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Books by Marvin X
Love and War: Poems /
In the Crazy House Called America /
Woman: Man's Best Friend /
Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality
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Books by Nathan Hare
The Black Anglo-Saxons /
The Miseducation of the Black Child /
The Endangered Black Family / Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood *
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Foreword
How
to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
By Dr. Nathan Hare
Call him Dr. M, as
I do, though I’ve known him by other names in other
places and, like Diogenes, who went around holding up a
lantern to the faces of the people he would meet in the
streets of ancient Athens looking for an honest man, I
have come to the realization that we as a people have
been waiting and looking for somebody like Dr. M to come
along for more than half a century, ever since America
was stunned by The Mark of Oppression (the Jim Crow era
book by two white liberal psychiatrists whose findings
had brought them to the heartfelt conclusion that the
race of people called “Negroes” was “crushed.”
In only four years
after their epitaph was written, Negroes (now called
“blacks,” “Blacks,” “Afro-Americans,”
“African-Americans,” or as Dr. M sometimes calls them
“American Africans”) had exploded in Montgomery with
passive resistance. In four more years the “sit-in
movement” broke out among the youth, followed like a
one-two punch by the so-called “freedom riders” (roving
bands of individuals who boarded and defied the
segregation of interstate vehicles and included a future
student of mine on spring break from Howard University
by the name of Stokely Carmichael). Then came “Black
Power,” in the context of which I first heard of a man
who had metamorphosed from the slave-name Marvin Jackmon
into a prominent “North American African poet” who went
by the name of Marvin X (the X connoting “the unknown”).
While, despite the
fact that I have known him through the intervening
years, I cannot unravel every single quality of the
brother, I can testify that Dr. M is a brand new Marvin,
a Dr. Marvin, a social doctor, if you will, with a gift
and a mission for a new black movement. I know this to
be true because, aside from my Ph.D. and years of
experience in the practice of clinical psychology, I
specialized in the study of social movements for a Ph.D.
in sociology at the University of Chicago. But more
than that, I have watched a dedicated Dr. M, up close
and clinically, going about his fearless work in the
mean streets of San Francisco. Over a period of many
months, on many a dark and dreary sometimes rainy
Wednesday night, I served as a consultant in clinical
psychology to Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Group” (the
pilot to his twelve-step model now unveiled in this
important book on “How to Recover from Addiction to
White Supremacy.” In the Recovery Theatre’s pilot
groups, I sat with diverse and ad hoc coteries of men
and women gathered impromptu in the austere basement of
a Catholic church, St. Boniface, located in the heart of
The Tenderloin, the highest crime district in San
Francisco, just down a few blocks from the famous Glide
Memorial Methodist Church. Many a night I marveled at
the ease with which Dr. M and his talented
co-facilitator, Suzette Celeste brought out trickles of
lost and unleashed hope and inspiration in the minds of
destitute and degraded street people as well as in the
confused and empty psyches of invited members of the
black bourgeoisie who, still trying to be unbroken, had
come where not many “bourgies” would dare to tread.
On many an
appointed night I stood by silently looking on while Dr.
M and his collaborators sauntered out into the shadowy
mysteries of dilapidated streets to solicit and harness
hapless homeless men and a woman or two and bring them
in to meet as equals with the anxious representatives of
the black bourgeoisie who had dared to cross momentarily
back over their tentative territorial and social
boundaries. This of course is not recommended for the
feeble or the fainthearted; because, until the
revolution comes, or the proletariat triumphs, there
will be difficulties and perils in chance encounters of
the social classes. So I must hasten to explain that a
security conscious Dr. M was operating within a safety
net of collaborators competent in the martial arts; like
Geoffrey Grier, who has been an international martial
arts competitor and is a son of a black psychiatrist,
Dr. William Grier, coauthor with Dr. Price Cobb of the
late 1960s blockbuster, Black Rage.
At the moment when
the oppressed have had enough, their rage will explode
-- Fanon had warned us in The Wretched of the Earth --
and it is at that moment, at the very point of mental
and spiritual coagulation and defeat, when they will
come together and rise. Frantz Fanon went on to tell of
a category of reconstruction groups called “’djemaas’
(village assemblies) of northern Africa or in the
meetings of western Africa, tradition demands that the
quarrels which occur in a village should be settled in
public. It is communal self-criticism, of course, and
with a note of humor, because everybody is relaxed, and
because in the last resort we all want the same things.
But the more the intellectual imbibes the atmosphere of
the people, the more completely he abandons the habits
of calculation, of unwonted silence, of mental
reservations, and shakes the spirit of concealment. And
it is true that already at that level we can say that it
spreads its own light and its own reason.”
