The "N-Word" and the Psychology of Black Oppression
By
Professor Gershom Williams
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One of the main tasks of
Black consciousness is to affirm the beauty
of our Blackness, to see beauty in Black
skin, and thick lips and broad nostrils and
kinky hair; to rid our vocabulary of ‘good
hair’ and ‘high yeller’ and our medicine
cabinets of bleaching creams. To de-niggerize
ourselves is the key task of Black
consciousness.”
–John O.
Killens (1966) |
—388 years after
the first 20 African indentured servants who were
erroneously called “Negars” were brought to Jamestown,
Virginia in 1619 –We are still using the N-word!
—200 years after
Haitian Blacks won their freedom in 1804, becoming the
first free Black independent nation in the Western
hemisphere – We are still using the N-word!
—142 years after
President Lincoln’s proclamation, the Civil war and the
13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which
finally abolished chattel slavery in the North America –
We are still using the N-word!
—85 years after
Marcus Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance and the “New
Negro” consciousness movement – We are still using the
N-word!
—50 years after the
landmark Supreme Court Case, “Brown vs. Board of
Education,” Emmitt Till’s lynching, and Rosa Parks’
courageous stand in the deep South – We are still using
the N-word!
—40 years after
Black leaders Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar
Evers were assassinated – We are still using the N-word!
—40 years after the
“Black is Beautiful” and the “I’m Black and I’m Proud”
movements. We are still using the N-word!
—and finally, 40
years after the other N-word (Negro) was virtually
obliterated from Black language and Black life—We are
still using the centuries old despicable term
Nigger!
With all of the
above in mind, why are many of today’s Black
psychologists, sociologists, historians, ministers,
politicians, community activists, etc., speaking and
writing about these same crazy issues facing
African-Americans across the nation, such as
self-hatred, internalized inferiority, White supremacy
(racism), mentacide, the Willie Lynch syndrome and the
post-traumatic slavery syndrome? Why is it that 50 plus
years after the experimental research of Dr.’s Kenneth
and Mamie Clark and their famous Black doll- White doll
studies with Black children, their response still yields
the same negative results in 2007? That being that
Black children in New York City still choose or prefer
the White doll over the Black one as being smarter,
prettier, and more desirable.
From the leaders of
early slave revolts on to W.E.B. Dubois, Carter G.
Woodson, Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, we have been
passionately informed that the most devastating impact
of the White man has been psychological. In their
writings and speeches, they consistently cautioned us
that “The key to the White man’s power and the major
strategy used by him to remain dominant in the global
power struggle of the modern world, has been in his
uncanny ability to influence other people’s minds
(cultures), and how they live and relate to one
another.”
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The intellectual
assaults or the psychic violence aimed at controlling
Black minds has surprisingly been well documented from
at least 1829 when David Walker's
Appeal to
the Colored Citizens of the World was first
published in Boston. In their book
The
Psychology of Blacks: An African Centered Perspective,
authors Parham, White and Ajamu state that “The most
daunting challenge that we face as African American
people is not White supremacy ideology but a need for
collective mental liberation.”
Nigger, Coon,
Jigaboo, Buck, Darkie, Pickaninny, Jezebel, Mammy, Aunt
Jemima, Sambo, Buckwheat, and Uncle Tom are all powerful
examples of negative racial stereotypes imposed on the
psyche of African descended people from the outside. No
other American group has suffered as many racial
epithets as have American Blacks. So who or what can
honestly heal our deeply inflicted psychological scars?
Who can really pay “reparations” on the Souls of Black
Folk?
In his 1903
literary masterpiece,
The Souls of Black Folk,
Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois made his case for the idea of a dual
or “double consciousness” existing with the collective
psyche of Africans in America. This false consciousness
that Dr. Dubois wrote about really speaks to the
confusion and ambivalence that Black folks experience
every day in America as they search and struggle for
their own meaningful sense of historical and cultural
identity. Indeed the latter struggle and the problem of
“The Color Line” are still with us more than a century
later.
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Let us now fast
forward to 1933, the year that another Harvard trained
Ph.D, Carter G. Woodson wrote his classic text,
The Mis-Education of the Negro. Dr.
Woodson’s critical historical analysis of the effects of
a Eurocentric/hegemonic education on the minds of Black
students informed both Black and White readers that “the
Negro’s mind” had been brought under the control of his
oppressor, and that when you control a man’s thinking
you do not have to worry about his actions.”
Dr. Woodson
furthermore penned the following statement regarding
Black student mis-education, “To handicap a student for
life by teaching him that his Black face is a curse and
that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless,
is the worst kind of lynching. It kills one’s
aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime.”
So how do we begin
to de-Niggerize and de-program both young and old Black
minds? How do we begin the process of breaking the
monopoly the oppressor continues to have on our minds?
Dr. Na’im Akbar’s powerful booklet (Breaking the
Chains of Psychological Slavery) asks and
answers precisely the aforementioned questions of how we
must begin the self-healing process by recognizing that
the starting point for understanding the
African-American personality must commence with an
in-depth study of the Holocaust of Enslavement (The
Maafa). Without question, this has to be the starting
point and not the end point.
In order to
liberate the Black mind, we have to change and
fundamentally transform the consciousness of the Black
individual. We must inculcate new and positive
information in the minds Black people in general but
more importantly our Black youth. This re-orientation
or re-education is a mental restoration process that
began with the writers and freedom fighters of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is needed is
an African centered or Afro-centric consciousness and
not a Euro-centric or false consciousness.
We must always
remember the words of our giant social scientist, E.
