LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

This is to certify that the
thesis entitled
THIS IS MADNESS: A STUDY OF
THE PATHOLOGY OF RACE PREJUDICE
presented by

Quincy T . Norwood

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

M.A. English

Jegree in

 

 

Date August 21, 2002

 

0—7 639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

, V , —__— .—
4_ , _ _

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/07 p:/ClRC/DateDue.indd-p.1

 

 

 

 

THIS IS MADNESS: A Study of the Pathology of Race Prejudice

By

Quincy T. Norwood

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English

2002

ABSTRACT
THIS IS MADNESS: A STUDY OF THE PATHOLOGY OF RACE PREJUDICE
By
Quincy T. Norwood
This document is an exploration of the prominent psychosocial disorder
commonly known as racism. In summation THIS IS MADNESS is a critical study of the
pathology of white male hegemony as represented in a tradition of Black writers of the
African Diaspora, past and present. Through an examination of the pathology of race
prejudice, I wish to re-expose the depth of white supremacy’s bourgeois tenets and
constructs and how they continue to work to essentially create and sustain a genocidal
reality that has historically targeted people of color. In addition, this thesis will serve as a
space to display the inherent contradictions of Occidental concepts of “progress” and
“civilization,” as they are inseparable from racially motivated and “approved” violence

and exploitation.

For the past, present, and future of the struggle. Known and unknown, famous and
infamous.

iii

 

ACKOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the following for their support, patience, advice, time,
senses of humor, and in some cases money (you know who you are). Firstly, I give
thanks to that Presence whose spirit moves through all. I have to give the proper respect
to ALL of those that lived and died to afford me this opportunity to continue what they
began. To Ma, Pops, and Will, I love y’all. To my crew in Detroit (on the Ferg), Ddub,
VD, T, B-Lewis, y’all are like my brothers. My Southfield people, Pat (my second
mother), Tori, Al, Preston, love y’all. To my CSU family, Truth, Sun, the Twins, Cha,
Cool Breeze, Abdul, Eshu, Dr. Dinesh Hassan and all the rest, I appreciate building and
adding on with y’all. My MSU family, it has indeed been rough for me here, but y’all
have definitely lightened my load, Greg, Monda, Phyllis, Tammy, Walt, and Norm in the

C] Department. Lastly, I want to acknowledge my muthat"****n’ SELF, for doin’ it.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1

CHAPTER 1: Crazy Baldheads: Whiteness, Power, and Pathology ..................... 3

CHAPTER 2: It’s Like a Jungle Sometimes: White Terrorism and Genocide.......l3

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................. 26

INTRODUCTION
This thesis, This Is Madness, shares its name with an album recorded by The Last

Poets in 1971. I picked this album up because it had one of my favorite poems on there,
“The White Man’s Got a God Complex,” but I never gave the title that much thought
until recently. After listening to the album in its entirety one night the significance of the
album’s title dawned on me. I realized that Alafia Pudim and Omar Ben Hassen’s chants
and poems that address a myriad of issues pertinent to Black folks in the United States
and abroad such as the persistence of slavery and colonialism, corrupt politricks, Euro-
Christian doctrines of pseudo-paciflsm, a burgeoning fascist, hypercapatilist technocracy
(that has now come to fruition) and a host of other relevant themes that seamlessly blend
together and climax in one poignant proclamation:

This is Madness!

This is Madness!

All this madness is madness!

This madness is madness!1
The Last Poets’ message that madness is a perfect way to describe the white supremacist
“shitstem” of racial subjugation that manipulates reality through brutality and
indoctrination to sustain its hegemony became clear to me. I chose THIS IS MADNESS
for the title of this piece because I wish to continue along the same lines as Pudim and
Hassen in identifying the pathology of white “jungle society,” while attempting to revise
and go beyond what they began with their edifying album. While The Last Poets
effectively and necessarily articulate the madness that Black folks confront daily, with

the exception of “The White Mans’ Got A God Complex,” they spend the majority of the

album concentrating on the effects of downpression rather than the pathology of the
actual downpressor. Far too little time and energy, especially in academia, has been
devoted to looking critically at whiteness. Studies of race and racism are ofien limited to
analyses of “minorities” which leave whiteness unquestioned, and as a result fail to reveal
what is at the crux of the “sufferation” in so-called minority communities. Studies
examining the effects of white supremacy are valid, but they run the risk of being
counterproductive because they ofien neglect the cause of downpression, which in a
sense exonerates the downpressor. “Approved” lines of inquiry pertaining to race rarely
allow a space for identifying and attacking white supremacy since they are predicated on
constructs manufactured by white supremacists to protect their selfish interests. Re-
exposing white supremacy requires a departure from popular academic trends that tend to
overlook the etiology of the sufleration that many reactionary “minority” scholars make a
lucrative living explaining to white people. I want to go a different route with this thesis
and deal with the psychopathological bent of the downpressor and the “jungle society”
that passes for civilization because the sobering words of Omar Ben Hassen, “This is
madness,” resonate in my mind when I look at the past and present practices of the

engineers of genocide. Fire ‘pon Mr. Babylon.

