Černoch is a neutral word for a black person in Czech. Not a slur. ("Negr" would be the slur, ironically taken from translations of Mark Twain; we had to import

Černoch is a neutral word for a black person in Czech. Not a slur. ("Negr" would be the slur, ironically taken from translations of Mark Twain; we had to import the slur from America.) Remember that for most Czechs until very recently, black people were characters from stories, if not fairy-tales, not someone whom they would actually ever meet in person. Until today, except for the biggest cities with international universities, the country is almost totally white with a few Vietnamese immigrants in between. The history of empires and subjugations took a completely different course here than in the former colonial and slavery powers to the west. Here, both the elites and the yoked ones were always native Europeans. Black people were, save a few documented individuals, as absent from local history as the Japanese samurai.