Black-Dutch

Black Dutch is a term with several different meanings in United States dialect and slang. It generally refers to racial, ethnic, or cultural roots. Its meaning varies, and such differences are contingent upon time and place. Several varied groups of multiracial people have sometimes been referred to as, or identified as "Black Dutch," most often as a reference to their ancestors.

Black Dutch is an unofficial American ethnic designation, often derogatory, of an ill-defined and marginal group of dark skinned people. There are a number of competing theories regarding the meaning and origin of the term, none of which has been satisfactorily proven.

It has been posited that the Pennsylvania Dutch could be the source of the term, which would translate roughly as Schwarze Deutsche in German. Unfortunately, the term has never been encountered in any written record among the Pennsylvania Dutch. There is not a single, verified example of the early German speaking settlers in Pennsylvania referring to themselves as Black Dutch. Nor are there any references to the term among the non-German inhabitants of Pennsylvania or western Maryland.

Another theory is that the term refers to Dutch of Spanish extraction and possibly Sephardic Jewish colonists. There are claims that the term "Black Dutch" first appears in U.S. colonial history as a reference to people from the Netherlands of darker skin than other European colonists, but once again, there are no contemporaneous sources for such claims. It has also been posited that the term Black Dutch was applied to the descendants of children (usually illegitimate) of Spanish soldiers and Dutch women born during the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands in the 16th century. This is an appealing theory and may be the correct one, yet despite considerable effort researchers have failed to find a single verifiable example for the use of this term. The term Black Dutch is unknown in the Netherlands. If the term Black Dutch was ever used in the Netherlands it may have had negative connotations. Many settlers from Holland did come to the North American colonies, and most settled in the New York area. But once gain, the theory is unsupported by documentation. It should be noted that the term Black Dutch has not been found in any New York sources of the 17th through 19th centuries.

The advent of inexpensive DNA tests may finally help answer the question of just who were the Black Dutch. One such example comes from the testing companies Ancestry and 23AndMe. A DNA sample supplied by a white male in his fifties whose ancestors claimed to be Black Dutch came back negative for Native American DNA. But the results came back 10% for Iberian DNA markers, 1.3% for Ashkenazi Jewish, with the remainder being from the British Isles and France (nothing from Germany). So, the Spanish-Dutch and Jewish sources for the term may indeed have merit.

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