"You gotta make a change, It's time for us as a people to start making some changes, lets change the way we eat, lets change the way we live, and lets change the way we treat each other. You see the old way wasn't working so its on us, to do what we gotta do to survive"  Tupac Shakur

How are we going to change, when we're so destructive to each other and don't trust each other. At times I wonder if its possible that a people can change. It's been said that "We ain't neva gonna change, we're like crabs in a barrel" Recent history shows that it takes something very dramatic, that will make us change.  If Four Hundred years of being enslaved hasn't changed us, I don't know what will. Today in most of our communities we worry more about the brotha shooting us then the white man. We have become a self destructive people and it seems that we rather build Mega Churches then build each other up.

We can't continue to blame the white man for things that we are capable of changing ourselves. We have to start, doing for self and learning how did we get,  to where we are now, and what can we do to create change. I'm talking about the type of change that I've mentioned on these pages. You know what each one of us have to change and if others see a change in how we treat each other and respect each other then others will follow. The chains of slavery are still on our minds and these shackles are doing us more harm then the physical shackles we once had. Also everyone who talks about change ain't about change, so beware. So let's heal ourselves.

Amos Wilson:  Black On Black Violence

THE IDENTITY CRISIS OF THE BLACK ON BLACK CRIMINAL:

Negroes also have been not too subtly defined by the White majority in America as Public Enemy Number One in the so-called “war against crime.” To the extent this is true, their dominant contribution to our crime problem has been ensured. The conscious or unconscious tendency among middle class whites to equate Negroes with crime has given the latter a final shove into total degradation and alienation, providing a powerful nothing-to-lose incentive to criminal acts.— EDWIN SCHUR Our Criminal Society

FOR THE BLACK-ON-BLACK VIOLENT CRIMINAL, identification with the White supremacist aggressor  community is never complete, nor is his dis-identification with the victimized African American community. The Black-on-Black criminal is a hybrid, a victimized aggressor one motivated and rationalized by his perceived victimization. Like all Africans subject to aggressive European domination he is neither “Peter nor Paul.” He is caught between the horns of an un-resolvable dilemma. He can never be a White man in the truest sense of the term, and he unalterably refuses to be a Black man in the true sense of the term. Having internalized the Eurocentric definition of what it means to be African — all negative — as well as having observed the material losses, social ostracism, victimization, rejection, etc., that Europeans and others have applied to those who identify themselves as African, he scurries to the safety of ethnic ambiguity or self- alienation. What “in-between” identity is chosen by the “average” African American, i.e., how much and what aspects of the White American racist aggressor and the Black victim he chooses to meld into his ambivalent personal identity, depends on many factors.

We must note that the Black-on-Black criminal as well as the “average” African American suffer most fundamentally from a chronically painful identity crisis from which they seek to find relief and/or escape. Many pathways to, and forms of relief are chosen, some more self-destructive and antisocial than others, all neurotic: many vacillating from one extreme to the other. Therefore, the “average” African American is synthetic, a Frankenstein creation of the American Dilemma. His synthetic identity is suffused with ambivalence, and based on misconceptions. For it is forged from two major falsified and self-serving Eurocentric projections — a projectively inflated, confabulated, European image and a complementary deflated, scandalized, apparently and repulsively exposed African image. Consequently, the victimized African with no positive African identity, and his identification with the false image of the European, can only achieve alienation from reality no matter how “normal,” “law- abiding,” “abnormal,” or “criminal” he may appear to be.

The Black-on-Black violent criminal, in forging his personality chooses to identify with, for whatever reasons, the violent, victimizing aspects of his White American racist aggressor, and attempts to reject or escape from his eurocentrically falsified, victimized African American image. In so doing he paradoxically incarnates and fulfills the eurocentrically projected stereotype of himself as criminal. His identification with his White suprema cist aggressor is partial because he, on some subconscious level of his being, recognizes his own victimization by the aggressor, and seeks to revenge or compensate for it. He therefore aggressively or through subterfuge rejects the moral, ethical values and preachments of his White supremacist aggressors.

He recognizes they are designed not to be applied to their own behavior and attitudes toward him, but are designed to prevent his retaliation against them and to make his victimization and exploitation more efficient and trouble-free. The violent Black-on- Black criminal feels the common African American ambivalence more intensely than do non-criminal African Americans. He is most sensitive to it and therefore represses it more deeply. He dissociates or splits off the pain from the emotion and only feels the vague indefinable frustration, invisible restraining forces, the anger, the restlessness, agitation, irritation and moodiness; the boredom, sense of purposelessness and meaninglessness, the painful states of consciousness that cry out from alienation and for violent expression.

Thus, the violent Black-on-Black criminal in many instances, being neither Black nor White, is but an ambivalent empty shell of a man whose bottomlessness, vacuity, numbness, and lack of definition are the sources of his insatiable need to fashion an identity from current fads, eccentric dress and behavior. His voracious and rapacious greed, his need to consume conspicuous!y, to become a gluttonous devourer of things and people, reflects his ethnic hollowness. His need to intensify the painful feelings of others are emblematic of his need to feel something within himself, to have someone else know the pain he has so deeply buried within. He kills the other so as to share his own death of spirit, humanity and deadness with someone else. His need to define reality and himself outside the consensus of others reflects his unrealistic definition by others, and his attempts to define himself through violent intrusion into their reality.

The partial or complete fulfillment of these needs brings about in him an overpowering sense of excitement, aliveness, power, sensuality, imperial authority and masculinity (which he often equates with the capacity to injure and destroy others). Though he transcends the restricted world that surrounds him, he also experiences, simultaneously, an unconscious sense of guilt and self-condemnation. He cannot escape his ambivalence. Since his antisocial acts are the only ones which he assumes permit him to experience the overwhelmingly “positive” feelings just described (even his material acquisitions are only instrumental to evoking desirable feelings), and since his nympho maniacal emptiness rapidly consumes these feelings, his hunger too soon becomes more painfully insistent.

To repress his unconscious feelings of guilt, isolation, alienation and self-condemnation that threaten to break through to consciousness, he becomes helplessly addicted to those intoxicating feelings and the violent, antisocial means by which they are ameliorated. Even if he does not “enjoy” his use of violence, the Black-on-Black violent criminal sees it as instrumental to attaining the feelings to which he is addicted. As such, violence is at least secondarily positively reinforcing.



POVERTY AND CRIME:

The reader should note that the foregoing discussion is not solely an intrapsychic, “blaming the victim” exposition. The author does not differentiate between “outside” and “inside” as far as human psychology is concerned, even though didactic and linguistic styles and limitations make it appear so. The human being, as are all things, is continuous with the rest of the universe. The environment, objects whether living or nonliving, human or nonhuman, concrete or abstract, intrude into the human psyche and body via the media of feelings. The psyche transduces the material, dynamic, and abstract world in terms of feelings. It is to these feelings that the mind, body, and personality respond, process, and feed forward into consciousness and the world.

The assertion that mediating values, perspectives, etc., and the feelings they help to produce motivate criminal behavior, should not be construed to imply that conditions such as “poverty” do not contribute to criminality to a substantial degree. Furthermore, it should not be construed to imply that attitudes, values, etc., need only be changed in order to change the criminal behavior of those who live in poverty without improving poverty conditions themselves.

A condition and the experiential reactions it appears to evoke are derivative of the synthesization of the individual’s perception of his “real” physical, behavioral, social environment and the organized experiences and the motivations he brings into that environment. Consequently, a significant change in one stimulates related changes in the other and vice versa.

Indeed, the conditions under which the individual lives may significantly affect those with whom he associates; the perspectives, attitudes and values he internalizes, provide or fail to provide the resources, opportunities and other amenities, the patterns of which determine whether or not he engages in criminal behavior. The conditions under which African Americans live have been deliberately instituted by White America in order to accomplish definite ends. Joel Kovel speaks to this when he states that:
..throughout our history, whites have created the institutions by which black people are forced to live, and which force them to live in a certain way, almost invariably so as to foster just that constellation of unworthy traits. From slavery itself to modern welfare systems, this has been the enduring pattern, reinforced in popular culture and education by panoply of stereotypes along the same lines.
The result of these cultural manipulations has been to ensure to the black person a pre-assigned degraded role, no matter where he turned.’

Poverty in the United States is a crime committed against the African American population. White racism, and other forms of discrimination against Africans, are designed to maintain African Americans in relative and absolute poverty. Poverty represents the deliberate, vicious robbery, exploitation, and extortion of the labor, wealth and resources of the African community by the European/White American community. Thus, if crime is “caused by poverty,” then Black criminality is crime White criminality produced. If African American crime is the psychologically-morally mediated outcome of poverty, or more specifically, the outcome of the psychological-moral factors “within the individual,” then it still remains the crime that European/White American crime produced. Psychological-moral values are learned social-political products. People are taught to be moral by direct instruction, observational learning, personal-familial-community-peer group relations and experience, and prevailing overall politico economic conditions. All these factors are under the dominative and self-serving influence of the European/White American community.

