My box was ablaze yesterday with people upset by a video of this NFL player, his White fiance and other Black and White people in his gathering toasting to "more light-skinned kids." Here are snippets from a thread and my responses.
Respondent one: "Hatred of self is an ill that we must continue to work to heal."
Respondent two: "I have no words for this"
Respondent three: "Nothing new here! It’s been in our culture for generations. The question should be how do we get people to love themselves."
That's why Mama Afiya and I do the Warrior-Healer-Builder work we do - to help us heal from the sickness.
Calling it out may be a start. It's hardly enough. To call it "self-hate" is to sell it short. To paint is a generic problem of "people loving themselves" removes race and racial oppression and injected oppression from the equation - when that's at the heart of the issue. The brother is only voicing what many, many - too many of us are doing - running away from our fight, our struggle, our Blackness. I feel sad. Maybe, I'll go get me a 6-pack and a box of handkerchiefs. Maybe, I'll write on...
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| Afiya and Wekesa Madzimoyo |
The brother's wound is a POWER issue manifesting as a self-esteem or "self-hate" issue. Seeing it as a self-esteem issue isolates it as the brother's problem from which he needs to heal, right? Convenient. We don't have to talk about the wounds from historic white brutality that have been passed down his family line (or ours), nor the continued oppression (hands up don't shoot) that causes and rewards his expression of his sickness, right?
*Power Sets Standards:*
The preferences and projected ways of the powerful (historically and presently white people - in this instance) set the standard whenever domination is the primary social order - like it is in America. The harsh application of the dominant group's social superiority morphs the psychology of the dominated group (Black people - in this instance) - inducing us to decide that oppressors or the "haves" are the standard bearers for beautiful, morality, intelligence, etc.
*Not Mental Weakness:*
This is not about mental weakness. Our abandoning our standards and acceptance of theirs started as
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| Into a burning house? |
It's understandable. Adopting the aesthetics of the powerful have led to more personal acceptance, less punishment, less starvation, more goodies from the dominant group. Let's face it, less starvation and punishment was practical.
Think about it. The "good and practical" thing becomes a beautiful thing.
Just as the religion of the powerful becomes the desired religion of the masses, beauty standards, music standards, educational standards, etc. become the accepted standards of the society - especially of the have-nots.
It's denial. The oppressed know. The brother knows. Denial eases and suppresses the internal pain of surrender. Holding something down or keeping something out makes you aware of its presence or force. That awareness reminds us of the original pain and the pain of our surrender, so denial takes the form of creative story-making - delusion. The NFL needs more light-skinned babies is an example. Making "nigger" songs for white boys to buy and sing is ok - as long as we get the check, is another example.
*What Doesn't Work:"
When we use our personal and collective power to oppose that dominant power, we reject them - and more slowly - their aesthetics as "standard, good, right, etc." Instead, we start to rediscover, create, and laud our own standards. That's what was going on in the late 50's and early to later 70's. The pictures of Black women on Ebony magazine's cover changed from light-bright to brown to blue-black. Afros took center stage. Our challenge to power made James Brown go from Please, Please Please to Say It Loud I'm Black and Proud. It made Run DMC Fight the Power!
The reason most current efforts to repair our "self-esteem" don't work is that they ignore or even shun this challenging, rebelling component and the subsequent healing and rebuilding components which use standards independent of the oppressor.
This rebellion is often shunned by us, for the same reason that the brother wants more "light-skinned" children - fear of reprisals and more access to social "goodies' - approval, acceptance, praise, jobs, etc. I mean the brother doesn't want to risk getting the "Kap " treatment, right?
Our fear and our aversion to challenging oppression are often wrapped in morality's clothes like "When they go low, we go high," or race doesn't matter because it's a social construct, yada, yada, yada. They are only other forms of delusion to shield us from the psychological dissonance of surrender.
Beauty, like love, like religion, morality, etc., is political - it's shaped by the powerful and used to serve a social, political, economic, and military agenda. That's exactly why they are presented apolitically. "Right and wrong is just right and wrong," right?" Beauty is just beauty," and whomever you choose to sleep with is just your personal preference, right? Nothing political about it, right?
*Correction:*
When you stand for and work for another social/political agenda, then you claim your power and choose beauty, love, morality, etc. that support your agenda. Especially if yours is a 400-year agenda.
*Forms follows function:*
What we call "self-hate" is really "surrender" of our goals to remove people from power over us and our culture to the oppressors projected standards. Not the real ones, but the ones projected for our consumption - tailored to appeal to our value-set and our induced need to compensate for our perceived "lack." Most times the surrender happened generations before us and we're just following family and social scripts.
It's time to rewrite them! In this way, the brother's unbridled expression of surrender can lead us to discover the small ways we have or have been surrendered. This will allow us to heal - turning surrender back to retreat back to using our power to remove people from power over us, back to - Black beauty.Respondent three again:
The thought process was more prevalent in past years. I still remember how James Brown’s classic made it popular to say “I’m Black and I’m proud.” Around this time, most of us stop referring to each other and ourselves as N.....s. However, the derogatory word has crept back into our culture, mainly through a genre of music.
My response:
James Brown certainly inspired me, and he didn't start out with I'm Black and Proud, the resistance movement pulled him there. Sam Cook didn't start out with his protest song A Change Is Gonna Come. Most don't even know this was a protest song, but that's another subject. Both started with the goal of making a cross-over hit to access white buyers. The point is our resistance movements - from UNIA to Civil Rights to Deacons for Defense to Black Panthers, to riots in the streets - pulled the entertainers, they, in turn, inspired us. Instead of advocating that we abandon the white standard, the Nation of Islam's mantra "The White Man is the Devil" was a direct attack on the injected psychopathology evidenced by Black people holding our historic oppressors as the standard bearer by reversing our view of them and things white from good to evil.
No matter where you sat on the resistance continuum, we were countering white people's power and
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| Fannie Lou Hammer |
Of course, fighting has to make way for healing and building -healing from the wounds of oppression and building with each other - in spite of oppression. That's where using our cultural and alternatively useful standards come in to play.
That's why our work is called: Warrior-Healer-Builder.
Regarding the music - it comes second. As White people saw the power of it, they moved to take over all Black radio stations and also to coop the music. I was a DJ in the early to mid-70s. They put money behind derogatory music and starved conscious artists. Again, the music comes second to the political aims and resources.
Re: N... My experience as that we continued to say "N...." We just didn't publish it for white people.
It would be years before me and Richard Pryor learned the errors of our ways.
Just one more thing:
These wounds have not just "been in our culture" they were forcibly injected in our culture, psychology, and relationships by captivity, forced labor, Jim Crow, etc. The distinction is subtle and important because we can't heal ourselves from the wounds of external abuse and blame ourselves for that external abuse any more than a person who is forcibly rapped can heal if s/he blames himself - as if s/he were the rapist.
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Keep the discussion going and learn more about our Warrior-Healer-Builder paradigm. Join us Sunday's 8pm Eastern.
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