Development of Psychological Defense Mechanism Pertaining to the Cress Color Confrontation Theory

Development of Psychological Defense Mechanisms

The id is the subconscious part of the brain that is the center of controlling all unknown pleasures or desires. These desires one may or may not be aware of, however, according to Freud, one will never be capable of understanding all desires. The ego mediates among the id, the super-ego and the external world. Its task is to find a balance between primitive drives, morals, and reality while satisfying the id and superego. Defense mechanisms are unconscious resources often used by the ego when id behavior conflicts with reality and either society's morals, norms, and taboos or the individual's expectations as a result of the internalization of these morals, norms, and taboos.

The Color Confrontation theory states that the color-deficient Europeans responded psychologically, with a sense of numerical inadequacy and color inferiority, in their confrontations with the majority of the world's people (Welsing, p. 4). The experience of numerical inadequacy and genetic color inferiority led whites to implement a number of psychological defense mechanisms. The first of these mechanisms is the repression of the painful awareness of their inadequacy. This repression was then followed by other defense mechanisms such as reaction formation. Reaction formation is a response that converts something that is desired and envied but obviously unattainable, into something discredited and despised. In other words, whites unfeasible desire to have skin color led to claims of that skin color being disgusting to them and they began to attribute negative qualities to color. Another example of the reaction formation defense is the myth of white genetic superiority which whites created because of the awareness of their inferior genetic ability to produce color.

Another defense was projection. Projection is attributing to others, one's own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts and/or emotions. Whites, in their hatred against non-whites, began the pattern of stating that non-whites hated them, in hopes of lessening their feeling of guilt which they rarely experience during their aggression towards non-whites. A second example of whites projection defense is their continuing desire for sexual alliances with non-whites and this desire being projected on to black males and females in the sense that they have sexual desires for whites.