Black Mindedness The Etiology of Our Demise

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The Scarlet Pimpernel Blog

Wednesday, 02 March 2011 06:55

By The Scarlet Pimpernel

The Conditioned Culture of Mindlessness- In anthropology, culture is operationally defined as the learned, shared, and transmitted values, beliefs, and norms, incorporated by a “group” to sustain and perpetuate itself.

At its core, culture is concerned with group preservation; it transcends language, gastronomy, music, dance and art, and is the unique key to understanding the dysfunctions created by the peculiar socialization of African slave descendents.

After decades of investigating the distinctiveness of “black culture,” it is my enduring contention that wherever in the world you scientifically observe “black people” (descendants of African chattel slaves) and black communities, you find the predominant behavioral proclivities to be rooted in the “artificial culture” inculcated during the slavery epoch and transmitted down the generations. Accordingly, it would not be inaccurate to deduce that the self-destructive, self-loathing, self-sabotaging behaviors typically demonstrated by black people everywhere in the world, is inextricably linked to the conditioning processes used by slave owners to systematically reconstruct the innate  psyche of our enslaved ancestors during the slavery era.

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During the holocaust of African enslavement, unnatural social and psychological modalities (traits of “mental slavery”) were learned, assimilated and transmitted through generations of chattel slaves to generations of modern “wage slaves,” who have been afforded the amusing privileges of autonomy, higher education and social equality to decipher their “conditioned mindlessness” (loss of their natural mind).

Despite emancipation proclamations, anti-slavery laws and a seat at the master’s table, black people in every corner of the globe are entrapped in a mindset which keeps them as enslaved today as they were 300 years ago. As a black forensic psychologist (forensic psychology is the conjunction of law and psychology), I find that reality more than a little unnerving, and in this article, I hope to provide some insights into why blacks remain “enslaved” today, hundreds of years after our ancestors received their “free papers”.

Introduction to the Willie Lynch Syndrome

The following speech was delivered by Willie Lynch on the bank of the James River in the colony of Virginia, USA in 1712. Willie Lynch was a British slave owner in the West Indies, who was invited to the colony of Virginia, USA in 1712 to teach his methods to slave owners. The term “lynching” is derived from his last name.


“Greetings,
Gentlemen, I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia, for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves. Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies, where I have experimented with some of the newest, and still the oldest, methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program is implemented.

As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we cherish, I saw enough to know that your problem is not unique. While Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along its highways in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasions.

I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree, a couple miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, and slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires, and your animals are killed.

Gentlemen, you know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems; I am here to introduce you to a method of solving them. In my bag here, I have a full proof method for controlling your black slaves. I guarantee every one of you that, if installed correctly, it will control the slaves for at least 300 hundreds years.

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My method is simple. Any member of your family or your overseer can use it. I have outlined a number of differences among the slaves; and I take these differences and make them bigger. I use fear, distrust and envy for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South.

Take this simple little list of differences and think about them. On top of my list is “age,” but it’s there only because it starts with an “a.” The second is “color” or shade. There is intelligence, size, sex, sizes of plantations, status on plantations, attitude of owners, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill, East, West, North, South, have fine hair, course hair, or is tall or short.

Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of action, but before that, I shall assure you that distrust is stronger than trust and envy stronger than adulation, respect or admiration. The Black slaves after receiving this indoctrination shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.

Don’t forget, you must pitch the old black male vs. the young black male, and the young black male against the old black male. You must use the dark skin slaves vs. the light skin slaves, and the light skin slaves vs. the dark skin slaves. You must use the female vs. the male, and the male vs. the female. You must also have white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks. But it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect and trust only us.

Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them, never miss an opportunity. If used intensely for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually distrustful. Thank you gentlemen.”

The Making of a Slave

Like Willy Lynch, it was the business and preoccupation of many slave owners to study human nature and the mental constructs of the slave-making process, with a view towards practical, sustainable economic results. Indeed, the study of slave-making increased dramatically after emancipation, when sophisticated techniques were perfected by the pioneers of psychiatry and psychology to reinforce white supremacy. The mentally enslaved conditions of the hundreds of millions of blacks who are the posterity of African chattel slaves constitute a living testimony of the astounding proficiency achieved in ensuring the long-term effects of the slave-making process.