However,
psychiatric authority for a self-help peer group focus
on individual feelings (or addiction) in relation to
white supremacy became available anew in the late 1960s,
when Jeffrey Grier’s father, Dr. William H. Grier, and
his collaborator, Dr. Price M. Cobbs, published Black
Rage. Dr. Grier has also consulted with Dr. M and his
Recovery Theatre around the time of the pilot trial run
of the first “Black Reconstruction Groups.” According
to Grier and Cobbs, in the “Introduction to the
Paperback Edition” of Black Rage, “The most important
aspect of therapy with blacks, we are convinced, is that
racist mistreatment must be echoed and underlined as a
fact, an unfortunate fact, but a most important fact – a
part of reality. Dissatisfaction with such mistreatment
is to be expected, and one’s resentment should be of
appropriate dimensions” among black warriors who would
exact retribution. “Psychiatry for such warriors,”
Grier and Cobbs went on to explain, should aim to “keep
them fit for the duty at hand and healthy enough to
enjoy the victories” that are likely to emerge.
Fitness for duty is
a pleasant but likely side effect of Dr. M’s “Black
Reconstruction Groups” working to free the minds of
persons addicted to white supremacy. This no doubt is
no doubt why they do not limit themselves in their group
sessions to expressions of resentment of racist
mistreatment and dissatisfaction but also calmly allow
its hidden effects, which often remain unconscious in
the way in which the relentless karate chops of white
supremacy have killed our dreams on a daily basis and
shattered our ability to love, to feel loved, to love
ourselves and therefore one another. I listened with
much satisfaction as Dr. M and his assemblies delved
into the depths of fractured feelings and emotions of
the brokenhearted in order to help them come to terms
with betrayal, jealousy and rage, in their moving
endeavors to learn to love again.
And so it is that
you will find many a reference to love in How to Recover
from the Addiction to White Supremacy. This includes,
for instance, “Women Who Love” and the motivations of
the men who love them.
Dr. M’s own fitness
for duty is complex, unique and variegated. According
to James W. Sweeney, "Marvin walked through the muck
and mire of hell and came out clean as white fish and
black as coal." Marvin can boast of “a Ph.D. in
Negrology,” as he puts it,” the study of nigguhs” issued
by the University of Hardknocks’s College of Hell),
based on twelve years of research , independent study ,
and practicum in San Francisco's Tenderloin and other
unlettered social laboratories throughout the United
States. There may still be hope, if it pleases you,
for Dr. M to join the white man’s system of miseducation
and mental health care, when we consider that
psychologists, including one of my mentors, the late Dr.
Carlton Goodlett, at first were “grandfathered” in when
the licensure of psychologists was started in the state
of California. Later came the oral exam
(conversational, not dental), followed in time by an
essay exam, before the boom in “standardized “ multiple
choice tests for which workshops were offered to prepare
you for a fee, causing excellent practitioners,
especially black ones, to be blocked from licensure
until they found out and forked over whopping workshop
fees .
There is also a
burgeoning market opening up in “clinical sociology” and
“sociological practice” still cutting out its slice of
the marketplace and finding its way in matters of
licensure and credentialing in the field of sociology.
But here it may be important to say that the self-help
peer group does not require a sociological or a mental
health professional, any more than the primordial AA
groups from which the mental health profession has
profited and learned. Dr. M is a social “doctor” (which
etymologically means “teacher”) grappling with a social
problem, white supremacy and its punishing residue in
the minds of oppressed black individuals and white
oppressors who have chosen to reject and come to places
where their fathers lied. Oppressors pure and simple,
who accept white supremacy, must be dealt with in a
later context, as you will not very well be able to keep
them in a Black Reconstruction or White Supremacy
Destruction Group (or White Supremacy Deconstruction, if
you will).
Much in the manner
of Hegel in his essay on “Master and Slave,” Marvin
senses that the oppressor distorts his own mind as well
as the mind of the oppressed. Hence Type I and Type II
White Supremacy Addiction. White sociologists and the
late black psychologist, Bobby Wright, converged in
their findings of pathological personality traits (“the
authoritarian personality” and “the racial psychopathic
personality,” as Bobby put it). But if Hegel was correct
in his notion that the oppressor cannot free the slave,
that the slave must force the oppressor’s hand, then it
is Type II White Supremacy Addiction which if not more
resistant to cure, must occupy our primary focus. Type
II White Supremacy may be seen as a kind of “niggeritis”
or “Negrofication” growing out of an over-identification
with the master, who is white. As in any disorder
severity of symptoms may vary from mild to moderate or
severe. As Frantz Fanon put it when he spoke for the
brother with jungle fever in Black Skin, White Mask: “I
wish to be regarded as white. If I can be loved by the
white woman who is loved by the white man, then I am
white like the white man; I am a full human being.” In
the twisted mental convolution of a brother in black
skin behind a white mask, Fanon observed a “Negro
dependency complex” independently chronicled in my own
Black Anglo Saxons (black individuals with white minds
in black bodies). They struggle to look, think, talk and
walk white by day, then go to sleep at night and dream
that they will wake up white. They refuse to realize
that no matter what they may ever do they will never get
out of the black race alive.
On the other hand,
you are going to be seeing “nouveau blacks” and lesser
Afrocentrics -- who faithfully and unquestionably follow
twelve-month years and endeavor even to blackenize the
twelve disciples of Jesus Christ -- jumping up to
question Dr. M’s re-africanization of the “Twelve Steps”
model for “using the Eurocentric twelve steps,” but they
forget that the very effort to be practical and
collective is the original African way. In any event,
we must build on whites as whites have built on us,
taking the best of the West and leaving the rest alone.
