Is Self-Love The Key To Ending Africa’s Skin Bleaching Syndrome?

To be black in the world today is to be stigmatised for having dark skin. To be light-skinned, on the other hand, is to be celebrated in line with western beauty standards.

Black people not only experience this stigma from outside of their “racial” group. The bias against dark skin has also been internalised by black people the world over and manifests as colourism within the black community.

My research suggests that African-Americans consider light skin as the most ideal personal characteristic one can have. And this internalised bias towards whiteness is not only limited to the US. In my 30 years of studying this subject, I have found it to be prevalent in all places where people of African descent live – including Togo, Senegal, South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria.

For as long as black people continue to idealise light skin, the bleaching syndrome will continue to afflict many dark-skinned populations.

THE BLEACHING SYNDROME

The bleaching syndrome has three components. In the first place, it’s psychological, involving the adoption of alien ideals and the rejection of native characteristics.

African-American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted a famous “doll study” in the 1940s that showed how black children as young as three come to understand their place in the world as “less than”. They reach this conclusion long before they have the ability to articulate race. It’s a phenomenon black psychologists refer to as a “colour complex”.