Wednesday, March 10, 2021 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
“As a child I was led to believe that Blackness was inferior. And I was not alone,” The New York Times’ Charles Blow wrote in his column, “Six Dr. Seuss books bore a bias,” published March 8 in the Sun. He described a systematic and sordid miseducation program designed to create self-loathing within Blacks.
As a child, calling someone a Black African proved a psychological knockout blow. Of course, my African knowledge, based on Tarzan movies, was scant; it would fit on a postage stamp.
However, a tall, sinewy, bespectacled messenger with a rapier tongue, fused with a towering intellect, helped me educate myself. The messenger was Malcolm X. During a May 5, 1962, address, he asked his audience: Who taught you to hate your hair texture, your skin color; that you bleach it to get white? Who taught you to hate your nose and your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself, your own kind ? The American white supremacist culture and miseducation system.
Martin Luther King Jr., a man who knew the power words contained, said even semantics proved anti-Black. He said Roget’s Thesaurus contained 120 synonyms for black; 60 are offensive, like blot, soot, grime, devil and foul. Whereas, it contains 134 synonyms for whiteness — they’re all favorable. For example, purity, cleanliness, chastity and innocence. And the abominable assertion that a white lie is better than a black lie.
Any literature, book or speech that teaches children to hate themselves must be refuted with truth.
