Internalized Structures of Oppression: the Most Dangerous Generational Trauma

I published an article in 2020 in the Journal of Black Studies titled, "We Have a Black Professor?": Rejecting African Americans as Disseminators of Knowledge. In it, I argued that Black students at predominantly Black institutions (PBIs) often do not perceive Black faculty as disseminators of knowledge. Instead, Black students view Black faculty through a racialized lens, ignoring their positionality as academic experts in positions of power. I contextualized the cause of this rejection in the binary construct of race itself and argued further that internalized structures of oppression serve as the catalyst for this phenomenon.

Internalized structures of oppression are not limited to higher education. This type of internalized anti-black racism permeates all sectors of society, and it's not simply confined to Black people.

The common denominator is the cult of whiteness.

In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known colloquially as “the doll tests” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children.

Their testimony was a key piece of evidence used in the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. Below is a description of the "doll tests" and its conclusions:

Drs. Clark used four dolls, identical except for color, to test children’s racial perceptions. Their subjects, children between the ages of three to seven, were asked to identify both the race of the dolls and which color doll they prefer. A majority of the children preferred the white doll and assigned positive characteristics to it. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” created a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged their self-esteem.?

But Brown did not go far enough. It is not simply "prejudice, discrimination, and segregation" that create feelings of inferiority in Black folks. And the remedy to oppression in the Brown case (and I am being reductive here) was largely to narrow the proximity to whites. In other words, end segregation in schools, move Black children to white schools (hostile territories), and by placing Black children in close proximity to their white counterparts this should end oppression.

This "solution" ignores the real problem - a problem that we still have not yet solved--the construct of whiteness itself.

So what is this construct and how did it begin?

This is how I explain the construct and the myth of whiteness in the article:

Over the course of the 400 years that Africans have lived in America, they have been defined by many identifiers: Negro, Colored, Black, and African American. Those terms, however, have been socially constructed by others. In fact, Smedley (1998) contended that race is not biological and is a relatively modern conception. She explained that in the 18th century, race became a “new mode of structuring inequality in human societies” and that the concept “evolved in the American colonies and soon was present throughout the overseas territories of the colonizing countries of Western Europe” (p. 694). Therefore, the identity of Africans in America has been largely defined by non-Africans. Sometime during the 18th century, the American Colonists began to construct race as a binary. Furthermore, European racial distinctions based on country of origin—Italian, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, German—were traded for a single identity—whiteness.

The concept of the binary construction of race is built upon a myth of whiteness a paradigm for all humanity. Whiteness provided and still provides far more political, cultural, and social currency than those previous geographical identities. Morrison (1992) described this phenomenon thusly:

Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable, not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent, not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.

Morrison argued that whiteness cannot exist without blackness—its dark other. In order for whiteness to function as a vehicle for cultural hegemony (Gramsci, 1926/1937), it must have a binary opposite by which to define itself. Whiteness cannot forge its own way as the paradigm for all American life unless it constructs blackness as its dark polar opposite and example of what not to be, what not to do, and what not to love.

Whiteness has also been constructed as normative. McIntosh (1988) argued that Whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, just as men are carefully taught not to recognize male privilege. McIntosh (1988) described white privilege saying, “Whites are taught to think of themselves as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we [Whites] work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us’” (p. 326).

Society has accepted and nurtured the myth. In fact, many Black people are living with internalized structures of oppression that are a part of their ancestral DNA (McCoy-Wilson, 2008). Coates (2015) also referred to ancestral memory throughout his text, but particularly in his examination of White brutality of Black bodies. In an effort to achieve the “dream,” as Coates called it, Black people do all manner of harm to themselves—psychologically, emotionally, and socially. Whiteness invisibly perpetuates itself in their “dreams” of happiness. McIntosh’s (1988) discussion of white privilege is similar to Coates’ notion of “the dream.” Coates focused on the symbols of the dream—little White children playing in tree houses, tucked away in manicured backyards in safe neighborhoods. Life in the suburbs is, at once, the backlash of “white flight” post Brown v. Board, and the representation of whiteness, white privilege, and “the dream” that mainstream society should covet.

Freire (1970/2000) argued that oppressed groups, having been conditioned within a system of oppression, see themselves through the lens of the oppressor. Ultimately, Black people are unable to escape the lens of "the oppressor" - the construct of whiteness.

Click here to read the full article https://www.academia.edu/64617236/_We_Have_a_Black_Professor_Rejecting_African_Americans_as_Disseminators_of_Knowledge

Click here to read the full article if you have access to a ProQuest database https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0021934720925777

#internalizedstructuresofoppression #antiblackracism #oppression #internalizedracism