Franklin Frazier who emphatically stated, “There is no
parallel in human history where a people have been
subjected to similar mutilation of body mind and soul.
Even the Christian religion was given to them in a form
only to degrade them.”
The Hip Hop
community and the present Hip Hop generation may
continue to revere and embrace
Tupac Shakur and
Biggie
Smalls as young, super bad Niggas! But
can we as wise, intelligent and critical thinking
African elders view the following ancestors: Marcus
Garvey, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Malcolm
X, Betty Shabazz, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B.
Wells-Barnett, Mary McLoud Bethune, Harriet Tubman,
Sojourner Truth, Paul Robeson, Fredrick Douglas, Martin
Delany, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Paul Cuffe, Denmark
Vesey, and James Baldwin as Negars, Niggers or Niggas?
[Check
Ebony's Fifty Influential Figures
in African-American History .]
I can certainly
think of, and I am sure that we all could create other
terms of endearment that we as an ancient and proud race
of people could use to refer to one another in humble
veneration and love. The concepts of Black inferiority
and the ugly, racist N-word have both been exported
overseas. People in various foreign nations, just like
Whites in America, are using the N-word in both the
public and private sectors.
As I heard it so
profoundly stated by Dr. Maulana Karenga of Los Angeles,
“We may not be responsible for our enslavement and
colonial oppression, but we are most certainly
responsible for our freedom and liberation.”
In closing, I would
humbly but sincerely submit to all who read this article
that a few of us African-centered thinkers have learned
that a major key to de-Niggerizing ourselves and
shattering the invisible chains of mental slavery is to
know and respect one’s own history and cultural
heritage. With this being said, let our positive
journey begin! May the ancestors be pleased!
Professor Gershom Williams teaches
African-American History at Mesa Community College.
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007
By Matthew Wasniewski
Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007—
beautifully prepared volume—is a
comprehensive history of the more than
120 African Americans who have served in
the United States Congress. Written for
a general audience, this book contains a
profile of each African-American Member,
including notables such as Hiram Revels,
Joseph Rainey, Oscar De Priest, Adam
Clayton Powell, Shirley Chisholm, Gus
Hawkins, and Barbara Jordan. Individual
profiles are introduced by contextual
essays that explain major events in
congressional and U.S. history.
Part I provides four chronologically
organized chapters under the heading
"Former Black Members of Congress." Each
chapter provides a lengthy biographical
sketch of the members who served during
the period addressed, along with a
narrative historical account of the era
and tables of information about the
Congress during that time. Part II
provides similar information about
current African-American members. There
are 10 appendixes providing tabular
information of a variety of sorts about
the service of Black members, including
such things as a summary list, service
on committees and in party leadership
posts, familial connections, and so
forth. The entire volume is 803 large
folio pages in length and there are many
illustrations. The book should be part
of every library and research
collection, and congressional scholars
may well wish to obtain it for their
personal libraries.—Pictures—including
rarely seen historical images—of each
African American who has served in
Congress—Bibliographies and references
to manuscript collections for each
Member—Statistical graphs and charts |
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Faces At The Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
By Derrick Bell
In nine grim metaphorical sketches, Bell, the black former Harvard law professor who made headlines recently for his one-man protest against the school's hiring policies, hammers home his controversial theme that white racism is a permanent, indestructible component of our society. Bell's fantasies are often dire and apocalyptic: a new Atlantis rises from the ocean depths, sparking a mass emigration of blacks; white resistance to affirmative action softens following an explosion that kills Harvard's president and all of the school's black professors; intergalactic space invaders promise the U.S. President that they will clean up the environment and deliver tons of gold, but in exchange, the bartering aliens take all African Americans back to their planet. Other pieces deal with black-white romance, a taxi ride through Harlem and job discrimination. Civil rights lawyer Geneva Crenshaw, the heroine of Bell's And We Are Not Saved (1987), is back in some of these ominous allegories, which speak from the depths of anger and despair. Bell now teaches at New York University Law School.—Publishers Weekly /
Derrick Bell Law Rights Advocate Dies at 80 |
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Nigger: The Strange
Career of a Troublesome Word
By Randall Kennedy
The
word is paradigmatically ugly, racist
and inflammatory. But is it different
when Ice Cube uses it in a song than
when, during the O.J. Simpson trial,
Mark Fuhrman was accused of saying it?
What about when Lenny Bruce uses it to
"defang" it by sheer repetition? Or when
Mark Twain uses it in The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn to make an
antiracist statement? Kennedy, a
professor at Harvard Law School and
noted legal scholar, has produced an
insightful and highly provocative book
that raises vital questions about the
relationship between language, politics,
social norms and how society and culture
confront racism. Drawing on a wide range
of historical, legal and cultural
instances Harry S. Truman calling Adam
Clayton Powell "that damned nigger
preacher"; Title VII court cases in
which the use of the word was proof of
condoning a "racially hostile work
environment"; Quentin Tarantino's
liberal use of the word in his films
Kennedy repeatedly shows not only the
complicated cultural history of the
word, but how its meaning, intent and
even substance change in context. Smart,
well argued and never afraid of facing
serious, difficult and painful questions
in an unflinching and unsentimental
manner, this is an important work of
cultural and political criticism. As
Kennedy notes in closing: "For bad or
for good, nigger is... destined to
remain with us for the foreseeable
future a reminder of the ironies and
dilemmas, the tragedies and glories, of
the American experience." (Jan.
22)Forecast: This may be the book that
reignites larger debates over race
eclipsed by September 11. Look for a
bestselling run and huge talk show and
magazine coverage as the Afghanistan
news cycle continues to slow; the book
had already been the subject of two
New York Times stories by early
January.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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