Upadhyay |1

Colour and the Inferiority Complex

Turning on the television these days will promise you a barrage of advertisements for fairness
creams. For decades in India, its been an unsaid motto: Light is Beautiful. In a country where
the vast majority of people are brown, fair skin continues to be the prized standard of beauty. The
ads for these creams promise love, happiness, satisfaction-even wealth-if only you made yourself
look whiter. The absurdity would be comical if not for the subtext, that an entire nation should do
its best to look less brown. This thinking, that ones skin colour determines ones fortune, has
been analyzed by Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon touches upon the
factors that subtly and gradually bring about an inferiority complex, using the example of
colonized people like the Africans and the Indians. He also talks about the implications this
inferiority complex has not only on their perception of their colonizers but also their perceptions
of themselves.
The white colonizers needed new sources to appease the demands of the rapid
industrialization taking place in their home countries. They decided that these demands would be
met by the resources of the third world countries of Africa and Asia. Therefore, for subduing
these countries, a systematic process of oppression and dehumanization was brought into being.
The whites managed to maintain the patterns of subjugation by the propagating the idea that the
coloured natives were somehow inferior to the perfect white colonizers. This hegemony
described the natives as a set of mindless bodies, who were dirty and lascivious, whose traditions
and customs were inferior and whose fate was to be eradicated by the so-called superior white
culture. The natives were also the victims of negative stereotypes, as Fanon points out that the
blacks were viewed by the whites as savages with a predilection for tom-toms, cannibalism,

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intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships. The colour of the skin, being the
most conspicuous outward indication of race was taken to be the solitary criteria by which
human beings were judged, regardless of their other characteristics and achievements. The
whites were the embodiments of virtue and purity while the coloured people were savages and
practitioners of vice and sin. As the sole perpetrators of power and authority, the whites dominate
the natives into believing that they were inferior because of their skin colour. According to
Fanon, this would finally result in the natives self-hatred and their ensuing efforts to emulate
and behave like powerful whites, a process which he called epidermalization of inferiority.
Colourism, or discrimination based on skin colour, is prevalent in a number of Asian
and African countries, especially in those which were either colonised by the western countries
or on which there is a great influence of western culture. The prevalence of pigmentocracy, a
term used to describe societies where wealth and social status are determined by skin colour.
Throughout the numerous pigmentocracies across the world, the lightest-skinned peoples have
the highest social status, followed by the brown-skinned, and finally the black-skinned who are
at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The white people are often seen as the harbingers of
propriety to the savagery that is the coloured society. For example, the poem The White Mans
Burden by the English author Rudyard Kipling is written as a rhetorical command to white men
to colonize and rule other nations for the benefit of those people. It admonishes the white man to
take up his burden, send his sons to exile to serve your captives need, and to tame the newcaught, sullen peoples, who he then irrationally calls Half devil and half-child. This puts forth
the doctrine many white people believed in those days, that it was the duty of the superior whites
to civilize the brutish and more barbaric parts of the world. This was also the introduction of the
idea of cultural imperialism which indicated that the colonial empires existed not for the benefit

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economic or strategic or otherwise of the countries themselves, but in order that primitive
peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with the white peoples guidance, eventually
become civilized. Showing a condescending view of undeveloped indigenous natural culture
and traditions, it served to legitimize the acquisition and domination of other backward
countries by the white people. This reasoning is also passed onto the colonized people, who
begin to think of their own culture to be substandard and the colonizers ways to be better. This
phenomenon is described by Fanon when he talks about the people in his hometown of
Martinique, which had been colonised by the French. All the top people in Martinique either
came from France received their university education there. They all spoke in perfect French.
People in Martinique found Creole, their native language wanting and saw French as better.
According to Fanon, that comes not from scholarly opinion but from being colonized, from being
under French rule.
Charles H. Cooley, an author and sociologist, introduces the notion of lookingglass self which holds that self-concepts are gradually formed as ones reflections of and
reactions to others evaluations in every environment .In the process of forming the lookingglass self, individuals first imagine how they may look in the presence of other individuals.
Second, they imagine others appraisals of that appearance; and eventually, they start to develop
some kind of self-perception or self-concept as a result of this process. Fanon writes about his
experience, that I was expected to behave like a black manor at least like a nigger and that I
was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged. Throughout
Black Skin, White Masks, he repeats that it is difficult, or better to say impossible, for a black
subject to be just himself. As Fanon puts it, the black man always must be black in relation to
the white man. Encountering the rhetoric of the civilizing group, experiencing great economic

