Amos N. Wilson | Black Child Development Under White Supremacy

[Applause] Thank you very much. I apologize if we kept you waiting too long. I certainly am appreciative of your invitation to appear before you here today to talk about black child development under white supremacy. A very, very important topic indeed, because it is the root of many of the issues and problems that we discuss so often in these types of forums.

I, of course, think it, it's very important that, uh, when we talk about the black child, that we have some idea of who or what the black child is. Because too often we hear people saying, "I happen to be black," you know, as if black is something that fell on us, unfortunately, some misfortune, you know. And also, there's the implication often in that kind of phrase that, except for our Blackness, we are just like everybody else. So, consequently, we are colored people, you know. We've just been colored over, but in a sense, we are white people who just happen to be black.

It's much deeper than that, ladies and gentlemen. The black child is unique. It is not a duplicate of the white child. It's not a colored rendition of white children. It's very important that you know that because if you start off with that premise, no matter how good your intentions, you're going to do a disservice to your children. If you are going to do the right things about your children, you must know them, which means that you must study their history and their psychology. You cannot study the history of Europeans and the psychology of the European child and apply that psychology directly to black children.

One of the major problems in education today is that we have a school system, and your children have inherited a school system that was designed to teach the white child. A school system that is based on the developmental psychology of white children. That psychology develops out of the history and experience of a people. Psychology, you must recognize, reflects the individual's history and experience. That is why, if you go to a psychologist's office or psychiatrist's office or social worker's office, they take your case history. They cannot reach into the files and get anybody's case history and say, "Now, let me see, and let me explain you in terms of this case history." They have to speak directly to you and get that information from you, otherwise they misinterpret you.

Why do they get a case history? Because they recognize that to a very significant extent, the way a person sees the world, relates to the world, behaves in the world, the attitudes, feelings, and emotions, that person's abilities, and so forth, are intimately related to that individual's unique history and experience. The same thing is true of people. The history and experience of African-American people is not the history and experience of European-American people. These histories are diametrically opposed.

We have some Negroes who run around and say, "I am an American." They live in abstractions. It's meaningless terms. Besides, if it had meaning, it wouldn't mean the same thing for the two people. Because the African-American experience of slavery in the United States is not the white American experience of slave mastery in the United States. A whole psychology comes from these two histories. A whole set of attitudes, a whole way of seeing the world and dealing with the world come from these two histories. So, you're both saying that you are American does not resolve the difference and does not resolve the psychology. Consequently, you cannot hide behind euphemistic platitudes about being an American or being a human being or all these other words you've used to escape your reality and your history and get away with it. It'll only do harm to yourself.

The educational psychology upon which the education of children is based is an educational psychology based on the history and experience of white folk. That is the reason why it is not working for our children. That's why you have to study the developmental psychology of your own children first and then relate that psychology to their education. But if you go and get the psychology of white children, ignore the history and experience of our people, and seek to impose that psychology both in your pedagogical approaches and other approaches, the education will make our children dumb. And that's exactly what it does. Your love will not be enough. Your good intentions will not be enough. Because if you have the wrong knowledge and the wrong understanding, you will still destroy, despite your good intentions. So, it becomes very important for you to know your children and to study their development, because that development is unique.

When I left New York, I was looking at the New York Times that was talking about how the evolutionary history of mankind had been traced back to the so-called African Eve. And no matter which way they work it, the history of man leads back to African man and to the fact then that African man is the mother and father of mankind. This is, this is what your children represent. They're not just color children. The, the genes that you carry in your bodies are not mere chemical packets that determine how tall you're going to be or determine other physiological features or some psychological features. These genes that we carry in our bodies are also capsulated forms of history. In other words, we carry in our bodies the complete history of our people from the very beginning. Every experience that they've had, biological, cultural, and otherwise, has been in some way encoded in our genetic code.

So, when we talk about these children then, if we're talking about African man and woman as the fathers of mankind, then they carry that history in their bodies. And this history is not carried by any other children on this Earth. This is their history. If we then to talk about African man as laying down the first civilizations on this Earth, as developing language, social relations, governments, science, so, so forth, that history too is encoded in our genes. And this is what it means to be a black child, you see. The biological evolutionary history of black people is not the biological evolutionary history of white folk. This body, these bodies that we refer to as African bodies, are African bodies shaped to adapt to the African soil, African geography, and geology. Therefore, they cannot be duplicates of European bodies. Therefore, ultimately, to even understand in detail the biology of the African body, you must come to study the biological evolutionary history of African people.

That's why, even ladies and gentlemen, even in modern medicine, we're recognizing that the African body does not react in the same way to medicines and other things as does the European body. Now, doctors are beginning to realize what they realized even in the 60s and 70s, but because it was politically unwise, they did not talk about it. And that was the idea that you must take the ethnicity of the individual in mind if you are to give them the best medical treatment. Because the biological history of a people is still represented in their very bodies. Therefore, then, when you look at our history, whether it is the biological history, cultural history, or the history of African people on this continent, it must strike you then that it is very important for us to recognize that we have a psychology that we must come to know.

Biological history implies that the black child, the body of the black child, does not develop as a duplicate of the white child's body. Some of you who read my book, of course, have run across this passage when we talk about where I talked about the growth and development of the, uh, black child's body. It is to the extent we indicated that the difference in growth is such that the black child needs a different nutritional chart than does a European child. Let me read a passage here.

"Both on an absolute basis and when corrected for income level, black boys and girls in comparison to white children tended to have skeletal advancement, oifc, dental advancement, age at permanent teeth eruption, and earlier maturation and some tendency toward greater body size, notwithstanding lesser body, uh, fat through adolescence. Black boys and girls evidenced a greatness on both a group basis and on an income-corrected basis. Therefore, genetic factors outweighed economic factors in explaining differences in skeletal and dental development. These findings suggest the need for different standards for blacks and white children when assessing nutritional status during growth." This was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

What are we saying here then? That the biological evolutionary history of African people is still written in the bodies of African children, African-American children today. You can't wipe that history out in three and four hundred years, no way. It is still written so deeply and engraved so deeply until we need our own nutritional charts to meet our own children's needs. So, this is not a child who happens to be black or who is what is it, colored?

