2. A Weakly-Supported Historic Claim
In 1999, writer Mario d Valdez y Cocom popularized in a website developed for PBS Frontline the claim that Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was black. Valdez’s interest in the British queen’s African ancestry began with his belief that she “looked black” in her portraits. As he put it, Charlotte had a “negroid physiogomy” [sic] and an “unmistakable African appearance“. Others have not found it difficult to spot that in Charlotte’s portraits, which do not stand out from portraits of other royal and aristocratic women of her era. Valdez eventually expanded his claims to include the assertion that Charlotte inherited her blackness from what he described as “a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House“.
Unfortunately, Valdez offered little to no evidence to support his claims, and his theory of Queen Charlotte’s blackness is rejected by most scholars. The queen’s distant ancestress Madragana is described in the earliest sources as Moorish or Mozarab, not black African. Moors are Berbers, Arabs, or Arabized Iberians. Mozarabs are Iberian Christians who adopted Arab customs, and some of them eventually converted to Islam. Some Moors and perhaps even some Mozarabs could well have been black African. However, it is quite a jump to go from the assertion that somebody was a Moor or Mozarab to the conclusion that it follows that said person must have been black African. Not that it would matter, as seen below, even if Madragana had been black African.