 Thus, intimating that African American criminality is the result of moral depravity the European/White American community unwittingly incriminates itself and reveals its own criminality. To avoid acknowledgment and confrontation with the fact that the moral attitudes and values are learned by the means just mentioned, and the means are under their control, the White American community must allege that the “moral depravity” of African Americans is genetic in nature: that it is inherited within their genes. Thus, it absolves itself of all responsibility. It is this type of absolution that sets up a vicious criminal mill wherein the European/White American community produces the criminality it attributes to innate African American venality. This is the most devastating of European/White American self-fulfilling prophecies.

WEALTH AND CRIME:

Wealth, the feelings and the associated ideas it evokes in some individuals, may motivate criminal behavior. Crime is not the monopoly of poor folks, nor is greed, alienation, and so on. We should note that a person or group is seldom if ever exposed to one environment exclusively, particularly in the United States. Poverty-stricken people know of and have been exposed to wealth. They are often keenly aware of the material and social benefits derived from being wealthy. This knowledge and experience, along with the internalization of cultural myths concerning rights and opportunities to acquire wealth, in conjunction with other ideas and feelings, interact with the current situation to determine behaviors, some of which may be labeled criminal. Discrepancies such as between what is and what could be, what is and how it got to be the way it is, are contradictions which may motivate criminal behavior as a “symptomatic compromise.” It may be more the exposure to wealth, to the wealthy via direct and indirect experience (e.g., reading, advertisement, etc.), which is the source of criminal behavior, more so than the exposure to poverty. Perspective, values, socio-ecological context, personal characteristics, and any other number of other transducers may evoke criminal behavior.

In fact, violence of all types including robbery, thievery, extortion, murder, are the monopoly of the middle- and ruling- classes. Their apparent non-criminality is mainly due to the fact that they define what crime is, and defines out of existence their own crimes. Their criminal activities are delegated through their police forces (enforcers), armed forces (gangs), bankers (loan sharks), sales persons and advertising agents (con artists), business men (extortionists making offers others cannot refuse), diplomats (front men), corporations (rackets), consortiums (drug and other types of rings), and numerous other euphemistically named organizations whose nefarious activities are whitewashed by deceptive terms and legitimized by their power. Their taking of property, wealth, dignity, and lives of others by force is called war; their major massacres, called World War I and World War II, the winning of which were sources of immense feelings of joy, pride, narcissistic self-congratulation, increased power, prestige, and wealth for the “victors.” Through delegation, distancing, and subtle use of the word, the middle- and ruling-classes deceive themselves and others into thinking of them as beautiful people.

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force — the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism....

Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make HaitiCuba a decent place for National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents. Major General Smedley D. Butler

WHITE CONTROL OF BLACK TRANSDUCTION:

Transduction refers to the process wherein one form of or information is converted or transformed by some type of mediation system into another form. Hence, through some brain or neuronal mediation processes, ideas, perceptions, feeling environmental information, .. .may be transformed into behavioral acts or a variety of other products and processes. Transduction via “mind-set” attitudes, expectations, desires, etc., transforms environmental information into other forms of thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc., which are then utilized by the “mind” to originate and regulate behavior.

Persons who possess operatively different sets of values, desires, attitudes, abilities, resources, goals, self-perceptions, etc., who find themselves in the “same objective environment (physically speaking) will experience that environment different ly, and behave differently in response to it. Consequently, a number of behavioral outcomes may flow from two persons reacting to the “same” environment — they may experientially and behaviorally respond in the “same” way, or in different ways. Two “objectively” different environmental circumstances may produce the same experiential behavioral response in two persons due to the different orientations brought to them by those persons. Thus, greed may be evoked by wealth in some individuals while poverty evokes greed in others.

To a significant extent, sociopolitical power held by one person or a group of persons, permits that person or group to manipulate the valuational/perceptual attitudes of another less powerful person or group, and thereby manipulate their transductive experiences, and through these their behavioral output. White America by naming, defining, interpreting and abstracting the world, by associating various aspects of it with pleasure or pain, seeks to control and name the experience of Black America and thereby name and control its reactive and proactive behavior.

 Because this White American conspiracy which more often than not operates on a subliminal level is consciously perceived by the Black individual as his own transductive attitudes, feelings, perceptions, etc., they appear to him to be “logically,” “naturally,” “universally,” “divinely,” and therefore unquestionably real and true. He thinks that he alone is the determiner of his attitudinal/behavioral tendencies. Until African Americans develop their own transducing or transforming values and identity (which is a system of values, precepts, etc.,) based on a thorough objective analysis of their historical, immediate, and anticipatory reality, they will be the unwitting pawns of European/White American self-serving needs and desires.


Neither Poverty nor Wealth alone makes a man criminally avaricious, In both cases his thievery is motivated by his desire to own more than he already possesses, And by his willingness to break the laws in order to attain his heart’s desires, The type of crime a man tends to commit is more a reflection of his social status
values and opportunity. Than it is a measure of his presumed Venality Accountants embezzle
Why mug someone when you can more easily and profitably “cook the books”?
The Lower classes rob Houses
The Ruling classes rob Nations
In the area of Drug Rehabilitation it should be the Pusher who is
the object of Detoxification
For it is his Addiction that is
the true cause of addiction in others — His Addiction to the American Dream


SUICIDE:

Since suicide is a social phenomenon by virtue of its essential element, it is proper to discuss the place it occupies among other social phenomena.— EMILE DURKHEIM Suicide: A Study In Sociology

On superficial thought, one of the outstanding characteristics of the suicidal act is that it is illogical. Yet one can take the position that there is an implicit syllogism or argument in the suicidal act. Although we cannot be sure that our logical reconstructions of suicidal logic are correct, it remains that the suicidal person behaves as if he had reasoned and had come to certain — albeit, generally unacceptable — conclusions. E SHNEIDMAN et al, The Psychology Of Suicide

SUICIDE IS THE PRE-EMINENT EXPRESSION of Black-on-Black
violence. It is the other side of Black-on-Black homicide. Both homicide and suicide are different forms of the collective self-destruction of a race by death. Both actualize a death-wish instigated externally, and executed internally. Both are assassinations by proxy: victim murdering victim. Both involve the killing of someone considered expendable, someone lodged between the assailant and some form of settlement or satisfaction. As in murder, in suicide there is the killer and the victim, the executioner and the executed, the judge and the condemned.

Suicide, like homicide, is dyadic. It is therefore a social act. It is the deadly vectorial outcome of a cataclysmic convergence of socially interactive forces. As in murder, in suicide killing is always done in public, in the presence of another, whether that other is physically or mentally present and accounted for. There is always the final judgment without appeal. Someone’s hopes have been unrealized, someone’s vanity injured, someone’s been mistreated and demands that the ultimate price be paid. Someone must be sacrificed to the needs of another, whether that other be inside or outside the skin of the victim. Both the homicide and the suicide are victims of ideas, sacrifices made to some ideology, some system of values. Both are attempts to palliate some unbearable hurt or pain, some sickness of the soul.

THE BLACK FAMILY, THE BLACK MALE, AND SUICIDE:

The Eurocentric organization of American society is such that its stability depends on the dysfunctionality and near disorganization of the Black family. Infected with the germ of self-alienation, self-abnegation, self-misrepresentation, and economic deprivation, the resultant intra-familial conflict often is actualized as various forms of suicide by its young. African Americans are the most patriotic of all American ethnic groups they sacrifice their lives every day for their country. The frequent breaking up of the African American home by many-pronged attacks on it by the racist system in which it is embedded, frequently leaves its children without a warm, caring, protective and wise parental system with which to identify and with which they can overcome an encroaching sense of emotional and social isolation: a system which can be their ally in their embattled struggle against a hostile world.

For the male child the loss of his father’s love and protection, or his failure to find a worthy substitute as the result of White supremacy’s unrelenting and murderous assault on Black manhood, are most often the apparent stimuli which instigate his committing suicide. The chronic and over determined negation of African American males, if not countered by strong Black male egos, may subject them to fits of depression and dejection. These mood disorders very frequently precipitate suicidal behavior, either directly and swiftly by lethal weapons, substances, and mechanical contrivances, or indirectly and slowly by injurious addictive habits, politically-based stress, negative health practices, neglect, and reckless behavior.

The rites of passage through racist White American-dominated society is extremely stressful for Black youth. This is more so the case for the Black male since he receives the brunt of the White supremacist attack against Black America. Stripped of appropriate male support, guidance, protection, education, and other important coping skills by a White racist system which fears his Afrocentric competence, he is left vulnerable to the thousands of little nicks and burns, physical and psychological insults, which cumulatively push him toward self-annihilation.