Jensen, the infamous Jensen, who looked at these children, stated, "It has been noted that the brain wave patterns in African newborn infants show greater maturity than is usually found in Europe, European newborn child." That is, in the European newborn child. "This finding especially merits further study, since there is evidence that brain waves have some relationship to IQ, and since at least one aspect of brain waves, the visually evoked potential, has a very significant genetic component, showing a heritability of about point eight." I won't go into the, uh, the technical details here, but essentially what he's saying is, these children are born at a more advanced level of intellectual development than our European children. And when you look at their brain wave patterns, these brain wave patterns which seem to be related to, uh, what we later call IQ or intelligence, would indicate then that these children's intelligence is inherently more advanced than white children. That's why he says this merits further study, because of course, he has to deal with his, the whole propaganda that he himself has projected.

Let's look a moment at, at a book, "The Magical Child," by Chilton Pierce. When he talks about the studies done by Marcel J, to whom I make reference as well in, in my own book. And let's just, let me read a bit of what he has to say about these African children. And what I'm reading here in terms of the Ugandan and Kenyan children is duplicated by African-American children. And he states that in 1956, Marcel Jabir, under a research grant from the United Nations Children's Fund, traveled to Africa to study the effects of malnutrition on infant and child intelligence. She concentrated on Kenya and Uganda and made a momentous discovery. She found the most precocious, brilliant, and advanced infants and children observed anywhere. And I think if you look at what we're going to talk about today, you'll see these are not exaggerated statements.

These infants had smiled continuously and rapturously from at the latest their fourth day of life. Blood analysis showed, uh, that they all, all had, uh, all the adrenal steroids connected with birth stress were totally absent by the fourth day after birth. The, uh, steroids are present in the body as a part of the baby's response to stress, and for many babies, this level may stay up for weeks or longer, indicating, of course, that they're still having problems adjusting to their new life out of the womb. So, he's indicating here that these children, by the fourth day, had made their adjustment to life outside the womb. Century mode of learning and general development were phenomenal, indeed miraculous. These Uganda infants were a months ahead of American or European children. A superior intellectual development.

You must realize, you see, that intellect begins in the womb itself. It is not something that starts in [Music] school. No, the intellect is present. We don't have time today to talk about the kind of learning that a child undergoes in the mother's womb, the kind of psychological connections that are made there, the kind of bonding that occurs between mother and child. And when you study African culture, you will see that culture, as the culture of any group, already instilling itself in the child before the child is born. So, the very psychological, sociological, uh, environment in which the mother resides already represents itself in the child at a certain level.

When the Bible talks about children being born in sin, there's a certain amount of truth to that in the sense that, in a sense, the child already shares the mother's environment psychologically and sociologically. In fact, it already shares the environment of the total group, because that group is going to influence what she eats. It's going to influence her attitudes and emotions, and these are represented as chemical changes in her body. Whether she is loved, whether she's among people who love her and whom she loves, whether she has good relationships with her husband and other close people, or whether she's trying to deal with the problems in the society such that she's eating incorrectly, or she's taking drugs or other kind of medicines. This world is shared by the infant. That is why we talk today now about things we call crack babies. In a sense, then, the baby has already been transformed by the nature of the society in which the mother lives, because that society has represented itself in the nature of the womb in which she carries the child. And that child is already a learning being, and therefore, it learns to adapt to that womb, which means that its personality and its orientation to the world has already been biased. And consequently, it comes out of the womb not as an innocent child. It already carries the guilt of the society in which it resides and of the experiences represented in the womb.

That is why you see the adequate rearing of children involves not only then the adequate health of the mother's body, but the health of the total society. It is all a part of rearing healthy children. It becomes interesting then to study the culture of Africans as it is represented in the womb and as it represents itself in the bodies and behavior of African newborns. And this is the kind of work we must do. When I teach my courses in developmental psychology, I do not begin with sperm and egg, you know, a zygote bit. That's too late, late. I start by asking, "Why do you have children?" Because that reason already begins to shape them. Do you want them or don't you? Because that attitude represents itself in the womb as well, you see. And these things had to be looked at.

The infants were awake a surprising amount of time, alert, watchful, happy, and calm. This staying awake, particularly in the, what we call the alert and active state, is very important in infants. In my future book, uh, about the education of black children, and in, in another that's coming out where I talk about maximizing the intelligence of black children, we emphasize very much maintaining the children, uh, and the newborns and the infants in what we call an act, uh, a, uh, an inactive alert state. That state where they're wide awake, but are looking at the world and observing the world and taking it in and routing it in their nervous system and in their brain and already beginning to process it, you see. And the longer you can keep them in that state and show them interesting things in the world and bring them into new experiences in the world, the more accelerated their intelligence will become. The earlier they learn, learn things, and the foundation of future intelligence is built by their being alive to the world. So, this is what he's referring to here, you see, that these children are wide awake and they are looking at the world and processing this world to an extent that, uh, you don't see in the European child at two days of age.

At 48 hours, those infants sat both upright, held only by forearms, with a beautifully straight back and perfect head balance. Their firmly focused eyes staring intently, intelligently at their mothers, and they smiled and smiled. I wish I could have time to cover some of the material here in terms of some current work that's going on in developmental psychology today that relates what we call the child's visual behavior to later intelligence. In other words, we can now look at the child's visual responses to, to, uh, stimuli and auditory responses to stimuli, what we, we refer to as habituation responses, and note that these responses predict fairly well, well, the intelligence of the child later on. As stated here, "It has been found that a baby's performance at age four months and at six months on tests of visual memory correlate at four and six years of age."

