Interior of a Slave Ship, a woodcut illustration from the publication, A History of the Amistad Captives, reveals how hundreds of slaves could be held within a slave ship. Tightly packed and confined in an area with just barely enough room to sit up, slaves were known to die from a lack of breathable air.    Image Credit: New Haven Colony Historical Society

5. Education We get it.  Education is falling apart.  Public schools are woefully disparate and hemorrhaging with only a pretense of effort being made to stop the bleeding. Fleeing the notion of “no child left behind” which is a planned-to-fail concept of teaching to a standardized test, the new meme became the charter schools.  Public schools,” ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, “meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone.” A better system, the organization argued, would “foster educational freedom and quality” through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this “choice,” and vouchers are called “scholarships”-- but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools. The first large-scale voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, was enacted in 1990 following the rubric ALEC provided in 1985.”[1]  Fast forward to today.  Charter schools in Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida have become public private schools, siphoning public school dollars that are poured into specific charter schools that your children ride past as they are bused out of their neighborhoods, those gentrified urban neighborhoods, while the new neighbors quietly place their children in the newly renovated middle and high schools just around the corner.  Meanwhile your kids are being systematically expelled from the very schools they’re being bused to and the money allocated for their education DOES NOT follow them. With me so far?  Elsewhere the schools deemed failing are being closed. Privatizing corporations take over. “ALEC’s most ambitious and strategic push toward privatizing education came in 2007, through a publication called School Choice and State Constitutions, which proposed a list of programs tailored to each state. That year Georgia passed a version of ALEC’s Special Needs Scholarship Program Act. Most disability organizations strongly oppose special education vouchers—and decades of evidence suggest that such students are better off receiving additional support in public schools. Nonetheless, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Florida, Utah and Indiana have passed versions of their own. Louisiana also passed a version of ALEC’s Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (renaming it Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence), along with ALEC’s Family Education Tax Credit Program (renamed Tax Deductions for Tuition), which has also been passed by Arizona and Indiana. ALEC’s so-called Great Schools Tax Credit Program Act has been passed by Arizona, Indiana and Oklahoma.”[2] But here’s the interesting part: The corporations doing the privatization of the schools are connected to the corporations taking over prison systems, state-by-state.  Private prison companies are being used to police public schools. CCA, Corrections Corporation of America -- the nation’s largest private, for-profit prison corporation and member of ALEC – participated in a drug sweep of a high school in Arizona.  The same corporation is demanding  ninety percent occupancy of its facilities with a twenty year state contract.  How can a state determine their ability to meet those numbers?  By using your children’s third grade class to calculate those numbers.  Are you awake yet?

6. Gentrification, in basic terms, is how the city government allows your neighborhoods and their properties to become devalued by neighborhood crime, lack of upkeep, and lack of support for aging homeowners who purchased the homes during the “white flight” to the suburbs.  This justifies the destruction of broken down public housing, formerly a tool for containing the minority poor in one area, which is torn down and replaced by condos, restaurants and townhomes that welcome the travel-weary suburb dweller back into the city.  The minority poor is displaced, some lured into believing that the suburbs is the best place to go, not realizing what it will ultimately cost them financially or through isolation.  Across the country, in every major city, business professionals and their families are quietly purchasing Uncle John or Auntie Nina’s old house for a fraction of its worth, or acquiring your mother’s house because she signed up for a “reverse mortgage” -- which is nothing more than a high fee, predatory loan for a third of the home’s worth that becomes a balloon payment due at death  -- fixing it up with low interest loans the city offers from their city revitalization funds and moving back into the city.  Your neighbors, meanwhile, are being lured into believing that moving out into the suburbs will somehow offer you a better life, because that was the truth – fifteen years ago, when it was not an option.  African Americans are often the target victims of housing fraud, including “flipping”, renovation loans, etc.  And who profits?