Not allowed the privileges and status of full and unfettered manhood by White racist male domination, a significant number of African American males are immaturized or are often led to express their “manhood” in self-destructive ways: in ways harmful to other Black males and the Black community in general. Immaturized by White racist oppression, void of overarching and long-term Afrocentric goals which provide them with maximum and healthy control over their impulses (including impulses to kill themselves) they may commit suicide. Without Afrocentric self-definition, possessed by an introjected alien identity, and racked by neurotic and psychotic conflict, the Black male readily becomes subject to White racist psycho political, psychopathological promptings and persecutions. Consequently, he may come to think that the only effective solution to his problems lie in physical or mental self-abnegation.

To be an African American male in White America is to live with anger and hostility, to feel the need to attack, to violently retaliate, to even the score. These murderous feelings without appropriate catharsis, sublimation, channeling, or targets. ..yet in need of outward expression.. .are often turned inward resulting in self-annihilation. White racist American society, harboring a poorly concealed death-wish against its Black captives, generally leaves but a few outlets for the release of societally provoked Black male rage: all inappropriate! They include the abject submission to oppression, narcosis by drugs or religion, deliberate ignorance, unending, unrewarding protests, futile sub rosa grumbling, over compensatory status striving, criminality, and homicidal attacks on other Black males or on himself (suicide). Having internalized white racist values and attitudes, having been possessed by his introjected white racist demon, the suicidal African American blames his victimized self. Identified with his implanted alien spirit, he harbors a death- wish against the victims of White racist oppression amongst whom he himself is numbered. Looking at the world through jaundiced white racist eyes, he sees the enemy: And the enemy is himself.

SUICIDE MORTALITY OF BLACK MALES:

The suicide mortality rate reaches its peak in African American males between ages twenty-five to thirty-four and in White males at age sixty-five and over. Homicide and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young Black males between ages 15 and 24. They are probably the leading causes if”accidental” deaths, and the many suicides on the installment plan — addictions, poor health habits, etc. — are included. Thus, Black men kill themselves with their futures ahead of them, and White men when their futures are behind them. One dies ablossoming in the Spring, the other after the first frosts of Autumn.

Apparently, the young African American suicide is one who has grown old while very young. He has packed all the guilt, failure, shame, fatalism, pain, hopelessness, and cynicism of a lifetime within a life-span of three decades. Somehow the cavalier optimism of youth and the willful self-confidence of young manhood are dissipated at or before the point of actualization and assumption of their powers to transform the world. Somehow Black youth and young adults are born into and come early to exist in a different and ominous reality: one that was created for them; one under the control of others. That created “reality” negates, diminishes and saps their will to live, makes their lives pointless, an absurdity filled with bitter ironies, a happenstance, a quicksand wherein every effort at self-rescue seems to pull them more rapidly under, and where every branch thrown to a sinking man breaks as he struggles to reach safe ground.

 That created reality is the handiwork of the introjected white supremacist spirit by which the African American is possessed, with which he identifies, and with whose eyes he peers out and surveys an alien and wasted landscape which promises him no surcease and which tantalizes him with ever-receding beauteous mirages. It is that internalized Eurocentric spirit which he misidentifies as his mind and thoughts, his superego and conscience: It is those internalized racist stereotypes speaking inside his head which drive him to murder, to die, to want to be murdered in order quieten their cacophonous chorus. It is that internalized racist spirit unopposed by hope of African triumph, love of African self, self-determined competence and self-confidence and faith, which, taking possession of his body and mind, uses his own hands to take his own life.

Black-on-Black suicide is the tail face of a coin on which Black-on-Black homicide is the head face. Both are welded together by violence. Both represent violent attempts to triumph over hopelessness and despair. Both represent abject reactionary surrender to what is perceived as an immutable, oppressive ordering of the universe. While the Black-on-Black homicidal criminal seeks to triumph through the externalization of murderous aggression, the Black-on-Black suicide victim seeks to triumph through his internalization of murderous aggression. Both seek to violently cheat destiny as they have been made to see it. Their pain blinds them to other alternatives, obscures obvious, though perilous, pathways through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Free to choose only the wrong things they both choose to murder the wrong persons for the wrong reasons.

SUICIDE AS DISPLACED AGGRESSION:

Suicide is a form of displaced aggression. To internalize the white racist spirit is to internalize the White supremacist’s death-wish directed at the African male. When a young Black male commits suicide it is usually a sign that the implanted White racist incubus has executed the order of its archetypal racist masters. It is the introjected white racist superego in black face which mercilessly chastises him for having sinned, and “fallen short of the glory of God” (European man). It is this implanted Eurocentric conscience which threatens him with eternal damnation for having committed the original sin of being born African in America, which derides him for his alleged helplessness, and unworthiness:

This same Eurocentric conscience tells him he will never be any good, never succeed on his own terms or otherwise, that he deserves punishment, that he is deservedly the object of hatred and revilement, that he has been cursed by God and sentenced to unending servitude, and that his death would be a favor to the world; tells him that he is unlovable, unprotected, incapable of happiness, unemployable, and that his only enemies are himself and the blackness of his skin. Having internalized the accusative self-serving conscience of his oppressors, the African American suicide victim exaggerates his self-accusation, the hopelessness of his future, his incapability for redemptive transformation. He considers his situation incorrigible.

His internalized alien spirit screams its recriminations and he masochistically submits to severe feelings of guilt and self-devaluation. It is this spirit which splits his psyche into executor and executed; into the person and depersonalized, judge and condemned. Thus, when he kills he does not kill himself; he kills the “nigger” within. Through apparent Black-on-Black suicide the white supremacist establishment obscurely pushes one more African toward the Final Solution it plans for all Africans.

The Black victim may think that suicide represents a sort of grim triumph, a having of the last word, the last laugh on his tormentors; that his suicide represents the ultimate protest, the penultimate defiance of the will of his enemies. Suicide may be his way of refusing to live a life of quiet desperation, of masochistic screaming, and squealing supplication, while fulfilling the sadistic needs of others. Maybe, like his ancestors who voluntariiy gave up the ghost during the Middle Passage by jumping overboard to feed the sharks, he sees living the life of a slave as not living life at all. And yet, he must know, or he quickly must be told, that such a triumph, such a hollow victory is pyrrhic, more costly to the “victor” than the vanquished; that it is an illusion of overcomance. How much more heroic to die fighting one’s true enemies than to die fighting false ones; to live five minutes as a man than die forever a coward! For the fight is not against the shadows cast on the walls of one’s mind but with the caster of shadows, the Wicked Witch of The West.

“For God gave us not a spirit of cowardice, but that of power and of love and of soundness of mind.” The power of European man over others is the power of deceit, illusion, lies and hatred over honesty, reality, truth and love. Such power cannot last.

COSMIC CAUSATION:

An act has a past and a future; it is not contained within the skin of its time of occurrence
Like a rock thrown into a placid lake, its effects flow beyond its point of impact and ripple across
the surface of time and place unsettling things both near and far removed
An act is concerted; it flows from generation to generation into generations yet unborn
Its explosion creates a universe ever expanding; its momentum radiating concentrically throughout
infinity until counteracted by nullifying counterforces
An individual act of sin is always communal It is always paid for — sometimes by the sinner,
always by others; others — good and bad, righteous and unrighteous
For ultimately, an act of sin is impersonal
— “it rains on the just as well as on the unjust”
“The sins of the fathers are visited unto the fourth generation”
The children must pay for the sins of their fathers for such sins are their inheritance
For they were fathered by sin
And in accepting the bequeathed bounty of their sinful fathers, they at one and the same time
accept the curses of that inheritance For with the goods of sin comes evil corrupting and destroying those who would be good
For he is not truly good and innocent who eats of food poisoned by sin, even if he eats them in
ignorance of their deadly nature
“For the wages of sin is death”
For children of evil fathers must atone the sins of their fathers if they and their children and
their children’s children are to escape the wrathful judgment which surely must come
The sin of one is the sin of all, of the dead, of the living, and of the yet to be conceived.

GOODNESS AND DECENCY under oppressive regimes are merely two versions of the same attitude — submissiveness. Law-abiding goodness and decency within the context of White American! European socioeconomic domination involves the unresisting acceptance and self-abasing obeisance to Eurocentric values, attitudes, rules, and regulations by African Americans even when they are manifestly biased against Afrocentric interests. These forms of submissiveness ultimately involve the humble compliance with Eurocentric demands by the African American community even when such demands are exploitative, unjust, injurious, and in many instances, lethal. Eurocentrically-defined goodness and decency require that African Americans submit to White American/European domination without complaint, or that their complaints be processed through White American/Euro pean-defined “legal” channels, processed and redressed “within the system.” In the name of “law and order” and “racial harmony” eurocentrically-defined goodness and decency call for the African American community to repress or compliantly restrict its just demands, to renounce or greatly attenuate their active, self- determined pursuit and fulfillment.

 Furthermore, they require the African American community silence its justified and valid criticisms of those who oppress and exploit it; that it defenselessly permit others to abuse it and yet to be ever ready to be indiscriminately benevolent to others, including its enemies.

