Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, an American psychiatrist, was born March 18, 1935 in Chicago, Illinois. She was educated at Antioch College, and is noted for her body of work called the “Cress Theory of Color Confrontation“, which explores the practice of white supremacy.
Now a practicing psychiatrist in Washington, DC, Dr. Welsing is most famous for The Isis Papers, (Third World Press, 1991), one of the most popular texts of the much debated but loosely defined ideology of afrocentricity.
The Isis Papers are a central and core argument for the African origins of civilization through the highlighting of the achievements of African/Egyptian pioneers in the areas of architecture, science, philosophy, and humanism. These origins are often re-colored and re-stated through Eurocentric fabrications, including the fact that some scholars have even dismissed ‘The Papers’ as not having made a direct link between racism and oppression, or even resistance to oppression.
Wherever there is a system that is practiced by a global white minority, conscious and unconscious, to ensure genetic survival to the detriment of others, Welsing, uses her education and experiences to teach and train people of color, particularly those of African descent, to understand how white supremacy works and how to dismantle it and bring true justice in the world.
In The Isis Papers , Dr. Welsing writes about the melanin theory, a hypothesis that has been called racist, pseudoscientific, and Black supremacist. She also talks about white people as the genetically defective descendants of albino mutants.
She teaches that, because of this “genetic mutation,” they may have been forcibly expelled from Africa, among other possibilities. Welsing supposes that lighter-skinned people developed an aggressive urge to dominate others militarily in order to preserve light-skinned purity. Welsing also says that their “melanin deficiency” makes for the inherent behavioral differences between Blacks and whites, and defaults to a working definition of what racism really is and how it manifests.
In a nutshell, the functional definition is: “Racism/white supremacy/systemic racism/apartheid is the local and global power and dynamic, which is structured and maintained by persons who classify themselves as white and who use patterns of perception, logical symbol formation, thought, speech, action and emotional response in all areas of living for the ultimate purpose of white genetic survival in order to prevent the genetic annihilation of their own race.”
As a psychiatrist, Welsing imparts a combination of Freudian/Marxist symbolism to further define structural racism, with an extensive interpretation of objects such as guns and weapons, Christ, the Holy Grail, the cross, the playing of ball games, boxing, smoking objects, paper money and gold; and majorly the use of the effeminization of the Black male in order to dilute the Black race.
Dr. Welsing has been criticized for stating that black male homosexuality was imposed on the black man by the white man in order to reduce the black population, and that black homosexuality is a sign of weakness and self-submission to other males.
Though her writings have been dismissed as “ignorant of the political economy that destroys both Africans and Americans,” and overlooking of “the culture of the diversity of the diaspora,” the current times and the long-standing actions of white supremacists who have merged themselves into the “greater culture” in order to ‘appear’ diverse have proven otherwise. According to Welsing, various cultural practices express white people’s sense of their own inferiority and genetic recessiveness.
Black culture, especially in the westernized world, has slowly but surely watched the ancestral teachings of the African-American elders unfold and come to life.
With the onset of the election of Barack H. Obama, 44th President of the United States of America, Welsing’s points, as well as those of the African American teachers and scholars before and since her, on racism and its origins have collided “with the stars” and the cosmos, and proven to be unarguably true. At the very least, time has only enhanced and proven those points, not diminished them.
Her concerns, not unlike the concerns of other Black historians and activists, have been made manifest in the “Age of the Millennials.”