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difficulties and being stripped of any local cultural originality, the colonized people gradually
come to internalize, or epidermalize, the long-imposed notions of white superiority and black
inferiority, hence introducing the upcoming of an inferiority complex. Everything related to the
white culture is considered better. For example, in many Asian cultures, racial prejudice is taught
to children in the form of fairy tales, just as the Grimms' fairy tales feature light-skinned
princesses or maidens; Asian mythological protagonists are typically fair and depict virtue,
purity, and goodness. A light complexion is equated with feminine beauty, racial superiority, and
power, and continues to have strong influences on marriage, employment, status, and income. In
many Asian countries, skin-whitening cosmetics are a multibillion-dollar industry pushing the
idea that beauty equates with lighter skin and that lightening dark skin is both achievable and
preferable. This deep-rooted colour bias has ensured that in certain professions such as aviation
and the film industry, people with light skin are generally preferred. Fanon talks about this
mentality in reference to the women of his hometown Martinique. He says that when women of
colour go after white men and put down men of their own colour, the cause is just what many of
us suspect: internalized racism. He says It is because the black woman feels inferior that she
aspires to gain admittance to the white world. Secretly they want to be white. Marrying white is
their way of doing this. They look up to white people and look down on black people. Whites
represent wealth, beauty, intelligence and virtue; blacks, on the other hand, are niggers,
something to escape, to be saved from, something not to be. Their racism is so profound that it
blinds them to good black men.
Frantz Fanon wants to be a man. But in the white world in which he lives his skin colour
becomes everything, more important than even his education and achievements. While his
neighbour or his cousin might hate him for good reason, white people hate him without even

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getting to know him. They are irrational. He is seen not as Dr Fanon but as a black man who is a
doctor. He says I was walled in: neither my refined manners nor my literary knowledge nor my
understanding of the quantum theory could find favour. Black men are seen as little better than
animals. They are seen as morally dark, as sinful and evil as if blacks were born with original
sin but whites were born pure. Even in Martinique where Fanon grew up and where nearly
everyone was black, his mother would tell him to stop acting like a nigger if he did something
wrong. And if his conscience was clear he would say he was white as snow. This comes from
the colour black being seen as evil, bad, dark and dirty and the colour white as pure, innocent
and clean. Whites thought that way long before they ever took blacks as slaves, but it did help to
support the idea of black people as morally bad and whites as morally pure. Whites also use
blacks as scapegoats: it is easier for them to imagine blacks as the screwed-up ones instead of
facing up to their own morally broken nature. For example, in the famous novel To Kill A
Mockingbird by Harper Lee, even though the innocence of the black man is proved, the jury still
convicts him of raping a white woman just because the accused was black and hence,
untrustworthy and expendable. In the media, darker skinned men are more likely to be portrayed
as violent or more threatening, influencing the public perception of African men. Since darkskinned males are more likely to be linked to crime and misconduct, many people develop
preconceived notions about the characteristics of black men. In America, lighter skinned people
tend to have higher social standing, more positive social networks, and more opportunities to
succeed than those of a darker skin colour. This is true for all minorities in America. Only the
white people are called true Americans. As Toni Morrison, the famous American novelist points
out, In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

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Ever since the first encounter between Columbus and the Native Americans, the West has
embarked on a subtle process of Otherizing non-whites as a means to maintain its hegemonic
power over the colonized groups. Little by little, the western socio-political structure compels the
minorities to internalize the negative stereotypes of their material conditions and their colour of
skin, which represented them as soul-less, poor, depraved, uncultured, irrational, and savage. The
desire to escape the negative stereotypes of colour and to gain a sense of self-worth within the
socio-political structure pushes them to denigrate their social origins in the hope of obtaining
recognition and respect from the mainstream western societies, a process which eventuates in
epidermalization of the inferiority complex and further entrenchment of colourism.

Bibliography

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London : Pluto Press, 1986. Print.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_based_on_skin_color
Mahshid Mirmasoomi- https://www.academia.edu/9875179/Blackness_Colorism
https://www.sites.google.com/site/exmaenglish/m-a-part-2/course-no-11-the-

postcolonial-literature/bswm-fanon
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/racism
http://www.ctadams.com/famous1.html