My Personal Connection to Color Prejudice

My connection to color prejudice comes mostly from high school. I was one of the few white students at Hyde Park High, on the South Side of Chicago, in the 1960’s. In my school there were six tracks - dumbest to brightest by the school’s assessment - and the darkest kids were in the lowest tracks. You could pretty much tell where a kid fit by their skin color. Which means the high schools were grading intelligence on the basis of a single layer of cells that produced melanin in the skin of their students. Since melanin has no connection to brain workings, something else was at play: the assumption on the part of the culture that the darker your skin the less you know; and, conversely, the closer you are to whiteness the more you know. This hierarchy was - and still is - so entrenched as to be invisible, which is why my school could use it without awareness or criticism. I’ve included links to the effects of colorism here: