The shadow of slavery still clouds our minds

by Mikel Kwaku Osei Holt
A century and a half after the "official" end of slavery in America, many of us are still bound in chains and shackles.

Not the physical kind of chains you see around the wrists of far too many brothers today, but a mental and psychological form of slavery that is just as debilitating.

That is evidenced by the incessant debate over our children running amuck. By the slow death of Black nuclear families--once the foundation of Black America--and by the continuing gap in Black and White academic achievement.

The shadow of slavery casts its ominous and debilitating impact on the thousands of teens who get pregnant each year because they don’t see a future for themselves; they only see value in their owning "something that loves them," that they treat like a toy or gift that most don’t have the resources or parental skills to care for, much less raise. Their child ultimately becomes a manual worker bee for the new slave owners, or a pawn in a game of poverty pimpology where people earn a good living by caring for, containing or supervising illiterate, uncontrollable or destructive slaves as part of the new world order.

And the shadow of slavery is obviously evident in the results of a test conducted by 17-year-old Kiri Davis of New York who replicated a self-esteem survey last month, one that clearly revealed that the lack of self esteem and cultural pride that stagnated the crusade for equal rights is still very much alive in the Black community today.

Davis’ non-scientific survey replicated a controversial study used as key evidence in the Brown vs. Board of Education case 50 years ago by Kenneth Clarke. That survey justified the myopic process of integration as a solution to America’s "race problem."

Clarke’s research showed that when asked, most Black children choose a White doll over a dark doll one, assessing the White doll as being more beautiful, wholesome and culturally acceptable. To the Black children, White is beautiful, pure and superior. Black is dirty, nasty, inferior.

Kiri did a documentary for a class project a half century later, and interviewed 20 young Black children, posing the same questions that Clarke did.

To some people’s surprise--myself excluded--Kiri’s study reached the exact same results. Seventeen out of 20 Black children found the White doll to be more appealing.

Prodded, they assessed that the White doll (the dolls were pretty much identical save for the skin color) was more appealing.

As with Clarke, social scientists conclude that the survey results show conclusively that a majority of Black children hold a subconscious belief that White is better, and that by osmosis, Black is inferior, dirty, inferior and disdaining.

The results also reveal a fact that most Black folks find unacceptable: that our children, like their parents and grandparents, harbor feelings of low self-esteem and self-hatred.

I put it another way: the shadow of slavery blocks out the sun, and clouds their mind. Their great, great grandparents were socialized to believe that they were subhuman, that they were of an ethnic group that was culturally inferior, contributed nothing to civilization, and were the descendents of Ham, a cursed people destined for slavery.

As historian and educator Taki Raton notes in his research, the great tragedy of our generation is that Black Americans, the descendents of captured Africans, were never deprogrammed.

The psychological affects of slavery were never erased from our memories, thus we continue to pass through genes, attitudes and stereotypes, a slave mentality that defines our actions, cements our status and controls our temperament and behavior.

Unlike the Jews and Native Americans, who had a strong cultural foundation to fall back on, African captives (I hate the word slave) had nothing but their Blackness.

Few knew where they came from, or otherwise had a link to their Motherland. Remember, they were stripped of their culture, their language and their religions.

In their captivity, they were victims of torture, bigotry and a socialization process that literally created a new being: a soulless, inferior creature reliant upon a racist "massa," lacking an identity and purpose other than the one provided, hating himself and trapped in a skin that separated him from those who controlled their survival.

They were completely brainwashed, thus when given their freedom, few knew what to do with it. And among those that did, they quickly discovered that even their benefactors didn’t allow them status as their equals.

Thus, the shadow of slavery didn’t disappear with the Emancipation Proclamation, nor did the vestiges of self-hatred. And like a bad gene, the shadow was passed down from generation to generation.

Those who didn’t fight back, tried in vain to adapt, some going so far as to process their hair to look White, rejected their Blackness to feel White, or when possible, to start a process of miscegenation to carve out a life that separated them from the darkies, the more visible brethren who would never be accepted. We creamed the paper bag test, we tried the skin whiteners, we married the lightest person possible but that too came with a catch; it meant you became a house slave, it didn’t mean you were free.

Survival for most meant leaving your self-esteem at home, never looking a White man eye-to-eye, drinking from the colored water fountain, "yes sir" and "no sir" your way around town. Without realizing it, many of us were reinforcing our inferiority, standing under the cloud of slavery without realizing it.

Many of us have been able to articulate our plight, to deprogram ourselves, or to vent our frustrations and anger through the Black empowerment movement. It was both an avenue for self-fulfillment, and self-actualization. The Black Power Movement of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, afforded us an opportunity to discover the plot to keep us in bondage. We then navigated around the cloud, or walked outside its parameters.

Those of us who have escaped understand the necessity of reaching back and pulling others outside the shadow, from up under the cloud of mental slavery. We look back over our shoulders and see the patterns of disfunctionality and implosion as manifestations of mental enslavement. That, of course, is not to excuse away the self-destructive behavior of our brethren, but merely to provide a basis of cognizance from which we can formulate a prescription to cure this patient.

Of course, there are those who refuse to accept my hypothesis, to reject my premise as absurd and baseless. And there are those who may agree, but have trouble recognizing the victims of the slave mentality from the psychopaths, neckbones and missionaries. Well, it isn’t that hard to figure out whose whom, if you’re paying attention. Here are few examples to get you started:

They are the ones who think white ice gets colder; who bypass a Black business to spend their dollars with a White business because they believe the service is better, the water is wetter, the sugar is sweeter.

They’re the ones who constantly talk about "good hair", or who reject dark-skinned men and women, subscribing to the old adage: "If you’re White you’re alright, if you’re yellow you’re mellow, if you brown stick around, but if you’re black, get back."

They are the ones who litter our streets, sell drugs to our children, prostitute our women, kill without conscience, and terrorize our community.

They are the ones who block Black progress, who believe only White leaders can lead us to the promised land, who follow the self-destructive crabs in a barrel paradigm, find comfort in staying on the plantation instead of escaping to the free states.

They are the ones who say you’re "acting
White if you’re articulate, obtain a good education, strive to better yourself.

They are the ones who refer to themselves as "niggers," call our sisters "bitches," and tell their children they will never amount to anything.

They are the ones who believe or teach that God is a White man with a long flowing white beard, that Jesus the Christ (versus Jesus Christ) looked like Jeffrey Hunter, and reject the premise that we are truly the first and true chosen; cast for whatever reason on our own 400 year exodus...

Obviously, there are many African Americans with one foot under the shadow, and the other on the first step of the freedom train. They may be the easiest to pull to freedom. For there is always the chance that when you step back under the cloud or into the shadow, you can lose your way and never get back out.

But try we must, because the alternative is to become victims of the inevitable implosion when the slave minded do what they were trained to do. Hotep.