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A hierachical tree of the pages of the book with links to each page.

Colourism - Introduction

This should be a page where I announce new additions and significant updates to existing ones.

This is where every page will be listed, hopefully. It may be somewhat disorganised at the start, but may get better with the passage of time, hopefully. It will definitely get rearranged as the natural structure of the topics become more obvious

The topics will be organized as a book, with each page having links to the previous, next, and parent pages. I will be updating a master page with the newer pages as I write them and that will be the page regular views should visit to see new pages and updated ones.

Over the years I viewed a number of discussions and approaches to colourism and none of them has sat well with me. It is a multifaceted issue and none of them have really tackled the various parts of the problem properly. It is one of tribal values, maturity of young men, pre-marital sex, easy divorce, media influences, social engineering, generational differences and a whole lot of other things besides. Each feature is not tackled properly and separately to give the young people a deeper understanding of themselves.

This series is targetted primarily at Africans, the African Diaspora, Indians, ie Desis and other dark-complexioned people around the world, who are made to feel bad about themselves or lesser on account said complexions. Indians are a particular focus for reasons I will go into later. Native Americans, particular south of the border who are subjected such sentiments are also a focus. Unfortunately those north of the border were either exterminated or subsumed into the remaining populations of Europeans and Africans.

Here are a few dictionary definitions of colourism. I don't want to delve too deeply into definitions and I prefer to focus on the deeper social issues. One point I should make quite early on is that I don't generally agree that it is mostly down to European colonial influences in Africa and Asia and the slave trade in the Americas.

Collins Dictionary

Discrimination against people with a different skin tone, esp within the same racial group