black heart

redbubble

Across many cultures, humans have long believed the heart governed emotion, thought, and character—and was even the seat of the soul itself. The color black, meanwhile, has ancient associations with evil, evoking darkness, storms, decay, and death. In Old English, we can find both heart used for a persons’s emotional and moral center and black characterizing something as “wicked.” Black-hearted, or “malevolent,” doesn’t appear until at least the 1630s. A black heart, specifically, emerges in record by the 1700s and 1800s, often appearing in literary contexts to describe a melancholy, hateful person with evil intentions.

In agricultural contexts, black heart has named a type of dark-colored cherry since the 17th century, and since the late 18th century, various diseases of plants, especially potatoes, that cause them to rot inside out. This black heart, drawing on black‘s sense of “rottenness” and heart as “core,” may have influenced increasing uses of black heart as a metaphor for systemic moral corruption in the 20th and 21st centuries. As one movie reviewer memorably commented on the 2006 documentary on the fraudulent Enron Corporation, “Enron was the twisted black heart of everything wrong with American capitalism.”

In the late 20th century, many black scholars, writers, artists, activists, and everyday people began variously using black heart to express pride in and love of their black identity and experience, reclaiming the long, historical racism against blackness. On social media, they may use the black heart emoji, released in 2016, for emphasis.