Now, when we look at these children here responding already the way they do, we know that we're dealing here with a natural intelligence. The question is, how are we going to deal with it? He goes on to state, "The issue is intelligence, the brain's ability to process sensory information, organize muscular responses, and interact with the environment." I'm going to indicate what that implies. You see, there are many psychologists, white and otherwise, who would indicate that black children are motorically more advanced than white children. And of course, by that, they try to sort of give us a, a backhanded slap, as if these children are only motors. But my hand is moved under the direction of my brain. It's not moving spontaneously. I move it because I will its movement. These children are not little motors moving and twisting and going. Their behavior is guided and purposeful, which means then that there is a purposeful what intelligence guiding their motor behavior. The behavior is psychomotor. It means, then, that their brains have advanced to the degree that they can translate their desires and wishes into behavioral activity, and they gained this much earlier than European.

Let's look at it at six or seven weeks. All 300 of these children crawled skillfully, could sit up by themselves, and would sit spellbound before a mirror, looking at their own images for long periods, indicating self-awareness at a very early age. This particular ability was not expected in American and European, in the American and European child before 24 weeks, six months. What are we saying here then? We are comparing an African child at six or seven weeks with the European child at 24 weeks, or a month and a half as against what? Six months. That's what I mean, ladies and gentlemen, when I tell you you have to know your own history. You have to look at the biological evolutionary history of African people to know your children. You can't go and run over to the other people. You're going to be misguided. These are not people children who are colored. These are African children. And it is connected to the melanin in their bodies. This color is not mere decoration. Because the melanin that colors your skin is the melanin that is a part of the brain's neurotransmitters network. The same embryonic layer that is responsible for your skin is the same embryonic layer that makes your brain. And the brain uses melanin-like substances for transmitting information within itself and between the neurons. And where you see children of color, then you see this advance and development. So, color again is not something that just happens. It is a part and parcel of everything else that we are. We must recognize that.

But between six and seven months, the Ugandan children performed the toy box, uh, retrieval test. Shabir, uh, showed the infant a toy, walked across the room, put the toy in a tall toy box. The child leaped up, ran across the room, and retrieved the toy. Besides the sensory-motor skills of walking and retrieval, the test showed that object constancy had taken place. The greatest shift of logic in the brain, at which point an object out of sight is no longer out of mind. In other words, he's stating here, if you are to show a child a toy at this age, and then you hide the toy, and yet the child goes and retrieves the toy, it means then that the child must be capable of mentally representing the toy in its mind. You say, if it were not capable of representing that toy, then it could not remember to go and find it, even though it's out of sight. And this is one of the ways we, as developmental psychologists, test early mental development, and we get some idea of the, of the mental maturity of infants. Because early in life, to put a, to a, a toy or stimulus in a child's face and then remove it, as far as the child is concerned, at a certain point in development, the toy has just completely disappeared. Meaning, at that point, they have not developed a sufficient mental apparatus to represent the absent toy in their minds. So, when these children then can go and find that hidden toy, it means then that they have developed the mental apparatus, the mental representational abilities to find that toy. That is not found in European children at this age. The test successfully completed by the Ugandan children between six and seven months of age was not to be expected, uh, uh, until somewhere between the 15th and 18th months in the American and European child. Do you hear what I'm saying? We're comparing children of six and seven months with children of 15 and 18 months.

This is not a child then who happens to be black. I often say, in a way, at least symbolically, that as our forefathers and forefathers were the first to walk on this, this Earth, first to build social institutions, governmental institutions, to develop language, and so forth, we see it replicated in the early behavior of our children, who also talk earlier, walk earlier, and do all of these other things earlier, as if again, the first of African mankind is represented again in our children's behavior. So, these are wonderful, miraculous children we have here. These children are second to none. We only have to look at ourselves and our own history to understand what they are about.

These children represent genuine intelligence. To a good extent, it is our failure to recognize this, to know this, to act upon this, to build their education on this, to build their feeding and nutrition on this, to build our social relationships on this, that in part, uh, to a significant degree, destroys their potential. Because we have been so propagandized that we think being to be different is to be inferior. Even though the people who are telling us that they are superior because they are different, we spend so much time trying to show how much alike them we are, until we overlook our own reality and we subvert that reality. If you want your children to be the equals of Europeans intellectually, or their superiors, then you have to act on their differences and use how they're different as the base for moving them forward, not in your anxiety, fudge the differences and fudge over them and create a false equality.

We could go on, of course, talking a great deal about what our children represent. And those, those of you who've read the developmental psychology, familiar with that. But I know you must be wondering what happens and what happened. In a sense, ladies and gentlemen, we are ever in the womb. We're never out of the womb. The word "mother" is related to the Latin term "mater," ultimately to the term "matrix," the context out of which something is created and developed. And the mother, of course, the womb of the mother represents a matrix in which the child is created and develops. That is why, as we talked earlier, this child reflects its conditioning in the womb. But the mother herself, as we imply too, is in a womb. She is in the womb of her culture, you see. And as we implied earlier, the nature of that cultural womb, you see, is going to represent itself in her body and in her womb. And of course, the child is represented in there. And her culture, and the culture itself may be represented in a larger society, and that society in a larger world, and in the world of the Earth itself, and ultimately in the universe.