7. Intracultural Separatism. Black people are not monolithic. We are diverse in thought, interests, perspectives, skin hues, backgrounds. During slavery passive masking was a strength that allowed slaves to survive emotionally.  “Enslaved African Americans also resisted by forming community within the plantation setting.  This was a tremendous undertaking for people whose lives were ruled by domination and forced labor.  Slaves married, had children, and worked hard to keep their families together.  In their quarters they were able to let down the masks they had to wear for whites.  There, black men, women, and children developed an underground culture through which they affirmed their humanity.  They gathered in the evenings to tell stories, sing, and make secret plans.  House servants would come down from the "big house" and give news of the master and mistress, or keep people laughing with their imitations of the whites.  It was in their quarters that many enslaved people developed and passed down skills which allowed them to supplement their poor diet and inadequate medical care with hunting, fishing, gathering wild food, and herbal medicines.  There, the adults taught their children how to hide their feelings to escape punishment and to be skeptical of anything a white person said.“[3]  Today, that strength has become a weakness. 

We allow ourselves to believe that using our culture to segregate ourselves in an ever-shrinking global community is of benefit.  Further, what we pass on and among ourselves is what is dictated to us as our labels.  Note, for example how in the entertainment industry, when dollars are waved in front of us, we are again the puppets of the masters; we embrace the given perception that we are a group of violent, oversexed people (see music videos).  Women are willing to bump and grind in front of the cameras – doing what most would never consider doing if the stage were instead a topless bar.  Then there are the comedic roles, the only place where we are allowed to be the majority of primary characters, where we again fall into the stereotypical traps that have been defined for us. The non-reality reality shows of today are little more that staged caricatures of the stereotypes we have been defined by.  Some of us believe that we should embrace our cultural differences by showing that we are “down with the people” but are we really down with the people – ourselves – or with the labels that are provided and we have chosen to embrace?  I remember vividly an experience when I passed a group of men on the street and one of them spoke and I responded.  He became enraged, because my response wasn’t “black enough” for him.  But who made the rule that correct English is “speaking white”?  I really don’t believe that it was us.  Why?  Because I have found that those I deal with in corporations and organizations, who feel compelled to tell me that I am so “articulate,” (their code for “speaking white”) as though it was a rarity among people of color, and at the same time view me as an enemy that had somehow infiltrated the ranks.  I believe we should embrace that within our culture which truly defines us as a race, and learn to discern between what is cultural and what is the stereotype by which others wish to define us.

When it comes to what is cultural and what is stereotypical: what’s in a name?  A lot.  We have chosen to make up names – especially for our daughters – in the name of culturalism.  What we have done is create a new stereotype, with which our children are defined.  As one gentleman from Nigeria told me “you Americans make up names that don’t mean anything.  In Africa our names are taken quite seriously.  It is what we pass along from generation to generation.”  While waiting to board a plane when I was on a business trip, three drunken males came by and made the mistake of commenting on my braids by attempting to fit me into their stereotype, inclusive of giving me a non-meaning name as a defining label of who I was.  Without further detail of subsequent events, my point is that many choose to define and stereotype by name.  When you call your child by a name that means nothing, what does that say about how we define ourselves and others define us?  “During the past decade, there has been a continuous battle within the African American community to eliminate internal racism.  It is going to take the power of Almighty God and the consciousness of all of us, together and individually, to change the course of our future into a brighter one, especially for our children.  Let us become conscious of the evil around us in order to make the strides we need.  Let’s understand that we have a better history than what is told of it.  We have a motherland, we are human, and we are God’s children.  These reasons are why it is so important to step outside of racism, totally disregard it, and abolish it from our souls and lives forever.”[4] 

One more thing:  My message to those who have yet to comprehend who we are or aren’t: Yes, we do need to give our children names that have meaning (one of my pet peeves), but you need to learn how to pronounce them and NO, do not give me or mine your nicknames; we don’t need you renaming us. If you accidentally bump into me, a sincere excuse me is sufficient; profuse apologies aren’t necessary because you think all black folks will explode into violence and attack you – 99.97% of us will never do that. My intelligence and ability to speak well is not an anomaly, stop commenting on it. Don’t tell me your racial inferences are just a joke and not to be so sensitive; that you do it at all says everything about you and I have the right to make it a teachable moment...for you, Understand that you will not define me, no matter how many labels you attempt to attach to who I am.

8.  Intraracism.  The enemy lies within and the enemy is us.  In the days of conscious physical slavery in this country, there were the house slaves and the field slaves – a deliberate psychological class distinction.  House slaves were programmed to believe that their loyalty included the betrayal of any exhibiting the potential of having an original thought or might potentially create a “problem”.  Ask yourself why – even today – Anglos get nervous, even angry when three or more of their minority counterparts are talking together and they don’t know what they are talking about.  They want to know what’s going on.  If you are asked about the conversation and don’t disclose the subject matter, they become offended.  You become the enemy.  We are selfish about our piece of the corporate, social or economic pie, afraid to share because we think that there might not be enough, not realizing that we have the power to bake a whole new pie.  So we “shuffle and grin” at the “massah”, and sell our own down the river in fear that we will somehow be reclaimed and sent back to the plantation.  We ignore the screams of those who realize they have been caught and turn up the volume on Marvin Gaye’s CD.  We allow them to eat our young by allowing them to set the standards for how they are treated, rather than demanding the standards we deserve.  We are afraid of losing all that we have gained by reaching back over the wall to help others over.  We sit and wait expectantly for “them” to come and solve our problems, not understanding that we must control our own destiny and need not wait for permission to do so.  We still wait for the forty acres and a mule.  And who profits?

“A paradigm is a system of belief or a way of viewing the world…To become a Free Sovereign Individual and do justice to yourself, you need to find out who you are.  Most of us, including many who yearn for freedom, suffer from what might be called ‘slave mentality.’  Our personal philosophy and psychology, in important respects, may be that of a slave rather than that of a free sovereign.  To get a better understanding of the sovereign individual paradigm, compare the free-wild horse to the broken-domesticated horse.  A horse is born free and wild.  Try and ride a free-wild horse and it will do its utmost to throw you off.  A free-wild horse doesn't like to be broken - enslaved - ridden by a master.  Once the cowboy has broken the free-wild horse, it becomes a broken-domesticated-obedient horse.  Now the cowboy is the master of the horse.  Once a horse has been broken it timidly accepts being saddled and bridled.  The saddle is placed on the horse's back and held in place by a strong strap around the horse's body.  Attached to the saddle are stirrups for the rider's feet.  The rider's boots may have spurs used to inflict pain on the horse in order to make it run faster.  The rider may also use a horsewhip.  Around the head of the horse a bridle is strapped.  Part of the bridle is a metal bit that passes horizontally through the horse's mouth.  The reins are attached to the ends of the bit and are used to steer the horse and make it slow down and stop.  Pain can be inflicted on the horse by yanking the reins or pulling on them with a seesaw motion.  The above paraphernalia are used to make it easy for a rider to control his or her horse - difficult for the horse to disobey its rider.  The horse is the slave of the cowboy.  The cowboy rides the horse.  The horse works for the cowboy.  The cowboy owns the horse.  The horse obeys the cowboy.  Disobedience may be punished.  The horse that fights tooth and hoof to prevent you from putting on bridle and saddle may be sold as horsemeat. 

Horses are born free and wild.  Horses are inherently free.  They are naturally free.  But they can be broken, domesticated, enslaved…One Afrikaans word for native Africans is "naturel" ("native"); another is "skepsel" ("creature").  The most derogatory is "kaffer" ("infidel").  These words are no longer acceptable.  My grandfather was a Senator and Chairman of the "Naturelle-Sake Kommissie" ("Native Affairs Commission").  That is the equivalent of the Chairman of a Congressional Committee that oversees the "Bureau of Indian Affairs.”  My grandfather was considered very wise and knew exactly what had to be done about the "Swart Gevaar" ("Black Danger").  My grandmother taught black children the three Rs and religion in her own farm school.  Her mission was to "civilize the savages.”  One day a black maid licked one of my grandmother's spoons.  My grandmother gave the maid a tongue lashing for "contaminating a white spoon" - then gave the spoon to the maid to keep, because it was "no longer fit for white use!” 

When I was about seventeen I got engaged in a conversation with a black man.  Suddenly, as if hit by a sledgehammer, I realized that I was talking to a Human Being!  Up to that time I had unconsciously assumed that blacks were "inferior creatures" - kind of sub-human…Steve Biko was the founder of the "Black Consciousness" Movement in South Africa.  Biko recognized that the biggest problem was that blacks in their own consciousness regarded themselves as "inferior creatures."  The culture we grew up in - the language we used - planted the notion in the minds of whites that they were "superior beings," and in the minds of blacks that they were "inferior creatures.”  Practically all whites and blacks were subconsciously enculturated in this manner. 

Biko recognized this phenomenon and advocated that blacks had to free their consciousness from the "inferior-creature" shackles.  Biko became world-famous and was visited by people like Bobby Kennedy.  Biko was also the greatest threat to white government in South Africa.  The police effectively murdered him.  The murder was "whitewashed." 

A few years before Biko's death I started reading books about freedom, books critical of government, books alleging that inflation was something done by government, books about secret conspiracies that were the real government behind the scene.  One such book was How I Found Freedom in an Unfroze World by Harry Browne. It had a profound effect on my consciousness.  This and other books - particularly The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane - eventually led me to discover that I was a free and sovereign individual.  Steve Biko was also a major inspiration in the development of my consciousness.  Soon after Biko's murder, I left South Africa.  Since then I have lived as a free sovereign individual in several countries.  In Brussels, Belgium I came across The Cinderella Complex: Women's Fear of Independence by Collette Dowling.  Her theme is that in their consciousness women tend to regard themselves as "inferior slave creatures" (compared to men).  This inferiority is mostly subconscious and culturally imposed.  According to Dowling, men tend to regard themselves as "superior master beings" (compared to women).”[5]

9. The Impact of Sports and Entertainment  Two questions were posed on Facebook by an actor.   “How much responsibility should entertainment from Black artists have in regards to preserving images of our prominent Black figures?  If WE don't take responsibility in that preservation, is it fair to ask the mainstream media to take on that responsibility in which how they depict us?”  -- Jada Pinkett Smith

My responses:  First, entertainment figures, like it or not, have a greater responsibility. Why? Because in spite of what's true, African America is seen as a monolithic group of people. Which is why we are expected to have one person to speak for all of us and are surprised when we balk at the notion. So when we become caricatures on non-reality reality shows, acting out the very stereotypes used to define us, we create films that, again, portray the stereotypes and DON"T support the quality films like Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Great Debaters to name a couple, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. We debase ourselves to create controversy, in order to stay visible because controversy sells in the US, not realizing unlike the rest, our controversy is an indelible mark the media will not allow to be erased. Second, if we don't come to understand, know, respect and LEARN from our history it most assuredly will be repeated and not in a good way. I expect the media to do what they do best: bait the trap with whatever sensational nugget we provide, and massage it for at least two news cycles contingent on the number of site clicks, then bring it back up years later as though it were yesterday, when it was likely they didn't get it right the first time. Are you listening Chris Brown?  

We have a role in this outcome.  When we choose to support a “McDonald mentality,” never looking past the surface, always accepting the shortcut as the best choice, allowing the entertainment and arts industries to give us what they want us to have, instead of setting a standard by using our economic power then we will always be cast in the role of the victim. If you want better quality television, better images of who we are on the big and small screen or blaring from the radio, then get off your sidelines, speak up, do something.

10.  A new age of racism. Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as President of the United States on January 20, 2009.  While many on the right grudgingly countered with the notion that all blacks should be satisfied because having a Black president meant racism in the US was over, it couldn’t be farther from the truth.  There are many Anglos, even some non-Anglos, who are enraged without complete understanding of the reason.  One key reason is that a shift in one’s paradigm is painful, especially when one has to admit one’s belief set, which is likely a legacy, is wrong.  The reality is they now have a President who is Black or African American, a strong family man, a Christian, intelligent, ivy league graduate, has a beautiful, brown-skinned wife and lovely, intelligent children who are living in the White House they always assumed would be occupied by an Anglo First Family.  Every single day, until 2016, they wake up to this truth. All the birthers, all the alleging doubters in the country will never be able to change this truth, no matter how hard they try. 

With the abilities and access to social media, combined with the noise from the girls and boys in the business of punditry and book writing, a cacophony of overt and covert racial anger and hatred has surfaced.  It seems not a week goes by without the disparaging, demeaning, obnoxious comment from a politician, pundit, or extremist, to be followed by the usual attempt to justify/double down/deny said comment, or offer a tepid apology if the pushback is greater than expected, if all of the above fails, implement the “I’m the victim here’ meme. 

