On Racial Melancholy and the Need to See. Commentary on Archangelo and O’Loughlin’s Paper “Exploring Racial Formation in Children: Thoughts from an Encounter with Black Children in Brazil”

Abstract

Archangelo and O’Loughlin’s beautifully written paper begins with a reference to the experiments by Kenneth and Mamie Clark on Black children’s preference for white dolls. This preference has always been understood to reflect the conflicted racial identities of Black children who are raised in a society that devalues individuals with darker skin and treats them as inferior. The preference for white dolls and the conflicted racial identities they denote point to deeply oppressive racial policies that have left Black children and everyone around them with “deep racial scars” (p. 1). They also point to a level of biracial awareness that white children do not typically demonstrate. Unlike Black children, many of the white children grow up without ever having to question the glaring racial inequalities in the world and the painful realities that maintain them. Sadly, the Black Brazilian children Archangelo and O’Loughlin present in their paper demonstrate the same troubling preference for white dolls. Much like the children in the Clarks’ study, nine-yearold Sarah finds white dolls to be prettier and more intelligent. Listening to her words makes one wonder where her faith in the superiority of the white dolls comes from. One can ask the same question in the case of the four-year-old-girl who compares her nail polish to Archangelo’s and says, “Your color is the color of happiness, mine’s of badness.” It is a painful statement to read as she associates the darker color of her nails and most likely, of her skin, with badness. In it one can read not just a silly equivalence or a reference to a more desired identity of an adult woman with wellmanicured nails, but her quick association of dark color with badness. Research shows that children between the ages of 3–4 make the connection between appearance and color but have no understanding of race as a social construct (Goodman, 1952; Stoute, 2019). What have these girls experienced that has contributed to such beliefs? What have they internalized that has led them to these symbolic equations and statements of negation? Racial formation, Archangelo and O’Loughlin note, is a complex process that involves more than adopting “wrong beliefs” and holding “wrong attitudes” (p. 6). It is a process that operates on a conscious and unconscious level and is shaped by socio-historical developments and the racial inequalities that emanate from them. Archangelo and O’Loughlin do not dwell on the history of racial oppression and exploitation and the effect of these realities on the formation of racial identity over generations. Instead, they turn their lens on the experiences of racial grief and melancholy and the role they play in the formation of racial identity for children who live in racially oppressive cultures. The skin color of children who are raised in such cultures is “stained with grief,” they state, and has an “intergenerationally transmitted racial melancholy” (p. 14). The grief they experience is derived from oppressive realities and repeated experiences of systemic hate. But the racial melancholy the authors refer to is a more diffuse experience, one that cannot be easily expressed with words. As O’Loughlin