Initial Broadcast Date: April 10, 1972
30 minutes -- Color
Dr. Francis Welsing, a psychiatrist at Howard University’s College of Medicine, will appear on the Black Journal program entitled, “Color Confrontation Theory” and will discuss her research into the origins of white racism.
Interviewed by Tony Brown, the program’s executive producer, the black psychiatrist discusses the far-reaching implications of the evolution of white racism that she has called: “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism.”
Dr. Welsing, who serves as a child and general psychiatrist, and is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Howard University Medical School, says that racism is a worldwide system of white domination, and that its quest for superiority is founded upon “a deep and pervading sense of inadequacy and inferiority.”
Commenting on the behavior of whites who maintain that their skin color will always be superior to those of dark-skinned people, Dr. Welsing says, “If anyone goes around saying that they are superior, psychiatrist should start asking ‘Why does that person say he is superior?’ I raised that question.”
In the publication on her theory, Dr. Welsing says “The quality of whiteness is indeed a genetic inadequacy or a relative genetic deficiency state or disease based upon the genetic inability to produce the skin pigments of melanin, which are responsible for all skin coloration.” And she adds that because “the massive majority of the world’s people are not so afflicted,” it suggests the state of color is the norm for human being and “that the state of color absence is abnormal.”
Dr. Welsing tells Tony Brown that she is not advocating any reverse form of racism that will turn blacks against whites. Instead, she believes that dissemination of her theory could lead to a better understanding of white racism by blacks and whites, when whites realize the full impact their racist behavior has throughout the world.
The black psychiatrist charge that the American cosmetics industry daily perpetuates that white is not desirable because it is devoted to people “who want to add color to colorless skins.”
Commenting on white couples who adopt black babies, believing that their motives are well-intended on the surface, Dr. Welsing suggests that they should instead help all blacks by providing for equal opportunities in jobs and housing. She indicates that will be a difficult task because most whites who say they are serious about helping to create equal financial and social avenues for America’s blacks, are basically opposed to integrated housing and busing.
“Black Journal” is a production of WNET New York.
Executive producer: Tony Brown
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