Publications think it’s okay to call a lovely nine year old a c**t, then sit silently while those on social media, hiding behind their touchscreens tell us it’s a joke and to not be so sensitive.  Black women are being verbally attacked and demeaned for their intelligence, creativity and resilience as though these strengths somehow render her unattractive and undesirable.  In the last five years, black women became a caricature of all stereotypes on commercials, in the non-reality reality shows, on television series. When some irrelevant white woman who calls herself a comedienne decides to use the N-word in reference to her white friend, many Anglo women comment we are too sensitive and should get over it because we "all" use it. (monolithic we are?) If your family doesn't speak like that, nor does mine, isn't it likely we are in the majority? Ergo these ads don't represent us and are just another version of blackface. There are many iterations and so many insidious ways to reach the same conclusion. Any mother of children of color, know that the issue of race is always on the table as soon as you walk out the door. It starts at school, to work, to the grocery, to hailing a cab to get home. It is mentally and emotionally exhausting, right?

Blackface is a historical method of caricaturizing and demeaning black folks. Fast forward to present and the practice becomes nuanced, hiding in plain sight: Toyota got into a lot of trouble, as did AT&T when they respectively used big red lips with a gold car on white teeth for postcards they wanted to distribute at nightclubs and a gorilla to represent the people on the African continent. Covert racism has continued to evolve into a strategy that is woven into the media, into commercials, into prime time TV. So innocuous that one has to pick the battles, respond versus react, look at the bigger picture in order to build a strategy. And it doesn't help when we shoot ourselves in the foot by being a part of the problem.

In the presentation I attended, the Holocaust and the Jews were being used as the significant example, these were specific points also attributed to the syndrome and just as easily associated to African Americans, who – like the Jews -- have historically managed to survive:

• The captive (slave) fears those trying to help more than the captors themselves.  We have finally figured out how to stop the captor from hitting us so often, and besides he throws us a crumb every now and then.  Why would we want you to come and mess things up?
• To the captive (slave), the captors position becomes justified, and that the captive (slave) has no choices.  The captor has gotten you to believe that there is no hope, even when you seem to have escaped.  Example (true and recent story): Woman hooked on drugs, upon release from jail, takes her baby son and leaves Chicago so that she is away from the lure of drugs; she buys a one-way ticket to Seattle, Washington.  Works and scrapes so that son develops a good life with a future; he has good grades, friends and a college scholarship.  One obsessed Anglo female lodges a charge of rape -- without proof.  Son is arrested on hearsay – does not even know the girl, except that she asked him to go out with her once and he refused.  Son loses girlfriend, friends and scholarship – and spends three weeks in jail – a place he had never even visited – along with mother’s life savings before it is determined that the Anglo female lied and is a virgin.  Even today the son is made to feel that he must be guilty of something, something must have happened.  Mother sends son back to Chicago in fear that the police will want to come get him again.  They still haven’t sued the girl for damages or the police for false arrest.  One of the definitions of rape is an outrageous violation, despoiling, by force.  Who was raped after all?
• Recovery can best be achieved when the captive (slave) is away from the captor.  It is a proven fact, yet no one has tested this fact on any significant level.  If you take someone permanently out of the environment that has generated the position of slavery to drugs, crime, or gang – he or she has a better chance of beating the enslaved addiction.

So now what?  I have no intention of extending an instant solution to such  complex problems, since the Stockholm Syndrome has very individualized effects and one solution definitely does not fit all.  Further, we are continually distracted by the newer, more subtle versions of passive racism.  But knowledge is power and the resource from which you can choose to draw resolution. What you can do, must do, is think -- really think -- about your life, your self.  Are you enslaved psychologically?  Do you exhibit the behavior of one who suffers from the Stockholm Syndrome or are you affected by its manifestation in others? 

Becoming conscious of its existence and how it manifests itself in your life is the first step.  The next step is to understand your past and that of your ancestors; you will never know where you are going until you understand where you’ve been.  There are resources that provide more historical fact than fantasy, such as A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki and sources on the Internet, such as Africans in America.

Finally, it becomes your individual challenge, even your responsibility to take the remaining steps toward reclaiming yourself, recovery, and giving yourself the power to leave the mental plantation -- moving on to true freedom.

An abridged version of this essay is featured on the MoAD I’ve Know Rivers website and included in the book ‘SHIPS, but does not include these updates.

©2013  

E. Joyce Moore, writer, author of Ramblings Through the Attic of Thought,  ‘SHIPS: How We Sail Through Life, children’s book I Like Brown illustrated by fine artist Charlotte Riley-Webb,  and CLAP! now available on smashwords.com.  Visit her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/E_Joyce

[8] Africans in America: Judgement Day – Part four