And so, in a sense, as we grow and mature, we are constantly born and reborn into new wombs of life. So, as that child moves out of the mother's womb, the womb of her body, it moves into the womb of the mother's culture and into the womb of the atmosphere that she creates around it. And again, it is influenced by that womb experience. And each womb experience, to a good extent, determines the nature of the child's adjustment to the next womb experience. That is why again, if we go back to crack babies and other babies, we see these children struggling to deal now with the new womb, struggling for life, struggling to adapt. Many, if they are not caught in the new womb and nurtured correctly, will struggle for life. And each new test, each new area they move into, will represent an overwhelming challenge. Because after the child deals with the maternal womb, in terms of after birth and in the womb of the primary family, it must now move into to the womb of the social world. And the kind of experiences it has had in that family and in that primary womb is going to affect how it adjusts in the larger social world. And as it moves from that world, it moves into the womb of the schools and of education. And we see again, you see, a continuity running from the mother's own bodily womb, to the womb that she represented in her relationship to the child after birth, to the family, to the primary group around that family, the culture, ultimately into the school, and from there into the world. That's it. And they are all connected. And therefore, the health of all of these settings is very important to the child's adjustment in the others.

Despite all of the kinds of problems then we talk about our people facing, our children still come shining through as a whole. It's an amazing situation. It shows just how hardy they are, huh? Because when you look at African-American children and again, measure them against European-American children, you will still see these differences shining through. You will still see the bright and intelligent faces there. But too often, we see them off the school, bright and intelligent, and start seeing the fire and the brilliance leave their eyes by the time they hit the third grade. Because it is in those inadequate areas, in the inadequate womb of the Eurocentric school, that the child is attacked and its intelligence is subverted. It is when this child runs into the womb of parents and of communities which are suffering identity crises, who do not know who they are, who are confused. When this child runs into parents and communities and a culture that is ambivalent, a culture that is motivated by escape and avoidance and fear, its natural intelligence is subverted.

There are some among us who think that by not knowing black history, they can escape it. "Oh, that happened 300 years ago, and it has nothing to do with what we're doing now." You cannot be more wrong. In fact, when I talk about the evolutionary history of African people, you must recognize that you represent the evolutionary history of basic life on Earth. You never escape your history. History is ever present in the human mind. We are the result of history. The shape of your brain, the shape of your body, the whole thing is a result of historical evolution. History is represented in every pore and every part of your being. You don't escape history. Your ignorance of it doesn't mean you've escaped it. As a matter of fact, the more ignorant you are of your history, the more you are its victim. The less you know about the history of Africans and the less you know about the history of African-Americans, the more you are victimized by that history.

Ignorance is a real force. It is not an absence of knowledge. It is a real force. It has concrete results. You see, ignorance is not a lack of something. It is a presence of something. You know, sort of like in physics where we talk about antimatter. Seems almost a contradiction in terms, but yet it is dealt with as a real particle in physics. Antimatter. What do you mean then being victimized by ignorance of history? Many people don't want to read history, and particularly African-American history, because if they read about slavery, they get angry, upset. Some may feel some shame and guilt and self-doubt and other kinds of things. And since these feelings are unpleasant, they want to avoid reading the history and avoid the knowledge. But look at what's happening then. If you, you don't want to read that history, and if you, you try to deny the history, it means then that your life becomes motivated by denial. In other words, denial itself, denial of reality, becomes a defining force in your life. If you don't read that history because you are afraid to feel shame or guilt, then it means that you have organized your life to escape shame and guilt. That means you're motivated by what? Fear. You understand what I'm saying? So, the absence of knowledge means that you're being motivated by negative forces, and you organize your life around negatives. In a sense, then, the life becomes organized around escape, denial, distortion, avoidance, which means then you are even more influenced, but now in a negative way, by history that you don't even know.

That's why the very foundations of mental health is a knowledge of reality. We measure mental illness by the degree to which the individual is out of touch with reality. And if you do not know the reality of the history of African-American people, you do not know the reality of your own history and of your own personality. And to the degree that you lack knowledge of that history, to that degree you are suffering from mental maladjustment. Your behavior then becomes a puzzle to yourself. And you walk around, "Why do I act like this? Why do black folk behave like this?" It's no mystery when you know the history. When you understand your experience. But when you deny knowledge of yourself and you refuse to know yourself, then you are a puzzlement unto yourself, and you're baffled by your own behavior. And it means then that you lose control over yourself. It means that the forces of which you do not know from whence they come are the things now that are controlling your life. Matter of fact, if you faced up to it and integrated it correctly into your life, you'll find that it will just increase your health and stature so much. You cannot exist well with a vacuum in the middle of your mind.

When we look then at the development of the black child, we're looking at a program, a biological program that expresses intent, a folding. And as it enfolds, these children walk and talk and do all the things we just talked about. It's an expression of an internal biological program. And if we are to allow for the full intelligence of our children, we must know how that program unfolds and how it expresses itself. If we are to maximize the intelligence of our children, we must cooperate with that program and meet the demands of that program. But you see, if you're filled with Eurocentric knowledge about the development of European children, and you base the nutrition of our children on that knowledge, you will see then that your behavior and your feeding of these children will be out of sync with the natural unfolding of their biological program. And that's, that's what's happening. And this happens on every other level as well.

Because these children are not only biologically developed, they're not only walking and talking human beings, they are developing emotionally, they're developing socially, they're developing intellectually. Which means all of these facets must be met at the correct time if the child is to maximize its potential. But when you're looking at the intellectual and social and, and the emotional and psychological growth, as well as the physical growth of white children and trying to apply it to black children, you are now going to miseducate your own children. That's what I'll be talking about in the book this fall, looking at these children and saying, "We should present an educational program in line with their development."

This program, this biological program, drives these children into a contact with the world. And of course, as you see your child develops, it, in its development, it, its contact with the world becomes ever and ever larger. Because the very first knowledge a child must conquer, if it is to do well in its, in its later life, it must conquer a knowledge of the Earth. It must conquer the very basic foundations of reality, of space and time, and object relations, and the nature of objects, and so forth. That's why time is spent in play and exploration. As we often say, play is child's work. It is not idling. This is the means by which the child comes to know the laws of physics. This is the means by which it comes to recognize colors and textures and to recognize the differences between a round object and how it moves on the ground as against a square object and its lack of movement or difficulty of movement. It comes to know angles and, and curves and other things. It comes to know the difference between hot and cold, small and large. Because if it never comes to know these things, how can it move efficiently in the world? It cannot. That's why again, we measure adjustment in terms of knowledge of reality.

