Skin Lightening/ Whitening, is the most common Mental illness in the World - Oscar Bamwebaze

Skin Lightening/ Whitening

Due to the effects of alienation of the existential self, some blacks have even gone as far as changing their skin colour from black to white, in an attempt to deny their “Africanness”. Many African women today apply skin lightening creams, and wear wigs of white women’s hair, in an attempt to deny their “Africanness”. It is considered fashionable by many African women to wear a wig of a white woman’s hair. Many Africans break their backs trying to imitate the accents of Europeans or Americans. These are symptoms of the psychiatric illness which Frantz Fanon aptly labelled ‘Alienation of the existential self ’. It is a severe form of self hatred which often leads to self destruction, physical and mental illness.

The Healing Power of Self Love (P. 131)

It was close to mid day when I bumped into five of my Ugandan friends. They were all well educated, fashionably dressed, and properly fed women belonging to the upper echelons of our society. “Hey Oscar,” they screamed out in unison, with beaming smiles, “check out this wig! What do you think about it? Do I look cool?” they asked excitedly, as each one of them tried out the blonde haired wig of a white woman.

On any given day, each of these African women looks fabulous, but with the blonde haired wig placed on their heads, their appearance was close to that of African ghosts rioting in a rural market place!

“That wig is a symbol of the black person’s self hatred!” I bellowed with intense emotion, a tight knot of disgust forming in my belly. “That is something Malcolm X spoke about in the 1950’s when he referred to the use of the conk and wigs of white women’s hair by blacks as symptoms of the self hatred of the black race. Anyone who wears that wig is mentally ill, and they suffer from a severe form of mental illness to which the psychiatrist ascribes the name Alienation of the Existential Self…”

My women friends posed for a while, took a hard long look at me, shook their heads in sympathetic disbelief, and then burst out into their loud, cheerful chatter as a very dark skinned woman among them planted the wig on her head. “Oh my God you look cool!” her friends complimented her, “but a light skinned person would look more like a white woman in that wig than a black person.”

These women were all suffering from alienation of the existential self, which is the most severe form of self hatred, in this case, the black person’s hatred of his own blackness, and in other cases, the Asian’s hatred of his own race. It is the most common mental illness among non white people, and the leading cause of self destruction in these people. Self hatred leads to self destruction in all its forms- addiction, suicide, mental illness, crime, depression, eating disorders, etc. At no point in history have white women attempted to wear wigs of black women’s hair, nor do white women make the attempt to speak in African or Asian accents. This is a mental illness that affects non white people only.

There are many other symptoms of this kind of self hatred. Many Africans, African Americans, other blacks and Asians bleach their skins in an attempt to look white, many others who have even never been to Europe or USA go to great lengths to speak in European and American accents. Light skinned African/ Asian women are considered to be more beautiful than black/ darker skinned women by Asian African men, and many African/ Asian women are increasingly suffering from eating disorders like Bulimia and Anorexia because they want to transform their African/ Asian morphologies into White ones!

According to BBC, more than half of the women in Mali are bleaching their skins, and the same could be said about any other region with black people, including the rest of Africa, Jamaica, USA, UK, etc.

Asians are facing a similar trend- 4 out of 10 women in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan use a skin-whitening cream. "Every Thai girl thinks that if she has white skin the money will come and the men will come.” said Nithiwadi Phuchareuyot, a doctor who prescribes skin bleaching creams at a clinic in Bangkok. In Thailand and many other Asian countries, the hatred of a non white skin is rooted in their languages. One common insult is "tua dam," or black body- it is a rude term used to degrade people of lower social standing. Similar words are "e dam" (black girl) or "dam tap pet" (black like a duck’s liver). As a black African, I was constantly a victim of racism in Bangladesh. My experiences are available at:http://www.selflove.zoomshare.com/0.html

A recent study revealed that 61 percent of Asians in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan said they felt they looked younger with a fair complexion. It also revealed that half of Filipino women, 45 percent of Hong Kong women and 41 percent of Malaysian women were currently using a skin-whitening product. "Everybody else basically wants white skin," said Leeyong Soo, the international fashion coordinator at Vogue Nippon (Japan). The Ancient Chinese used to say that, "one white covers up three ugliness".

Another survey by a research company, Asia Market Intelligence, revealed that three quarters of Malaysian men thought their partners would be more attractive with lighter complexions. In Hong Kong two thirds of men had a preference for fairer skin, while half the local women wanted their men paler. Almost half of Asians aged 25 to 34 years have bleached their skins.

Slavery, segregation, Apartheid, and colonialism instilled self hatred in non white people, most especially those of African descent, because they robbed them of a sense of self worth and self value. It conditioned them to hate themselves for many centuries. When you are abused over and over again, you learn to hate yourself, and those of your kind, until, in self hatred, you turn against yourself, and begin to abuse yourself in the same way that you were once abused. This is what is sometimes referred to as Repetition Compulsion.

Non white people could not defend themselves against their white abusers, and so they identified with them instead! They learned to adore the white skin, and everything associated with it, and to hate the non white skin, and everything associated with it. The great psychiatrist Frantz Fanon explained: “In the man of colour there is a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence”.

