Misrepresented people

13th April 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor

Part II

With a nod to the myriad of ways that Black people become willing co-conspirators in our own demise. Noted psychiatrist and acclaimed author Dr. Frances Cress Welsing told “The Carl Nelson Show” March 24 that Black people have “Ebola of the mind.”

That succinctly sums up the Mental State of Black People in America and around the world.

A number of African-centered scholars have said over the years that Black people have “lost our African minds,” essentially saying that we have forgotten who we are. As the descendants of a proud people who understood that “to forget is the same as to throw away,” we are traveling down a path that is fraught with great peril.

It is a path we have been on for centuries as we have witnessed the kind of Maafa (“great suffering”) that has taken a psychic toll on us individually and collectively. Colonialism, mass kidnappings, enslavement and sale on the auction block have chipped away at the fiber of our being, causing many of us to question our self-worth and place in the world.

With no sense of who we are or who we were, we have fallen prey to a myriad of plagues, many of them man-made and designed to keep us at the bottom of the totem pole.

We seem to jump at the opportunity to sell each other out or allow ourselves to be exploited for someone else’s benefit.

We’ve seen our women paraded around like “Venus Hottentot” of southern Africa, Josephine Baker and a host of Black mammies in Hollywood. Now we see Halle Berry showered with praise for her saddening role in Monster’s Ball and all of the sisters earning a living on “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” “Love & Hip Hop,” “R&B Divas” and yes, “Empire.”

The more the mainstream networks degrade us, the more we seem to love it. Tragically, we are voracious and seemingly insatiable consumers of television programming and multimedia messages that question our humanity, insult our intelligence, attack our dignity and refute our very right to be.

As I said earlier, “Empire” is not the problem.

Neither is “Scandal,” which some in the conscious community have been referring to as “Mammy Unchained,” a thinly veiled reference to Kerry Wash­ing­ton’s character’s Sally Hemings-like connection to a white American president.

We could waste a lot of precious time criticizing other television programing that targets Black viewers like “Blackish” and “Black Ink Crew,” but why bother when there are still Black folks who act like they don’t know who FOX Television Network owner Rupert Murdoch is?

There’s plenty here to criticize but it’s relatively easy to turn the channel or turn the TV completely off.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson once said that sick villages raise sick children and it is clear that in 2015 we are a sick people. That sickness is reflected in the culture, the music we listen to, the images and messages we embrace and the way we treat one another.

What we somehow seem to forget is that the images of us on the silver screen, television and throughout social media are transported around the world, uploading twisted and warped caricatures of us to people all over the planet.

These portrayals of us as criminals, thugs, brutes, derelicts and buffoons are often used locally to justify the way we are treated. Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s description of Michael Brown as a “demon” is but one example.

These images also quell the possible public outcry that might accompany us being railroaded by the criminal justice system.

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, brilliantly describes how the prison industrial complex has revolved from the antebellum plantation system.

“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out, we are told,” Alexander writes. “This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed 10 miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.”

It should be noted that the powers that be never considered abandoning the old-school plantation system regardless of the outcome of the Civil War. Those “jobs” once performed by enslaved Africans are now being performed by our brothers and sisters in Third World countries whose elected officials are paid handsomely for the right to exploit their cheap labor. Outscouring oppression allows the powerful and wealthy to amass even greater wealth and power.

Stevie Wonder continues to chronicle our history in the hauntingly beautiful song “Misrepresented People”:

1969 — Black Power’s at the door./1982 — Hop-hop was on the floor./1992 — Gangsta crack prevailed./1999 — Our colors filled the jails.

It is through the grace of God/That we all were not scarred./

From back then until now/We see no comedy;/We have been a misrepresented people.
From back then until now/You know we made you grow;/

We have been a misrepresented people…

From back then until now/We see our destiny—/To never be a misrepresented people.\

There was a time when it would have been inconceivable that Black people would so enthusiastically embrace such blatant attacks on our humanity, dignity and intelligence as a people.

Not only are we a misrepresented people — we have become a diluted people, a watered-down version of our former selves, several generations removed from our resilient and steadfast ancestors who refused to die or forget who they were.

Our beloved forebears understood that to forget is the same as to throw away and that to throw away who they were would have doomed future generations of Black women, men and children to lives of confusion, chaos, despair, mental slavery and nothingness.

Over the past decade, I have gotten a deeper understanding of what some of our most dedicated and committed African-centered scholars mean when they say that Black people have lost our African minds and forgotten the African way. We have done precisely that.

The wear, tear and barbarity of centuries of invasions, hostile takeovers, kidnappings, colonizing, chattel slavery, miseducation and terrorism have taken a toll on us as a people. We carry those struggle scars and historical baggage in our ancestral DNA and it manifests itself in our lives in a host of self-destructiveways.

I believe one brother called it P.T.S.D.: Post Traumatic Slave Disorder. No explanation needed.

Oftentimes, we don’t even recognize ourselves or what we have become. That often leads to anger, frustration and rage that causes us to turn on one another rather than to one another in our time of need.

But it is not just Black people living in the U.S. who have lost our African minds. Our African brothers and sisters in the Motherland have also been scarred, disabled and negatively impacted by the continuous invasions by explorers, missionaries, emissaries and conquerors that have viewed the African continent as a golden opportunity to expand their empires. Although many said they came in peace, they often came in war and greed and left on ships overflowing with spices, artifacts, precious minerals and our beloved ancestors.

They have never even attempted to make amends for the psychic damage and atrocities committed in the Motherland and are quick to say that slavery existed in Africa long before Europeans reached its shores. What they don’t tell you is that the African version of what they call slavery more closely resembled indentured servitude and that the godless, inhumane chattel slavery introduced by Europeans arguably has no rival in the annals of human civilization.

Given what Black people have gone through and are still being put through under the construct of global white supremacy, it is no wonder that so many of us can no longer recognize that the great grandsons of our oppressors are still feeding us a steady diet of toxic television, malevolent music, narcotics, illegal guns, poison apples and genocide and juice.

Black people, problems are long and time is short. We have a lot of work to do.

The last thing we need to be doing is swallowing the lies, caricatures, stereotypical images, mixed messages and misrepresentations of ourselves that are specifically designed and planted within us to ensure our continued enslavement and self-destruction.

Y’all still feel like waving y’all hands in the air like you just don’t care?

All power to the people.

This article originally published in the April 13, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.