Black Identity
Du Bois (1973) writes, “What we must ask ourselves is when we become equal American Citizens what will be our aims and ideals…That would mean that we would cease to be Negroes as such as become white in action is not completely in color. We would take on the culture of white Americans doing as they do and thinking as they think…We would lose our memory of the Negro history and of those racial peculiarities which have long associated with Negro.” Here, Du Bois elucidates the cause-effect linkage between assimilation and the forfeiture of black identity. Black ethnicity is unreservedly unique; endeavoring to dilute it through assimilation into the white culture would be equivalent to downright disposing of the black identity. Efforts to embrace the white culture are pointers of intrinsic racism which underwrites the conception of black lowliness.
White Predominance
Haynes (2002) explains, “The ethnicity-based paradigm arose in the early 20th century as an explicit challenge to the prevailing racial views of the period. The then-prevalent biologistic paradigm continued to explain racial inferiority as part of a natural order of humankind. Whites were considered the superior race; white skin was the norm, the most advanced form of the human body. Other non-white corporeal features , such as dark skin color, nappy hair, or variations in eye shape , had to be explained in respect to the white norm. Religious doctrine had long been employed for this purpose. Since the early days of slavery and colonization the “curse of harm” had been invoked to connect the phenotype of dark skin with God’s displeasure, especially with black people, but also with others deemed non-white.” Manifestly, the 20th century prototype regarded race to be a Biological actuality, which pigeonholed people into the low-grade and grander statuses. Consequently, the Paradigm depicted race as a genetic dynamic that would not be reformed. Additionally, religion ratifies the viewpoint of white pre-eminence particularly through the calculated quotation of ‘curse of Ham.’ The skewed construal of the Bible explained, to a degree, enslavement and colonization.
