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Breadfruit · (#35 (**permalink**))

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The speaker was talking about the Stockholm Syndrome as it pertained to Jews in the Holocaust. I was suddenly struck: how does this psychological phenomenon apply to me, to us, as African Americans? Suddenly, I realized this is one of the keys to our recovery and change as a people.

The Stockholm Syndrome is a phenomenon in human behavior which, as it turns out, has been documented since Biblical times, when Israel was ready to return to Egypt and named for a botched bank robbery and kidnapping that took place in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973.

It is an emotional attachment, a bond of interdependence between captive and captor that develops when someone threatens your life, deliberates, and doesn't kill you. (Symonds, 1980)

The relief resulting from the removal of the threat of death generates intense feelings of gratitude and fear that combine to make the captive reluctant to display negative feelings toward the captor.

Historical, sociological and governmental archives continue to ignore the parallels between the Jewish Holocaust and the enslavement of Africans in the United States.

To ignore history is to increase the chances of its repetition.

The question becomes do we really understand our modern day enslavement and slave mentality?

Are we still trying to treat the effects of slavery without acknowledging the causes, even today?

It takes only three to four days for the results this syndrome to emerge. After that, research shows the duration of captivity is no longer relevant. Trying to keep your captor happy in order to stay alive becomes an obsessive identification with the likes and dislikes of the captor which has the result of warping your own psyche in such a way that you come to sympathize with your tormenter.

African American women had to endure the threat and the practice of sexual exploitation. There were no safeguards to protect them from being sexually stalked, harassed, or raped, or to be used as long-term concubines by masters and overseers...Many became compliant as slave men, for their part, were often powerless to protect the women they loved.

Technique and Process:

Step One is alertness reduction: The captors cause the nervous system to malfunction, making it difficult to distinguish between fantasy and reality. This can be accomplished thorough poor diet, little sleep combined with long hours of work as well as being bombarded with intense and unique negative experiences. In the slave ships the stench of death and excrement, the cries of fear and pain suffocate you, not knowing what is day or night, what is reality or your worst nightmare.

Step Two is programmed confusion: You are mentally assaulted while your alertness is being reduced as in Step One. This is accomplished with a deluge of new information encounters which usually amounts to the controller bombarding the individual with results. During this phase, reality and illusion often merge and perverted logic is likely to be accepted. You are on a slave ship and you are made to witness violent acts -- examples of what would happen if you did not obey. You are degraded, naked, and shamed – and more is to come…

Step Three is thought stopping: Techniques are used to cause the mind to go "flat". These techniques initially induce calmness by giving the mind something simple to deal with and focusing awareness. The continued use brings on a feeling of elation and eventually hallucination. The result is the reduction of thought and eventually, if used long enough, the cessation of all thought and withdrawal from everyone and everything except that which the controlling captors direct. The takeover is then complete.

Additional techniques include the introduction of jargon--new terms that have meaning only to those who participate. Unity among African Americans was destroyed during slavery times by evil, dehumanizing tactics and terms.

The word N****r was brutally imposed upon them by means of coercion that stripped African Americans of their identities As a result, African Americans have allowed it to become part of their souls; transmitting it down through the generations.

The incessant use of the word in our speech, our music, and our culture, keeps the evil spirit of racism alive…From the day or night, almost five hundred years ago, that the first African’s foot touched the soil of America; the so-called “Land of the Free" has yet to be realized.

The word N****r was beaten deep into the African’s soul. So deep that it has just as much evil power now as it did then. In fact, even more power, because African Americans, in using it to designate themselves, clearly have forgotten how evil this word is.

Imagine what irreparable psychological scars were created over generations of slavery in this country. There was no psychological deprogramming, no debriefing for freed African slaves.

Former slaves, stunned and shocked, were left to find their own way financially and physically, all the while not understanding that they were far from psychological freedom.

There were instead new, more sinister forms of slavery generated then…and now. Today, there are so many ways in which we are indentured and/or enslaved -- socially, economically, and mentally – that they would be too numerous to identify and detail in one article. Below are some examples.

I challenge you to begin to identify others in your own life: Labels. We are a unique group people who allow ourselves to be defined by the labels on our clothes, shoes, purses, cars, etc, spending over Four Billion dollars annually and having little to show for it.

We think in the short term, fearing the day when it’s all taken away from us. If African Americans study their history, they will become more aware of how labels have been used to dehumanize them. It is time for them to collectively become critically conscious of the slave mentality they exercise within their culture.

They did not come to this country as “N****rs". They must break this bondage, free themselves, and stand up against evil.

Drugs and all that is drug-related. Drugs are believed to have been introduced into this country as a method of control of the African American communities. Those who have not become a slave to the drug itself are slaves to the perception of drug sales being the solution to their exit from their plantation of poverty. However this is pure myth, given that the majority of inmates -- 58.6% -- in prison are there on drug-related charges, most of them African American, most with harsher sentencing than their Anglo counterparts. Consider how today, “meth" or “crank" use by Anglo Americans is touted by both media and policy as a social and medical concern, yet the use of “crack" by African Americans is considered a crime.

Recidivism is the return of a person to prison after being released on parole or by serving the full term of his or her sentence. Prisons and the business of incarceration are booming. As a result there is an increase in the business of privatization of prisons, so that they are run outside of the government. Prisons offer a low cost employment base for corporate contracting for anything from farming to inbound call centers. The inmates are paid a practically nothing, while the prison owners reap the primary profits.

Gentrification, in basic terms, is how the city government allows your neighborhoods and their properties to become devalued by neighborhood crime, lack of upkeep, and lack of support for aging homeowners who purchased the homes during the “white flight" to the suburbs.

It justifies the destruction of broken down public housing, formerly a tool for containing the minority poor in one area, now replaced by condos, restaurants and town homes welcoming the Anglo suburb dweller back into the city. Across the country, the minority poor is being displaced, some lured into believing that the suburbs is the best place to go, not realizing what it will ultimately cost them financially or through isolation.

Intraracism. The enemy lies within and the enemy is us. In the days of conscious physical slavery in this country, there were the house slaves and the field slaves – a deliberate psychological class distinction. House slaves were programmed to believe that their loyalty included the betrayal of any exhibiting the potential of having an original thought or might potentially create a “problem". We have more African American elected officials now than we’ve ever had, yet none have effectively challenged the quality of public education our children are receiving. We are selfish about our piece of the corporate, social or economic pie, afraid to share because we think that there might not be enough, not realizing that we have the power to bake a whole new pie. So we “shuffle and grin" at the “massah", and sell our own down the river in fear that we will somehow be reclaimed and sent back to the plantation.

We allow them to eat our young by allowing them to set the standards for how we are treated, rather than setting the standards for ourselves. We ignore the screams of those who realize they have been caught and turn up the volume on Marvin Gaye’s CD.

So now what? I have no intention of extending an instant solution to such a complex problem, since the Stockholm Syndrome has very individualized effects and one solution definitely does not fit all. We are continually distracted by the newer, more subtle versions of passive racism.

But knowledge is power and now you know. What you can do, must do is think -- really think -- about your life, your self.

While I don’t agree with everything Dr. Phil McGraw says, one of his “Philisms" is right on point: you cannot change what you don’t acknowledge.

It becomes your individual challenge, even your responsibility to create the steps toward a new beginning.

E. Joyce Moore