Internalized Racism

Internalized racism represents, "experiences of people of color who have internalized the racism from society. Essentially what that means is that the proponents of racism and all the variety of ways that is exacted speak to or insist upon the inferiority of people of color. and so when you've internalize that, that means you've internalized to some degree that you are inferior."

-Dee Watts-Jones,
Interview with Ackerman Institute

Not By Choice, Charly Palmer

More From The Artist

"The reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties stirred these thoughts, made me think about the necessity for the claim...The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the self-mocking, humorous critique of cultural/racial foibles common in all groups, but against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze. I focused, therefore, on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female."

-Toni Morrison,
The Bluest Eye

"The twin practices of skin bleaching and hair straightening are present-day indicators of the internalization and reproduction by Afrikan people – on the Continent and in the Diaspora – of racialized notions of embodied aesthetics, which are anchored in sexual and social meanings that are white defined and designed to reproduce white supremacist narratives of power and self-identity politics."

-Imani M. Tafari-Ama,
"Historical Sociology of Beauty Practices: Internalized Racism, Skin Bleaching, and Hair Straightening"