White American/European-defined “good and decent” attitudes and behavior as internalized and practiced by African Americans are essentially quasi-religious, quasi-legalistic rationalizations and protections against anxiety, against the xaggerated fear of White American/European power; Black American/African forms of avoiding the arousal of White American/European resentment of and retaliation against African American self-determination. They also represent ways of securing reassurance by garnering European paternalistic affection. The internalization and expression of these attitudes and behaviors on the part of African Americans require they feel unworthy and incapable of goodness and decency unless defined, imposed on them, and enforced by White AmericanlEuropean agencies. Therefore, European/White American-defined and regulated moral/behavioral concepts are imposed against the will of the African American community without its consent and are therefore accepted by that community with a spirit of unconscious resentment, hostility, and self-loathing.

These unrecognized and unacknowledged feelings then find indirect expression through projected and displaced aggressive behavior towards others — their neighbors. These feelings also find indirect expression through guilt-driven, self-destructive habits and mutually destructive social relations.
In general, the conscience implanted in the collective African American psyche is the moral/ethical agent of European/American domination and functions to maintain that domination under the guise of mediating morally acceptable thought and behavior.

It is this implanted White American/European conscience introjected in service to White American/European domination that is rejected by the Black-on-Black criminal. It is this moral/ethical double-agent, this source of self-defeating “goodness and decency” exhibited by oppressed African Americans, which is eschewed out-of-hand by the Black-on-Black criminal. It is this externally imposed and tricky “good and decent” conscience which he so resentfully and spitefully ridicules, seeks to undermine, and finally defeats. He subliminally recognizes the sanctimonious deceit and dumb hypocrisy of those African Americans who submit to its tyrannical and exploitative demands in the name of morality, ethics, law-abidingness and brotherly love. He perceives the expediency, fear and cowardice, the weakness and absence of self-ordained authority which lurk behind their “good and decent” facades. This deception emboldens him to violate their rights and bodies, to violently assault their “innocence,” to viciously pillage and plunder their properties.

This violent criminal orientation can only be sufficiently attenuated if and when the United States of America becomes a fully-liberal and egalitarian society for all, or if and when African Americans and Africans the world-over critically reject White American/European self-serving definitions of Good and Evil and replace these with Afrocentric/humanistic definitions and behavioral orientations.

WHITE EUROPEAN DISPENSATION:

Often those who make laws, who discern the laws of Nature, come to think themselves as above those laws. The White American, the foremost definer, inscriber, and enforcer of laws and codes, the foremost discoverer of Nature’s arcane functional infrastructure, is also their most frequent and flagrant violator, and most disingenuous subverter. And yet he feels that he should pay no penalties for their violation and subversion. Hence, his sponsorship of the most massive criminality, terror, and ecological disaster which afflicts the world today.

The White American promulgates the European regressive ethical ideology of individual sin; the ideological belief that a sinful act merely reflects the dysfunctionality of the person who perpetrated the act and that penalties attached to their perpetration are only to be borne by the perpetrator. This mystification permits him to deny the cosmic consequences of his own criminal behavior and to deny that he and his children must pay for violating a rule central to his ethical code — “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” — the Golden Rule. Thinking himself above the law, denying its applicability to himself particularly in regard to its violation when interacting with African peoples, he assumes he may with impunity enslave, murder, rape, rob, terrorize, defraud, deceive, brutalize and do all manner of psychophysically injurious things to African peoples and escape the negative consequences of his acts.

Thus he pretends undeserved and pained surprise when his dignity is insulted, his goods are “stolen,” his peace disturbed, his “innocent” women and children violated, his sons assaulted, mugged and murdered, his property destroyed and devalued, and his resources wasted by some of Africa’s sons. When he is cursed and reviled by those, and the children of those who he has historically and contemporaneously so heartlessly abused, he is similarly “pained and surprised.” He thinks that his pillage of the resources, minds, bodies, and souls of African peoples gives him the right to sleep undisturbed, to walk the highways and byways of this earth unmolested; gives him the right to have his stolen goods be left unmolested. Yet deep in his heart he must know that the “crimes” committed against him and his children are the result of the original crimes of his fathers — his fathers, the enslavers and exploiters of the world. He must know, too, that though his fathers may have lived and died happily surrounded by their mournful slaves, that he, his children, and the children of slaves are doomed to live in enmity.

 Every mugging, each murder, insult, every disturbance of his peace of mind, every desecration of his property perpetrated by Black against White, every beggarly black hand thrust out by penurious Black mendicants call for reparations he must make until he chooses to retire the debts of his fathers. And he will continue to pay, as will his children, though they lifted not a whip to strike the back of a supplicating slave. For in his and their “innocence” they have not only accepted the bloody wealth and prerogatives of their fathers, but have waxed fat on their increase, and more ominously, have accepted and further cultivated the attitudes of superiority and supremacy bequeathed to them with their father’s estates. Thus, “good” and “decent” White folk must suffer with the rest.

Why must these “good” and “decent” ones suffer? Because their goodness and decency are but illusions created by a repressive denial of the truth. Their innocence and goodness are the innocence and goodness purchased with stolen goods, and the blood, sweat and tears of others they fleeced of their humanity. They are allegedly good, decent and law-abiding only because through their deceptive writing and reading of history they have forgotten the murders they committed to obtain the wealth and privileges which now subsidize their “good” life. How good and decent would White America really be without support of its blood-money and legitimized theft of bread from the mouths of others?

THE UNCIVIL CIVILIZED WHITEMAN:

The White American dares to think himself civilized. His “legitimate” theft of the wealth and the resources of others now “exempts” him from the need to commit “crimes in the street”; to look the people he robs and kills directly in their eyes as did his “pioneering” and colonizing fathers. With one stroke of the pen, he mugs millions and desecrates the whole of the earth. Because it is a pen he wields, and mercenary bandits he hires (including his own armed forces) to do his dirty deeds for him and not a pistol held to the temple, a knife or a deadly grip across the throat of his victim as the Black-on-Black mugger must do he deludes himself by thinking himself “good,” “decent,” and “law-abiding.”

You have murdered millions of persons; plundered, pillaged and ravaged thousands of hamlets, villages, towns, cities, states and nations. Now you seek to legitimize your criminality and perceive yourself as good and law-abiding. Your civility and civilization are like the rest of your lives, purchased through the death of others. It is easy to be “law-abiding” and “decent” when you write the law and define decency and when you have the money to buy them. A true test of your ethicality would be to be good and law-abiding in the face of deliberately instigated poverty, degradation, powerlessness, hopelessness, insecurity, terror, pain and death. Until you have lived under such circumstances do you really know how “decent,” “law-abiding” and “good” you really are?

Yours is a goodness born of evil. Your goodness does the work of Evil its father. It is Evil disguised as good, hatred disguised as love. That is why your “charity” corrupts. Your “goodness” is the goodness born of not having to murder another in order to take his possessions but of having your police, your armies, mercenaries and puppet dictators do it for you. In the name of “national interests,” “self-defense,” “free enterprise,” “private property,” “fighting for democracy,” “restoring peace,” “maintaining the balance of power,” and hundreds of other hypnotic, self-deceptive words and phrases, you hide from yourselves the murder committed by your “patriotic” sons. With diplomatic double-talk you deny that your armadas — standing and mercenary armies — your fortresses scattered hither and yond, your deadly missiles and star wars battle stations are but guns you hold to the collective temples of the world’s peoples while you rob them hand-over-fist.

Your newspapers and books, your media, are your instruments of repression, repressing through misrepresentation, omissions and lies the painful reality of your truly murderous trek across the globe — permitting you to think yourself inherently good and your victims inherently evil. They reverse reality, stridently screaming in their headlines about the murder of one “innocent” White victim on the streets by some “burley Black man,” some “Black teen-age savages” gone “wilding,” while the rape, murder and plunder of a whole African continent and its peoples does not merit a whisper in the last page, last column. Of this your “goodness” is born. And for this reason your “goodness” shall be assaulted, your peace disturbed, and you shall see evil intent staring back at you through every non-White pair of eyes. That Black man you hate and fear is the Black man you made. You are being menaced by your own shadow.

Yet there remains a question which begs an answer! While some Whites suffer the criminal depredations of Black criminals, it is Blacks who suffer far more than do ‘Whites, from the activities Black-on-Black criminals. Why do “good and decent” Black people suffer the malice of Black criminal violence? Victims of other people’s cruelties, whether they themselves are good and decent, or evil or indecent, are not exempt from suffering for the sins of their fathers. For if fathers sell their children into bondage the children will suffer from their fathers’ mercenary betrayal.

While many African ancestral fathers fought to keep their children free from enslavement, others betrayed and sold them to the White enslavers. For this betrayal, perhaps some would call it a necessary compromise, Africa’s children had to pay. Slavery, colonialism, onerous subordination and general contempt, powerlessness and dependency, hunger and starvation, are but some of the crosses they have to bear for the sins of their fathers and their enslavers.

Too many of ancestral Africa’s fathers and sons — forgetting the commonality of their Africanicity, differences in tribe and tradition notwithstanding — were corrupted by those who were to become their masters. They then turned on each other, and on their children, and their children turned on them. And turning around on themselves they bartered their progeny and the soul of the race for a mess of European porridge.

If the children of African American elders attack them, it is in part because their elders have betrayed them, because they have sold their children’s birthright and squandered their inheritance. Black America is attacked by its children because, like too many of its slave-trading ancestral fathers, it has refused to fully recognize its fundamental Africanicity and have its constituents relate to each other and the world according to that identity. Too many African Americans have permitted the luster of gold and silver, the glitter and glamour of trinkets, status symbols and personal vanities, small comforts, false alienating ideologies and religions, the addictive pursuit of painkillers and pacifiers, the belief that ‘Whites are invincible, to blind them to the truth and reality of what they are doing to their children.

African American mothers and fathers betray their children when in seeking to escape the anguish of their oppression, they vainly court the sympathy and love of their White American and alien exploiters. They betray their children when they, in their poverty of spirit, spend all their monies and resources to purchase their self-respect and the overpriced, shoddy goods from those who hold them in utter contempt. They delude their children when they pander to the interests of other races which are inimical to their own; and when they enrich, through trade and commerce, their oppressor’s children while impoverishing their own. African mothers and fathers betray their children when they permit their oppressors to mis-educate their children.

When African American fathers choose not to prepare their sons to undertake the revolutionary overthrow of their oppressors they betray their children and the race. They thereby earn the enmity of their sons and come to live in fear of them. They see them as the enemy. As long as African American mothers and fathers refuse to take primary responsibility for the care and welfare of their children and families; refuse to become their children’s preeminent educators and enculturators; refuse to take control of their economy and bequeath their wealth to their offspring; refuse to take charge of their history and their future; refuse to accept the positive reality of their African identity and to love their African selves, they shall continue to be vindictive targets of their children’s violence. And their children shall continue to be exploited and victimized by the children of alien races. And they shall continue to be victimized by indomitable addictions to euphoric substances and faddish vanities the satisfaction of which will drive them to violently victimize their brothers and sisters.
Hence, if African Americans are to be truly liberated, they must vindicate their fathers’ debts by their absolute refusal to follow their fathers’ erroneous ways and by dauntlessly undertaking to complete the arduous revolutionary task which, for too long, they have ignored. By these means they will forgive those ancestors who betrayed them; they will honor themselves and pay homage to those ancestors who kept the faith, fought and died that they might be free.

The race is born again in its children. Those who live today are the reincarnated ancestral spirits of those who lived yesterday. They themselves are to be the reincarnated spirits of those who will live tomorrow. Yet those who live today are more than just a link in the karmic chain which binds the generations. For by their knowledge of truth and of self, and by their courage to live true to that knowledge, they can positively transfigure their own lives, the lives of their ancestors and the lives of their progeny. Then the cycle shall be broken, the race shall be free. And once again its life shall be an example and blessing to mankind.
For every generation represents a new opportunity for a race to purify its past and to beatify its future.

The Neutralization Of Black On Black Violence

Is the contention exaggerated, or does it speak the simple truth, that man has contrived his institutions for the combat of crime so that he may in fact maintain it? — PAUL REIWALD Society And Its Criminals

THE FOREGOING DISCUSSIONS briefly outlined some of the forces which move some African Americans toward criminality and Black-on-Black violence. The decriminalization of the Black male and the neutralization of Black-on-Black violence require that we learn to discern the forces which compel Black criminal behavior and Black-on-Black violence; that we gain an expert knowledge of their psycho political, psychodynamic interaction and of their politico-economical, socioeconomic functionality. Decriminalization and neutralization further require that African Americans develop, control, and effectively utilize opposing countervailing forces against those prevailing forces which, if permitted to continue, will extinguish African life at home and abroad.
The prevention of Black-on-Black violence and Black criminality, which results in the incarceration of tens of thousands of young African American males in the prime of their manhood, depends on the creation and vigorous activation of Afrocentric countervailing forces opposed to those Eurocentric forces which motivate and energize their criminal assault on the African American community and their self-destructive assault on themselves. These men, were their minds and bodies free, would be the leaders of the revolutionary vanguard which would overthrow and obliterate the truly criminal dominance of the European.

Afrocentric countervailing forces include: Afrocentric personal, moral, ethical values and appetitive incentives; Afrocentric cultural values, interpersonal and social interactive orientations; Afrocentric cultural motives, goals, and community organization; and Afrocentric policing, criminal justice, governance policies, and the establishment of Afrocentric economical, political, technological, cultural and military systems. The scope of this essay does not permit a discussion of the nature and purposes of each of these countervailing forces. They will be discussed in detail in forthcoming works. However, as implied by our previous analyses, the construction and effective utilization of Afrocentric countervailing forces necessary for African survival and the empowerment and enhancement of the quality of African life, require our technical understanding of a number of important facts:

1. The continuing economical, cultural, and perhaps biological survival of African Americans and Africans the world- over, is in serious question. Black-on-Black violence and criminality are just two of the most salient symptoms of a people headed for self-destruction and possible annihilation. A drastic reorganization of priorities and re-examination of values: development of Afrocentric cultural, political, economic programs; and Afrocentric ethical renewal, must be undertaken if disaster is to be avoided and our survival secured. This requires a thorough understanding of the oppressive, imperialistic functioning of the ideology of Eurocentric individualism when it is unwittingly and unmodified accepted and practiced by subordinated African peoples. Africans must recognize that “individuality” is a collective epiphenomenon that radiates from group power and prestige. There are no “individuals” who belong to powerless, degraded groups: only notorious stereotypical exceptions to a very general racist rule. Individual choice and distinction is a fringe benefit of those who belong to dominant or autonomous groups. The route to individual power is that of group empowerment. All other “individual” power is illusionary and ultimately a form of self- and other-destruction.

2. It is of premier importance that African Americans understand the criminal, anti-life origins of White American society; understand its current national and international criminal and crimogenic nature; and how their imitation of that society — their wish to be integrated into its “mainstream,” their wish to be totally identified with it; as well as their wrongheaded anger, frustration and self-alienation which result from being rejected by it; are the essential sources of Black-on-Black violence, criminality, sociopolitical and economical impotence, mental maladjustment, and racial death on the installment plan. To become one with a system which was built on African enslavement and is currently founded on the continuing socioeconomic, sociopolitical degradation, ignorance and disorganization of African peoples, is to become allied with the deadly criminal enemies of African peoples.

The psychodynamics of ego self-defense mechanisms, internalization of racist attitudes and perceptions, identification with the aggressor, displaced aggression, misdirected anger, rage, etc., and how they are utilized by a crimogenic Eurocentric system in its attempt to compel African Americans to engage in apparently “self-willed” acts of communal, interpersonal and individual acts of self-destruction, must be thoroughly understood. Discussions of how these mechanisms operate within the context of group power differentials must be numerous and in- depth, and the methods of counteracting their negative effects taught and trained as a part of African American education for life, survival and overcomance. The African American must come to understand that “ego self-defense,” under the ineffectively opposed influence of an oppressive white racist regime, is no true defense of the ego or of the self. It is ultimately naught but a defense and rationalization of the “right” to be destructively exploited by his Eurocentric oppressors, and to join them in their annihilation of his African self.

Displaced aggression, which is the source of so much Black-on-Black violence, suicide and self-destructive addictive habits as well as Black educational, political, cultural and economical under-achievement, will virtually cease if African males, instead of cowering before the illusion of Eurocentric power and invincibility, would decide to stand up and make their preoccupying goal the eradication of European power and domination. They would stop killing themselves if they decide to neutralize their true frustrators, tormentors and enemies.

3. It must be understood that it is the unexamined acceptance of the racist White American value system and the egregious imitation of White American material greed by African Americans (and Africans worldwide) which are the primary sources of Black violence, general community disorganization, relative powerlessness and poverty. Under European domination and organization of the national and international economic systems and opportunity structures, disproportionate numbers of Africans are virtually forced to engage in the same criminal acts of violence against and oppression of African peoples as do the Europeans whose values they try so vainly to realize. In practice, the Eurocentric value system has underdeveloped African economies and impoverished African peoples, endangered the whole of life on earth, bred, aided and abetted the rape, robbery and murder of nations and peoples.

Therefore the wholesale acceptance of Eurocentric values by African peoples will but hasten a destructive process that is already tidal in its immensity. A impartial examination of African values and their practical application in African life is the only means of achieving African liberation, and significantly reducing Black violence and disintegration of the African American community. What fruits for African Americans have the tree of White American values borne?

The African American must accept the very likely possibility that he may never be fully integrated as an equal into the so-called American mainstream. Even if he were fully accepted there is no guarantee that should circumstances warrant it, the Eurocentric system will not renege on its prior acceptance and eject him from the mainstream. As long as Whites possess the power of “acceptance” or “non-acceptance,” the power of the purse, police, military, etc., the existence of African peoples is in jeopardy: whether integrated or segregated. African survival depends on meeting White power with equal or superior Black power.

