At the time that Ibn al-Jawzi wrote his 12th-century treatise, “Illuminating the Darkness: Virtues of the Sudanese and Ethiopians” (Tanwir al-Ghabash fi Fadl al-Sudan wa-l-Habash), two explanations were prevalent for the etiology of black skin in humans. The first characterized blackness as a divine punishment inflicted upon descendants of Noah’s son, Ham. The second interpreted blackness scientifically, as a natural product of the extreme environment inhabited by Sub-Saharan Africans. This racial-naturalist argument—which construes humankind as subdivided into immutable, biologized kinds influenced by history and environment—was used by authors simultaneously to falsify the Curse of Ham and to substantiate racialized links between biology and behavior, as people blackened by the sun were also said to be scorched into states of irrationality, hypersexuality, and so on. At times, naturalism was taken to other specious extremes, with the 10th-century geographer al-Idrisi alleging that in the intensely hot climes of the Swahili coast and nearby islands, even plants and animals were uniformly black. By contrast, in his section on the virtues of blackness in nature, Ibn al-Jawzi points out the healing powers of such commonplace things as nigella seeds, psyllium, and ebony. He thus takes an expansive view of blackness as naturally occurring across climes and highlights its healthfulness and physiological utility for all bodies. This paper interrogates how racial naturalist discourses are posited, cited, and refashioned across a variety of genres of Arabic literature. I compare Ibn al-Jawzi’s pharmacological discussion with a range of other munazarat (responsa) composed in the early Islamic period that aimed at articulating blackness’ value vis-à-vis the Muslim community’s Arab social core. I argue that Ibn al-Jawzi deviates from the techniques of racial-naturalist discourse found in these sources while still adhering to the science of the times. By focusing on the medical applications rather than the pure aesthetics of black objects—and thus on these objects’ subtle or invisible but nonetheless significant effects on various bodies—Ibn al-Jawzi sketches a phenomenology of blackness and its effects.