By A. Elsworth Boss Ed.D.
WordPress.com – April 27, 2018
“The girls I went to school with growing up didn’t like me. I never blamed them though. It wasn’t their fault rather what they were taught, maybe by their parents and then from their grandparents and then their grandparent’s parents. They were programmed to believe that my black was beautiful and theirs’ wasn’t. It’s crazy how they hated me due to my skin tone and due to preconceived notions about me ‘thinking I was all that’ when I would have traded skin tones with them in a heartbeat.” (Diamond Durant – Morgan State University)
Black people are always talking about how racist other ethnic groups are toward them. But in fact dark skinned blacks can be some of the most racist people on the planet because we hate and discriminate against our own people on the bases of their skin color. In my experience as a high school teacher and a dark skinned black man I have witnessed this phenomenon on a daily basis. White girl, high yellow, half breed, red bone or ghost are all words used by dark skin back females to embarrass and humiliate light skin black girls. Dark skinned black males are usually referred to as coons, sambo, black monkey, tar baby, smoke etc. by other dark skinned blacks. How crazy is that? In my life time I have been called all of those names and more.
We weaponize words to attack the targets of our displeasure. In my experience this is especially true in the case of dark skinned black women. These behaviors are wide spread, generally accepted and embedded in black culture. They are symptomatic of a contagious, toxic, psychological sickness, conceived out of animosity and self-hate. It is what I call “Black Peoples’ Burden” and it all starts in childhood.
Young black girls learn everything from their mothers in the beginning. They learn how how to walk, talk and how they should feel about the world around them. But their is a greater force at work and it is the preservation of the species. Survival. Children are born with the knowledge of skin color and its’ consequences in the context of the outer world. Older children, relatives and adults reinforce the pathology that is already present.
As a child growing up in my own family where all of us shared the same dark hue, “you black monkey” was the preferred epitaph shouted at each other in anger by me and my siblings. Fortunately our household was a “No Cursing Zone” mandated by my mother and enforced by my father. But that didn’t stop the name calling in the privacy of the children’s own playing space.
At a young age my siblings and I zeroed in on the negative racial stereotypes about blacks which were as prevalent then as they are today. The only difference is in today’s world the stereotypes are more subliminal. I remember walking through white neighborhoods in North Newark, New Jersey as a child and being called nigger by a white store owner. So I knew my skin color was unacceptable to some whites but it also seem to be unacceptable to blacks. I could understand not being accepted by white people but I could not wrap my brain around the idea of being rejected by my own ethnic group.
Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark were psychologists who pioneered a study in 1947 of black children and the relationship of self-esteem and racial preference. Using two dolls one white and the other brown they tested black children and their preferences. They found that black children rejected the brown doll and preferred the white one. The psychologists interpreted this behavior as self-hatred and self-rejection. They theorized that the behavior was the result of the school segregation laws which they believed harmed black children.
The experiment has been refined and duplicated many times with similar results. Even as recent as 2010, Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer was hired by CNN to conduct the same type of empirical research examining the relationship between self-esteem, racial identity and racial preference. The results were the same as the Kenneth Clark study. Black children overwhelmingly rejected the dark color doll and preferred the white doll and considered the dark colored doll to be bad. The researchers concluded that the atmosphere of racial bias, exclusion and rap music lyrics had a negative effect on black children’s self-esteem and self-perception.
I think the answer goes much deeper than exposure to bias, discrimination or listening to the wrong music. Those experiences are catalysts not causes. The truth is much more sinister, scientific and deliberate. The self-hatred black kids display is already present in their DNA. They are born with low self-concept, self-hatred and a fear of white people.
The young black boys were no better. “Hey red bone,” they would say. “She’s not a red bone,” was my reply. “She’s my cousin.” Then he says jokingly, “Why is your cousin so yellow?” “She’s not yellow knuckle head, she is black.” “Aw man you know I was just playing.“ That was always the response from them. But I knew it was more than just a game. There was something about her light skin color or her physical facial features that set him off.
In graduate school I became obsessed with finding an answer to the question no one in the black community wanted to talk about. And the question was, “Why do dark skinned black people have so much hate for light skinned black people?” So, one day I walked around campus with a clipboard, pen and paper talking to black students about the light skin dark skin issue. Most dark skinned people avoided the discussion by saying they didn’t have a problem with light skinned blacks. But the people who did talk to me said in general, (1) Light skinned blacks think they are better than dark skinned blacks. (2) They don’t go through what dark skinned people are subjected to such as discrimination, bias and prejudice. (3) They have better opportunities in society because of their lighter skin tone. (4) Light skinned blacks are accepted more by whites. At that point I realized right away that psychologically the problem was much deeper than skin color. So I decided to duplicate the Kenneth Clark “doll study” and write my doctoral dissertation based on the results.
My research was designed to study children’s perception of physical facial features, personality judgment and the relationship of self-concept. I did not look at skin color as a factor like the other studies. But keeping in mind that subliminally, human beings tend to unconsciously add color to physical facial features when color is absent.
This approach was new, different, unique and never attempted in the past. I wanted to find out what effects physical facial features had on young children. I studied physiognomy (physical facial features in relation to personality and character traits). I used facial images drawn on plain white paper so that all the faces were the same color. By using this technique color was essentially eliminated as a cause factor. There were three girls and three boy’s faces. I only manipulated the nose and lips of each of the figures. The Caucasian face featured thin lips and thin nose. The mulatto face had medium size lips and medium size nose and the Negroid face had a wide nose and larger lips.
My research team asked six open ended questions; 1) Is there a child that you like to play with? 2) Is there a child that looks like a good child? 3) Is there a child that looks like a bad child? 4) Is there a child that looks like a white child? 5) Is there a child that looks like a black child? 6) Is there a child that looks like you?
I studied 71 pre-school children between the ages of 3 and 5 years old from three different day care centers in three different cities in New Jersey. The results were shocking. Children as young as 3 years old could identify the faces and the different ethnic groups, without seeing color.
Black children (95 percent) chose the Negroid and Mulatto drawing as “the bad face. “ While 75 percent of white children chose the Negroid and Mulatto face as the bad face. The beauty of the study was that color was not a factor. This meant that there was something going on in addition to skin color. There was something that had to do with the transfer of psychological information. If you think about it some of these children had only been alive for three years. How and why would 3 year old black and white children believe that a black youngster is bad just by looking at his or her face? This is the break through no one else has considered. The possibility of genetic transfer of DNA coded information.
Based on Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution, traits are passed on from generation to generation for the purpose of the survival of the species. The human genome is the complete set of nucleic acid sequences for humans and makes it possible for survival traits to be pasted on as encoded DNA.
There is only one race the human race. When a group of human beings are enslaved for 200 years (10 generations) each generation passes on physical, mental and emotional traits so that the group (species) has a better chance of survival. Self-hatred, low self-esteem and prejudice against certain members of one’s own ethnic group were once useful survival tools for blacks in slavery. The resulting behaviors were a method of avoiding discomfort, pain and death. These traits are no longer useful but continue to be passed on from one generation to the next.
The problem is “most” dark skinned black people do not love themselves, so it is impossible for us to love light skinned members of our own ethnic group. And, as odd as it may seem it is not our fault, we were mentally conditioned to behave this way. And the behavior was passed to each generation. The fault lies in our own refeusal to acknowledge a pathology and have the courage to stand up and change it.
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