The philosophy of life, virtue and success behind most black families, at least with certain values and norms that were instilled in us when we were children, has always had us envision our utopia with white establishments and accomplishments. Of all my grandmother's grandchildren you would be her favourite simply because your are of a lighter complexion to the rest. When your complexion had darkened as result of melanin reaction to the Ultra-violet rays as a result of exposure to the sun, in protecting you against the cancer ill-effects thereof, your own mother, sisters, brothers, aunts and all the others in the family would somehow make you feel out of place – that you are no longer taking care of yourself or you are sick. When your complexion darkened because of the wonderful workings of this precious gift, pigment melanin, the creator has endowed a black man with, you were told that you have "lost" complexion when in actual fact you had gained colour.
What your family did not know was that the lighter the complexion the more vulnerable your skin is to ailments. The cultural milieu within which these values, norms and believes were taught to us through the family structure could not allow us to see the beauty in us in many ways.
I often heard my grandmother derogatorily call my cousin 'ntho e e ntsho' a Sesotho phrase meaning 'this black thing' or 'Rantsho' meaning 'father of blackness' shouting at him in reproof for having done something wrong. Hearing that would boost my empty light-skin good complexion ego. This mentality that I had was reinvigorated by my other big cousin brother who was obsessed with dating light-skinned girls. Each time he had seen one such sister I would overhear his conversation with his friends in which on the outset he would exuberantly exclaim 'Ma-authi ke bone ngwana le-wete, half-ngamsheshe', black township slang meaning 'friends, I've seen a beautiful girl, almost a white woman', here slang for 'beautiful girl' was 'le-wete' derived from English 'white', 'ngamsheshe' is a variation of 'ngam'la', a white person.
I remember one incident where my mother, my other cousin and myself were watching a television at night. If my memory serves me well, I was then 10 yrs of age. We were watching a movie, one of these European romantic movies, called 'Endless Love'. In the middle of it my mother was moved and carried away by the romantic life portrayed in it when she, with great passion, remarked, "White people are not like us, and they really have true love". Since that day I never envisioned my ideal future wife a black woman. My desire was to marry a white woman when I grow. Achieving that I would have felt I had reached the height of my ambition.
But what kind of mind could my mother have been expected to have when the media portrayed and still does portray a black man as an drunkard, sex maniac and women and child abuser and a white man as a loving and caring husband and/or a romantic boyfriend, whatever 'romance' means to us if it at all has any meaning.
“We must question our attitudes; No one can be superior unless you are inferior” Molefi Kete Asante, City Press, January 29, 2006.
The above statement by Asante can be dissected within the confines of introspection. Not only should we question our attitudes, our desires and pursuits are core in this introspection. An attitude is a person’s way of thinking or feeling, framework of a perception. Let us consider the proposition that your chief good can neither be something you esteem equal nor inferior to yourself. If you regard as your chief good something you esteem your equal, this would trap you either into an illusion or a frustration mode characterized by your unrealistic expectations far beyond what the object you esteem your chief good can provide. This may affect your autonomy of self for embracing an illusion can have an effect of you eluding your very existence; you begin to mythicize everything including your state of being. Concerning embracing that which is inferior to you, you yourself become inferior.
What if I have what Fanon refers to as a desire for whiteness which impels me to straighten my hair, lighten my skin, do nose jobs and act white in all mannerism and disposition? Here being white is an ideal I am so desperately striving, in futility, to bring to the reality of my being. If I can’t get a white woman to bed, the least I can settle for would be a light skinned Black sister who has either a fried hair or a pony tail attachment to her hair. The idea of being white now rules supreme in my life. I even stiffen and tighten my thick Black lips when I speak so as to modulate my accent and voice tonality to the European cultural patterns and rhythms of speech, disposition and all mannerism. In this state it can be safely said that a quasi-European personality has been fashioned, you are an ‘honorary white man’. The idea of being white is your chief good. You worship a European image, and in actual fact, a white man. Embracing an inferior idea has eventually made you inferior. You hate being yourself. You are a slave to your own desire, a desire for whiteness. The first step towards your emancipation would then be to confront the enemy that is lurking in the higher regions of your mind and recesses of your soul holding your mind captive to self-hate, and then challenge all the desires that threaten your “autonomous self”. By autonomous self I mean the self that is free from thought inhibitions in its nature impelled inextricable and indivisible duality with the universe. Being an individual here means being in an indivisible duality with the universe.