The case of the African American is a good example. His self hatred is evident in his health profile. Even though 1 in 2 Americans has a diagnosable mental disorder each year, and 81 Americans commit suicide every day, of all the races in the United States, the African Americans rank highest in psychopathology, alcoholism, and self destruction. 70 to 75% of the nation’s 2 million heroin addicts are black! African Americans account for 39% of the drug abuse related emergency room visits reported to the Drug Abuse Warning Network of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Since 1980, the suicide rate among young black males has doubled, and African Americans are more likely to experience a mental disorder than their white counterparts. Somatization is more common among African Americans than among whites. Unlike the other races, African Americans experience culture-bound syndromes such as isolated sleep paralysis. Over 25% of African American youth exposed to violence meet the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Among Vietnam War veterans, 21% of black veterans, compared to 14% of non-Hispanic white veterans, suffer from PTSD…

The overwhelming majority of today’s African American population traces its ancestry to the slave trade from Africa. The legacy of slavery, racism, and discrimination continues to influence the social and economic standing of this group. Almost one-quarter of African Americans are poor, and their per capita income is much lower than that of whites. They bear a disproportionate burden of health problems and higher mortality rates from disease.

Africa is on the whole a self destructive continent- there are 28,964,447 alcoholics in Africa, compared to 16, 302,193 alcoholics in the USA….there are up to 500,000 cocaine users in South Africa, and one-third of its teenagers experiment with drugs…At least two fatal suicides occur in South Africa every hour and 20 attempted suicides occur every 60 minutes…there are 29,199 annual cases of actual suicide in the USA, compared to 55,994 cases of suicide in Africa. At least two fatal suicides occur in South Africa every hour and 20 attempted suicides occur every 60 minutes. Every day, more than 300 murders and violent attacks take place in South Africa. In 1997 South Africa had the highest per capita rates of murder and rape, the second highest rate of robbery and violent theft and the fourth highest rates of serious assault and sexual offences, of the 110 countries with crime levels listed by Interpol. This is a direct result of the consequences of apartheid. When a population is traumatized, it lacks the discipline necessary for its growth and development. This partly explains why Africa is the poorest continent in world. Africa is the world’s poorest continent and, relative to the rest of the world, it is getting poorer all the time.

Asia is the world’s largest producer of heroin, skin bleaching creams, counterfeit drugs, and it has the worst human rights record. It is a region that is always swamped by war and violence. Conditioned to hate themselves, they have turned against themselves in self hatred.

But black people the word over seem to be the most affected. For very many centuries, the African was systematically brainwashed to hate himself through a process of socialisation that influenced every major discipline. By 1797, the “father” of American psychiatry, Dr. Benjamin Rush, had declared that a rare, congenital disease called “Negritude”, which derived from leprosy, caused the colour of blacks! Dr. Rush said, “The only evidence of a ‘cure’ was when the skin turned white”. Using “disease” as a justification for segregation, he came to the conclusion that “Whites should not tyrannize over (blacks), for their disease should entitle them to a double portion of humanity.”

He also recommended that, “whites should not inter marry Blacks, for this would tend to infect posterity with their disorder!” In 1851, Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a prominent Louisiana physician, claimed that he had discovered two mental diseases peculiar to blacks, which he believed justified their enslavement. He identified them as: “Drapetomania and Dysasthesia Aethiopis”. The first term came from drapetes, a runaway slave; mania means outright madness. He argued that this “disease” was what caused blacks to have an uncontrollable urge to run away from their slave masters, and that the “treatment” for this “illness” was “whipping the devil out of them.”

In 1918, Dr. Paul Popenoe, promoted the idea that the IQ of blacks was determined by the amount of “white blood” they had in them. He argued that the lighter the skin of a black person, the higher his IQ was, and the blacker his skin, the lower his IQ was. His concluded by saying, “…the Negroes’ low mental estate is immediate…The Negro is mentally, therefore eugenically, inferior to the white race. All treatment of the Negro… must take into account this fundamental fact.”

Frantz Fanon once reported that a congress of psychiatrists who were distressed by the criminal propensities of the native population, had declared that, “Those people kill each other, that isn’t normal. The Algerian’s cortex must be underdeveloped.” In central Africa, other prominent European Psychiatrists came to the conclusion that “The African makes very little use of his frontal lobes.” According to Fanon, these racist psychiatrists declared that the native was inferior to other human species by virtue of his black skin: “The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. The customs of the colonized people, their traditions, their myths- above all, their myths- are the very sign of that poverty of spirit and of their constitutional depravity”…

In 1935, at the Congress of Mental Specialists and Neurologists, professor A Polot argued that, “The native of north Africa, whose superior and cortical activities are only slightly developed, is a primitive creature whose life, essentially vegetative and instinctive, is above all regulated by his diencephalons.” …Dr A. Crothers, an expert with World Health Organization at the time, stated that, “The African makes very little use of his frontal lobes. All the particulars of African psychiatry can be put down to frontal laziness”. According to him, the normal African was a ‘lobotomized European”…

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