Imagine what would happen if you lost all of your senses. You couldn't see, you couldn't feel, you couldn't smell, you couldn't taste, you couldn't even feel your own body. Your mind begins to unravel. You start having hallucinations. As a matter of fact, you would have to be taken care of. Other people would have to move you around and take your places. You cannot cut yourself off from reality, which is the function of the senses. The major function of the senses are to detect reality so that the individual can read that reality and move in it. And of course, in these first years, then, the child is sharpening up those senses and the coordination of its body so that it can move on the Earth and adapt to the Earth and adapt the Earth to itself. And it is representing that knowledge of the Earth in its brain. And it uses that knowledge of the Earth in terms of patterns and codes and to work on the Earth itself and to move objects and to shape objects and to manipulate the world so that it can even think in its imagination before it does anything with that built-in knowledge. It can combine and operate to come out with creative solutions in dealing with the world.

That is why then when you have children, as we have seen, locked in orphanages where they just lay in beds all day long without any changes in environment, without any real human relations with caretakers and so forth, sometimes are months and years behind in their intellectual and physical development. Therefore, again, ladies and gentlemen, these brilliant children that we have are too often running into deprived worlds, and they are deprived of the experiences necessary to further stimulate their great potential. And this is the world that racism makes for them. And this is the world that people who have permitted themselves to to be shaped by racism make for their children. And we have to keep that in mind.

Development, as Paris says, is the interaction of the intent within and the content without. Intent moves the child toward interaction out there. The intent within must be given its content from without. Intelligence is the ability to interact, and this ability can grow only by moving from that which is known into that which is not known. We don't have time today, of course. When you read my later publication, I do spend a good time about intelligence because black people misunderstand what we mean by intelligence. We think intelligence is a score that you make on a test. We have chosen a European definition of intelligence, as we have chosen a European definition of education. We are still being educated to be servants. That has not changed, not at all. The fundamental relationship African people have with Europeans today is exactly the same that we had when we were slaves. Yes. Why do I say that? Are you being educated for a job, for a trade? Is that what you're telling? Is that what while you're going to school? Who are you going to work for? For whose profit are you going to work? How is that different from our own great, our own slave great-grandparents working for their slave masters for the profits of their slave masters? Nothing has changed, ladies and gentlemen, nothing has changed. That's right.

Oh, but you're deceived because you think you're studying computer science. You're different. Ah, no. You're no different. That we had skilled slaves. Slaves were very skilled. You know, there were not only house, uh, slaves and house servants and field servants, there were slave craftsmen, skilled craftsmen, mill rights, ship builders, carpenters, blacksmiths. They were into every kind of skill. As a matter of fact, in many areas of the South, at the end of slavery, there were more black skilled workers than there were white skilled workers. So, the idea that you have a skill does not differentiate you from your slave great-great-grandparents. You're still, we are still working for the same people they worked for, for the same reason they worked for them. Nothing has changed. And as they were educated to work for them, we are being educated to work for them. So, the servant slave mentality is still being built into the African mind today. And that mentality requires a different twist in the intelligence than the, than the mentality of masters and controllers of the world. And this is the kind of content these children meet when they go out into the world. It is this evil intent to maintain African people in slavery that is there.

When we do not take control of our children's education, it means then that we are not there to meet the intent of their biological and cultural programming with our own cultural content and with our own intent as a people. And therefore, there's going to be a mismatch between how they are taught, what they are taught, and the whole bit, and their own intellectual growth and development. In a sense, the largest percentage will fail. They will fail. Even if they succeed to a good extent, our successes represent our greatest failures. We're talking paradoxes here, but you must look at things dialectically. What do we mean by that? That as you learn one thing, you become ignorant of another. And therefore, in a certain sort of way, to be educated is to be made ignorant. Since we can't learn all things simultaneously, can we? No, we can't do it. And therefore, in a way, the more you learn of something, the less you learn of what something else. So, you, you have a process of ignorance and knowledge going side by side.

Now, we have to recognize something here, then. This is really tragic. When you are learning the wrong, wrong thing. That's why you've got to be very careful about what you're learning, you see. And that's why you have to be very careful about what your children are learning. We tend to think that if they're learning something and learning a lot of it, they are being educated. They could be made, they could be being made stupid and ignorant. As a matter of fact, under oppression, black people must be made, made ignorant by their education. Yes. The school itself must become the instrument of your dumbness, whether you learn in it or whether you don't, it's made to catch you both ways. That's why those of us who achieve great education in it still often cannot make any contribution to the advancement of our people because we have been educated to serve another rather than ourselves. You have to understand that.

That's why education in itself is not enough. Educated for what? Often tell, "We want our children to read." I have to ask you, read for what? Do math for what? To what end? Why are you learning to read? So that you can increase the profits of your masters? Because I was telling the brother when I was writing over here, Colin Powell reads very well. He reads good enough to drop bombs on Panama and to make war on other nations of color and to jump on Grenada and to make war in the third world, as he set up to do. So, reading well must not quite be enough, ladies and gentlemen. You've got to read for a reason. And one of the reasons why our children don't read as well as they should is because we haven't given them good reasons for reading. And they ask us all the time, "Why should I learn this, Mama?" Yeah. These black astronauts that go into space and put our weaponry out in space so that African nations are literally defenseless against Star Wars raining down 5 and 600 miles out from space, defenseless, unable to defend African people. And yet, we applaud African men going up, deploying those weapons. They do math well, they learn physics well, but in other ways, they have been also made fundamentally ignorant and stupid. You have to understand what I'm saying here. It's not just learning. You've got to learn for the right reasons.

