Blackness, Colorism, and Epidermalization of Inferiority in Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck: A Fanonian Reading of the Play

Abstract

Ever since the first encounter between Columbus and Native Americans, the West has embarked on a subtle process of “Otherizing” non-whites as a means to maintain its hegemonic power over the subalternized groups. This strategy was also employed by the dominant whites in the United States, where a stereotypical representation of black slaves served as a justification for the institution of slavery. Through depicting blacks as irrational, lascivious, and eternally damned with a deviant pigmentation, the racist representational strategy turned into a useful instrument to subjugate African slaves. Under such circumstances, blacks, merely due to their different skin color, were barred from having any major contribution to the sociopolitical or cultural spheres. Frantz Fanon was one of the critics concerned with the psychological effects of racism on the colonized subject. He believed racis m would eventually cause an inferiority complex in black-skinned subjects who found themselves unable to effect any alteration in the discriminatory status quo; in other words, the white dominators would gradually compel blacks to internalize the negative stereotypes of their skin color which portrayed blackness as the symbol of vice and depravity. According to Fanon, this would finally bring about blacks‟ self-hatred and their efforts to behave like powerful whites, a process which he called epidermalization of inferiority. The process of epidermalization is conspicuous in African American community, where the degrees of blackness or whiteness have become the index of assigning or denying privileges, a hierarchical system which is called colorism. As a case study, Zora Neale Hurston‟s play Color Struck (1925) is analyzed in this paper to demonstrate the entrenched presence of coloris m and epidermalization of inferiority in African American community, all of which attest to the preponderance of white ideological force and the coercion of blacks into the internalization of stereotypes as a means of survival.