 

' The Last Poets, “This Is Madness,” This Is Madness. (Douglass 1971).

Chapter 1.
Crazy Baldheads: Whiteness, Power, and Pathology

In academia the historical experiences and cultural practices of Black folks and
other “minorities” are analyzed, Otherized, exoticized, problematized, and deconstructed
from the perspective of whites or reactionary Blacks, while whiteness remains a taboo
subject. The connotations of whiteness are rarely, if ever, looked at critically, especially
in the present climate of exaggerated Americanism and hyper-patriotism where any
remotely subversive word or action is immediately deemed treasonous. “Whiteness” here
does not refer to a biological construct of race, but “a social, economic, and historical
confluence of forces that determines the social being and consciousness of large segments
of people and informs their relationships with each other.”2 Studies of the meaning(s) of
whiteness are necessary since historically, white skin privilege has been a matter of life
and death for people of color. The despotic and exploitive undertakings of (neo)
colonialist regimes in the United States and throughout the Black diaspora are grounded
in the fallacious ethnocentric doctrine that binds whiteness to God, godliness, and most
notably god-like authority in every area of life, but specifically when it comes to
encounters with people of color. Centuries of murderation endured by the world’s
nonwhite population can attest to the excessive licentiousness in the name of enterprise
and imperialism that has been part and parcel of the nominally Christian Western white
male identity.

A viable explanation for the lack of studies regarding whiteness could be the fact

that whiteness has been normalized to the extent to where it is no longer even considered

a race. For example, at any given university there are African, African-American, Asian-
American, Native American, and other “minority” literature courses. Conversely,
courses that concern European or American literatures are simply general “literature”
courses. These courses may have a specific historical period or locale in the title, but
they are never dubbed “White Studies” or “White Literature,” which is in fact what they
are. Richard Dryer addresses this phenomenon of un-raced or “invisible” whiteness in
White (1997), a text outlining historical representations of whiteness. Dryer contends
that while whites place nonwhite people in easily identifiable racial categories according
to phenotype, they don’t view themselves as white people, but as “people:”
The assumption that white people are just people, which is not far off from
saying that whites are people whereas other colours [sic] are something
else, is endemic to white culture. . .In Western representation whites are
overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant. . .and above all are
placed as the norm, the ordinary standard. Whites are everywhere in
representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as the norm
they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who
are variously gendered, classed, sexualized and abled. At the level of
racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race,
they’re just the human race.3
In the passage above, Dryer makes the point that whiteness is situated as the invisible, yet

omnipresent, embodiment of humanity. The seemingly innocent notion of being “just

 

2 Wahad, Dhoruba Bin Interview with Chris Bratton and Annie Goldson. Still Black Still Strong:
Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries. Eds. Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones, & Sylvere
Lotringer. New York: Serniotext (e), 1993. 28.

3 Dryer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. 2-3.

human” ignores the power and privilege that is allied with whiteness. Taking the idea of
white people as “just people” into consideration reveals the actual meaning of phrases
such as “the American people,” “We the people,” and the fashionable post-9/11 mantra
“United we stand.” The aforementioned phrases attempt to homogenize Americans into a
single people, but the reality is that “We” and “the people” refer to the physical and
ideological descendants of this country’s Native American genocide perpetuating and
slaveholding forefathers. While Black America is used to describe the sum total of
specifically Black communities in the United States, “White America” and America are
interchangeable, which implies that the former is the true America. In addition, the
interchangeability of “White America” and America verifies whiteness’s place as a given,
or the norm. It is unnecessary to actually utter the words “White America” because it is
understood that that is what is generally meant when whites say “America.” Whites
purporting not to be of a particular race, but instead representatives of the “human race,”
validate the universalization of their culturally specific theories and practices by
reinforcing the assumption that when whites speak they do so with the authentic voice of
the “human race.” Furthermore, in the assumption that whites are imbued with the
capacity to speak for the entire “human race,” lies the power to create and sustain a
linguistically constructed reality that corroborates white supremacy by obscuring its
existence through egalitarian and “melting pot” rhetoric.

