Transcription
Before we get into the next book, let's pan out to the higher heights and do a quick recap on the inception and the development of black consciousness. Right?
The beginning is with slavery in the 1600s. You had various African tribes with their own identities and their own cultures who warred with each other. And in the process millions of them were captured and traded for goods that were brought to them by European merchants. Now, they didn't imagine themselves as being the same people, so let's get that clear. They didn't have the concept of being the same people just because they shared the same skin complexion or shared the same physical features. That's a colonial European invention and it was created or and used primarily to dominate people. Right? So, these Africans weren't selling their own people. They were capturing and they were selling other people from other tribes. Right? People they saw different from themselves. Don't matter if they looked the same or whatever, that's not how they were operating. But the point here is that there is no slave trade without the involvement of Africans who did the vast majority of the capturing. Right? That's the reality.
So, with these captured people from the African continent now in the hands of people like the English they were deliberately stripped of their culture and deliberately stripped of their identity and forced to become black people or Negroes. An identity created for them by colonizers. And in the process of becoming a Negro they were forced to develop a culture adapted to the new slave environment in a foreign land. So, at that point they no longer had the same mental operating system as the ones who remained on the continent. And therefore, they became culturally different people. In addition their offspring mixed with Europeans, both freely and through force. And also in some cases mixed with Native Americans. So, on top of being culturally different they also became genetically different. Right? Genetically different from their African ancestors. And so, the point is they were now Negroes. A completely foreign entity that would have been unrecognizable to the people in Africa. Negroes spoke a different language ate different food dressed with a different type of clothing had a different religion developed different mannerisms and they had a very different mental model of the world. A mental model that was optimized to be a slave. Do we understand?
This is how the Negro consciousness was created. It's a way of thinking and behaving developed to deal with the realities of an oppressed environment. The slaves were beaten whipped and severely punished for going against the slightest demands of the masters. So, to avoid that punishment the slaves had to adapt their behavior and they had to adapt their manner of thinking to fit into the mold of that environment. Right? Or else you're going to die or get punished or get beaten. Feel immense pain. So, you adapt to that so you don't deal with that negative consequence. Right?
Now, we have to remember that the objective of the slave master was to create the perfect permanent slave. The plan was to set up the entire system where the pressures from the environment would keep these people as slaves forever. And their offspring and so on and so forth. So, in addition to the mental torment of making them feel less than human they set up laws to reinforce the objective of making a permanent slave. Slaves weren't allowed to read, they weren't allowed to learn how to write and they weren't allowed to have basic civil rights. And essentially, the government was used as a tool to enforce all of that.
This is also where the concept of race comes in. They called the slaves Negroes, inwards and black, which are all variations of saying the same thing, which is black. Right? So, they were named black by the colonizers and they incentivized the poor European settlers to take on the identity of white. Now, why would they call people with a creamy pinkish or olive skin uh tone white? Why would they do that? What was black supposed to represent and what was white supposed to represent? In short, those are meant to represent status. White for purity good upstanding morally upright someone with all the rights and privileges a ruler at the top. And black for evil bad wicked the people with no civil rights, no privileges the lower level human at the bottom. It's psychological warfare meant to target the mind. You got a warfare that's meant to target the body with guns and all that. Then you have words and language and concepts and ideas that are meant to target the mind. Right? That's what this is aiming at. And people don't catch that because they're focused on just the physical part. They haven't elevated up to the mental part to see the mental warfare. Which is the most important part. The colonizers were playing the full game, the physical and the mental. And it worked very well for its desired purpose.
So, the European immigrants, they bought into the white identity and they were used as the oppressive tool for the elite. Used to keep them down in their place. And in return the whites would get all the civil rights and they would get the opportunities to build wealth. Right? This is how the white supremacy entity was conceived. Its survival depends on feeling a sense of superiority over other people and having access to things that other people don't. And this was the motive for the poor whites to continue doing the dirty work for the elites. They were chasing that feeling like crackheads chasing their next hit. So, that was the overview of their system of oppression, which was the most elaborate and effective slave system in human history. It created the environment and it molded the minds of millions of victims for centuries.