The infusion of an idea that to think and speak white is wise, and looking close to European is beautiful, was and still is demonisation of all those other than white. This idea was instilled in you at childhood; there is where it took root. Your adulthood simply matures and sanctions you inferiority complex.
Is White All Right?
Remember the somewhat innocent sayings like “Ngwana o o motle ekare ke popo” (meaning ‘this child is as beautiful as a doll”) coming out of your mother’s or aunt’s mouth? She was surely not taking about a doll resembling a dog, monkey or chimpanzee; she was talking about a doll resembling a European white girl/woman. Your sense of beauty was made analogous to a white man’s image, standards and dictates. Your poor mother or aunt had no idea about the hell she was made to raise out of you – a hell of self-hate, self-negation, and self-alienation and self-torment and destruction. This is how from childhood we were destined to be a non-people.
After more than a decade of what was proclaimed freedom and democracy in South Africa, you would think that young black South African girls and boys would have a better self-image. They don’t. In our world of bleached blonds – white-skinned, brown-skinned and black—black is still not beautiful.
Let me relate an illustrious story in this regard: My widowed sister in-law and her son are light-skinned and so was her deceased husband. She once told my wife and I how her 7yrs old son disliked the man she was dating simply because the brother was a very dark-skin fellow falling short of colour standards set in the little boy's mind.
One of the things contributing to or perhaps a potent tool used by white supremacists in this daylight identity robbery committed to our children is exposing our little daughters to playing with white dolls. If you can take two dolls that are identical, except one is brown, the other white, and present them to 10 black girls at pre-school level, and ask them to show you the doll that looks bad or the one they would like to play with, I bet you, eight out of ten will chose the white doll to play with. And if you would further ask why they think the one they chose was beautiful they will probably tell you because it is white.
It is from childhood, through exposure to things like white dolls, where "good hair/bad hair standard was modeled. That is why my beloved black sister to this day you still believe that the more naturally straight the hair, the better the quality it is.
In almost every culture children epitomize innocence and purity. Now, if a black girl plays a mother in a children's play called in Sesotho mantlwanetlwane and has a white doll as her puppet for a child, the black girl learns to relate to innocence and purity through this doll. Her sense of care, kindness, sympathy and adoration is thus evoked. This reminds me of my childhood perceptions of white people. Watching a boxing match as a child, I would feel sad so when a white contender gets blows from a black contender. I believe it was imbedded in my subconscious mind that white is innocent and pure, and black is ugly and evil. Today in wrestling sport, have you ever wondered why most black children are more inclined into having white wrestlers such as John Cena, HHH, Randy Orton etc as their icons than black wrestlers such as King Booker, Bobby Leshly, Elijah Burke etc. Is their solely based on merits? I contend it is not.
Your psychological feeling of inferiority triggered in the evil genius scientist’s mind a sense of innovation and got his destructive creative juices flowing. It pays him great dividends for you to hate yourself so much; He blesses your negative self-image by inventing and patenting bleaching (skin-whitening) creams, hair-straightening and blonding products, blue eye contact lenses and nose-job surgery. He comes wise out of your foolishness. It is in his best interest that your life rotates upon an axis of illusions. The entire cosmetics industry is making billions out of our destruction.
If know what a colon is and what its function is, you will then understand in depth and magnanimity what it means to be “colon-ised”; to be colonized means to be made or turned into somebody else’s colon.
The White Supremacy system controls a black man's thinking and all the beneficiaries of this system do not have to worry about a black man's actions. Our enemy does no longer have to tell us we are ugly, baboons, kaffirs, negroes etc, we believed them and got baptized in his hell and became new self-hating and self-destructing creatures who find pleasure in their rootlessness. We always find our "proper place" and with his indoctrination and tenacious policy he had ensured that we will stay in it. He can no longer send us to the back door, we voluntarily take ourselves there and come out of the front door praising and worshiping his god and willfully giving credence to him.
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