What is taken for granted in the declaration that whites are “just human,” is who
defines what it means to be human. As Dryer begins to suggest above, the assertion that
whites are the un-raced “human” norm automatically stigmatizes nonwhites and consigns

us to the status of the abnormal Other. “White” becomes a signifier for human, while

other “races” represent a deficiency of the human, which serves as the premise for
master/slave and colonizer/ “native” relationships that accelerated Western imperialist
expansion. The idea of a nonwhite, not quite human, counterpart to the white human Self
sustained the plantation’s culture of domination. Sylvia Wynter elaborates on the
cultivation of a totemic system of humanity that equates whiteness with “human”
rationality and blackness with subhuman irrationality in her essay “Sambos and
Minstrels.” Wynter argues that the creation of the minstrel stereotype was essential to the
forming of the white bourgeois identity:
The social construct of Sambo, like the opposing social construct of the
rebellious Nat, was necessary to the self-conception not only of the
master, but to that of all whites in the South who patterned their own self-
conception on the master-model. The slaves’ testimony points to the way
in which their claim to equality with the rich whites came to came to be
based on the strategies by which the bourgeoisie projects its own
bourgeois model as Norm, so that it can be internalized by the proletariat
who then vindicate their claim to equality within the context of the
bourgeois universe of signification.4
The image of the docile and simpleminded Sambo unified wealthy and poor whites under
the flag of their bourgeois construct of whiteness by giving poor whites a symbol that
epitomized the adverse of the bourgeoisie human Norm. Although poor whites may not
have been slaveholders, they could still adopt the master’s bourgeois sensibilities by
pointing to the stereotype of the Sambo. The Sambo’s childlike and “irresponsible”

nature afforded poor whites the opportunity to act out their patriarchal fantasies and

emulate the hegemonic posture of the father/master. Although poor whites may not have
been slaveholders, they could still adopt the master’s bourgeois sensibilities by pointing
to the stereotype of the Sambo. Wynter’s “bourgeois universe of signification” is an
organization of signs that designate standing in the plantation order, and society in
general. She continues:
First of all the system produces the imaginary social signification of the
Place of the Norm. The Place of the Norm is constituted by and through
the definition of certain desired attributes. The most desired attribute was
the “intellectual faculty.” The sign that pointed to one’s possession of this
attribute was whiteness of skin. The sign that pointed to its nonpossession
was blackness of skin, which revealed non-human being. The black exists
as the Symbolic Object constituting the Lack, the Void of these qualities
that have been postulated as the absolute sign of the certainty of being
human. . . The plantation order which made it illegal for a slave to learn to
read and become educated, which exhausted the black with relentless
work, then produced empirical evidence of the Negro’s “lack of
intellectual faculties.” The Negro then becomes the SYMBOLIC
OBJECT OF THIS LACK WHICH IS DESIGNATED AS THE LACK
OF THE HUMAN.’
The ideological underpinning of the plantation system is an arrangement of symbols
created in the white imagination that sublimate whiteness, while denigrating blackness.

The master’s sense of being is contingent upon a construction of blackness that associates

 

" Wynter, Sylvia. “Sambos and Minstrels.” Social Text, 1979.
5 Ibid. , 152.

it with the polar opposite of what whiteness allegedly represents. Supposed absence of
rational aptitude, signifying non-humanness, is projected onto black skin from the
master’s imagination in order to stabilize his self-image as master, and the unlimited
autonomy that is packaged with his ontological perception of the world. Wynter
mentions that safeguarding an imagined white identity was the impetus behind the
plantation order’s systematic denial of the possibility for the enslaved to become literate.
In Western thought literacy is tantamount to “intellectual faculty,” and being lawfirlly and
violently refirsed opportunities to learn to read and write reinforced the myth of the
enslaved African’s “natural inferiority” while solidifying the white master’s position as
the “human Norm.”

Wynter’s assessment of the hierarchical order of the plantation that positions
whiteness as the human Norm is invaluable, seeing that the plantation’s ideological
support system is the foundation of contemporary race relations. Conventional accounts
of the psychological remnants of slavery seem to be limited to its Black victims, but the
psychic carryover of the pathological imperialist worldview that persists in privileging
whiteness is given close to no attention. “American domination—the only domination
from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never escapes unscarred,”6
remarks Aime Cesaire. Cesaire’s statement holds true for both the victims and the
victimizers. The white people as “just people” discourse presupposes that whites that
adopt this label have somehow detached themselves from the system of white hegemony.
However, as Cheryl Harris notes in “Whiteness as Property,” identifying as “white”

precludes such a disconnection:

 

6 Cesaire. Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, 2000. 77.

At the individual level, recognizing oneself as “white” necessarily
assumes premises based on white supremacy: It assumes that Black
ancestry in any degree, extending to generations far removed,
automatically disqualifies claims to white identity, thereby privileging
“white” as unadulterated, exclusive, and rare. Inherent in the concept of
“being white” was the right to own or hold whiteness to the exclusion and
subordination of Blacks. Because “[i]dentity is. . .continuously being
constituted through social interactions,” the assigned political, economic,
and social inferiority of Blacks necessarily shaped white identity.7
The “just people” claim does nothing to reject a “white identity” that is reliant on Black
subordination, or the power and privilege that it encompasses. Harris observes that “the
white identity” invokes the legacy of domination that that one inherits and perpetually
benefits from, simply by being “white.” In Harris’ line of reasoning, whiteness possesses
certain cultish characteristics, and membership in this cult is synonymous with
exclusivity and entitlement. Malcolm X extends Harris’ point in his speech “Educate Our
People In Politics” with his analysis of the implicit relation between whiteness and
power:
But when you get the white man over here in America and he says he’s
white, he means something else. . . when he says he’s white, he means he’s

boss. That’s right. That’s what white means in this language. You know

 