Then when the Civil War happened in 1861 and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 things took a change. The North defeated the South, which put an end to the Southern system of producing permanent slaves. But at that time they had already produced somewhere around 3.5 million slaves, which is a lot of people. A lot of people programmed to think a certain way. A lot of people programmed to behave a certain way. Right? And to think of themselves in a certain way. They were in the cultural and mental pit and in need of climbing out of it. But as they tried to climb out, the Southern whites still wouldn't let them go, just like Pharaoh. They tried all manner of ways to keep society as close as possible to how it had been developed over the previous 250 years. >> [snorts] >> The idea of free blacks just didn't make any sense in their world view. It was a contradiction to many of them. And even more of a contradiction was blacks having equal access to public facilities and public services. And this shouldn't be surprising because we know that the white identity was built on the idea of having more rights, more freedoms and more access than everyone else, especially blacks. So, for whites and blacks to share something equally that was also a contradiction. It just didn't make sense in their mind.
So, after emancipation and after the reconstruction period in 1877, Jim Crow was established. And it functionally kept blacks and whites separated, just like the good old days in the mind of many whites. Now, as time went on, many blacks eventually began leaving the South to go north and to get away from the whites and to find better-paying jobs. This was known as the First Great Migration, which spanned from about 1910 to 1940. Now, there was segregation there as well, but not to the extent of the South, since northern whites weren't as immersed in the slave culture as the southern whites were. But, Negroes in the north still had to experience their fair share of discrimination, especially in the real estate and the job markets.
Now, let's understand one thing. Negroes at that time were by no means innocent saints. They still carried with them mental fragments developed in the slave world and passed along generation to generation. They had a lot of quarrels, dysfunction, and self-hatred. And as they moved into the northern cities, a dark criminal element began to quickly emerge. And we're going to talk a little bit more about them in a bit. But, alongside this element was a more progressive element. And they learned to be independent, learned to build their own sections of town. We're talking about um areas like Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was also a very politically progressive group that fought hard for civil rights in the '50s and '60s. What they did with the civil rights victory put a major dent in the system of white supremacy. Right? Big time. It essentially delivered a death blow to it, like David did to Goliath. And it has been rapidly dying ever since. It was dying already, starting with the Civil War, but this put a real dent in it with that civil rights victory. Right? This victory put the final end to the Jim Crow era. And at that point, segregation was no longer legally enforceable.
Now, in the midst of the civil rights battle, there was another event taking place. Right? Coming back to it. Which was the Second Great Migration. Massive numbers of blacks fled from the South to go to cities in the north and the west. And this migration picked up during World War II in the 1940s and it carried on into about 1970. And the reason for them leaving was the same as the group that left first. Better-paying jobs and to get away from the southern whites and the system that they had going on. Still trying to keep people as boys and all this other stuff. Head down and bowing and all this other slave stuff. Right? So, they got up out of there. They went to the north, went to the west. And they went and found more opportunities and they made more money.
Now, the only issue is that this group still contained the residue of the old slave mind. Self-hatred, bitterness, anger, impulsiveness, and jealousy. Not all of them, but a good portion still did. Right? And it clashed with the new environment. And the dark element began to grow. Divorces, kids growing up in single-parent households, and crime, all these continued to increase. From the late '60s to the mid-'90s, the black homicide rates reached an all-time high. It went through the roof. Right? We talked about that in the last book that we went over. Crack cocaine, gangs, and broken families all playing their part in this increase in violence.
Now, during this time and even before, whites had already been evacuating the city. But, black violence in the city gave them even more reason to do so and at a quicker pace. But, understand this. They weren't the only ones fleeing the scene. No, sir. Remember those civil rights victories in the '60s? That meant that blacks could also move out of black neighborhoods if they could and if they wanted to. And they did. Which leads us to our very next book, White Flight, Black Flight by sociologist Dr. Rachel Woodoff. This book is going to give us a first-hand account on why blacks left the black neighborhood and what happened once they did. And trust me, you'll be surprised. So, stay tuned because we're going to open up this book in the next commentary. I thank you for your time and attention. My name is Brooklyn Saint Michael and I'll see you in the free world.