I recently attended a conference during which a speaker who addressed the issue of children and gang violence moved me. Soon after he began to speak, I thought about how gang culture is similar to many groups within our communities. I started to think about how gangs have a culture of their own, and that our Black children are often divided by the “colors” of their clothes rather than the “color” of their skin.
Just as I began to tell myself that our children must surely know that they are all Black, my mind flashed back to an incident that I witnessed a few days previously when I saw two children who were accompanying their mother as she shopped. One little boy (rather light-skinned) said to the other, “Nigga, you’re too Black.” The other little boy (who by now had begun to cry) quickly turned around and socked him! Their mother intervened, but by then it was clear that the children had internalized a message that would impact them for life--a message that had been intentionally implanted in our culture over 300 years ago.
In the 1700s, a white man named Willie Lynch wrote several articles about how to “control” a slave. I recently read an excerpt from one of his speeches that focused on the strategies that southern slave owners should employ in order to make sure that they could keep Black people psychologically disempowered so that they would not rise up against the oppressive system of slavery. As a clinical psychologist, I sometimes use hypnosis to work with addictive behaviors or other disorders. In my training, I have learned that a great deal of what we hear is internalized into our belief system as truth. Consequently, if one hears a particular message long enough, the message becomes reality. So, if I tell you often enough that you’re a duck—sooner or later, you’ll start to quack! The message that Willie Lynch conveyed was to “make sure that Black people learn that they can not trust each other.”
In his speech, Willie Lynch wrote: “Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along its old highway in great numbers, you are here using the tree and rope on occasion.... You are not only losing valuable stock by hanging, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left in the field too long for maximum profit, and you suffer occasional fires.” He later wrote: “I have a foolproof method for controlling your Nigger slaves. I guarantee everyone of you that if installed correctly, it will control the slaves for at least 300 years.”
Specifically, Lynch stated that he capitalized on difference so as to create a rift between African-Americans. We continue to implement this practice of letting ourselves be divided—and it is at least 300 years later. He related the following: “ I have outlined a number of differences among the slaves; and I take these differences and make them bigger. There is intelligence, size, sex, size of plantation, status of plantation, attitude of owner, whether the slave lives in the valley, on a hill, East, West, North or South...”
Lynch later described the fact that he would suggest that white people “use fear, distrust, and envy for control purposes.” Finally, he told slave owners that they “must pitch the old nigger slave versus the young nigger slave, and the young nigger slave against the old nigger slave... use the light skin slaves versus the dark skin slaves and the dark skin slaves versus the light skin slaves.” He concluded his message by saying: “You must also have your white servants and overseers distrust all niggers but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must Love, Respect, and Trust only us.”
So, now I think about the fact that not only is our community separated by gangs, we are separated by many other sub-group cultures. Financial status, church affiliations, fraternity/sorority groups, and even geography separate us. For example, there is even some belief that African-Americans on the North side differ from those who live on the south side. And practically everybody “knows” that the culture of folks living in Minneapolis is different from the culture of folks who live in St. Paul!
While a recognition and celebration of the diversity within our group is critical to our success as a people, we must thwart the temptation to buy into the notion that because two groups are “different,” one group is “better” than the other is. Somehow our ethnocentric pride has been translated into systemic “put-downs” of others. Psychologically, we tend to perpetuate the same individualistic “divide and conquer” mentality that was originally meant to keep us fighting among ourselves --so that we do not collectively fight the “real” enemy.
For Black folks, our “real” enemies are racism, and oppressive systems that force us to use them because we believe we have no other alternatives. Our “real” enemies are ignorance of the laws that protect us, limited access to opportunities and the pervasive lack of economic equality. Our “real” enemies are those internalized messages that say that when “white” people say we’re good, then what other Black folks think does not matter. Our “real” enemies are the parts of us that continue to believe that we are helpless and dependent on other groups or systems to meet our needs rather than creating our own systems that support the wellness of our people and the core of our cultural beliefs. Our real enemies include apathy and a lack of involvement in the political system. We “throw away” our votes on candidates that do not represent values that support MOST of us because we see only our “individual” and not our community or group needs.
Some of us forget that not 50 years ago, people were raped, beaten and even killed on their way to the voting booths. And if they did make it there, they had to pay a poll tax so high, they would have to decide whether buying food was more important than their voting rights. And now some of us don’t even vote, or register to vote for that matter. This level of apathy represents a sad legacy to our children, and a shameful affront to our forefathers and mothers!
We have to stop and think about how difficult we make it for ourselves by holding on to resentments against each other, rather than moving forward together. We have to stop and think about where we have power NOW. A huge election is about to take place, we have to think about the greater good for all of us, and exercise our right and privileges to vote. No matter how one votes, we all need to think about how our individual participation in this election will impact the collective power of our communities. Involvement should not be an option. Yet, despite these words, many of us will continue to stay home because personally, we don’t care. And despite my words some of us will continue to perpetuate a spirit of racial divisiveness—because we’ve been “Lynched” and we don’t even know it.
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