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Frances Cress Welsing, the Black author and psychiatrist whose 1991 work, The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, introduced the world to the “melanin theory” and the “neuroses” of white supremacy, has died.

She was 80 years old.

Welsing, a Chicago native and graduate of Howard University’s College of Medicine, often explored the origins of White supremacy in her works, arguing that White people developed an aggressive manifestation to dominate society due to a biological mutation. Her research, while controversial, focused on White racism while offering the theory of Black superiority based on heightened levels of melanin.

In her 1970 essay The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy), Welsing wrote that “the quality of whiteness is a genetic inadequacy or a relative deficiency or disease based upon the inability to produce the skin pigments of melanin which are responsible for all skin color.”

Acutely aware of their inferior genetic ability to produce skin color, whites built the elaborate myth of white genetic superiority. Furthermore, whites set about the huge task of evolving a social, political and economic structure that would support the myth of the inferiority of Blacks and other non-whites,” she wrote.

While her intellectual work has garnered praise from the Black community, her stance on homosexuality has been criticized. In the 1980s Welsing wrote that homosexuality was a “white-imposed” attempt to discourage reproduction in Black families.

Hip-hop journalist and activist Harry Allen took to Twitter to send his condolences, reporting that Welsing died from a stroke she suffered earlier this week.

Other notable journalists and public figures also expressed sadness and grief at the news of Welsing’s passing.

May she rest in peace.

SOURCE: Twitter | PHOTO CREDIT: Twitter, Gett

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Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, Author Of The Isis Papers, Dead At 80  was originally published on newsone.com

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