Physical attributes of humans

[Tezcatlipoca]

Cool; thanks.

[Aristeas]

Well...in BJ...which doesn't count as far as I'm concerned but mentionable in this discussion....Xavier's adopted father and brother are black.

In the Dune Encyclopedia(a piece of work that I consider closer to canon than anything written by BH and KA) it says the Harkonnens have Russian ancestors but this is contradicted in Heretics...or at least their Russian ancestry isn't mentioned.

10,000 years is plenty of time for a race of people to change in appearance. We aren't talking about differences on the scale of Homo habilis to Homo sapiens. We're just talking about coloration for the most part. That really doesn't take as long as you might think...depending on the environmental pressures that those people are placed under.

Given the current international community's apathetic attitude toward Africa and the fact that much of the world's wealth and power is in the hands of Europeans and those of European decent, it is very possible that the vast majority of those living in Africa would not have been able to find a way off of Earth before it was incinerated. This takes a whole lot of those African genes out of the pool. The genes of those blacks that did make it off the planet could easily be absorbed by what was, in all likelihood, a largely white population.

But honestly, I think its something else. We have to keep in mind that FH was writing Dune during an era when black folks in the US were, in a way, invisible. Authors and television/movie producers and even advertisers were under no pressure to infuse their works with racial diversity as they are now. How many Hollywood movies had black leading men in them in 1963? How many novels? Frank was a white man writing in a white man's society so it isn't that surprising that blacks were overlooked.

But while Herbert describes the physical traits of the main players in the Duniverse as being typically Caucasian...the Harkonnen's red hair, the Atreides gray eyes, the Corrino's red and blond hair, and even a mention of at least one Fremen being blond in the original Dune; I don't think we can take this to mean that there were no black people in the Duniverse; only that there weren't black people in the story itself.