And this is what I say when I talk about intelligence. Intelligence is not a number on an IQ test. It's not a high number on an SAT. It's not even making A's in the best white schools. Because you must recognize, ultimately, ladies and gentlemen, that the basic function of education is to secure a people's survival. That's the basic function of education. Not jobs. That's a secondary function. That's a part of their maintaining their survival, but it's not the primary reason. You look at all cultures, engage in education. There's not a culture that doesn't engage in education because cultural continuity is maintained by educating children in the ways of that culture. And they're educated in the ways of that culture to maintain that culture and to advance its interests and ultimately to try to maintain its very survival. That is the fundamental reason people are educated.

What does it matter if you learn physics and computer science and everything else, and you cannot defend yourself against a military assault by Europeans or a germ warfare assault, as we see here in AIDS, by Europeans? A knowledge of computer science, a knowledge of law, a knowledge of all these other things, matters not at all when you are unable to use that knowledge for your self-defense. And consequently, you see, African-American education, like the education of any other advanced nation, must be defined within the context of how it functions to maintain our very life and being here on Earth. Any other definition does not count. And at this day and age, should Gorbachev and Bush decide that they want to wipe the Earth, the face of this Earth, clean of African people, there's not an African nation that can defend us against these people. And as long as we are not educated to defend ourselves against these people, we are being incorrectly educated. Nothing else matters.

Ultimately, then, intelligence must be defined in terms of the degree to which it solves your problems. The nature of education today prepares you to to solve their problems, not your own. That's why you study their books, you go to their schools, you learn their information, their language, their styles, their perceptions, you know, so that when you come out, you can do a humdinger of a job solving European problems, but you can't solve your own. And then you dare call yourself intelligent. Come on. That's the height of stupidity. That's not intelligence at all.

But you see, ladies and gentlemen, under oppression, the oppressed people must be turned backwards. They must see lies as truth and truth as lies. You see, they must see intelligence as stupidity, as stupidity as intelligence. And I don't have time to go into it tonight, but I can show you where almost every idea we get is twisted around backwards. And it's got to be, if the system is too oppressive. And this is another thing that I talk about when I talk about the education of our children. Ultimately, the education of our children must be an education for solving the problems of black people. And those problems are not the same as those of white folk.

Let me sum it up this way. I don't have time to talk about it in detail. I often say then that the destiny of the white child, by the very nature of the racial status quo today, is conservative. And the destiny of the black child, based on the same racial status quo, by its very nature, must be what? Revolutionary. It's got to be. In other words, the whites who have all of the money and have all of the power, military advantage, economic advantage, social advantage, cultural advantage, all of the other advantages we talk about, they must be educated to maintain and advance those advantages. Therefore, their education is what? Fundamentally conservative, to hold on to what they've got. You understand? That's why you can't give your children the same education. That's why children, they're not in the same place. What are they conserving? Their deprivation. Yeah. And in a sense, we are being educated to conserve our deprivation and to perpetuate our oppression. When you go around this world and you tell me every African nation that you visit, whether it is in the Caribbean, Central or South America, or on the African continent itself, you see African people at the bottom of social, economic, and other ladders. Even in their own countries, other groups are stacked on top of them, one right after the other. The same thing that Marcus Garvey saw when he moved around the world. How can you say you, your children have must have?

The same education as a white child. When you tell me that the wealth of the world is located on the African continent and located in the lands of non-white people. When you tell me that Japan, which has no natural resources at all, and yet it seems as one of the richest and most powerful nations on Earth, that you want your children to have the same education. You have to be out of your minds.

In order for us to be in this condition where Africans starve over wealth, it means then that our minds must have been turned backwards. It means that the European is keeping us in a particular kind of consciousness such that we cannot use our own wealth and our own resources to feed our own children. If then we are to take advantage of our own wealth and of our own possibilities, we must be educated to get that wealth and those possibilities back. And that means what? Revolution. It means turning this world upside down.

It is see some of you sit here and you innocently talk about, "I want to be equal." That's all I want. I want to be equal. Do you know what you that's a revolutionary statement? You know that a lot of people don't recognize that. They think they're non-revolutionary. You know, they think revolutionaries are people who want to shoot and fight. And so now we, we, we just wanted everybody to be the same. Do you know what you're saying? Do you know the tremendous amount of transference of wealth that must take place for Black folk to be equal with white folk? Yeah, the tremendous control over resources, the tremendous ownership of real estate in this country, the real ownership of the means of production. Are you really talking about equality? You can't me and the.

And so if you start to realize what you're saying when you say that you just want to be equal and you want all people to be the same, you'd realize that you are a revolutionary and you're making a revolutionary statement. Because for Black people to be equal in this country will call for a major reconstruction and a major reorganization of this nation. You have to understand that.

You know, in New York, they're asking Blacks who are fighting the Jews in Crown Heights, but how are we going to reduce racial tension? You know, and they keep pushing them. And I, I wish they would ask me that. I'm not here to reduce racial tension. I'm here to increase it. I bring not peace, but what? A sword. Because in a city, as cities all across this country where Blacks don't even own their own communities, where they only spend a nickel out of every dollar they have with themselves, there cannot be racial peace and harmony until that's changed around. And there's going to be some racial turmoil. And while we change it around, it's got to be, we got to get ready for another 10 or 15 or 20 years of racial tension because it's going to take that for us to gain, if you want to call it equality in the system.

