http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/01...-a-white-supremacist-who-happens-to-be-black/
One of the most obvious signs of a white supremacist is an apparent belief that white people are superior to Black people. This belief in fact may be rooted in self-hatred or a sense of inferiority that bubbles just beneath the surface, but the outward manifestation is the hatred and mistreatment of Black people. Psychologists would say they are high in “social dominance orientation” (believing that some groups are superior to others). But many Black people have so deeply internalized the racism that swirls around them that they wind up treating other Black people as badly as the white supremacists do. These are the signs of membership in that group of Black self-haters:
1. Embracing and Propagating Eurocentrism
These Black people have so enthusiastically embraced the narratives, stories and culture of white America that they have no use for Black people and the Black community. They have thoroughly rejected most everything about their history and culture, deeming it unworthy of their time and attention. The brilliant Afro-French philosopher Frantz Fanon addressed this phenomenon in his 1952 work, “Black Skin, White Mask,” theorizing that the divided self-perception of the Black Subject who has lost his native cultural origin and embraced the culture of the Mother Country, produces an inferiority complex in the mind of the Black Subject, who then will try to appropriate and imitate the culture of the colonizer.
2.
Treating White People Better
Psychologist Bill Cross hypothesized a cognitive developmental model of racial identity that posited that as racial identity evolves, Blacks progress through a sequence of five stages (pre-encounter, encounter, immersion-emersion, internalization and internalization-commitment). Cross suggested that Blacks begin their development at a stage called pre-encounter. This stage is characterized by dependency on white (not Black) society for definition and approval; attitudes are anti-Black and Eurocentric in nature. It is at this first stage where far too many Black people have gotten stuck, showing preference for everything white, choosing to treat white people better than Black people.
3.
Terrorizing Black Community with Black-on-Black Violence
Across America, members of gangs have bought into the idea that their biggest enemies are other Black people who look just like them, who hail from the same neighborhoods and have very similar life experiences. But instead of targeting their anger and frustrations at the people and institutions that have created the dire poverty in their neighborhoods and families, they take an extremely myopic view and target their brothers and sisters from the neighborhood across town. Scholar Dr. Amos Wilson says Black-on-Black violence serves to maintain the system of white domination, masking the violence that is done to the Black community by white leaders who create the conditions in which Black violence occurs. A 2013 story in Psychology Today reported that about 5,750 people were killed in Los Angeles County alone in the past 10 years in gang-related violence, many of them children and teenagers. Each one of those bodies, killed over something as arbitrary as the block you live on, represents another kind of manifestation of hatred.
4.
Devaluing Black People
There is a significant portion of the Black population that has a yearning desire to spend as much time as possible with white people — in friendships, romantic relationships, as neighbors — because they think whiteness is superior or more valuable. This is what scholar bell hooks calls having a “colonized mind”— suffering from internalized racism. Schools, television and American society in general teach people, both Black and white, to overvalue whiteness and undervalue Blackness. As hooks says, the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” of American society tell us that not only is American society built by and for rich white men, built on divisions of race, class and sex, but the losers — Blacks, women and the poor — are brainwashed into accepting it through education, television, music and film.
5.
Light Skin Preference
There’s no escaping the fact that the rape and sexual mistreatment of enslaved Black women in America throughout the centuries has created a wide range of skin complexions in the African-American community — and generations of psychodrama among African-Americans. Researchers Stephanie Irby Coardz of New York University, Alfiee M. Breland of Michigan State University and Patricia Raskin of Columbia Teachers College wrote that the significant role skin color plays in the lives of African-Americans has been debated in the social-science literature for over 60 years, with skin color exerting powerful and persistent influences on societal attitudes toward and treatment of Blacks, within both white and Black cultures. As they noted, while the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s went far toward stamping out light-skin preference, it was not entirely successful. There are still Black people who, brainwashed by Eurocentric beauty standards, show a preference for light skin, believing it to be superior and more beautiful than dark skin.
6.
Devaluing and Mistreating Black Women
Scholars have written libraries full of books about the mistreatment of Black women during slavery. But 150 years after Emancipation, the mistreatment continues. Malcolm X harangued Black men for failing Black women, famously saying, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” A considerable source of devaluation is Black music — artists using the sexual exploitation of Black women in their videos and the derogation of women in their lyrics are doing more damage than the most active white supremacist.
7.
Mistreating Black Children
As scholar Stacey Patton has written, corporal punishment is deeply embedded in Christianity and Western culture, and in African-American culture it is related to slavery and Jim Crow segregation. America has exerted an extreme amount of control over the Black body through centuries of slavery, lynching, sexual violence, reproductive legislation, surveillance, segregation, mass incarceration, police practices and popular entertainment. So those who subject Black children to beatings are mimicking the disciplinary methods used by enslavers. As Patton notes, Black parents have responded to this systemic violence by debasing their children through harsh physical punishment —behavior that the Black community deems a core feature of Black identity, quality parenting and responsible citizenship. But the research community for the last 50 years has produced evidence on the negative impact that hitting has on children’s developing bodies and brains.
8.
Allowing Your Children to Eschew Education
Fearing that Black literacy would prove a threat to the slave system — which relied on enslaved people’s dependence on masters — whites in many colonies instituted laws forbidding the enslaved from learning to read or write and making it a crime for others to teach them. Most white Southern slaveholders were adamantly opposed to the education of their enslaved people because they feared an educated slave population would threaten their authority, according to researcher Heather Andrea Williams of the University of North Carolina. Nonetheless, even under the strict limitations of slavery, the enslaved still developed ingenious strategies to become literate. Upon Emancipation, white Southerners’ fear of an educated Black population did not dissipate; they used violence and arson to prevent attempts to educate freed Black people. So in light of this history, parents who are not urgently pushing their children to embrace education are acting in the manner of the Southern slaveholders or the white racists who tried to prevent education after Emancipation.
9.
Devaluing Anything Created by Blacks
For many Blacks, anything created by or intended for Black people is inherently inferior — schools, businesses, hospitals, etc. Activist and scholar Assata Shakur says such thinking is the deliberate outcome of a demoralizing ideological subversion program. “Black people are seeing themselves through lens that have been deliberately assigned to them by white mass media manipulation experts,” Shakur writes. “It is a massive covert manipulation program designed to ensure the continuance of white dominance and control — implemented by those who clearly understand the power of ideas, specifically of evil ideas or ideologies.” But the result is a mindset in line with that of white supremacists, devaluing Blackness.
10.
Devaluation of Africa
This mindset has long been present in Black America, where so many Blacks have been brainwashed into believing negative stereotypes about the motherland. Unwitting heirs to prevailing white American mythology, many descendants of Africans who were enslaved in America believed that they had few complimentary ties to Africa, according to University of North Carolina professor Trudier Harris. They believed it was a dark land from which, as poet Phillis Wheatley asserted in the late 18th century, they had been mercifully rescued. It would be a long time before African-Americans began to receive a true picture of Africa, its breathtaking history and grand cities — though for many that education still hasn’t come.
