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Starting with a discussion of the death of Blackness in the postblack age, the present paper explores the psychological explanation of the social malady of African Americans which has been named as Black Self-hatred by the psychologists. It starts with the depiction of self-hating Blacks in African American literature and goes on to examine the psychological and social theories about the phenomenon of self-hatred. This paper provides an analysis of the postblack expression of the self-hating trait of the African Americans with an aim to understand the possible socio-political and psychological reasons behind it. Researcher uses the psychological and social research studies conducted by some eminent social scientists and psychologists regarding Black Self-hatred to bring home the fact that the socio-political conditions and severities against the Blacks have, in the course of time, affected the psychological well-being of Africans in the diaspora and made them look at their own color through the eyes of their perpetrators. At the same time, the paper also discusses the differences between the double consciousness of the older generations and the postblack generation of cultural mulattos, though their reasons for self-hatred resemble one another. At the end, the analysis comes to the conclusion that the Blacks have now begun to see blackness as a disadvantageous flaw that is attached to them from the very birth, something they now want to get rid of at any cost. However, the Caucasian psychological theories have been equally unjust regarding the malady of self-hatred among the Blacks, as they seem to be the expression of the same age-old prejudices against Blacks.
Dr. Vikas Meshram. “Self-hating Blacks in Afro-American Literature: A Psycho-social Investigation into the Phenomenon of Black Self-hatred.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 478-492. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.29.
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