The unspoken: seeing yourself through others' eyes

In the 1940s, in the United States, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark showed African American children aged three to seven four dolls, identical except for their colour. They asked them to say what "race" each doll was and which one they preferred. Most chose the white doll and attributed positive qualities to it. For the Clarks, prejudice, discrimination and segregation had planted a sense of inferiority in these children.

This work carried weight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, the justices cited an article by Kenneth Clark and wrote that separating children because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority that may affect their hearts and minds for a long time.

This is what we now call internalized racism: people targeted by racism end up absorbing, often without knowing it, the stereotypes spread about their own group. Sociologist Karen Pyke described it in 2010 as the inculcation of negative prejudices presented as self-evident truths. As early as 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois gave this experience a name: "double consciousness," always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.

Naming this mechanism is the beginning of freeing ourselves from it. Ubuntu reminds us that we become persons through others: if some gazes have wounded, other gazes, kind and just, can also heal. Every child who sees themselves as beautiful in the eyes of their community takes back a little of what someone tried to take from them.