Chapter One
Introduction
1.1 Background of the study
Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the colour of your skin to such extent that you bleach to get like the white man? Who taught you to hate yourself, the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the sole of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to so much that you don’t want to be around each other… you should ask yourself who taught you to hate what God gave you.
The import of Malcolm X’s speech delivered on May 5, 1962 is an apt description of this study on colour and its dynamics. Colour politics is directly related to skin pigmentation and its concomitant stratification which both function as a result of race consciousness in a multiracial society. America and Europe are examples of societies with multiracial distribution. In this situation, the black race is the worst hit because of the joint effort of Trans-Atlantic Slavery and other historic events that necessitated the mass migration of the black people from Africa to America and Europe. For these black immigrants and their descendants in America and Europe, racism is an everyday reality made manifest in different dimensions and experiences of people’s social existence. The colour hierarchy that values light complexions over the dark one specifically affects people with black skin as they are often treated and evaluated based solely on their physical traits.
Therefore, blackness acquires negative connotations in the European psyche as early as the third century. Stratification based on skin colour started during the Trans-Atlantic Slave period. The institution of slavery is justified by a belief system that marked whiteness as superior to all (Hill Mark 84). The consequence of this nefarious system has had a devastating effect on the psyche of even the people with shared ancestry. For instance, the mulattoes who have a deposit of black gene in their blood tend to deny every affiliation with blackness because of the implication of affirming the identity. In the words of Franklin Frazier, he says that the mulattoes are conscious of the distinctions between themselves and the dark slaves and believes that their white blood has placed them on a better position when compared with people of pure black ancestry. The people of African descent have been regarded by whites as black whether they are of mixed African ancestry or not. To be black in colour or to be of African race is to be dirty, ugly, evil, deadly and devilish while to be white is to be clean, beautiful, good, lively, pure, innocent and godly. This shows that “colorism” a term coined by Alice Walker in 1982 is still a sensitive and complex phenomenon in the lives of black people in Diaspora.
| Project details | Contents |
|---|---|
| Number of Pages | 55 pages |
| Chapter one | Introduction |
| Chapter two | Literature review |
| Chapter three | methodology |
| Chapter four | Data analysis |
| Chapter five | Summary,discussion & recommendations |
| Reference | Reference |
| Questionnaire | Questionnaire |
| Appendix | Appendix |
| Chapter summary | 1 to 5 chapters |
| Available document | PDF and MS-word format |
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