In his seminal text, Let’s Make a Slave, Frederick Douglas, a black abolitionist, who was himself a former slave, documented his study of the scientific processes employed by white slave owners to break black Africans captives and make them into slaves. He describes the “breaking” process as employing the same basic principles used in breaking a horse, combined with features of “operant conditioning” to produce a complete reversal of the slaves’ natural mind. The object of the methods employed was to completely distort the minds of the slaves while keeping their bodies fit for production.

After being subjected to the breaking processes, black men and women were psychologically reduced and transformed from their natural state. Slave owners learned that humans would not work as chattel slaves in their natural state.Consequently, scientific methods were employed where the natural human independence, the tendency to seek freedom and the natural capacity to take care of offspring, were systematically stripped away and the natural mind systematically distorted to create a dependency which enabled slave owners to enjoy useful production and a variety of prurient pleasures from their slaves.

Breaking the Female

In her natural state, a female would have a strong psychological dependency on her mate and a protective tendency toward her offspring. Slave owners were instructed to reverse the nature of female slaves by brutally killing, torturing, and bullwhipping male slaves to the point of death, in the presence of the female slaves, in order to destroy her image of the black male, and to leave her feeling lonely and unprotected.

Female slaves were tested regularly to determine their continued willingness to submit completely to the will of the slave master, who would never hesitate to use the bullwhip if female slaves showed any sign of resisting, albeit care was taken not to kill the females and destroy a good investment. Slave masters learned that after they break the female (mother), she will break her offspring to submit to labor in its early years, and when her offspring becomes old enough to work, she will readily deliver her child to the slave masters, because her normal female protective tendencies would have been lost in her breaking process.

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Regular ordeals were orchestrated to systematically transform female slaves from their natural state to a psychologically frigid, traumatized state. In this unnatural psychological state, female slaves raised their male and female offspring in unnaturally reversed gender roles.Out of fear for the life of her male offspring, female slaves ensured that their sons became physically strong, but raised them to be mentally weak and dependent, while female offspring were trained to be independent.

As a consequence of the breaking process, female slaves unwittingly socialized their female offspring to become psychologically independent while the males were reduced to being psychologically petrified, dominated, and dependent.

Brutality

The processes used to break slaves were notoriously brutal. One fear tactic widely in use in the conditioning process involved taking one of the most restless male slaves, stripping him of his clothes, then tarring and feathering him in front of the other males, females, and infants. Next, they would tie each of his legs to a different horse, faced in opposite directions, set him on fire and beat both horses until he was torn apart and ablaze in front of the other slaves. The remaining males would then be bullwhipped to the brink of death, in front of the females and the infants, to imprint the fear of the white master in the minds of all the slaves.

Crossbreeding

Frederick Douglass also informs us that the slave owners paid less attention to the original subjects of the breaking process, but concentrated on future generations, which provided evidence of the effectiveness of their methods. There was special and particular focus on female slaves and their offspring, since both are required to be crossbred to produce a variety of skin colors, which determined position in the division of labor (the “brown paper bag test”). Crossbreeding slaves meant that white males would impregnate as many black slaves as possible, and then let their offspring breed with each other to create as many different skin colors as possible. Since skin color determined social status and position in the hierarchy of labor, this method of crossbreeding ensured confusion and disunity among the slaves, based on skin color.

The Role of the Christian Church

This article is far from comprehensive and intended to only touch generally, a few of the key devices used in the slave-making process, but I would be remiss if I did not mention the important role of Christianity and the church in reinforcing white supremacy and  securing the success of the brutal, racist conditioning of black slaves. Black Christians still sing “the rich man [white slave master] in his palace, the poor man at the gate, high and low God made them so and ordered their estate.”

Conclusion

Through the process of continually breaking the slaves, traumatizing and throwing the female slaves into a frigid psychological state, killing the protective male image, and creating submissive dependent male slaves, the safety and security of the slave owners were guaranteed. Everywhere, there is evidence that the cycle created by slave owners has successfully regenerated for more than 500 years and could literally regenerate on its own forever, unless this regenerating “psychological genocide” is reversed by a system of “emancipation education” to restore our natural minds.

 

The Scarlet Pimpernel is the nom de plume of an Antiguan born “knowledge broker” whose intercontinental exploits involve work as a university founder and educator, military strategist, international legal consultant, United States prosecutor, published author, trade advisor in Latin America and international investment counselor.

The inimitable acuity of the “Pimpernel” is sought after by entrepreneurs, investors and governments from Dubai to Brazil. Recent work, created for Latin America, which speaks to the conjunction of technology and education to reduce cost, motivate students and improve testing results will be translated for school systems across the Caribbean. “Employing anonymity to domesticate the ego ...”

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