You know, you have some groups when we were picketing stores and so forth after they had insulted some of our women, as you're familiar with out here. Well, why don't you get your own stores? And you have to remind them, but you really don't mean that. You're just trying to put me down. Because if I own my own store, how would you make a living? So in a sense, you're, you, in a sense, you're going to object just as much to me owning my own as you're objecting to me now picketing yours. Cuz in the long run, your wealth depends on my not owning something. And therefore, when I start owning, you're going to have another reason to fight me. So let's get used to tension. You're going to catch hell one way or the other. So you may as well catch it in the right way.

This is why I, I talk to Black psychologists who get into these useless arguments with Europeans about the cultural bias of intelligence tests. But you must understand, it's not about cultural bias. It's not about the test at all. It's about power and the rationalization of oppression and control. As soon as you prove to them that you are as smart or smarter than they are, they are still going to do what? Kill you. Of course. This is the way people act in real life. You get rid of your rivals. So the issue is not, "Right now, they say we keeping you down because you're too dumb." Right? But then when you go the other way, "We got to get rid of you cuz you threaten our way of life and our economy." So you may as well get intelligent and get ready and get the battle on. Because either way, you're not.

This is what it's the matter. We have to understand this. And we are so productive as a people. I tell people are marveling about, uh, say, a person like Mike Tyson, 30 million. I hope he managed to get some of that 30 million. See, everybody else is getting on the bandwagon. Looks like it's going to be payday for a whole lot of people. But anyway, that aside. And we get caught up with that. And yet we don't realize. And I try to get our people to recognize that, don't look so much at what he's going to earn. Look at what he's creating. If he's getting 30, he's creating 300 million. Where is that money going? If Michael Jordan is getting so many millions, if he's getting 10 or 15, he must be creating 150 million. Why aren't we getting that end of the deal? Black music sells more music than any other music in the world. Millions and millions and billions of dollars. But where do, where do we get off looking at just the movie star there? The star is only getting a fraction of what they produce.

When you look around, then you will see that Black people have been the most productive and the most wealth-producing people this nation has ever seen. And yet that wealth is not coming to us. When you get into a true Afrocentric education, you see, you will educate your children to get that wealth. You understand? And that's how you get them off welfare and all. And this is how you stop them from shooting us in the street and knocking each other out and all these things. You see? But they must be appropriately educated. But you must understand what intelligence is, how it is built, what the real purpose of education is about, and how it must be given to our children.

And it's at this point, you see, of our not meeting the intent of the biological programs of our children with the content of our culture and the content of the education that they are lost. And it is this thing, then, that we must change. These children, then, to use P's word, I, I, either we either block the child's movement into the unknown and so block intellectual growth, or we propel the child into inappropriate experience. See, this is, and this is how intelligence is killed. See, you don't appropriately set it up.

In a new publication, I talk about continuity. And I mentioned it even here in the developmental psychology of the Black child, about how there's a discontinuity that the Black child faces when it moves into school. Because these schools are not organically related to the culture of our people. There's no bridge that moves between the Black home and the school. The child enters into a completely new world, speaking a different language, with different expectations, different behavioral orientations, different time systems, all kinds of things are going on in there that is quite different from the movement of the child from its home. Remember, its parents are also the teachers. The language that it is speaking in the house is also the language that's being spoken in the school. And yet, we have a situation here of where we expect our children to shed the so-called Black English as soon as they walk through the door of the school, to unlearn the value of Black culture and so forth as soon as they walk through the door. We expect them to go through the process of unlearning their culture and repressing their culture and learning the new culture at the same time, at the same point, as a white child. And therefore, when we give them a test and they don't make the same scores, we start talking about deficiencies, special education, and all the rest of the nonsense that you hear all the time.

That come from people not studying their history, knowing themselves. Who told you that all children must learn the same thing at the same time, at the same age? That's not written in concrete. If you have a different destiny, which I mentioned earlier, if our children are to solve different problems, they must be learning different things at the same age. So consequently, the use of standardized tests and these other tests, they're irrelevant. Because we are not concerned that they have the same knowledge as white children, because they're not going in the same direction as white children. We will be teaching them in terms of what we have to do as a people. And therefore, so-called standardized tests do not apply, particularly those where you then start measuring deficiencies and all this other nonsense.

I try to get across to people the understanding that each culture has a time dimension related to it. Each culture has its own time. You know, Black folks' time is real. African time is real. And there's nothing wrong with it, by the way. Nothing wrong with it. It's problematic because we are operating within the time structures of what? Of another people. But if we had fully our own culture and place, the time would be on time, you see. It only becomes a problem because you, you have two time systems that are clashing, one with the other. And these time systems are related again to a people's history and experience, you see, and to a people's needs and desires and outlook on life. Time is not something that just as abstract and represented by a clock. No, it represents. How your time is represented comes out of your own cultural experience.

Now, what do I mean then by this here? You put your children in these schools and you say, "Well, the European child is in there 45 minutes, and therefore I want my child to have equal education. I'll educate him for 45 minutes." And then you'll complain to me about, "Well, they come from the project, they come from single mother homes, suffer from, you know," and all of this. But yet, with all of these problems, he's got to learn the same thing, in as much as a European child, in the same. What? The same. What you're saying, you see. If children have these kind of problems, then the time structure of their education fit of those problems. Since these are not white children's time. And it is the use of the time systems in these schools based on white culture that, in a, that is why when you really come to understand education, is deepest cized in order them that time. When you restructure this, right? When you get deep enough, because the way you organize in a circle also reflects your cultural experience and needs. Ladies and gentlemen, you give that their needs, their intellect is going to explode and grow.