7 Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to be White.
Ed. David R. Roediger. New York: Schocken Books, 1998. 112.

the expression, “free, white, and twenty-one.” He made that up. He’s

letting you know all of them mean the same. “White means free, boss.8
As Malcolm X explains, the pathological master-complex of the Euro-American white
male has remained virtually unchanged since being fostered on the plantation. A
definitive aspect of the master-complex is the myopic view that sees the world as land to
conquer and its nonwhite population primarily as an expendable source of cheap labor.
“Sanctioned” violence, corporate sponsored socio-political institutions, and a monopoly
over the world’s mass media outlets are utilized to help the capitalist Euro-American
male assert his will over the planet. The fascination with globalization boils down to the
Americanization of the rest of the world, which translates to the subjugation of
nonwhites, by any means necessary.

The master-complex, distinguished by the all-consuming desire for control and an
unending inclination toward avarice, is symptomatic of the pathology of whiteness.
Violent behavioral patterns and racist attitudes that whites exhibit toward “minorities,”
specifically Blacks, are reflective of a psychological defect that prevents them from
meshing their actions with their lofty doctrines of democracy and social equity. Dr.
Bobby Wright expounds on the concept of the psychopathological white profile:

This presentation is based upon the following very simple premise: in their
relationship with the Black race, Europeans (Whites) are psychopaths and
their behavior reflects an underlying biologically transmitted proclivity
with roots deep in their evolutionary history. The psychopath is an

individual who is constantly in conflict with other persons and groups. He

 

8 X, Malcolm. “Educate Our People in Politics.” February 1965: The F inal Speeches. Ed. Steven Clark.
New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992. 85.

10

is unable to experience guilt, is completely selfish and callous, and has a

total disregard for the rights of others.9
Dr. Wright’s description of the psychopathic racial profile is based on whites’ historical
record of hostility, exploitation, and downpression imposed on Blacks and other
“minorities,” and the lack of recognition of any wrongdoing on their behalf whatsoever.
Reconciling unconscionable murderation with a sense of Christianity based morality does
not present a problem for the white racist because, as Wright says, “psychopaths simply
ignore the concept of right and wrong.” The potential for capital gain and the insatiable
lust to maintain a position of global dominance has eroded any modicum of ethics in the
collective mind of the white ruling elite.

The racist white power structure often employs Western rationalism, a system of
pseudo-sciences that were biased from their inception, to justify violent crimes
perpetrated against Black folks and other “minorities.” E. Franklin Frazier argues that
the “mechanism of rationalism” excuses them from blame by fabricating evidence to
support their delusions of racial superiority:

Race prejudice involves mental conflict, which is held to be the cause of
the dissociation of ideas so prominent in insanity. The Negro-complex in
often out of harmony with the personality as a whole and therefore results
in a conflict that involves unpleasant emotional tension. In everyday life
such conflicts are often solved by what—in those following contradictory
moral codes-is generally known as hypocrisy. When however, the two

systems of incompatible ideas cannot be kept from conflict, the insane

 

9 Wright, Bobby. The Psychopathic Racial Personality and Other Essays. Chicago: Third World Press,
1984. 2.

11

man reconciles them through the process of rationalization. Through the
same process of rationalization, the Southern white man creates defenses
for his immoral acts, lynching becomes a holy defense of womanhood.10
F razier’s “Negro-complex” describes a fear of blackness that prompts whites to project
their own anxieties onto Blacks. For example, the white desire to rape becomes the
stereotype of the hypersexual Black male that preys on white women, and as a result this
stereotypical image rationalizes the lynching of a Black person as a “holy defense of
womanhood.” In similar fashion, the white inclination toward violence becomes the
image of the young Black inner-city dwelling super-predator that rationalizes a slave
trade-like prison system and the pervasiveness of police brutality. Clay, the male
protagonist of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, speculates on what in would happen in an
instance of racial role-reversal to best explain the innate hypocrisy of Western
rationalism. Ironically, Clay makes the following statement moments before the play’s
white female antagonist, Lula, murders him:
Don’t make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge of Christian
charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism,
or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they’ll [Blacks
on the train] begin to listen. And then maybe one day, you’ll find they
actually do understand exactly what you’re talking about, all these fantasy
people. . . And on that day sure as shit, when you really believe you can
“accept” them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject

peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a

 

'0 Frazier, Franklin E. “The Pathology of Race Prejudice.” The Negro Caravan. Eds. Arthur P. Davis,
Sterling Brown, & Ulysses Lee. New York: Arno Press Inc., 1969. 906.

