Now a survey by the Metropolitan Chicago Information Center suggests that African-Americans are more likely than whites to hold negative opinions of their fellow blacks’ innate capabilities. The survey shows that nearly 14 percent of black adults in the Chicago area agreed that African-Americans have less “inborn ability to learn than whites,” while only about 9 percent of whites believed blacks were inferior. The survey also showed that more than a third of Chicago-area blacks thought that poor African-Americans lack the willpower to pull themselves out of poverty.
Such poll results are a sobering indication that a residue of self-hatred persists despite years of emphasis on black pride and self-empowerment. Experts like Larry Bobo, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, stress that “the majority of African-Americans are proud to be black.” The basic explanation why a minority-within-the-minority still retains a negative image of blacks, Bobo says, is racism. “Black people in this country have had to fight a pervasive ideology … that blacks are inferior to whites,” he says. “When an entire society is built around it, it becomes very difficult to surmount.” Elijah Anderson, an ethnographer at the University of Pennsylvania, says the American ethos of bootstrap economic success and social mobility is also to blame. “This is an individualistic society where the individual makes it by himself, supposedly, and fails by himself, supposedly,” Anderson says. “When you don’t get the job, you don’t blame the system, you blame yourself.”
Research by Gloria Johnson-Powell and others suggests that black children absorb these negative images early in life. One study of preschoolers showed that 76 percent of the black children chose a black doll as “bad.” The study, by Derek Hopson and Darlene Powell Hopson, also showed that when black preschoolers were asked whether they would like to play with a black doll or a white doll, 60 to 78 percent chose the white doll. Johnson-Powell’s own research suggests that black children prefer black dolls until about the age of 5. Then, she says, they begin to be aware of their racial differences and to perceive those differences as negative. By adolescence, she says, many black youngsters put on a bold front. “They may say, ‘I’m black and beautiful’,” she says. “But you can mouth the words and not mean it.”
Even studying the problems of negative self-image can be controversial within the African-American community. But researchers like Darlene Powell Hopson say more candor is needed. Without it, at least some youngsters in the next generation of black Americans may never learn to Be Somebody.
