Today, I'd like to introduce a guest blogger, Frances Holland who has a theory about color. If anyone is interesting in learning more his theory after reading this topic you can read more at Journal of Color Arousal . In addition, Frances has the floor on this topic, so address your comments or questions to him. Thank you!
When we understand that biological “race” simply does not exist, then we begin to look for language and terms that communicate the discrimination we face in our everyday lives. I wanted terms that were not linguistic derivatives of the root word “race,” because “race” doesn’t exist as a matter of science and it is hopelessly confused with science when we use the term in sociology.
The fact is that when we see our own skin color and perceive the skin color of others, we have been carefully trained to call upon color-aroused ideation, which leads to color-aroused emotion, and all too frequently leads to color-aroused behavior. People whose minds work this way to an extent that they are severely impaired in one or more key areas of their lives suffer from Extreme Color Aroused Disorder.
As I began my book on this topic, I discussed it with a friend who has white skin here in Brazil. She told me the story of another friend whose father disowned her because he discovered that she had a Black boyfriend. Rather than be intimidated by her father’s color-aroused ideation, emotion and behavior, the white woman moved in with her brown-skinned boyfriend as soon as they arrived at the same college.
The white father was livid. When the young white woman and her Black spouse married and had a child, the white father did not go to the wedding and did not speak to his daughter for ten years. . . until he was diagnosed with cancer, his wife had died, and he had no one to take care of him.
At that point, the white father was compelled to accept the financial and personal help of his brown son-in-law. They never discussed the issue that had kept them separated for a decade. Instead , they discussed their common interests in soccer. When the white-skinned father saw his grandchild for the first time, he was overcome with emotion and cried as he held her. In those moments, he clearly saw how his Extreme Color Aroused Disorder had cheated him out of his daughter and his granddaughter for a decade, which was time that could never be recovered in the time the white father had left.
You will never hear the public discuss benign, moderate and severe racism, because racism is not a scientific field of inquiry, like stage four cancer. Racism, we believe, is so awful that it is always at its worst, and so we refuse even to admit the idea that some cases, like the one above, are worse than others.
When we discuss color-aroused disorder, we do make reference to its severity, be it benign, moderate or severe. Color Aroused Disorder is severe when it causes an individual to, for example:
· Confront strangers on the street on the basis of their skin color, risking bodily harm to themselves or criminal charges against themselves;
· Engage in any color-aroused criminal activity that risks loss of social status, liberty, family contacts, income and professional maintenance and advancement;
· Causes a family member to reject other family members based on their interactions with people of a different skin color;
· lose a job because of color-aroused antagonism toward co-workers, supervisors and/or those one supervises;
· Loose opportunities to find a suitable marital partner because of color-aroused ideation, emotion and behavior, often reinforced by pressure from family, social group and others.
· causes an employer to be subject to civil fines as a result of a worker participation in“ noose-play,” color-associated epithets, and causes a hostile work environment
· under cutting other employees in a manner that leads to decreased productivity;
· Shoot co-workers because they interact without regard to skin color differences;
· Be referred to “sensitivity training” because of on-the-job color-aroused antagonism toward others.
The list of ways to express Extreme Color Aroused Disorder is very long, especially compared to the paucity of psychiatric services designed to treat the disorder. Doug Williams was a white-skinned Lockheed employee with a years-long history of antagonizing both white and brown-skinned employees, because he didn’t believe the “races” should mix. Here it is clear that part of the ideation that led to his illness was the belief that distinct races existed in the first place.
After years of treating Doug Williams’ on-the-job color-aroused harassment of others as a mild form of color arousal, Lockheed ordered Doug Williams to participate in a sensitivity training in which he would be in close quarters with Blacks and whites from his workplace.
A psychiatrist should have been brought in to screen Doug for color-aroused disorder. Had a competent psychiatrist been involved, the doctor would quickly have realized that Doug Williams was already far too sensitive to his and others’ skin colors in his environment. Additional “sensitivity” would be reckless and dangerous, because it could push Doug over the edge, unless it was carried out in a facility where Mr., Williams would not pose a safety risk to himself and others.