12

watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and
all those ex-coons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard
useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they’ll murder you. They’ll
murder you and have very rational explanations. Very much like your
own.11
Clay’s appraisal of Western rationalism exposes its pathological temperament, as he
posits that becoming “stand-up Western men” entails a license to commit “justifiable”
homicide. Shortly after Clay utters the words above, Lula plunges her knife into his chest
twice, and his lifeless body falls on top of her. Lula screams to the other passengers,
“Get this man off me! Hurry, now! Open the door and throw his body out.” The
passengers follow Lula’s orders and after dusting herself off, she proceeds toward
another Black male on the train who will undoubtedly have the same fate as Clay.
Frazier’s “Negro-complex” explains why Lula escapes persecution for murdering Clay.
The “Negro-complex” prevents the other passenger from believing that Lula, a “white”
woman, could have been the aggressor in the situation, even though they witness her stab
Clay. The “mechanism of rationalism” vindicates Lula by positioning her as the white
damsel in distress defending herself from a Black sexual predator.

I wish to end this chapter with a simple statement made by poet Langston Hughes
that condenses what I have attempted to express here. “Some white folks have gone
crazy from being white” laments Hughes. White supremacy is innately pathological, but
the lack of attention that its depth receives allows it to thrive. As long as whiteness is

avoided as subject of critical inquiry, it will continue to be privileged as the human

 

H Baraka, Amiri. Dutchman. The Amiri Baraka/ Leroi Jones Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991. 98.

13

Norm. Re-exposing and dismantling white supremacy must begin with a look at the
unchecked psychosis of the “white bourgeois identity” that replicates itself from

generation to generation.

14

Chapter 2.
It’s Like a Jungle Sometimes: White Terror and Genocide

Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness

and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror

and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing

and the night cold and the night long and the river

to cross and the jack-muh-lantems beckoning beckoning

and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere

morning and keep on going never turn back and keep on going

Runagate Runagate Runagate12

Robert Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate” opens with an articulation of the thoughts

of an anonymous slave frantically running toward freedom, and running away from the
dogs and patterollers13 that are relentlessly pursuing her/him. Upon reading this passage,
one cannot help but take notice of the escapee’s overwhelming sense of urgency as the
threat of an ensuing terror draws nearer with each step taken “from darkness into

”'4 exclaims the

darkness.” “No more auction block for me/ no more driver’s lash for me,
renegade slave as s/he frenziedly runs for her/his life through the woods. S/he continues,
“And before I’ll be a slave/ I’ll be buried in my grave.” Two options present themselves
to the runaway, freedom or death. Being apprehended and returned to the plantation is

not a viable alternative because it would mean being subjected to the unspeakable horrors

of slave life all over again.

 

‘2 Hayden, Robert. “Runagate Runagate.” The Norton Anthologv of A fi'ican American Literature. Eds.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: WW. Norton & Co., 1997. 1506

‘3 Runaway slave hunters

‘4 Ibid. , 1507.

15

Hayden does well in capturing the sentiments of the slave fleeing the ubiquitous
racially motivated violence that characterized the lives of slaves. In order to secure
obedience, white masters often employed the most brutally extreme measures of
terrorism. Frank Bell, an 86 year-old former slave from New Orleans, provides an
account of his encounter with white terrorism from his early life:

When I’m about seventeen I marries a gal while Master on drunk spell.
Master he run her off, and I slips off at night to see her, but he finds it out.
He takes a big, long knife and cuts her head plumb ofi’, and ties a great,
heavy weight to her and makes me throw her in the river. Then he puts
me in chains and every night he come give me a whippin’ for a long
time.15
After witnessing his wife being decapitated by the hands of his master, Bell is forced to
throw her in the river. As if the viciousness of this ordeal is not enough to satisfy his
master, Bell receives lashes from the whip to “punish” him for the “crime” of wanting to
marry, or taking it upon himself to make a decision that would affect his life. Although
Bell’s master is clearly the guilty party in the aforementioned passage, Bell’s wife is
savagely murdered and Bell, himself, is brutally beaten. The slaughtering of slaves ofien
got justified in the public domain due to the white supremacist “mechanism of
rationalism” that not only criminalized Blacks, but also claimed that they are subhuman;
therefore they were not afforded the same human rights as whites. Though Bell’s master
was eventually killed in a shootout which gave Bell somewhat of a quasi-freedom, the

psychological remnants of the horrors Bell experienced as a slave continued to haunt him,

 

‘5 Yetrnan, Norman R Voices From Slavery: 100Autheritic Slave Narratives. New York: Dover
Publications Inc., 2000. 22.

16

“Finally I gets up nerve to leave town and stays the first night in white man’s barn. I
never slept. Every time I hears something I jumps up and Master be standin’ there,
lookin’ at me. . .Next night I slept out in a hay field, and Marster he get right top of a tree
and start hollerin’ at me.” The atrocities that Bell experiences physically, visually, and
aurally on the plantation leave a lasting impression on his subconscious, making the
memory of the terror slavery a part of his everyday existence.

