Racism is Cumulative
April 12, 2007
In my sociology class Drugs and Society we have recently learned about the Kindling Effect, a theory suggesting that over time the impact of stress on a person’s mental well-being becomes more and more detrimental. In other words, as time goes by a person is more susceptible to stress and it takes less and less stress to mentally perturb them. The Kindling Effect came to mind when I was reading Black Like Me and when we watched the clip in class about the white family who was made black. John Griffin claims to understand the sting of racism after being black for seven weeks. I think he has an idea of what it feels like to be discriminated against on the arbitrary basis of skin tone, but I don’t think he, or any person who is not black, will ever truly understand because he has not been black for his whole life, he has not been exposed to racism for his whole life. Yes, John Griffin is pained by the racism he has encountered on his stint as a black man but then just imagine the complexes that inherently develope and the entrenched hurt that a real black man must feel who has dealt with discrimination and “hate stares” for his entire life. I think the Kindling Effect is relevant here, I think that over time the black man’s protective skin wears thinner and thinner until finally incidents of racial ignorance ignite him that perhaps would not have ignited him several years ago. Bruno, the white dad in the television clip we watched, says something about how if he were black and someone called him a nigger he would react rationally, adding that black people should react rationally too and not fly off the handle. But he does not know, he can not fathom how he would feel after being called a nigger continuously since childhood. They simply don’t know and they can never know beacause you can’t imagine an individual’s history, you can’t take on years of discrimination and thus you can’t take on a realistic black identity. My point is that the effects of racism on the black psyche are a cumulative stress.
April 17, 2007 at 11:16 pm
The Kindling Theory is a really succinct way of explaining why neither Griffin nor the white male on Black White can understand, despite purporting to understand, the effects of a lifetime of racism. Six weeks in black face and bronzer can’t simulate a lifetime abuse, conditioning, and internalized racism. I recall Professor Parham discussing how public posture and gaze (the sphinx-like expression to which Griffin so often refers, or the act of focusing on a fixed abstract point in the distance, or staring down in order to evade eye contact) are defensive social adaptations, to avoid being singled out–these are practices cultivated from mirror stage onward. Griffin can assume all he wants, can evoke images of Africa, can recall his “conditioning process,” but he cannot, for the life of him, evoke the lifetime of self-hatred, confusion, pain, and shame that we have seen in Toi Derricotte’s narrative, nor can he comprehend the evolution of the self-concept as it responds to decades of oppression. How could he possibly understand what it is to experience racism as a child, to internalize that brutal hierarchy, or to experience shame?