In this day and age, Black people must know more. We must know what they know. And even, you know. So then we have to understand that our children have been given, have been given great gifts. We've been blessed as a people with such wonderful talent in our children. Our problem then becomes one of investing in these talents. No doubt we have some good church people here. And you'll recall, I think it's Matthew 14:25 or something, the first journey leaves the servants with so many talents or money and returns to see how they invested that money. And those, and so you had one, he got so much and he invested, invested it and it doubled or whatever, and the master rewarded him for that. And another invested a certain amount, didn't. Then you had one who had all kinds of excuses, "Oh, you reap where you didn't so, and you're such a terrible master, and you this, and you that." And so, "I just hid my talent under, buried it in the ground. Here it is." What happened? Even the talent he had was what? Taken and given to those who had more. As a matter of fact, the verse says, "To he, to he who has, what more shall be given." That's right. And he who is not, even that which he has shall be what? Taken from him.

You have been given beautiful and wonderful children. The problem becomes then, how much are you willing to invest in this great talent that you've been given? If you don't invest in this talent, and if you don't invest correctly, your children and their minds will be taken away from us and used to enrich another people who already have more than they know what to do with. And even the little we have shall be taken from us. And as the servant, as happened to the servant, we shall be thrown outside with a gnashing of teeth, wailing and mourning. We've been given these children. And this is what's going on, ladies and gentlemen. Our lack of investment in them means that they come to haunt us in these streets out here. We come to fear them. It means even those who get a so-called education, get that education to increase the wealth of the other people, not of ourselves. That's what happens when investment is incorrect, or when we don't invest at all. Their lives are taken from us.

While I'm on this thing here, there are some of us, we've been made in these churches to believe that we don't have to do anything but depend and wait on the Lord. Yes, and God will provide. But God has already provided by giving you children with such beautiful minds and bodies. You've already been blessed. God is not wasting talent and time. He did not give these children the kind of brains that I just got through talking about for them not to use them. It is a blasphemy for them to grow up and not use their brains and minds. And yet, we have some people who think all they got to do is sit back and wait on the Lord. Reread your Bible. I said, people don't read the Bible very well, you know. And I don't have time to talk about it today, but I wish I could cover the whole story of Moses, which is such a beautiful example of political science. Fantastic example of political science.

And often it becomes a little fun to ask church members, "How many of you realize that the children of Israel were not really converted to God, even after all those miracles?" Yeah. And yet, it's right there in front of your face. They still hadn't been. They still weren't into God at all. Moses had to go up to get what? Laws and rules to come back down to unify them. Which meant that they didn't have all the laws and rules when they came out, did they? No, not at all. And then when he got back, they were down there partying, worshiping of the gods. After all of these Passover miracles and splitting the Red Sea and everything else, they are still praising another god. All right. Some people talk about these people being chosen. And I said, they were chosen because they were so hardheaded. So God figured, "If I can convince this group, the rest is easy." Yeah. You know, because people are chosen by God, don't mean that they're necessarily the better people. You know, we confuse that. You know, we got a lot of people confused. This issue, "Well, they God's chosen." It could be chosen like a bully is chosen in the class. "He's the baddest one, so let me get this one. I straighten this one out. The rest of the class is okay." You know? So to be chosen doesn't necessarily mean that you're better. It could mean that you're the worst of the lot. Yes.

And when you read their history, you will see them in constant rebellion against God. Constant rebellion. They nearly hung Moses about four or five times. That's right. But see, people don't read. You see, they don't really read. They don't read what's right in front of them. Not at all. Moses was, was saved within an inch of his life many times. Yes. I ask people, "How many you realize that Moses killed 3,000 people? Ordered the death of 3,000?" Why did he order the death of 3,000 people? Read, read it and see. There was also an ordering of the killing of 24,000 people. Remember that one? The Midianite story. What is the political science reason for that which went on there? He teaches a whole lessons about unity and unity of purpose. And how when a nation is surrounded by its enemies, when it is caught in the wilderness, it cannot afford a great deal of dissension and splits within itself. It may even restrict the marrying of foreign women, right? Yes. Oh, yes. Because they were out there marrying those women outside of their group. Yes. Bringing those women into their group, bringing foreign values and everything into their group, creating confusion and stuff within their camp. They had not yet come into the promised land. They were still surrounded by their enemies. They could not afford at this point to extend individual liberty so that people can have any kind of women they wanted to. You have to understand that the individual freedom must be measured against the total freedom of the people. And when the total people are threatened, is why some of you mix-married people at this junction. We object to your marrying because at this point, with Black people who are threatened by enemies on all sides, whose future is crowded, who are struggling to maintain their very survival, they need as little confusion and dissension within their camps as possible. If you're going to marry them, then stay in their camp. Because if you remember in the story, after they were chopping so many heads, there was one prince who was going to come on in with the foreign woman anyway on his arm. And one of the men in that camp, I forget his name, went in and killed both of them. Do you know what happened to the man that killed both of them? He was rewarded by God. And it says, "Oh, because you did this, I'm going to let you see the promised land." Read your Bible. You don't read. See, people don't. You listen to these preachers and then you read only what they preach about, but you don't really read with your own eyes. You see?

But the major point I'm trying to get off here, I'm getting point, but the major point, the major thing I'm trying to get to here is, of course, the issue of the promised land. And I'm getting to these people who are going to wait on Jesus. You see? And and when they read their Bible, I, uh, God promised these people this land, didn't he? Didn't he promise it to them? Yeah, he promised it to them. But there was something interesting about that promise. When they got there, he didn't say, "Step right up, step right in." You know? No, he didn't. Did it? "Oh, you've arrived. Go in and enjoy yourself." Uh-uh. He came to Moses and said, "Moses, you got to send in an intelligence team into this land that I have promised you. And that team has to do surveillance. It has to get the lay of the land, the lay of the cities, count their armies, count what they eat, even bring back some samples of how they eat and so forth and so on." Ain't that what he did? Why this all-knowing, all-seeing God could have just handed Moses all the information, couldn't he? But he didn't do it, did he? Even though he had promised them the land, he still didn't say, "Here, Moses, this is the way it is." Or better yet, he didn't take his lightning rod and just kill all the people over there and say, "Okay, go ahead on in." