SHOCKING: The forgotten mentally mortifying aspect of Black enslavement in the U.S.

[TheNubianWarrior]

The following is also an exerpt from the popular best selling underground book The Black Matrix By Franklin Jones (c) 2006


For the most part, what most African Americans know today about the slave experiences of their ancestors they have learned from text books written entirely by White educators or by way of movies and televisions programing reinterpreted by White directors and White screenwriters. Such an example was the 1970's mini television series entitled "Roots" based upon the novel Roots written by Alex Haley. Although an African American wrote the novel, whites wrote the television screenplay-- thereby giving it a white reinterpretation. The depiction of the African slave experience was not intended to educate but rather to entertain. These shows were very careful not to offend its White audiences and its White sponsors. Those television shows such as Roots and the many others that followed about the African slave experiences merely reiterated repeatedly the stories depicting the Underground Railroad, the sale and splitting up of Black families. Within these portrayals the brutalities sustained by the slaves are softened down to make Whites appear more humane throughout history. These stories brought to the screen by Whites to entertain and to get good ratings should not be taken as accurate historical accounts of the African slave experience. Such as seen, for example, in the failures to reflect the fact that the North had also participated in slavery. Although slavery had not really flourished in New York and adjacent colonies, there were 1,300 slaves in five counties about New York in 1703.
The system of human slavery is perhaps as old as civilization itself and was practiced commonly among Africans; however, slavery as practiced in America was very different from slavery in Africa. Because the White masters believed that their slaves were racially inferior, they saw fit to ensure that their slaves believed likewise by implementing a mentally reducing acculturation process upon the minds and psyches of the African slaves – it also ensured a greater degree of loyalty from the slave. White America’s retelling of the African American slave experience has deliberately and consistently ignored this mentally debilitating acculturation process that was inflicted upon the minds of the slaves, arguably the worst aspect of the African slave trade.
The practice of slavery in Africa was usually like that of indentured servants. The slaves retain customary rights and might even accumulate property. Sometimes, the enslavement was effective for limited periods but not for life. However, in America being a slave meant being such for the duration of one’s entire life and that the slave could not acquire property or any essential rights or privileges beyond what his master's inclination or self-interest allowed. Moreover, the life of a slave was fraught with very rigorous and unrelenting physical, psychological, and emotional mistreatment and indignities. Africans slaves in America, unlike other oppressed people such as the Native Americans and the Jews who were able to maintain some degree of racial pride, culture, and heritage, were totally stripped of their culture, heritage, and racial pride and were conditioned to believe that they were inferior to Whites.
During the enslavement of Africans in America, the White slave masters implemented a brutally mortifying method of psychological warfare upon our slave ancestors to make them more passive and loyal. After all, the White master could not possibly merely capture an African and then simply tell him to obey his master. Furthermore, because the master would eventually entrust the slaves to raise his children without harming them and to cook his meals without poisoning him, immense loyalty was required of his slaves. To acquire such loyalty, a psychologically mortifying acculturation process was indoctrinated on the minds of the African slaves in America. A method today commonly referred to as the Willie Lynch method of slave indoctrination. This psychological mortification process is believed to be connected to many of the unique problems now facing African American community today. Many psychologists believe that this psychologically mortifying acculturation process indoctrinated upon the minds of our slave ancestors is being regenerated by pathologies of self hatred imbedded within African American culture. This is an aspect of slavery more denigrating to the hearts and souls of the slaves than the chains placed upon their necks, wrist, and legs -- an affliction far more severe and more profound than any physical or sexual abuses they sustained. In order to obtain the total obedience from a slave, the master first had to break their defiant spirit.
The position of the slave masters was to treat their slaves no different than they would any other wild animal. The process required the total deconstruction of the African slaves and than re-conditioning them only to serve. This process required breaking their defiant spirits. Slaves were murdered for sport in the presence of other slaves to establish Black fear and White dominance. This showed to the male slaves how little their lives were valued by the White master and that no insurrection would be tolerated from the slave and demonstrated to the female slaves that the men could not protect them or their offspring from their White masters. Once this is completed, and then he teaches it to know whom his master is. It was by means of this technique that gave birth to the "Nigger", the inferior Black man fearing to dare even look a White man in the eyes. The life of a slave in America was also wrought with constant degradation; their masters did not honor even marriages among slaves. A family of slaves had no rights to remain together or to keep their offspring, and the master enjoyed full discretion to have sex with any slave to his liking male, female, or child. Marriage and family arrangements among the slaves were entirely at the discretion of their masters.