But Dr. M has expressly and creatively added a
thirteenth step; for his goal is not just recovery but
discovery, his goal is not just to change the individual
but to change the individual to get ready to change the
world.
Meanwhile there is
one thing on which we can all agree: in any serious
attempt to solve the bitter mental ravages of white
supremacy, we must face the unadulterated fact that we
are limited when we look to the institutionalized
“profession” and their professional “providers.” This
of course is not to say that the institutionalized
professionals cannot be helpful. Dr. M is quick to point
out that a self-help peer group cannot cure all the
diverse neuroses and psychoses that afflict us. Indeed
he goes so far as to suggest that some of us “may need
to be committed.”
The late Queen
Mother Moore (who loved to boast that she had “gone as
far as the fourth grade, and stayed in school too long
to learn anything”) delighted in going around
deconstructing our “slave mentalities” and saying
somebody needs to “do some surgery on these Negro minds”
– in which Queen Mother had diagnosed a chronic
condition she called “oppression psychoneurosis.” Queen
Mother Moore was basically joking, that is, laughing to
keep from crying, but it is no joke that mental health
professionals, operating under the medical model, think
nothing of seeing a person suffering from a psychosocial
problem and not only treating the victim instead of the
problem but – much in the manner of any addict or drug
pusher– use or apply chemicals and sometimes chemical
abuse to deal with the inability of the “patient” to
feel good in a bad place and thrive, to try to “have
heart” in a heartless world. Many people are unaware to
this very day that the practice once was rampant for
psychiatrists to treat a person with chronic mental
maladies by subjecting them to lobotomies cutting off a
portion of their brains. Shock treatment was another
method – you’re shocked by life, let’s shock your brain,
Senator Eagleton (who later ran for the vice-presidency
in the 1970s on the ticket with George McGovern).
It should never
have been any surprise that the mental health profession
would be of only partial help in reconstructing the
psychic consequences of centuries of prolonged
brainwashing and subjugation (this is not to mention
“Sicko” and what we know of the crippling new effects of
“managed care” on the medical profession). Many mental
health experts, the overwhelming majority of them white,
have long suggested that the “medical model” may be
inappropriate in the treatment of the psychological, not
to mention, sociological components of mental illness.
But you don’t have
to be a mental health professional or a sociologist to
know that we can no longer restrict our search for
healing to professional shrinks, raring back in
executive chairs and carpeted suites stocked with
“psychometric instruments” standardized on the white
middle class, far removed from the realities of the
concrete social milieu of afflicted and homeless black
“subjects” living lives of hardship and subjugation,
with no assurance of available treatment.
Even when they are
“insured they are limited to the care and treatment some
insurance clerk is willing to “authorize.” In matters
of mental health, this typically will include a few
sessions of “fifty minute hours” of “talk therapy”
before leaving with a prescription or chemical
palliative to dull agony and the pain but not the
punishment of life on the skids in a sick society.
The hour is up and
time is running out, black people, but white supremacy
is not. We are living now in the final and highest stage
of racism and white supremacy. We’ve let our struggle
slip back while sitting in classrooms and conferences
crooning about “afrocentricity” and ancient African
glories that have gone forever.
We have come now to
a crossroads. We have lost control of our children’s
minds, our future. We have lost their respect, and
appear to be on a collision course to a war of words
between the black generations, in which hip-hop youth
disparage and mock our language, our music and our
humanity with a creativity and a rime and a rhythm we
can’t fathom, let alone equal in our pitifully fruitless
endeavors to eliminate the “n-word” and box with the
black-on-black random violence of dissocialized youth
who have concluded that adults and their leaders cannot
or will not fight the power. Who knows but it may be
that Dr. M’s movement of recovery from addiction to and
from white supremacy is offering us a final and
effective chance to begin to “sit down together,” to get
together and get our heads together.
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The book is available from
Black Bird Press, POB1317, Paradise CA 95967 or
De Lauer’s News, 1310 Broadway at 14th, Oakland
To book Dr. M for speaking and readings, call 510-355-6339
mrvnx@yahoo.com /
www.marvinxwrites.blogspot.com
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Black Bird Press is an imprint of the Marian M.
Jackmon Foundation.
The Mission of the Marian M. Jackmon Foundation is to
preserve and disseminate the writings of Marvin X. Also,
to establish grants and scholarships for men and women
entrepreneurs of spiritual consciousness. Feel free to
make a generous donation to the Marian M. Jackmon
Foundation. Your donation can be tax deductible.
Marian M. Jackmon Foundation, P.O. Box 1317, Paradise
CA 95967. Call 510-472-9589 /
mrvnx@yahoo.com
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From the forthcoming book HOW TO
RECOVERY FROM THE ADDICTION TO WHITE SUPREMACY BY DR. M.
Read excerpts:
www.marvinxwrites.blogspot.com Leave a comment.
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update 18 October 2007 |
