Dr. Frances Cress Welsing published her first significant work, “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation,” as an essay in 1974 while an assistant professor at Howard University. In the controversial essay, Welsing argued that the drive for white supremacy and superiority stems from a pervasive feeling of inadequacy and inferiority. Welsing claimed that “whiteness” was, in fact, a deficiency, evidenced by the inability of whites and other races to produce melanin, which generates skin color. In short, white people in America could not cohabit peacefully with their Black peers, according to Welsing, because of a deep-seated jealousy of people with melanin and their embrace of racial supremacy to accommodate these feelings. The essay was controversial and, according to Welsing, prevented her from not only gaining tenure at Howard but, in fact, losing her teaching post. In 1991 she authored The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, 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. Despite the controversy surrounding her, Welsing was praised in the Los Angeles Times for being “the first scientist to psychoanalyze white racism” in the history of Western psychiatry, rather than focusing on the victims of racism. Aside from her published racial and social theories, Welsing was an advocate for a strong African American family unit. She advised black men and women to delay having children until their thirties and instead take the time to thoroughly educate themselves so as to rear the next generation of high-functioning and disciplined black Americans who could challenge white supremacy. Frances Cress Welsing died in Washington, D.C., on January 2, 2016, after being hospitalized for a stroke. She was eighty years old.
enemies too.