Skin Bleaching, Self-Hate and Black Identity in Jamaica

Abstract

The Afrocentric view concerning Jamaicans who bleach their skins is that they suffer from self-hate, a result of the lingering psychological scars of slavery. The self-hatred thesis is tested by comparing the self-esteem scores of a small convenience sample of skin bleachers with the scores of a control group. The two groups have almost the same average scores above the median, which indicates that skin bleaching did not occur because of low self-esteem. The preliminary results suggest that there are varied reasons for skin bleaching and there is a range of Black identities as each person constructs his or her identity in a multicultural society.

Keywords: skin bleaching; self-hate; miseducation; identity; survival