The most troublesome question for me today is why so many Black American youth are suffering. To harm a people, focus on their children.
When an entire “people” has been fully enslaved – physically, politically, educationally, psychologically, spiritually and economically — whether by invasion and control of their homeland, or by their translocation to a foreign land, if their enslavement has lasted over several generations, they will not gain full freedom for countless generations forward, even after external restrictions have been drastically reduced or even eliminated.
The primary purpose of a people’s culture is to ensure their survival through natural accommodation to their specific geographical and social environment. Effective culture evolves over time. However, enslavers’ culture thwarts the natural evolution of slaves’ native culture and retards the inculcation of the best features of the foreign culture, resulting in a “tainted” subculture. Some vestiges of the foreign culture that was built around enslavement will prevail after ostensive freedom has been granted. The “tainted” slave subculture will condition the oppressed group members’ relationships with each other within generations and between generations, such as adults and youth, irrespective of what representatives of the formerly enslaving group do, or even what their own progressive leaders do.
During America’s “Slavery-Racism” era, America’s leaders and descendants of slaves became linked in a mutually reinforcing system. The surest road to hell is the most gradual kind. When people are getting worse gradually, they come to understand their own corruption less and less. Moderately bad people know they are doing wrong; thoroughly corrupted folks think they are all right, and therein lies the rub.
Oppression that leaders define as in the best interests of a group of people, or for their own good, e.g., paternalism and White Man’s Burden, is the worst form of despotism imaginable. The influence will dominate and persecute the victims practically forever. Since the oppressors believe their cause is righteous, even “God’s Will,” their own consciences are clear — hypocrisy is non-existent. Thus, the strategies they will implement will be of infinite variety, although unscrupulous and cruel. If this repression is practiced long enough, the victims themselves will become the unwitting co-conspirators in their own destruction.
During America’s sixties’ Civil Rights revolution, opportunities did evolve; and many laws, institutions, and corporations did move forward – unfortunately, too many minds did not. A revolution which aims merely at reforming official policies, institutions and external conditions has little chance of genuine, long-lasting success. The indispensable transforming revolution must take place in the human spirit, driven by an absolute conviction of the need to alter the vision, values and behavior which shape the course of a people’s progress.
Without a transfiguration in the human spirit, the forces which had produced inequities in the past will continue to obstruct reform and regeneration of the former slaves’ culture. To transform, the people must unite in the determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, and to resist the corrupting influences of anger, ignorance, and fear.
The harm from contamination will be especially ruinous and durable if the younger generations respond inappropriately to reminders and symbols of their ancestors’ previous condition of slavery.
The youth are supposed bring fresh powers to bear on the people’s social progress. Each generation of young people should be to their people like a vast reserve force to a tired army, lifting the people and moving them forward.
There is a greater connection to America among older Black Americans than by younger generations. The younger African Americans as a group, even in places where there are opportunities to acquire personal resources that will render racists’ intentions much less effective, are failing in large numbers to take advantage of those opportunities.
Their attitudes begin to develop before they are intelligent enough to understand subtle oppression, the conditions we loop under the rubric of so-called Institutional Racism, or to understand the negative conditions that stem from poverty and affect all Americans who are poor and under-educated irrespective of their ethnicity or gender.
The younger generations of African Americans are angrier than the older African-Americans who lived during eras of direct, dehumanizing racism; but who, nevertheless, opened doors of opportunity for the generations coming behind them, building bridges they could never use. Moreover, and quite worse, the values of the two groups differ drastically. Black boys in particular have fallen under a sub-culture that is reflected in a greater degree of failure as compared with Black girls. They readily blame racism for all their failings, ignoring the accomplishments of peers in their own midst who are succeeding, even denigrating them. Their responses to real and imagined racism, getting even, for example, cause them to harm themselves, crippling their own chances for free, more successful lives, and, worse, doing great damage to the people closest to them.
Youth have not been taught that we hurt enemies of the people the most when we achieve those things the enemies want desperately to prevent, those conditions which change the fortunes of the people fundamentally and can be passed on to future generations.
