Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

SEKOU MIMS, M.Ed ., MSW – LARRY HIGGINBOTTOM, MSW, LCSW – OMAR REID, Psy.D – POST TRAUMATIC SLAVERY DISORDER – PYRAMID BUILDERS , INC; - DORCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS – NO DATE, PROBABLY BEGINNING OF THE 21^ST CENTURY

This book conveys a track blazing barrier breaking inspirational philosophy directly implemented in the real world. The book is the production of three authors, all greatly qualified in their fields, who are endowing the Nation of Islam with a policy, a program and an objective: to liberate African Americans, the descendants of the slaves of the old days from the trauma this slave experience planted in their minds over more than 383 years (that duration dates the book to the year 2002):

1.       246 years of slavery from 1619 (first slaves in Virginia) to 1865 (full abolition of slavery);

2.       100 years of Jim Crowism and apartheid and then Civil Rights Movement from 1865 to 1965 (Civil Rights Act, 1964, Voting Rights Act 1965);

3.       since then inclusion in democracy.

The book is explicit about how the African deportees (80 millions of them died in the deportation and slavery that ensued their capture) were transformed into slaves following the teaching of Willie Lynch in 1712. These passages should not be provided to too young children. And yet the book is clear about the necessity to face history and the reality of this savage period of slavery at an early age (don’t wait and see: the consequences would be drastic). In fact trying to forget, to avoid speaking of it is a symptom of the PTSlaveryS they are speaking of.

They start with a parallel between the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome that has been identified in survivors of great accidents or catastrophes. It is quite obvious that even the worst war (WWII and the final solution known as the Holocaust or the Shoah) or the worst civil wars (there are plenty of examples) cannot compare in length with the African Holocaust. 246 years of slavery represent at least ten generations of people born and raised in slavery, once the first generation or the new arrivals had been broken into the condition.

The book is clear as for the transmission from one generation to the next, the parents educating their children to be ready to suffer the least hence to rebel the least. That implied avoiding learning the language of the whites, English, both spoken (keeping some jiberish form of it) and especially written. A black slave found trying to read got his/her eyes enucleated and his/her tongue cut out, which meant sure death in a short time, be it only due to infections or just starvation, or even self-starvation to shorten the time during which they were burdens to their communities. The second attitude transmitted from parents to children was a necessary distance and aloofness of the parents towards the children and of the children towards the parents to avoid being sold or/and to be ready when they were going to be sold. The third consequence is about the relations between men and women. Men were breeding animals and could not attach themselves too much to the females they were impregnating and the women were breeding animals too who had to be ready to be impregnated at any time by any male on the plantation (and the white males were of age early and could easily play the beaus with the plantation’s belles), and the children were a property, slaves, to be exploited or sold as an extra income.

And the book came ten years before the recent remake of Django that gives some examples of how some black males were turned into to-the-death fighters (called gladiators in another era) for the entertainment of the masters. Such fighters were condemned to be killed young, either by their opponent if the latter won, or by the master when his fighter was no longer able to win and hence earn his survival. And refusing to do it meant instant death or being sold away to some mine or other punishing institution in order for the rebel to die fast and in great suffering.

The interesting point is that the self-protective attitudes of the slaves became the self-inflicted handicaps in the next period: to work as much as possible to be accepted as a good nigger, to refuse any education not to be seen as uppity and dangerous for the whites’ superiority, to refuse (as for males) any marital commitment and yet to breed around multiple children with multiple partners and in absolute lack of any stability, to be ready (as for women) to enter relationships with any man available at any time to avoid being ostracized because unwomanly, to look for easy money (as for children) without any work or education behind leading to prostitution, pimping, gangs, crime, you name it you have it.

The book is going to surprise you. It defends the idea that during the apartheid and Jim Crow period the blacks were educated in all black schools and thus could excel, even if it were in practical and vocational subjects and with limited objectives. At least everyone got some education and accepted to get it and not only the Talented Tenth of W.E.B. Dubois. In contrast to this accepted education within segregation, when integration arrived, the Black minority was confronted to the white majority in integrated schools and that led to the reactivation of the negative attitudes of the time of Slavery since they were once again face to face with the whites. This book defends and advocates the idea that this PTSlaveryS can only be solved by the Blacks with the Blacks and for the Blacks. No escape from this principle.

I would like to insist on another idea that is essential still today and that the authors call the dumbing down process. It is extremely revealing about the PTSlaverySyndrome. In integrated education the Blacks are looked down upon by the whites, which makes them feel inferior, hence become rebellious, hence be classified a-social or even worse. They have been dumbed down by the situation and by the whites. But they reactivate an old reflex of the time of slavery when mothers always declared their children, especially boys, as being dumb, ignorant, clumsy, lazy or whatever to avoid their being sold away. In the new integrated schools the Blacks, particularly boys, push themselves down into some dumbed down attitude to avoid being picked out and hence victimized in a way or another. And the school system is very quick at classifying these students as emotionally disturbed and/or socially maladjusted, and/or consequently learning disabled, which leads the vast majority of Black boys and a fair proportion of Black girls into special education instead of the standard stream of mental and knowledge development.