Here's an example of how a master may have used these discretions. This story takes place in Mississippi August 12, 1742. It is on a Friday night, and the master is entertaining a few fellow slave owners from the neighboring plantations. As they continue to drink and share slave stories, the hosting master begins to brag about a particular "negress" who was a favorite when he desired sex. His male guests grew intrigued and all asked to see her and to perhaps have a turn at her. The hosting master agreed and took three of his guests out to the field in the rear of the mansion were the noted female slave lived. When they kicked in her door and entered the shack house that she shared with her family, they found her lying in bed with her husband and their young children, two little girls, were lying in a separate bed of the same one room shack. The White men numbering four, the master and three of his male guests, ordered the husband to get up out of the bed and ordered him outside, He, the husband -- conditioned by years of horrific torture by his master –complied and without even taking a moment to get dressed he immediately went outside nude. As he sat outside naked upon the cold grass moistened by the nightly dew, he listened as the four White men repeatedly raped and sodomized his wife as their fearful children tearfully looked on screaming. The husband tried to block out the sounds by placing his hands over his ears but to no avail. When the White men were completed raping his wife, they marched out of the doorway laughing and drunk telling the husband as they walked over him lying in the doorway that he was a lucky Nigger to have such a wife. He was forced to smile and agree nodding his head as he returned inside his home smelling the stench of the drunken sex and finding his wife and children in tears. The White masters raped any slave that he desired male or female and even committed the acts of incest with there own mulatto children born of their Black slaves.
The master also possessed full disciplinary powers he could beat his slave to death if he saw fit to do so. The courts rarely took action against these acts because the legal assumption was that the proprietor would not destroy his own property, and if he did, he had good reason to do so. Moreover, in time, many slaves began governing the conduct of the disruptive slaves by reporting their actions to the master or trying to stop it themselves. Here is such an example of this profound misplaced loyalty among slaves.
This story occurred near Petersburg Virginia in 1836 on a financially struggling plantation. There had been several years since this plantation had a successful crop season that turned a profit. This resulted in the master having to sell several slaves each year right before Christmas just to get by. Also during these winter months, the slaves were given very little to eat. During good days, the slaves would eat twice and during the bad days only once and the good days were far and few between. The master said that this rationing was necessary because of the low crop production during the summer months. However, the master hid extra food for himself and family within an old abandoned barn house that was made off limits to the entire field slave. The off limits rules were strictly enforced. Therefore, any slave found near the barn, other than those house slaved sent by their master to recover food, would immediately receive 25 lashes across his or her back. Furthermore, the master, to ensure that the field slaves stayed away from the barn, instructed the house slaves to spread rumors among the field slaves that the barn was in fact haunted.
For years, the master’s scheme worked perfect and as a result he and his family always had more then enough for themselves during the winter while the field slave often loss an average of twenty ponds during the winter seasons. However, this was about to change for upon this plantation, there lived a very exceptional and inquisitive little eight-year-old African American slave born into slavery. What made this little boy unique was that, "unlike other slaves with broken spirits on the plantation, he was not affected by the brainwashing by the hands of his master and expressed his insightfulness and inquisitiveness more openly than others."
His intelligence and intuitiveness would often get him into trouble with the master. He even secretly learned to read at the age of seven, a fact that his mother, herself only nineteen, adamantly discouraged and made the boy promise not to divulge to any one else —not even other slaves for she feared gravely that if word of the child’s ability to read got back to the master's house then her only son would be severely punished and then sold because it was illegal for slaves to learn to read and write. One morning, this inquisitive boy awoke with the desire to find out what was really hidden in his master’s old barn. Therefore, he quickly got dressed and sneaked out to the barn under the darkness of the early morning. As he got closer to the barn, his heart became filled with fear as he remembered all of those stories of the barn being haunted and those 25 lashes that he would certainly receive if he were caught. Nevertheless, the boy continued onward until he reached the barn’s door. There was an old rusted lock upon the door, so the boy picked up the biggest rock that his little arms could lift and began hiting it against the lock until it broke and fell to the ground. The boy then slowly opened the large squeaky door and was immediately shocked for what he had found. He found that the barn was filled with many hidden jars and cans fill with food. The boy became elated and very excited by his finding. He was anxious to show and inform the other slaves, so he rang the old triangle bell awakening the other slaves.
