Published in Sep 2017

The difference between racial and self-esteem in the context of Africans being erased from history

Why has the history of African people been erased?

We do not live in a fair world, things aren’t fair, you do not get equal opportunities, you get equal opportunities that you create for yourself and if someone gets in there first and they conquer you and they colonize you, they enslave you, they simply make your history disappear, to make it look like they conquered, colonized and enslaved nobodies. When people have a history that makes you a somebody, so if you remove the history you become a nobody and so your history disappears nobody is lamenting the loss of that history. That is why, conquerors, colonizers and enslavers make the people's history whose they have conquered, colonized and enslaved dissapear.

There are psychological reasons why people would want to associate themselves with a history. There is a link between what people think of themselves, what someone thinks of their people, and their history. Scholars talk about personal esteem that mean self-esteem then you have interpersonal or group esteem, which is what you think of your group or what you think of your race, racial esteem. Self esteem and racial esteem are not the same thing, someone can have high self esteem and very low racial esteem. That is one of the reasons why black people are prone to fight each other, prone to disagree with each other, prone to conflict with each other because someone thinks highly of themselves and someone thinks lowly of their group.

The way to raise people's racial esteem is to introduce them into their history and if the history happens to be a great history, a history that people objectively can be proud of, they will see their people in a very different way, to how they see their people at present.


By Robin Walker