This requires the construction of an African American nation within a nation with a fully developed sociopolitical, socioeconomic system, fully invested in the ownership of the American production system to the point of, obtaining an influential equity in it, and the conversion of that system from an instrument of African exploitation and death to one of African enhancement and life. Alliances between African Americans and other African nations must be forged all over the globe, and those alliances must be organized to retake control over their economic and cultural systems; the development, on the African continent and other places, of technological and scientific systems second-to-none; development of military defense systems capable of effectively defending Africans against European military incursions.

4. The principal economic roles of African Americans in White America include those of being surplus, expendable, cheap labor and heedless consumers. These roles somewhat parallel those of Africans internationally as harvesters of basic raw materials, and as consumers of the surplus production of other nations, not as producers of finished products for their own or the consumption of others. Collectively, if the African American population were considered a nation, it would rank as the ninth or tenth richest on earth considering its national income and wealth. It would be considered one of the largest African nations in the world and with its educated and trained classes, its relatively politically sophisticated population would represent a considerable challenge to the top ranking nations on the earth today. It has developed a significant and growing coterie of administrators, bureaucrats, government officials, elected officials, civil servants, business executives, professionals, intellectuals, generals, etc., which are the foundations and sinews of a modern nation and which could represent the basis for African people to take care of and determine their own interests.

Yet the perception of Black America is one of poverty material poverty and poverty of spirit. This perception which runs against the grain of African American economic reality and potential, is necessary in order to facilitate and rationalize the riotous fleecing of Black consumers and the rape of Black human and economic resources by White Americans and other ethnic groups. This rapacious exploitation of Africans requires that the Black population must starve its own members, particularly its youth, in order to support the families and youth of other ethnic groups. To meet its own economic and institutional needs, the African American population needs to spend the largest bulk of its consumer dollars with itself and engage in the production of economic goods and services which can be sold to itself and others.

 The African community must enter into full economic competition with other peoples. It cannot do this and continue to be the economic sucker of other peoples. Black Americans, with their very sizeable population, 12% - 15% of the general American population, and relatively large consumer wealth, spends only about five cents of each of its consumer dollars with themselves, and ninety-five cents with others. They invest relatively little of their earnings on wealth creating instruments, activities, economic organizations, and real estate. Thus, the African American community spends itself into poverty and though it possesses the capacity for tremendous economic growth and influence it does not significantly use that capacity to create employment, purpose, wealth and stability for its constituents, particularly its male members.

The organization (more aptly, disorganization) of the African American economy and the psycho economic organization of the African American personality denies its children an economic inheritance, legacy, and tradition. Hence they become reactionary dependent on the economic machinations of their oppressors and exploiters. The failure of the African American leadership and professional classes, petty bourgeois and business classes to appropriately organize a coherent and cohesive Afrocentric economic system, is tanta mount to a rejection of their historic role and a betrayal of their people and of their children. These betrayed children are the ones which criminally assault their elders with a special hostility and vengeance. The failure of the African American middle class to invest in African economic development and empowerment is itself criminal.

• The adult African American population must be cognizant of the fact it must earn the respect of its youth through expending its creative, organizational, and economic resources in their interest, not in the interest of the youths of other people who will one day be the enemies and exploiters of their own children. The refusal of Black America to perceive itself as a national entity (being under the influence of “American individualism” and develop an economic system and a coherent economic policy both nationally and internationally, means that it will remain psycho economically dependent, economically dis-invested, and will not be respected by other ethnic groups.

Because of its refusal to invest in its economic autonomy, it cannot utilize its very considerable potential economic clout to train and employ its young men as well as to further its psycho political, socioeconomic interests, to insure self-defense and survival. It must build and support the social institutions necessary to determine its destiny and produce the types of children and adults who represent assets and not liabilities to its well-being. The failure of the Black community to economically invest in itself and in America, as well as to militantly utilize its consumer power to force the American economy to train and employ throughout its business strata its young men and women (while passionately seeking to imitate White American consumption patterns and engage in compensatory, conspicuous consumption) potently encourages Black male criminality, Black-on-Black violence, drug addiction, family disorganization, intellectual retardation, general communal disintegration and demise.

5. A people, and a nation, is created, re-created, and sustained through the appropriate education and training of its youth. Every culture engages in some form of education and training, the principal function of which is to secure cultural identity, continuity, organization, integrity and above all, survival. When a people is mis-educated or inappropriately educated and trained, its sense of people hood is destabilized as is concomitantly its individual and collective psyches, and its capacity to withstand the deadly assaults and exploitative pillaging by other peoples and the insidious wasting away of its vitality.

African Americans are educated and trained to further the imperial and exploitative interests of racist White America — interests inimical to their own. They are therefore educated against their own interests, which is one of the reasons that despite their sizeable educated, professional and trained classes relative to other nations, their economic and political power is benign and their survival is in question. Black-on-Black violence, criminality, social dysfunctionality, economic instability, defensive vulnerability, can to a great extent be traced back to African Americans not understanding the basic function of education and of educational institutions, and permitting their exploiters and oppressors to determine the nature of the educational experience of their children.

Consequently, when African Americans are educated and trained under white racist domination — no matter how highly educated or how highly trained  they are educated to serve the predominant needs of their White oppressors and thus trained for servitude. Those left untrained, uneducated, undereducated, mis-educated and unemployed, also are made so at the pleasure of White America. Ultimately, a certain type of ignorance and ineptitude, a certain dumbness, regardless of level of formal education or the lack of it, is maintained among African Americans and Africans in general. It is by means of this fundamental dumbness that Eurocentric domination and exploitation are efficiently maintained and remain unchallenged.

When educated through the auspices of their exploiters, African Americans and Africans in general are educated into ignorance, are made the recipients of an alienated education which means that it can be utilized only to further alien interests. Thus, the formal and informal education of African American youth is an education in alienation, self-abnegation, incompetence, unreality and wrong-headedness. Many of the youth, particularly the males, resist this alienating, anti-life, emasculating and insulting process: a process designed to prepare them for subordinate places in a racist society. They reject and refuse to cooperate with this design, and through “antisocial” acts offend, tax the resources of, and attack its perpetrators. They defend valiantly, though self-destructively, what shreds of “masculinity” they have left.

They violently attack the elders and the community who and which have failed to educate them around African cultural identity and purpose, independence, self-determination, responsibility, self-knowledge and self-love: education for the attainment of a fulfilling and liberated life. If African American youth are to be educated away from their “antisocial” proclivities and educated in ways that permit them to legitimately actualize their human potential and secure the biological and cultural survival of African peoples, they must be educated, especially during their impressionable years, by their own elders and equipped with an Afrocentric education. Suffice it to say that if the education of African youth is designed to primarily serve the interests of African peoples and to maintain the wholesome integrity of the African community, such education must be grounded in objective analyses of the African psycho historical and psycho cultural experience as well as African future development.

Today the education of African children is one in search of a considered Afrocentric pedagogic theory. The overarching goal and function of education must be that of seeking to insure the survival of a people, to enhance their quality of life, their ability to exercise self-determination and a self-created sense of people hood, personhood, and humanity. African youth must be educated to carry out the revolutionary overthrow of their oppressors. An appropriate education and training of African American youth must take into consideration the transformation and distortion of the African personality and psyche, and the resulting distortion of their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics which have taken place and continue to take place under European oppression. The African American community must grasp that it has to train its young to accomplish tasks which are diametrically opposed to those of White American youth. Consequently, there can be no such thing as equal education, the same education, provided to both African American and White American youth.

The education of African American youth must be measured according to the standards and needs of African peoples if those peoples are to leave the path leading to self-destruction. The beneficial education of Black youth and the African American population can only occur within the confines, and under the control of, African American communities and institutions. The education of African American males must occur in African American homes, churches, private schools, preempted public schools, auditoriums, prisons, and any other places where the truth and reality of the African history, experience and destiny can be taught; where their teachers, their people, have a profound understanding of the developmental psychology of the African American child, a knowledge of the tasks they must accomplish, and can train them in how to accomplish those tasks.

The appropriate rearing and education of African American children require that African American people recognize the inappropriateness of White American parenting and pedagogical approaches for their children. They require that African Americans review the pragmatic approaches to child rearing and socioeconomic organization utilized by their ancestors, and the creation and adaptation of new approaches where necessary. For example, the African American acceptance of the European family model as representing the ideal and valid model for their own family organization, despite the markedly different psycho economical, psycho historical origins and contemporary contexts of the European family configuration relative to that of the African American family configuration, has resulted in the perception of the predominantly African American family configuration as deviant, deficient and pathological. For instance, the African American’s acceptance of the Eurocentric conception of the father’s role in the family as the primary and only male responsible for the training for manhood and adulthood of his Sons has crippled Black America’s capacity to creatively train its sons for manhood and adulthood when nearly half of its families are female headed.

 A review of their ancestral history would teach them that the training of male youth is a community activity: a responsibility of communal males, not just that of the biological father. Thus, the absence or ineptness of the biological African father would not necessarily have the negative ramifications it has in contemporary Black America. A radical redefinition of manhood and fatherhood, of training for manhood, must be undertaken by the African community in America if its youth is to be saved, the prisons are to be emptied of its men, the community is to decriminalize itself, defuse Black-on-Black violence, and create a just, harmonious, secure, and prosperous African American people.

Why Crime Prevention And Rehabilitative Programs Fail

Since White America maintains its positive collective self-concept and rationalizes its oppression of its African population by protectively degrading all things African, it cannot be expected that it will promulgate effective crime prevention programs. It cannot negate that upon which its psycho political, psycho economical life depends. Its pressing need to perceive African Americans, particularly African American males, as innately criminal, requires that it perceives them as incorrigible and incapable of rehabilitation. These perceptions, whether held consciously and/or unconsciously, mean that crime prevention, rehabilitation, and other programs and approaches designed to prevent crime in the Black community or to significantly reduce Black recidivism, when controlled by Whites, and rationalized on the basis of White psychology, are doomed to fail through self-defeat. Moreover, White American crime prevention and rehabilitative methods, because of White ambivalence toward alleged Black criminality and Black-on-Black violence, tend to help increase, or at best not effectively reduce, Black criminality. Hence, eurocentrically oriented corrections facilities and criminal justice systems are often “schools for crime.”

It must be acknowledged that the continuing European need to dominate and economically exploit African peoples requires that inequities of power and privilege persist and be enforced between the supreme Europeans and the subordinate Africans. Ultimately, this implies that fairness and parity under these circumstances cannot operatively exist between Blacks and Whites. A White dominated and rationalized criminal justice system, for the foregoing reasons, must be unjust, particularly in regard to African American males. White America’s need to dominate Blacks means that every White American institution must operate in opposition to its implied mission and name when dealing with African peoples. Thus the criminal justice system must produce injustice; the corrections system must promote in correction — just as the Eurocentric economic system must impoverish Africans.

Thus, when the White American criminal justice establishment talks about crime prevention it really speaks to the issue of how African Americans can be contained or kept in their “places” and prevented from escaping. Its chief concern is with African American containment and the prevention of White victimization by Black criminals. It is far from being passionately concerned about the prevention and reduction of Black-on-Black violence and Black criminal victimization of the African American community. This establishment is one with all other Eurocentric institutional establishments in that they all function to maintain White supremacy and in service to that purpose, to maintain Black communal destabilization, or Black communal stabilization at the price of having Blacks humbly accept (in a moral/religious, intellectual, emotional, and behavioral sense), the “places” chosen for them by their Eurocentric oppressors. As we have intimated, White America needs Black criminality to maintain its illusory positive self-image and politico economic hegemony.

It profits economically in many ways from the processing of Black males through its criminal justice and corrections systems and its crime prevention and rehabilitative programs. In place of ineffective rehabilitative programs and the necessary restructuring of American society, it stridently demands more draconian police methods; the continuing erosion and abridgement of African human and civil rights; an increasing emphasis on preventative detention; construction of more and larger prisons; longer and harsher sentencing of alleged convicts (especially Black ones); increasingly treating Black youthful offenders as adult offenders; defunding and rendering ineffective rehabilitative programs and services such as family counseling, probation and parole; as well as effectively neutering proven rehabilitative approaches and new experimental rehabilitative techniques.

Frankly, the most effective means for reducing Black criminality and Black-on-Black violence would be the prevention, correction, and rehabilitation, not of Black criminals, but of fundamental White racist criminality, White-on-Black violence, both psychical and physical, and the pathology of White racism. Black American crime is the progeny of White American criminal intercourse with African people. But since this course of action is very unlikely to be followed, it is necessary that the African American community successfully undertake its own prevention, correction and rehabilitative programs. It must take history into its own hands. While we have stressed the production of Black criminality by White criminality, this does not imply that Black criminality and Black-on-Black violence can only cease when White America decides that White-on-Black violence should cease.

This does not imply that African Americans are not to some measurable extent, responsible for the phenomena of Black criminality and Black-on-Black violence or that the African American community does not possess the internal, autonomous means of significantly reducing and preventing its victimization by Black criminals and violence-prone offenders. In fact, the surest way of ridding American society and the world of crimogenic Eurocentric dominance, imperialism and exploitation, is for the African American community to refuse to let sizable numbers of its constituents to be reactionary tempted into criminal, violent and self-destructive behavior or to tolerate or justify its existence. To a significant extent, White America is the reciprocal creation of Black America: Whites cannot be what they are unless Blacks choose to be or accept what they are. The relationship between White and Black America is both a parasitic and symbiotic one: a change in one necessitates a change in the other. And the African American community is capable of self- determined, autonomous change!

The premise of this essay is that to a very significant extent Black criminality and Black-on-Black violence are reactionary forms of behavior. This implies that if the African American community is to rid itself of reactionary Black criminality, it must expunge from its collective personality and psyche its tendency to respond to White racist provocation of various types and in stimulus-bound reactionary ways. It must learn not to react unthinkingly and self-defeatedly to White racist insults to the collective African ego complex. It must learn to resist White American material, social, economic, cultural enticements and seductions. How Black America chooses to react to the actions of White America determine the psychosocial, psycho economical, psycho political influence and outcome of those White American actions, regardless of their original intentions.

If it chooses to gain control of its own mental, emotional, behavioral and material processes, define and regulate its own institutional systems, then the African American community must determine the quality of its own community life to captain its own ship and determine its own destiny.

The earnest rehabilitation of the Black-on-Black criminal must begin with the acknowledgment that such a process must be one with full liberation of the African community and African peoples worldwide. The alienation of the individual African is endemically reflective of the alienation of the African community. A community is its people. Its oppression requires the concrete oppression of the persons who constitute it. Its permanent oppression, subordination, and exploitation requires that its individual constituents and the social relations which inhere between them, be organized and simultaneously disorganized in a way such that its autonomous and wholesome existence should never be actualized.

This is the fundamental condition upon which enduring European/White American political- economical hegemony and White supremacy uneasily rests. Thus, the mental and socioeconomic maladaptiveness of African individuals and peoples and their social relations is a political- economic necessity if today’s ethnocultural status quo is to be preserved intact. It follows then that the African American and African peoples in general must be subjected to a deliberate and efficient program of White American/European created and sustained socioeconomic/cultural destabilization paradigms. These paradigms are reflected in the destabilization, confusion, alienated adjustment and self-destructiveness of many African communities and nations.

Any serious “rehabilitation” program dealing with African individuals and groups must be founded on the knowledge that the continuance of White American/European domination of African peoples requires continued African mental and social maladaptiveness. The social and individual ills that plague the African American community are politically inspired. Therefore, their rehabilitation must be politically informed and understood as a form of political activism, the goals of which must include the overthrow and permanent disablement of White supremacy, the root cause of those ills to begin with. The appropriate treatment of the Black-on-Black criminal must, by the very casual nature of his ailments, include his psycho political deprogramming and reconstruction.

His aggressive impulses must be redirected. They must be given their appropriate definition, causes and objectives, including above all, the liberation of his African self, of African peoples, and the ending of White supremacist global hegemony. To accomplish these ends he must not only understand the social psychological and psychodynamic sources of his violent behavior. He must be educated in the arts of self-control, social organization, cooperation, creative-strategic thinking and behavior, self-love, self-acceptance, and love of his people.

 Black Perceptions Of White Law Enforcement

The contradictions discussed above are further complicated by the fact that many African Americans justifiably perceive the police force principally as an alien, hostile, colonial imperialistic constabulary deployed against them. The force’s reasons for being in the African American community is seen as that of maintaining the racist status quo through intimidation of the local Black constitutional, civil and human rights. They have seen “the law” and its enforcers take sides with reactionary White American communities and join with those communities in hypocritically and blatantly violating their own legal and moral codes to maintain racial advantages.

Not only has the African American community suffered emotionally from the violations by Whites of their own moral and legal codes; they have witnessed the writing and enforcement of laws which are specifically designed and passed to facilitate their domination and exploitation, their humiliation and degradation, their subordination and dehumanization, by the White American community. This historical and contemporary situation has bred contempt for laws and authorities, for social mores and etiquette, and motivated open, rebellious subversion of these entities by certain relatively small but influential elements of the African American community.

 It has reinforced criminal contempt and activity in many youth and young adults because of the pleasure derived from outwitting the laws and their enforcers, laws promulgated and enforced by outsiders and enemies and therefore only to be obeyed by “squares” and “chumps.” Prestige is thereby gained in the eyes of unsophisticated Black youth by Black-on-Black criminals who in their perverted ways dare to challenge racist White supremacy as represented by the laws and authorities, even if such unthinking subversion, resistance and rebellion may ultimately prove to be self-defeating, self-destructive, wrongheaded and pointless.

The African American Community And Improved Law Enforcement

The following conditions must inhere if the African American community, in cooperation with the law enforcement and criminal justice establishments, is to commit itself effectively to the support of the nation’s laws, their enforcement, and is to prevent or significantly reduce criminal activity in its midst:

• The laws must be rigorously and equitably enforced and not purposely, or in effect, written to rationalize and protect race or class prerogatives and power advantages.

• The laws must be consonant with generally accepted moral, valuational and constitutional preachments and written with the mutual agreement of the people — including the African American people.

• Law enforcement establishments, authorities, and personnel must impartially enforce the laws and not pennit themselves to be perceived as representatives and enforcers of discriminatory racial, class, institutional attitudes and practices.

• Law enforcement personnel should reflect the ethnic compositions of the African American communities they serve, and should employ at all levels a representative number of African American personnel who possess a high level of Afrocentric consciousness and demeanor. Those police units which operate within the African American community, the cities and highways in general, should possess a sound working knowledge of the culture, history, and behavioral character of the African American community and demonstrate an earnest respect for it.

• Police personnel should be taught to perceive and acquit themselves not as occupiers of the African American community, not as its rulers or as enforcers of quasi-colonial laws but as its servants, employees, as its representatives, and who along with the members of that community are mutually and co-equally concerned and involved in protecting its best interests.

• Police and criminal justice personnel responsible for violating the rules of common decency and courtesy, for the use of racial slurs and epithets, for abuse of power and authority, the use of unnecessary force, other forms of harassment and injurious behavior when dealing with African American citizens, should be visited with certain, swift, and effective chastisement.

• Police authorities and personnel must be equally and as speedily responsive to the needs of the African American community as they are to non-African American communities.

• Police personnel and authorities must serve and learn to differentiate the criminal and non-criminal elements in the African American community, and be perceived as even handedly opposed to its criminal elements and as zealously protective of its citizens’ lives and properties, as respective of their rights and humanity as they are the criminal elements, lives, properties, rights and humanity of other ethnic communities.

• The police and criminal justice establishments must respect the intelligence of the African American community and exhibit full confidence in its capacity to know how best to solve its social problems. They, therefore, should be prepared to actively listen to the community and diligently support its efforts, not paternalistically and autocratically dictate solutions to its problems.

• The African American community should by all means saliently demand the swift, sure and effective punishment of those of its constituents who dare victimize, in whatever manner and for whatever reasons, any other of its members. Culprits who commit Black-on-Black crime should be aware of the fact that the community will not tolerate, rationalize, countenance or in any way condone (historical racism as a causal factor notwithstanding) the victimization of one Black by another.

The African American community must rid itself of the internalized racist belief that African life is less precious than non-African life, especially White life. Having done this and having actively committed itself to the revolutionizing of the police and criminal justice establishments along the lines suggested above, as well as having committed itself to its full internal socioeconomic, sociocultural, psycho political reorganization, the African American community must unequivocally and loudly condemn, and vigorously pursue the fair-minded prosecution of those Blacks who harm other Blacks, no matter their station in life.

Recommendations For African American Community Preservation And Empowerment

The African American community must realize that it has the right and duty to defend itself from its criminal elements if the government, to which it pays taxes, and whose officials it helps to elect, fails to do so. The ability of unarmed Black Muslim young men and of other Black community organizations — with or without police support — to successfully neutralize or markedly reduce criminal activity from some African American neighborhoods throughout the U.S.A., demonstrates clearly the African American community’s potential for ridding itself of crime if encouraged and organized to do so.

For approximately one-third of what a city like New York City expends to employ its patrol forces, a comparable group of young African American males and females could be trained and stipendiated to patrol and protect their own communities. While White America utilizes its sons and daughters to provide protection for itself (which is the police establishment’s principal function) the African American community is not permitted to exercise that right, hence its occupation by colonial police forces. Policing their communities would provide very valuable opportunities for teaching young African American males that their first duty is the protection of their people against internal and external victimization.

 The opportunity to develop discipline, work habits, appropriate attitudes toward and relationships with authority, to learn to appreciate order, to learn to command as well as to obey, is lost when the African American community is treated as some dependent, defenseless, neocolonial protectorate by the White American-controlled constabulary.

Finally, the fear that African American and the worldwide African communities may develop their own effective internal authority system, their own autonomous afrocentrically based organization, which could place them in the position to challenge the hegemonic White American national and global White American/European socioeconomic systems, motivates those sociopolitical conglomerates to actively oppose any semblance of African American self-determination and self-defense. For when all is told, Black self-defense and self-determination is viewed by Whites as criminal offenses and as threats to White authority.

 Thus, in the defense of its authority, the White community promotes the defenselessness of the Black community against its own self-destruction. The African American community — at the expense of having to confront the White American community, the White-dominated police force and criminal justice establishment — must not let this situation continue if it is to survive and prosper.

Prevention of Black-on-Black criminality and violence through more rational law enforcement, through the unbiased execution of appropriate criminal justice procedures and the provision of effective counseling and rehabilitation services, is not the same as the prevention of Black-on-Black criminality and violence through the Afrocentric organization of the African American community. While law enforcement and criminal justice systems may effectively suppress, thwart or correct criminal tendencies, intent, and activity after they occur, and may reduce crime in one area by deflecting it to another, appropriate socialization of children, equitable and fair organization and distribution of national and community resources, the provision of Afrocentric educational training and of equitable occupational opportunities, can suppress and redirect possible criminal tendencies, and activities before they are actualized or can occur.

 Crime prevention would then result from internal, personal and communal processes rather than from the exertion of external, alien and ultimately corrupting, constabulary forces. To accomplish this end the African American community must: Recapture its Afrocentric self. For it is with the “splitting off” of the African American ego complex from its African self that the tragic transformation of too many Africans into antisocial personalities begin to take place. Neurotic and psychotic behavior is essentially measured by the degree to which the individual is out of touch with reality; the more out of touch with his sociohistorical reality, the more neurotic, psychotic, maladjusted and/or self-destructive. The African American community must confront and accept the reality of its African cultural origins — and identity. The rejection of this reality is the acceptance of psychopathology.

Rebuild, re-create, and create African based cultural and moral values essential to the regaining the cultural sanity, health, liberation, and survival of the African American and Pan-African communities.

 • Build Afrocentric national and international economic, military; technological and political systems not dependent on European consent. African power must originate from the psycho political heart of African peoples.

• Take full responsibility for providing its children with an Afrocentric education based on Afrocentric psychology and pedagogic techniques designed to serve the survival and life-enhancement needs of African peoples. The community must take over caring for the health and welfare of its constituents through the increase and distribution of its own wealth and through the vigorous exertion of its collective political power and influence in the U.S.A. Accepting continuing charity from outsiders corrupts the spirit and health of a people.

• Take the initiative and responsibility for building and providing adequate housing and employment for its constituents.

• Make one of its central motivating goals the overthrow of European and Eurocentric (and any other ethnocultural group’s), psycho political, psycho cultural, socioeconomic, techno-military, religio-ethical domination of African peoples. This decrees that the African American community envision itself as a people — a nationality — as a nation- within-a-nation, organize and function as such, and relate to the other pluralistic ethnocultural groups as such. For in reality, the African American community is perceived and treated as a separate, outlaw, outcast nation. The refusal to deal with the reality of its separateness and use it to its own advantage, to accept the reality of the pluralistic organization of America society where each ethno cultural group is almost exclusively concerned with its own welfare, entering alliances and coalitions when it is to their advantage to do so, are the sources of the African American community’s current negative and frightening vulnerability to alien economic exploitation and to self-destruction. The survival of African American communities cannot continue to be based on the fickle “largesse” and “moral turpitude,” “sympathy,” “empathy” and “brotherly love” of the White American community.

• Take its destiny into its own hands. The African American community must psychosocially be “born again.” It must rehabilitate its incarcerated population and itself by getting to know its true ancient, pre-enslavement, enslavement, and contemporary history; by getting to know the true history and psychology of its oppressors and of other peoples; by getting to know how it was and is created and manipulated in service of Eurocentric and European interests and, conversely, against its own. It must recognize that it is possessed by an antagonistic eurocentrically introjected spirit, a spirit with which it self-destructively identifies and over which it has little or no control, and which directs its collective personality in opposition to its true purpose and character. It must recognize that every thing originates out of a psycho political milieu, possesses psycho political purposes, has psycho political implications, emanations, effects and ramifications. The understanding of these phenomena and their application to the reconstruction of the African American community, to correcting the incarcerated African American population, to the rearing, guidance, education and counseling of African American children, will provide an indestructible foundation upon which African liberation and the liberation of humankind can be re-constructed and realized.

The Image Of The Black Community Is Horrendous In The World. The Image Of Black Men In Particular Is That Of A Bestial Maniacal And Savage Group Of Persons. Minister Louis Farrakhan

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