This leads to a phenomenal concept of “mentalcide” (a cross of mental with homicide and suicide, showing the two direction of the concept, down against the Blacks and up in front of the whites, coming respectively from the whites out of racism and from the Blacks out of fear). This mentalcide is probably the most difficult symptom and phenomenon to repair, to heal in order to salvage the minds of these young people, and eventually their adult parents and relatives. But the authors also insist on mentalcide on the side of the whites. The whites during the Jim Crow apartheid period could be violent with the Blacks, lynch them, humiliate them, kill them out of pure pleasure or as hunting simple game, treat them as cattle in their sharecropper positions because the whites had also spread over their mind, their conscience, their ethical sense, their religious beliefs, over whatever makes them human a veil of mentalcide that enabled them to see the Blacks as not human. During slavery they were just plain real estate or chattel possession. But after the Abolition of Slavery they were seen as not human, not deserving any human treatment not because these whites were necessarily criminals in their minds, but because their minds had been killed by the situation (homicide) or by the shame they might have felt in front of what they were doing (suicide): they killed their own minds when confronted to Blacks.

Then the book proposes an important fourth chapter that explains how the Blacks can get out of this absurd situation, hence can be healed from PTSlaveryS. The main idea from my point of view is that the solution has to be both individual and collective. Each individual has to make a personal effort to grasp the seriousness of their situation and the urgency of a treatment, but at the same time, meditation is not enough if it is not collectively prepared and experience. That means the healing process has to be carried out in small groups with a qualified person to manage this group. This means that this qualified person will have to get each individual and the group to the consciousness of the past, of the causes, of the symptoms, of the urgency and of the possible solutions. Then each individual has to get down into their heritage, past, family genogram on both sides of their families, their two parents and beyond as far as possible. Then each individual will have to meditate on their lot, fate, curse, luck or whatever, positive and negative. It is essential to understand that sharing is central: sharing with the qualified person who is managing the operation, and sharing with the group in full open-mindedness and critical sense.

To conclude I would like to make two critical remarks.

The first one is that the past situation is often, too often, seen as mainly negative and though it is asserted here and there, now and then, that there were some Blacks who managed to get out of the syndrome and to pave the way to some healing procedure, some exit from the exploitative situation, though it is said from time to time that the slaves evolved some resisting and adaptive procedures that could manage for them to avoid the worst punishments and violence, it is not emphasized enough that human beings, and the Blacks are human beings, are flexible, adaptive and always dialectical. In the worst situations human beings, individually or collectively, look for solutions that protect them and that liberate them. All along the slavery and apartheid periods the Blacks dreamed of their liberation and some fought individually (escape, the underground railroad) or collectively (slow down work in spite of the whipping and the barking of both whites and dogs). In a man there is always that dialectic and that’s why this PTSlaveryS can be healed because, no matter how thick the veil of mentalcide might be, there is deep under it the desire to get free, to get to the Promised Land, to be liberated, a real Mosaic dream borrowed directly from the Whites Christian – or Jewish – religion.

The second remark is that we have to understand that any human society has to be hierarchical because the human brain cannot think in any other way, and it could not work in any other way, but hierarchy must not mean superior and inferior but rather that everyone, no matter how qualified one is, has still some knowledge to learn, some skill to acquire, some improvement to achieve, for oneself for sure, but also for everyone because Homo Sapiens from the very start could not have survived and spread all over the planet without a fair dose of collective action and thinking. This then means the way human society is managed has to be the management of the people, by the people, for the people. Then in any society that forgets these principles, even the supposedly most advanced democratic societies, there is a dose of economic starvation used by some in power positions to eliminate those who represent a danger for their power. And too often there is no appeal procedure against the decisions of these powerful or averagely powerful people, or if there is an appeal procedure it takes so much time that when it succeeds the plaintiff, who is the victim in this case, has died of starvation or has become completely depressive and suicidal, or has already committed suicide giving the abusive authority people a victory they do not deserve.

More than capitalism, what is at stake is the selfishness of those who climb up in the hierarchy of the society and transform their positions into authoritarian if not totalitarian fortresses that bombard those under the walls of this fortress who do not want to get on their knees and worship the master, the guru, the prophet, the leader, the dictator, or whoever this person believes he/she is, maybe God himself. I would have the tendency to consider that Stalinism, for example, is one such drift and is typical of an unhealed Post Traumatic Proletarian Syndrome. The struggle is thus far from just being that of the Blacks in America. All Post Traumatic Social Syndrome victims unite! Just to plagiarize another famous motto that unluckily produced the second vast cause of brutal human death, the gulag, the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, etc.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU