melanophobia

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.

1867, John Wesley Thomas, “Blackwood and the Blacks”, in Poems on Sacred, Classical, Mediæval, and Modern Subjects, London: Elliot Stock, […], page 190

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.”

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

[…]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.

1903, The Medical News, page 414, column 1

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.

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

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.

1922, The Missionary Herald, page 135

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.

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

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.

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