Instead, Lockheed assumed that ‘all racism is the same.’ They apparently did not consult a competent color-aroused disorder specialist psychiatrist about Doug’s color-aroused ideation (e.g. pro-segregation),and emotion (fury), and behavior (physically confronting co-workers about heterochromatic friendships).
Doug Williams entered the training session, returned to his car for his gun, and shot several co-workers, including some with white skin and some with brown skin. Then Doug turned the weapon upon himself and committed suicide.
Extreme Color Aroused Disorder is the most dangerous both to the sufferer and to those around him. The two cases recounted above should make it clear that color-aroused disorder is not a disorder in which there is a culprit and a victim. An individual with Extreme Color-Aroused Disorder sometimes does as much harm to himself—professionally and personally—as he does to those whom he targets.
People with Extreme Color Aroused Disorder share many of the symptoms of people with other psychiatric illnesses, such as:
· constant alertness to color-arousing stimuli in the environment
· constant stress over the “risk” that Blacks will advance, combined sometimes with the ideation that Blacks advancement is degrades white people;
· Uncontrolled anger and fury that leads to crimes, including hate crimes, that jeopardize the victim’s liberty;
· Inability to advance in a profession, e.g. politics, because past expressions of color-aroused hatred and disrespect make the individual clearly unfit for public office;
· sociopathic lack of empathy for others based on skin color;
· Inability to see their own behavior as the source of their thinking, feeling and behavioral problems associated with skin color.
Sixty years after we began talking about “racism,” we are still debating whether a Black person can be “racist.” Instead, we should be asking whether a Black person’s Extreme Color Aroused Disorder can render Black person’s life ineffective and unmanageable. When I told my niece I was writing a book on this subject, she introduced me to a Black woman whose situation provided the answer quite clearly. The woman explained that she was extremely sensitive to observing interactions between Black men and white women.
She said that:
· Black men should go out with Black women;
· It was a personal put –down to her when she saw a Black man who had chosen a white woman instead;
· When she went to clubs, she was hyper-sensitive and hyper-vigilant to heterochromatic couples involving a Black man and a white woman;
· When she saw such couples, even though they were strangers, she felt compelled to confront the white woman and the Black man, which often lead to fights that could get her arrested, and thereby make it impossible for her to go to work;
· The issue came to dominate her life to the extent that she fought in the family home with her brown-skinned brother about his white girlfriend, and this caused a dramatic inability for her to continue her otherwise close relationship with her own brother;
· She felt low self-esteem because she was not chosen by Black men;
· Her life was in a downward spiral in which she could not control her behavior toward heterochromatic couples in public, she could not form or maintain a relationship with a Black man, and she felt lousy about her own weight and her personhood.
In this case, issues of skin color had come to dominate her life to a degree that she was imminently at risk of being arrested for her confrontations with strangers in bars and clubs. Yes, she and people like her sometimes cause pervasive hardship for couples who do not share a skin color. But, the obsession with this issue—the ideation, emotion and behavior—were robbing this Black woman of the quality of her own life. She needed urgent psychiatric help from a competent, knowledgeable and experienced Color Arousal Disorder professional in order to:
· make herself safe from potentially dangerous confrontations, and
· learn to value herself regardless of what choices some Black men make, and
· Forgive her brother for having a white girlfriend, if only to continue to have a relationship with her brother, whom she valued and with whom she lived in harmony, until he dated a white woman.
Debate this endlessly as a political issue, if you must, but also acknowledge that it can become a fundamental psychiatric issue, based on our awareness of our own skin color and our perception of the skin colors of others. There are far too many examples of Extreme Color-Aroused Disorder leading to ruthless and notorious murders for us to continue endlessly talking about “racism” without acknowledging the daily toll that Extreme Color Aroused Disorder takes on Blacks, whites and the American “family.”
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