Blackness possesses an immense range of negative and fearful associations. Basically black is the color of night, when your enemies can surprise you and when ghosts or nameless, shapeless beings can attack you unexpectedly. Cosmogonically, blackness is chaos; ontogenically it is the sign of death and the tomb, or of the ambivalent womb. Though pallor is associated with death and hence with evil—heretics and demons are often pallid in the Middle Ages—black indicates evil in places as disparate as Europe, Africa, Tibet, and Siberia, and recent experiments with American children seem to show a prejudice against the color black separate from racial attitudes. Often black is associated with the direction west, because of the sunset. Ontologically it is nonbeing, the void; physically it connotes blindness; psychologically it signifies the fearful land of dreams and the unconscious. It is connected with mental depression, with intellectual stupidity, with religious despair, and with moral sin. It is associated with dirt and poison and plague. In ancient Mexico, it was associated with the obsidian weapons of war. A man running for mayor of a large city in the last decade learned how difficult it was to use the term black [sic] in a positive way. Addressing a large crowd of black voters, he assured them that though his skin was white, his heart was as black as theirs! In proudly asserting its blackness, a whole race has pitted itself against one of the most ancient and powerfully prejudiced symbols in the human psyche.
(Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977], 66 [footnote omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 