The Moors were mostly Arabized Berbers, as is a majority of the Moroccan population today, and northwest Africa generally. They aren't "black" but as the narrator says, are relatively diverse in physical characteristics. They're mostly brown, without Negroid features--probably darker than most Mediterranean Europeans, but not black by any means. Go to Morocco and check it out. It's possible that there were black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa among the invading Muslim armies, and that they caught the eye of fair-skinned Europeans. Berber is a linguistic/cultural category. In Morocco, there are still noticeable differences between Berber (majority) and Arab (minority) components of the population. Arab women tend to wear black hijabs that they use to cover their faces when a man approaches. Berber women seem less inclined to bother with that.
I watched the video. It's interesting that the narrator talks about confirmation bias, but ignores that his own confirmation bias is woven through the entire piece. He's got an American (US) accent. If he simply used the US OMB/Census description of racial categories based on ancestry or origin for self-identification purposes, the question of whether the Moors were black is easily answered, but it's not the answer he gives or the conclusion he reaches. With regard to ancestry and origin, "people of North Africa" are specifically mentioned within one of the racial categories used in the US. He could have simply stated what category that was and ended it there. Jabar (or Jabbar) doesn't identify, explain, or use the concept and categories of race used in the US for people both indigenous and from elsewhere, including North Africa. That's fine, appropriate even. So, he must identify, explain, or use a concept of race used somewhere else in the world or from some other source he's consulted? No, he doesn't do that either. He could have made up his own concept and told us how he applied it, but he didn't even do that. The farther back one goes, reliable written sources become more sparse, but it is clear that long, long ago people of the Mediterranean region, including North Africa, recognized differences in people's superficial physical features based on place of origin. Two examples are the Babylonian Talmud, almost 2,000 years old, and the Egyptian Book of Gates from about 3,000 years ago. Jab(b)ar uses neither of those sources, nor apparently any other. If applying the question of race or blackness to people where race isn't a legal or customary concept makes any sense at all, and I don't argue that it does, then the person attempting to classify a historical and diverse group of people really needs to identify the standard he's using. As sincere as the piece is, it reflects glaring ignorance, and ultimately Jab(b)ar attempts to answer a question that doesn't need to be answered. He does so using his own confirmation bias and not much else. He says that it turned out to be a controversial video, but he misses the reason. It isn't others' confirmation bias that prompts controversy on the point. It's that he applied his own confirmation bias to reach a definitive answer, without logical or factual basis. He would have been better off providing the historical information that he did, but concluding that it's not a meaningful question or one that lends itself to a definitive answer.
