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Racism in the form of discrimination and intolerance due to skin tone can potentially inflict harmful psychological scars on a person, beginning as early as birth. This paper looks at the influence of racially based affective trauma on the development of a young child's personality as a consequence of his or her skin tone. A child can suffer psychological injuries through relational experiences with others whose conscious or unconscious racial beliefs are negative toward the child. Repeated affective traumas can trigger deep feelings of being unwanted, unlovable, and defective. Damage to the child's personality from unpleasant racial experiences with important caregivers, including the mother, can occur before the child has the cognitive ability to understand the social implications of racism.
Fairbairn's (1952) conception of personality development emphasizes the primacy of social relationships on the formation of psychic structure. The initial caregiving relationship for a child is usually with its mother, and this is where the first emotional experiences occur. A mother who has racially based negative feelings about herself or her child might unconsciously project those feelings onto the innocent child. Negative feelings might be transmitted to the child through such experiences as mother's touch, the sound of her voice, her visual engagement, and the degree and quality of her attentiveness to the child's needs. While the child who senses this negativity from the mother might be too young to form a cognitive understanding of them, the child might affectively and emotionally experience its harmful presence in the relationship. A child who grows up feeling hopeless, helpless, and unlovable might later become a parent