Counter-Currents
The Anti-Black Plague
“Black Death” of 1347-1351 Kills Half of Europe . . .
Black Women Most Affected
Jim Goad
1,438 words / 10:42
Even the fleas in medieval London hated black women.
That’s the only conclusion I could draw from a series of headlines this week implying that no one suffered more from the bubonic plague that ravaged London in the mid-1300s than black women.
This came as quite the wake-up call to me, seeing as how in my repulsively bigoted ignorance I was unaware there were any black women in Western Europe back then.
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Many of the headlines unequivocally stated this as established fact. Here are two identical headlines that go way beyond the “pale” and not only state that black women were more statistically likely to die from the “Black Death” — they were its primary victims:
Tech News: Black Women Were Primary Victims of Black Death in Medieval London
Ancient Origins: Black Women Were Primary Victims of Black Death in Medieval London
Holy moly, sounds like it sucked to be a black woman in medieval London!
Taking it down a notch from “primary victim” status, the following headlines imply that black women suffered a higher statistical likelihood of dying from der schwarze Tod than all other groups in London:
The Voice: Black women of African descent more likely to die of medieval plague
The Guardian: Women with Black African ancestry ‘at greater risk when plague hit London’
Okay, but why? Don’t be a dummy — the answer was RACISM:
The Telegraph: ‘Racism in medieval England’ may have led to black people dying of bubonic plague
And in something called “ianVisits”: Unearthing Inequality: Black Women were more likely to die during London’s great plagues
Where in the holy name of Aunt Jemima are they getting this information? According to the BBC — which in this case stands for British Broadcasting Corporation rather than Big Black Cock — the Museum of London has the scoop:
Black women most likely to die in medieval plague, Museum of London says
The BBC article mentions a “study” on which this odd conclusion is based . . .
The study is the first archaeological exploration showing how race may have influenced a person’s risk of death during what was known as the Great Pestilence or Great Mortality. . . .
Data on bone and dental changes of the 145 individuals from East Smithfield emergency plague cemetery, St Mary Graces and St Mary Spital formed the basis of the study. . . .
The report said: “There is a significantly higher proportion of people of estimated African affiliation in the plague burials compared to the nonplague burials (18.4% vs. 8.3%).”
. . . but the BBC doesn’t mention the study’s name, nor where a curious soul such as myself might find the study.
The estimated death toll in London from the 1348-1350 outbreak of bubonic plague was 30,000-35,000, so I’m going to brazenly speak truth to power here and suggest that a sample size of 145 — only 40 of whom were determined to have died from the plague — is statistically iffy.
Being the diligent, truth-seeking gumshoe that I am, I had to pore over all the other aforementioned headlines to conclude that the “study” in question was written by a Dr. Rebecca Redfern, Dr. Joseph Hefner, Dr. Dorothy Kim, and Professor Sharon DeWitte.
Still, none of the articles listed the study’s title, nor where I might be able to take a gander at it myself. Several of the articles say it was already published by Bioarchaelogy International, but according to the University of Florida Press, which publishes that periodical, its most recent issue was from the Summer of 2023 and makes no mention of black women dropping dead from Da Plague in London during the mid-1300s.
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
Only one of the articles about this shockingly invisible new study, dated from this past Tuesday, said it was “to be published,” which makes me suspect that it hasn’t even been released yet.
I contacted the University of Florida Press by both e-mail and voicemail about how I might be able to take a gander at this study. I also contacted one of the study’s co-authors, Joseph Hefner. No one responded. It appears that either the alleged publisher or the study’s authors issued some sort of press release, then a credulous media gobbled it up and puked it back out to the public.
The most pressing question is, “How in the heck did they determine these 700-year-old corpses were black?” According to The Telegraph:
It is understood the Museum of London will not conduct any DNA testing into the plague burial remains.
Okay, so no DNA testing. Innnnnnteresting. The Guardian says [emphasis added]:
The results reveal nine plague victims appeared to be of African heritage, while 40 seemed to have white European or Asian ancestry. Among the non-plague burials, the figures were eight and 88 respectively.
At least there are some numbers tucked in there. So what they seem to be saying is that a higher quotient of plague victims appeared to be of African heritage — which could mean “Egyptian” rather than “Bantu,” for all I can tell — than those who didn’t die from the plague. And what kind of half-assed conclusions are they drawing from this?
Based on a patchwork collage of quotes attributed to the study’s authors, this is all evidence that:
Intersectionality — the compounded harm of race and gender and misogynoir — may have impacted mortality during medieval pandemic disease.
Not only does this research add to our knowledge about the biosocial factors that affected risks of mortality during medieval plague epidemics, it also shows that there is a deep history of social marginalization shaping health and vulnerability to disease in human populations.
[The plague] is portrayed as being an indiscriminate killer, but we actually know it wasn’t.
Apparently, “misogynoir” is a portmanteau coined to describe hatred of black women, yet it makes me hate whatever nincompoop came up with it.
