What is the cress theory of color confrontation and racism?

Answer 1

Washington, D.C.-based http://www.answers.com/topic/psychiatrist and race theorist Frances Cress Welsing rocked the fields of cultural and behavioral science with her 1970 essay The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy).This striking theory of the origins of racism is rooted in the effects that varying degrees of melanin--the color-producing pigment in skin--can have on racial perception and development. "The quality of whiteness is a genetic http://www.answers.com/topic/inadequacy or a relative http://www.answers.com/topic/deficiency or disease based upon the inability to produce the skin http://www.answers.com/topic/pigment of http://www.answers.com/topic/melanin which are responsible for all skin color," she explained in the essay, adding, "The majority of the world's people are not so afflicted, suggesting that the state of color is the norm for human beings and [its] absence is abnormal." In her essay, Welsing contends that because of their "numerical inadequacy" and "color inferiority," white people may have defensively developed "an http://www.answers.com/topic/uncontrollable sense of hostility and aggression" towards people of color which has led to "confrontations" between the races throughout history. Repressing their own feelings of inadequacy, whites "set about evolving a social, political and economic structure to give blacks and other 'non-whites' the appearance of being inferior." - http://www.answers.com/topic/frances-cress-welsing