters of the Late Rev. Thomas Whytehead, M.A., London: Daldy, Isbister & Co., […], 1877, page 75:

     This odious apparatus of pen and ink! Why cannot we hold intercourse together without this formidable machinery? I have a perfect melanophobia, and I go on like Coleridge, with his headache in bed, longing to write, yet always wanting the time for something else.

   • 1882 July 15, “Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849”, in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, volume 54, number 1,394, London: […] the Office, […], page 88, column 1:

     To most people suffering from too much pen the idea of homœopathic treatment is inexpressibly repulsive. They leave no address; they would, if it were possible, omit the cursed implement from their baggage altogether; they suffer from what might be, if it has not already been, called melanophobia—from a morbid horror and shuddering at the sight of ink.

   • 2002, Nicholas M. Railton, “Methodist Missionary”, in Transnational Evangelicalism: The Case of Friedrich Bialloblotzky (1799–1869), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, →ISBN, page 162:

     Although ‘greatly subject to melanophobia’, or the dread of ink, he penned a forty-six page letter suggesting changes to the society’s operations: […]