These results also, according to the authors of this unnamed study that has either yet to be published or that no one is willing to link to, demonstrate “structural racism’s devastating effects” and the “health outcomes of structural and anti-black racism.”
But what’s to say that the “non-plague deaths,” from which purported blacks suffered lower alleged instances of reputed victimhood, weren’t the result of being beaten to death, burned at the stake, or ritually disemboweled? These were violent times, were they not? If one had an agenda, as the authors seem to have, one could make a case from the same results that black people escaped some of the era’s harsher, human-inflicted punishments compared to white indigenous Londoners.
Not that there’s anything weird about it, but study co-author Rebecca Redfern has been writing about corpses from fourteenth-century London cemeteries for quite some time. In two previous studies which I was actually able to find, she alleges that the reputed non-white corpses show absolutely no sign of maltreatment relative to the purportedly white corpses.
From 2019:
The study failed to identify any health disparities or differences in funerary treatment.
From 2021:
When we looked at how the skeletons were buried at East Smithfield, we found that none of the plague victims with Black [sic] African or mixed heritage had been maltreated as you might expect to see in a population group that might have suffered from discrimination. We could see that their bodies were placed in the graves with care and respect, as can be seen in the image.
So she’d previously gone out of her way to note that these allegedly black corpses had been treated with care and respect, yet suddenly her vadge-flaps are howling about structural anti-black racism.
What a dingbat.
The plague outbreak of the mid-1300s reportedly appeared in North Africa before it made its way to England. If one were so inclined, one could easily blame North Africans — who are not the same as sub-Saharans — for trying to commit genocide against the English.
It’s also widely thought that the plague pandemic of the mid-1300s was first introduced to Europe in 1346 as part of a deliberate biological-warfare attack by Asian soldiers in the Golden Horde who catapulted plague-infected corpses over the walls into the Crimean city of Kaffa. If you’re looking for “structural racism,” there it is.
At least the fleas of medieval Europe can proudly claim that no one ever called them “nigger.”
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24 comments
Great work, Jim.
As for the karaoke, would you sing “Cattle Call” (Eddy Arnold version)?
I will sing and yodel it. Check the home page in the coming days for how to set up these karaoke fundraiser performances.
YES!
I will do that, sir. I wasn’t sure you’d go for the song because of the yodeling.
The yodeling will just be the icing on an already delectable cake.
Hell, I’d even do “Hocus Pocus” by Focus to help the fundraiser.
Hmmmm, tempting as that is, I’m thinking Paralyzed by Legendary Stardust Cowboy. I’m going to cash in my change jar….
Systemic misogynoirism at its worst.
Even if the study identified the bodies correctly (though they didn’t say how), which seems doubtful since there just weren’t that many Blacks there at the time to make such an outcome likely, there are also some other problems. For one thing, as noted, they’re jumping to conclusions about what caused the difference in outcome, accusing our ancestors of wrongdoing. In the present politically charged climate, of course this lends itself to support narratives that fan the flames of anti-White agitation. One other problem is that a small statistical sample (even if this study weren’t cooked up out of fairy dust) has a relatively large margin of error.
Just as a thought experiment here… Suppose that a group of self-loathing White leftists who cooked up a “study” like this were met by a pack of “migrants” with an average IQ of 70, now whipped up into a frenzy after hearing about it on the “telly”. What would they say to the howling pack of rioters? “Hey guys, don’t kill us; we’re activists pretending to be scientists, and we write fake studies and give them to the media to get you all riled up.”
Surprisingly, without the plague of the fourteenth century there would have been no Renaissance in Europe. Europe was terribly overpopulated, people lived on top of each other, and the land, at the level of agricultural development of this epoch, could not feed them. The Crusades, which eliminated part of European knightly chivalry, came to a standstill, and the Conquest and even the discovery of America by Columbus were still more than a hundred years away. Only the Black Death eliminated a significant number of the population, providing those who remained not only with a relatively tolerable life in the emptied space, but also giving them the opportunity to engage not only in pure survival, but also in crafts, and subsequently also in science/scholarship and arts.
It’s also widely thought that the plague pandemic of the mid-1300s was first introduced to Europe in 1346 as part of a deliberate biological-warfare attack by Asian soldiers in the Golden Horde who catapulted plague-infected corpses over the walls into the Crimean city of Kaffa. If you’re looking for “structural racism,” there it is.
There was no such thing as the Golden Horde, at least under this name.
And, well, maybe, highly civilized Europeans should not have killed all their cats as “servants of Satan.” Cats could help destroy rats and mice that carried plague fleas. But no, religious prejudices turned out to be stronger.
There was no such thing as the Golden Horde, at least under this name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Caffa
“The siege of Caffa was a siege of the Genoese port town of Caffa by a large Crimean Tatar army under the Golden Horde, led by their Khan Jani Beg. The Mongol army allegedly threw the bodies of Mongol warriors who had died of plague over the walls of the besieged city, which is considered one of the earliest examples of biological warfare.”