The other slaves hearing the ringing bell quickly put their clothes on and rushed out to find out what was going on? Upon reaching the site of the ringing bell, the slaves were surprised to find that it was not their master ringing the bell, but instead that it was the little boy of insight who had rung the bell awakening them so early. One of the slaves, a large man said boy,”what's going on and why did you awaken us so early?” The boy responded that he had found lots of food hidden in the barn. The large man responded to the boy saying “you know that master told us all never to come near this barn, so what's wrong with you, boy? Sounds like you don't what to live to get old; because you won’t get much older not listening to the master.” The crowd, although many were themselves starving, began to also express their displeasure with the boy's defiance of the master's instructions. "Yeah, yeah," they yelled, “that boy's going to get us all in trouble with the master.” The entire crowd began to yell saying that master is going to be angry, and as their anger escalated, they demanded that the child be punished immediately. They echoed that the boy should be punished for he had disobeyed their master in the first place and that was what had to happen. The child's mother picked him up and ran through the woods. The angry slaves pursued her. The mother continued to run as fast as she possibly could until she slipped and fell with her son into the cold neighboring creek where they both drowned. Most of the slaves, after witnessing the tragedy, responded with the sentiments of good riddance for the boy had been a thorn in the master's side ever since he was born. Now, they said “let's try to fix that old lock and place it back on to the barn door.” The slaves repaired the damaged locked and put it back on the door of the barn as if it had not been disturbed, and they resumed their typical slave chores feeling no remorse for the now deceased mother and child. The slaves in this story were more concerned with offending their master than they were about the death of the young mother and her child.
How is it possible that these slaves could express more concern for their master then one of the very own fellow slaves, especially that of a young mother and her child? This type of devotion to their masters was not at all uncommon behavior of the African slaves in America. Moreover, when an African slave was planning an escape or a revolt, often another slave would forewarn the master. During the Civil War, many African slaves attempted to defend their master’s home and family against the approaching Union soldiers. There is evidence that some Africans fought on the side of the South. Why and how absurd to imagine such behavior and loyalty to their masters at the expense of their own self preservation. These actions by the slaves extended beyond just mere loyalty. These behaviors of the slaves were the outcome and result of a self-generating psychological acculturation process that was a necessity for maintaining slavery.
The Emancipation Proclamation merely abolished physical slavery, but the far worse mentally mortifying aspect of slavery has never been removed or ever addressed. The African Americans of today are the direct descendants of these slaves who were victims of an atrocious mental mortification process. When slavery was abolished, there were no efforts made to restore the damaged psyches of Africans. No psychologists rushed in to study the impact of 400 years of slavery upon the Africans. This was unlike the Jewish atrocity, the twelve-year holocaust that ended with World War II, which saw America, with the support of the United Nations, secure land within Palestinian territory and denoted millions of the dollars towards the building and the establishing the Nation of Israel. It was deemed appropriate and necessary to rebuild and to restore the culture, history, psyche and lives of the European Jews. However, in contrast to how the Jews were treated, White America turned its backs on the moral obligation to rebuild the lives and to restore psyches of their newly emancipated slaves. This was due to the low regard and immense racist contempt held towards African Americans. Therefore, only the chains are gone while the mental conditions stayed unaddressed therefore uncorrected. Many years ago the metal chains of steel and iron were removed, but the mental chain remains even today.
“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out three inches, that's not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. Progress is the healing of the wound, but America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife. Nor will they admit that it is still there”.
El Hajj Malik El Shabazz -- Malcolm X

[YorubaQueen]

Peace...
Really interesting post...but to me it's telling me stuff that I already knew about (as well as probably 99% of the members in Assata). I am glad that the author wanted to make aware of the stories and narratives that happened to Afrikans during those times and I understand that we need to be reminded of what happened (because HIStory tends to always repeat itself). But I think that we need so much more...at least an addition to what happened.
Maybe I need to read the book but it seemed very well this is what happened and that's it. Not much reason given as to why we need to remember said informatino and occurances...but that IMO.
I wish that there were more books that included that information as well as information that helped us instill that information to our kids and communities as well. Because we still live like that. We are still scared to go into that shed for the food. We are still scared to go up against yt and anything yt says. But, how do we get the people to GET IT? Telling them the story just ain't gonna help. Do I have ideas...some that have been tried and not as successful as I would have hoped...but at least I gave it a shot (so I'm not just preaching to the choir here...I'm practising my sermons)....

[Pragmatic]

[IsraeliteApostle]

More black people need to read The Black Matrix.