The sentiments of terror expressed in Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate” and Frank
Bell’s post-slavery interview disclose the mythology of the concept of Western
“civilization.” “Progress” of the imperialist Western regime, now represented best by the
United States, has long been reliant upon Black sufferation resulting fi'om the many
forms of white terrorism that continue to perpetuate a system of racial domination. The
very presence of Black folks on American soil is a living testament to the legacy of white
terrorism. The Maafal6 experience set the tone for what would grow to be a seemingly
never-ending series of atrocities inflicted upon Black folks in the name of white
hegemony. Occupying the peculiar position of being both the catalysts and victims of
Western “civilization” has provided Black folks with an intimate knowledge of the
underlying physical, psychological, and socio-economic violence that is discounted in the
popularized white bourgeois discourse of “civilization.” The reality is that for Black
folks, and other “minorities” the West’s civilization has been all but civil. In Discourse
on Colonialism Aime Cesaire, the forefather of the Negritude movement, writes:

At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with
impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which

justifies colonization-and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a

17

civilization which is morally diseased. . . Colonization: bridgehead in a

campaign to civilize barbarism, fiom which there may emerge at any

moment the negation of civilization, pure and simple. ‘7
According to Cesaire, in the colonial situation the Western idea of civilization thwarts the
materialization of an actual civilization. To those on the underbelly of Western
“progress,” “civilization” has proven to be a misnomer used to masquerade decadence
and terrorism. This is why Fanon informs us “when the native hears a speech about
Western culture he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within reach.”18

From chattel slavery, to sharecropping, to peonage, to neo-slavery, coping with

the ever-present threat of white terror has been an integral part of the Black experience.
Cultural critic bell hooks asserts that, “All black pe0ple in the United States, irrespective
of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by
whiteness?” As hooks rightly observes, white terrorism transgresses the boundaries of
class and political preference. However, though white terrorism does not discriminate, it
does appear as if the white supremacist establishment disproportionately targets poor
Black folks. One can even posit that their very status as “poor” points to the economic
terrorism of capitalism that systematically denies Black folks the opportunity to partake
of the fruits of their own labor. Comrade George Jackson describes this condition of
economic terror as neo-slavery:

Slavery is an economic condition. The classic chattel slavery and today’s

slavery must be defined in terms of economics. . .Neo-slavery is an

 

‘6 Swahili term meaning “disaster,” used to describe the Middle Passage.

'7 Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, 2000. 40.

‘8 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched ofthe Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. 43.

'9 Hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1992. 175.

18

economic condition, a small knot of men exercising the property rights of

their established economic order, organizing and controlling the life style

of the slave as if he were in fact property. Succinctly: an economic

condition which manifests itself in the total loss or absence of self-

determination.20
Loss or absence of self-determination equates to the downpressed being dependent on the
downpressor. Violence and Ideological State Apparatuses, such as the media, religion,
education, etc., all serve to secure the hegemony of the ruling class (i.e. wealthy white
males) in the neo-slaveocracy. Jackson notes that the purpose of militaristic police, a
repressive state apparatus, in “the new Black colonies” is not to protect the citizens, but
to reinforce the conditions of neo-slavery by serving as agents of the dominant class:
“The pigs [police officer] are not protecting you, your home, and its contents. Recall
they never found that TV. set you lost in that burglary. The pig is protecting the right of
a few private individuals to own public property! !”21 The laws of a neo—slaveocracy,
created for the people by politicians, are designed to maintain a social order that severely
restricts the progress and freedoms of Black folks and other “minorities.”

The economic underdevelopment (bloodsucking) of many “minority”

communities has numerous by-products that play a significant role in sustaining the neo-
slaveocracy. One of the foremost of these by-products is “crime,” which leads to a

disproportionate incarceration rate for Blacks. For example, the disparity between the

 

20 Jackson, George. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Bantam Books,
1970. 189-191.
2‘ Ibid. , 191.

19

laws concerning sentencing for possession of powder cocaine and crack cocaine”, which
is cheaper and made more readily available in Black communities contributes to the ever
expanding “minority” prison population. The United States prison system is rapidly
becoming a private stock overflowing with Black people from the lumpenproletariat
class who are depicted as “criminals” in the media. Capitalism’s socio-economic
guillotine pushes poor Black youths into survival mode, and often they resort to less than
legal means of employment in order to sustain themselves rather than accepting minimum
wage jobs that barely pay enough to support one person, let alone a family of people.
The stereotypical image of the young Black super-predator assuages the public
consciousness, while ignoring the poverty and social reasons that create “crime.” This is
the logic behind political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s assertion that all prisoners in the
United States are political prisoners due to the economic terrorism that cultivates
“criminal behavior.” When asked if he considers himself a political prisoner, Abu-Jamal
responds:
Most people, if not all people are imprisoned for a political reason. For a
political effect. Prisons in America are political organs of the state. . .Yes I
am a political prisoner. As a matter of fact I believe every prisoner in
America is a political prisoner. That may be too radical, that might not be
accepted by the United Nations, but that’s my position. . .Every

prosecution is a public and a symbolic act, a political act by the state to

 

22 The 100:1 quantity ratio calls for a more severe punishment for those convicted for possession of crack
cocaine than the punishment administered for those in possession of powder cocaine. Possession of 500
grams of cocaine warrants a mandatory five-year jail sentence, while possession of five grams of crack
cocaine carries the same sentence. [tone is arrested for possession of five grams of powder cocaine, that
person will most likely receive probation without actually serving any jail time. Most people convicted
under the 100:1 law are young Black males.