The state you speak about was called Ulug Ulus, i.e. The Great State. It has never called itself The Golden Horde. This name is taken from Muscovite chronicles of the SEVENTEENTH century, when the Ulug Ulus a.k.a Ulus of Jöchi/Zhoshy, has not more existed for 200+ years. Some of my Türkic brothers, even some of Nogays, now use the word Golden Horde (Altyn Orda) to describe this medieval state in positive light. I understand why they do so, but anyway they are historically wrong. As wrong are people who use word “Aryan race,” because Aryan is a linguistic term, not a racial one.
“The Crimean interior came under the control of the Turco-Mongol Golden Horde from 1239 to 1441. The name Crimea (via Italian, from Turkic Qirim) originates as the name of the provincial capital of the Golden Horde, the city now known as Staryi Krym.”
This may be true. This also may not be true. We remember very well the propaganda stories about the Germans killing Belgian children with bayonets and making soap from the dead corpses of soldiers killed in the First World War. We also remember about soap made from Jews during the Second World War, so called RJF. And we also remember about the babies killed by Iraqi soldiers of Saddam Hussein in Kuwaitian incubators.
So then what we can sure say about the events of seven hundred years ago. Especially considering that almost everything written about the ancient and medieval Türkic peoples was written by their enemies: Westerners, Russians, Chinese, Persians, Arabs. The image of terrible barbarians, common in China since the time of Mode/Modun/Metehan and untill all “Mulan” movies, or in Europe since the time of Attila, later the Genghisids, is such that it even entered the works of Tolkien, where the orcs are clearly modeled on medieval European stereotypes of the ancient Türks.
This is what the great Russian scholar türkologist Lev N. Gumilyov called the “Black Legend” – this is how he characterized what the Western European and Russian medieval chronicles wrote about the so-called “Tatar-Mongols”, who also never called themselves as such.
And I always thought that the Black Africans in the medieval Europe had been only in Mel Brooks’s film parodies.
“The jig is up!”
There were hardly any. Someone who apparently was trying to “prove” that Britain was always multiracial did an intensive search of the records, yet found evidence of no more than a few dozen Blacks having set foot on Britain prior to the Renaissance – ever.
During the Age of Exploration, a small amount of Black flotsam found their way to London. Then Queen Elizabeth I hired a Dutch captain to ship the “negars and blackamoores” back to Africa. Later in history, when more flotsam trickled in, a couple other remigrations of London’s few Blacks occurred, bound for Sierra Leone. So it wasn’t until the 20th century that large numbers of the darlings showed up, brought in by the government without consulting the will of the people.
The modern moviemakers want us to believe that Anne Boleyn and Queen Charlotte both were black.
I think Tom Rowsell, (Survive The Jive), has yet another great debunking of this that is out already. As always Mr. Goad, your writing on this topic is a beautiful exposition of scathing wit that creates a necessary deconstruction and demolition.
How we long for the medieval era. There were almost no strangers/aliens to be found in our lands. If they were to be found there, they were met with a healthy cold shoulder, clear signs of, you are not welcome here stranger, and immediate calls for redress to those responsible for protecting the homeland. The same is true of these invaders in their homelands. We will bring it back and we will do so before it is too late.
These papers do serve their purpose even if they are debunked. As I see it they:
Money Launder another payment in the anti-European-man spoils/patronage system.
Though failing in the discrimination myth, put another brick in the wall of normalizing the idea that non-Europeans have long made up a significant portion of the European population.
Every single one of these people has left a paper trail. They have also constructed a tyrannical system. More often than not, those systems change hands and the shoe goes on the other foot.
Here it is:
Black Plague Victims DEBUNKED
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYa5bxUkixU
Brilliant, Jim. I never saw this coming.
In related news, I can’t wait to hear about how the 14th century “Red Death” was racist against (feather) Indians, and the yellow fever is racist against Asians…
Braindead black skin fetish rags like The Guardian were whining during the pandemic about black and Asian people disproportionately dying. The solution to that was simple: to tell the superstitious plague-spreading halfwits to stop listening to their leaders advising them not to take the vaccine. Instead, the insane English left were putting out dogshit like this ‘rap,’ with Jeremy Corbyn’s certifiable brother, and some barely sentient screeching, growling black clown:
https://youtu.be/PjinEc_z930?si=VX189BYQB0H6BTBP
You’re not being entirely fair, Jim. There is textual evidence supporting this story. If you crack open Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, you’ll find Ye Tale of Ye Personne of Coloure which talks about how ye Transgenderye Genderyequir Personnes of Coloure were subject to ye Misogynoirye by ye Patriarchie. It’s just before the part where Chaucer talks about the importance ye Actionne that Beeth Affirmatiuve and ye Repairationnes unto Slaverie.
This guy does some good debunking of horseshit like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYa5bxUkixU&ab_channel=SurvivetheJive
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