Colorism, more than skin deep, professor says
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Apr. 10—PLATTSBURGH — In 1960, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh decided their children and grandchildren, in need of a surname, would use Mountbatten-Windsor, according to www.royal.uk.
Then, they couldn't imagine Master Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor or an unidentified Royal family member's concerns over his potential skin color that left the Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry, "a bit shocked," as he affirmed in his and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex's jaw-dropping interview with Oprah Winfrey last month.
DISTANCE FROM BLACKNESS
"Colorism is rooted in hatred of Black people," Portia Allie-Turco, MS, a counselor and SUNY Plattsburgh professor, said.
"It's to be able to distance as much as possible from being Black. If you look at the origination of that it's a suggestion from colonialism, which the British were very much a part of, that suggested we weren't quite human, we were inferior in some way and we were not civilized.
"So asking about the color of the baby is asking how close the baby is going to be to the savage. Once again that anti-Black hatred. If you look at the literature, it's going to talk about this."
Colorism is "the prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group," according to Oxford Languages.
An insidious nursery rhyme cited by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing in the September 1974 issue of "Ebony" magazine puts it succinctly: "If you're black, stay back; If you're brown, stick around; If you're yellow, you're mellow; If you're white, you're all right."
Allie-Turco's dissertation at the University of the Cumberlands explores a unified framework for teaching cultural compentency skills in counseling.
"The root of colorism is about distancing any association with blackness," she said.
"It's an anti-Black sentiment. But when we say Black, who are really, really, talking about? Anti-Black racism is a direct hatred of blackness. It's the name that's given to the hatred that's directed toward Black people. Anti-Black racism devalues blackness."
It originates from the devaluation of African peoples and their civilizations, especially sub-Saharan Africans, by suggesting they were uncivilized.
"That they're savage," she said.
"Anti-Black racism is contrasted to whiteness. It's the antithesis of civilization, of whiteness, so you have these polar opposites.
"We have the savage and the civilized. We also don't talk about the fact that anti-Black racism is traumatic, and what is traumatizing that Black people consistently have to prove they are oppressed, even now in 2021."
THE MYTH OF POST-RACIAL
The BIPOC community daily experience micro-aggression and macro-aggression in the United States, where their perceptions of incidents are questioned, even turned back on them, Allie-Turco said.
"'Oh, well no, that didn't really happen,'" she said.
"Once again you are going to see that it comes back to that idea that we're now living in a post-racial society, that this is a meritocracy.
"We want to be like 'Yeah, we all do what we can to succeed, if you work hard you're going to succeed.'
"It doesn't line up with that idea that some people are not able to do this no matter how hard they work. We still want to live in this idea that we're post-racial.
"Chris Rock made a good point. He said, 'You know how many millions I have, I bet not one of these white guys would be me today.'"
Anti-Black hatred, rooted in oppression and prejudice, goes back centuries.
The race theory of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was based on bad science and ideas that are discredited by people who study genetics today, according to facinghistory.org
"In colonizing people of color and taking away their land, resources and justifying that against those white Christian values, to be able to manage the cognitive dissonance, the discrepancy between what you believe in, your values and what you're actually doing, you have to dehumanize somebody," Allie-Turco said.
"WHERE THE REAL WORK IS'
Queen Elizabeth II, who has ruled longer than any British monarch, is descended, twice over, from George III, who the colonists rebelled against during the American War of Independence.
Afterward, 12 U.S Presidents owned enslaved people of African descent, and eight of them did so while in office.
"They believed all men were created equal except for women, Black people and Native people," Allie-Turco said.
"If everybody is created equal, what do you mean that some people are half human? You are doing that so you can turn around and say that they're animals. So whatever I do to them is fine."
This translates today in generational disparities in healthcare, housing, employment, education, mass incarceration, etc., Allie-Turco said.
"With taking away land that doesn't belong to you, that's how it translates when you are dehumanized," she said.
"And if you accept the system is racist, then you have to accept that all of these other things could potentially be true and that they need to be addressed and that's where the real work is."
Email Robin Caudell:
Twitter:@RobinCaudell