20

give the populace an illusion of control, to show that “we’re taking care of
this problem.” 23
In white supremacist society nonconformity leads to incarceration or one of many other
punishments established to maintain the social order. Conforming in this context means
becoming a pawn in the capitalist order of things. F anon’s fellahs, or those who choose
to operate outside of what the ruling class deems “legal” are viewed as potential threats
that must be eliminated. “So called criminal action is governed by cause and effect, as is
everything material. All criminals are victims of the attempt to maintain hierarchy,”
explains George Jackson.24 Mass incarceration contributes to White America’s false
sense of security because they feel that they are protected from society’s “criminal
element.”

As more people get incarcerated, more prisons are constructed which creates a
source of cheap labor to perform menial tasks. William Upski Wimsatt notes, “Prisons
are a $100 billion dollar industry. A lot of money is being made. The beds must be
filled.”25 Like the Jim Crow Laws of the South, and other statutes designed to control
slaves and “free” populations of Black folks in the early twentieth century, the crack
cocaine mandatory sentencing law acts as one of the many laws that are specifically
engendered to extract bodies from economically underdeveloped communities to become
“wage” slaves in prison. In an exploration of the United States’ prison industry Howard

Zinn explains:

 

7" Abu-Jamal, Mumia. Interview conducted in 1989 at Huntingdon Prison in Pennsylvania Still Black Still
Strong. Eds. Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones, & Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1993. 126.

2“ Szulc, Tad. “George Jackson Radicalizes the Brothers in Soledad and San Quentin” New York Times 1
Aug. 1971. 10.

25 Wimsatt, William Upski. No More Prisons. New York: Soft Skull Press, 1999. 8.

21

The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the
American system itself: the stark life differences between the rich and the
poor, the racism, the use of the victims against one another, the lack of
resources of the underclass to speak out, the endless “reforms” that
changed little. . .the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in
jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact,
they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted;
the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they
were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire
clever lawyers, get better treatment fi'om judges. Somehow the jails ended
up firll of poor black people.”5
Along with the justice system, the police have a historical record of terrorizing
Black folks. More often than not, the police officers responsible for incidents of brutality
and outright murder never receive any formal punishment outside of minor slaps on their
wrists. I believe that at the root of the prevalence of police brutality lays the
nonhuman/human binary that I discussed in the previous chapter. Sylvia Wynter speaks
to this notion in an open letter in which she cites the Los Angeles Police Department’s
usage of the acronym N.H.I. in their report concerning the infamous Rodney King
beating. As Wynter indicates, N.H.I., meaning, “no humans involved,” is used to refer to
“the category of the non-owning, jobless young of the inner cities; primarily black,
Latino, and increasingly also white, assimilated to its underclass category.”27 In the neo-

slaveocracy, the unemployed and inner city dwelling Black and Latino youth are

 

2‘ Zinn, Howard. A People 's History of the United States 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial,
1995. 504-5.

22

identified in terms of the nonhuman Other to the white bourgeois human Norm. The
acronym N.H.I. points to a shift in the way that humanity is gauged; from literacy or the
adoption of Euro-Christian ideals to ownership and the ability to contribute to the
consumption/production cycle that supports the economy. If one is unemployed, they
don’t have “purchasing power,” which makes them persona non grata in the capitalist
neo-slaveocracy, and their “human rights” become null and void in the eyes of the white
ruling elite. As said by Robert F. Williams, the way that the rights of Black folks are
perceived by the white ruling class parallels the major premise of the Dred Scott decision,
“as far as the Black man is concerned, he has no legal or human rights that white terror is
bound to respect.”28
The veracity of Williams’ assertion is evidenced by the fact that in the minds of

many officers of the law, who are foot soldiers for, and reflect the collective sentiment of
the larger white supremacist enterprise, the value of Black life has really not increased
since the days of chattel slavery. F orrner political prisoner and Black Panther Party
member Dhoruba Bin Wahad contends that the police in Black and other “minority”
communities are essentially given free reign to commit wholesale murders and other
crimes in the name of protecting and serving:

The majority of policemen see the poor communities as a jungle in which

they have to be the number one predator, the feared animal in the jungle,

and they carry out this absurd analysis to its logical conclusion and that’s

 

2’ Wynter, Sylvia. An open letter to her colleagues.
28 Williams, Robert F. Interview. The Black Scholar. May 1970. 2.

23

treating people of color as if their lives were insignificant. . .The police

have murdered people fiom all these communities with impunity.29
Wahad appropriately uses the analogy of the jungle to describe the terrain of Black
communities in which the police execute the will of the establishment. The life
experiences of Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Timothy Thomas, Malice Green,
Donovan Jackson and countless others demonstrate that in “hostile white jungle

”30 the aggressive and overtly racist actions of the police are part of the daily

society
cruelty of a society distinguished by its penchant toward white rule by terrorism and
intimidation. The distressing consequence of the high incarceration rate and normalized
murderation of Black folks by the police is the “elimination of young Black males by
ostensibly normal and everyday means.”3 1

The psychological aspects of white terrorism manifest in a process that Dr. Bobby
Wright characterizes as “mentacide,” or “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a
group’s minds with the ultimate objective being the extirpation of the group?”2
Mentacide encourages Black self-hatred by through an insidious conditioning process
that is endemic to the system of white domination. George Jackson contends that
schools, churches, and other appendages of the State socialize Black folks to internalize
negative images of blackness and adopt white bourgeois ideals:

Right behind the expeditionary forces (the pigs) come the missionaries and

the colonial effect is complete. The missionaries, with the benefits

 

29 Wahad, Dhoruba Bin Interview. Still Black Still Strong. Eds. Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones, & Sylvere
Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1993. 113.

3° Ibid. , Williams. 3.

31 Ibid. , Wynter. 14.

32 Wright, Bobby. The Psychopathic Racial Personality and Other Essays. Chicago: Third World Press,
1984. 17.

24

Christendom, school us on the value of symbolism, dead presidents, and
the rediscount rate. The black colony lost consciousness to these
missionaries. Their schools, their churches, their newspapers and other
periodicals destroyed the black conscience and made it impossible to for
us to determine our own best interest.33
The ideological restraints of white supremacy have served to colonize the minds of Black
folks. White terrorism coerces Black folks to view themselves through a whitewashed
lens. The pathologiCal nature of white supremacist society only allows for the conception
of difference to occur in terms of a hierarchy. Anything outside of prescribed white
cultural norms is deemed inferior and subsequently marginalized. Whiteness remains the
privileged signifier in textbooks, mass media, and other outlets of widely disseminated
information, while blackness continues to be underrepresented, or more often than not,
misrepresented as the embodiment of abnormality. In my paper “Plantation Rhymes: Hip
Hop as Writing Against the Empire of Neo-Slavery,” I cited the following lyrics from
Carson, California rapper Ras Kass that illustrate the destructive results of mentacide, “In
’81 I remember the night/ I covered myself with baby powder so my Black ass could be
light/ Cuz God is white, and Bo Derek is a ten/ I hate my Black skin/ It’s just a sin to be a

”34 Ras narrates an experience born from the psychological terrorism of white

nigga.
supremacist society. The idea that “it’s just a sin to be nigga” originates from the
Western discourse of Man, which purports that the idyllic (hu)man is the white bourgeois

Christian male. Furthermore, as Sylvia Wynter indicates in “History in the Age of Man,”

 

3’ Ibid. , Jackson, 192.
3“ Ras Kass. “The Evil That Men Do,” Soul On Ice. Priority Records, 1996.

25

blackness, or any differentiation from the bourgeois white ideal signifies the “name of
what is evil.”35
With the one-year anniversary of September 11th hastily approaching, and the
popular “war against terrorism” and “axis of evil” terminology that has become so
popular, I can’t help but take note of the chauvinism of American (white) violence. The
current American discourse on terrorism positions the United States as the guiltless
victim of a random attack by “a network of terrorists,” and in doing so completely
disregard the continuum of Western imperialist aggression that has facilitated the
underdevelopment of the Third World proper, and the Third World in the first (U sgs).3 6
At the crux of the pathology of whiteness is the “normative gaze” with which whites look
at the rest of the world. This causes them to look outward for terrorism, evil, and
barbarism while turning a blind eye to their own historical and present behavior. I am not
attempting to detract from the significance of what occurred on September 11‘”, but the

terror and fear that White America experienced as a result of 9/11 is the terror and fear

that has been a normality in the daily lives of Black folks for close to six centuries now.

 

35 Wynter, Sylvia. “History in the Age of Man.” Small Axe: a journal of criticism. 3 (2000): 180.
36 United States Ghettoes

26

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu-Jamal, Mumia. All Things Censored. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000.

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1962.

Bowser, Benjamin P. and Raymond G. Hunt, eds. Impacts of Racism on White
Americans. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1981.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. Yhe Afiican Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Chicago:
Lawrence Hill Books, 1974.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Jackson, George. Blood In My Eye. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Thomas Alexander, and Samuel Sillen. Racism andPsychiatry. New York: Citadel
Press, 1993.

Wiiliams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization. Chicago: Third World
Press, 1987.

Williams, Robert F. Negroes With Guns. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.

27

   

lwilljjljjllgllljjl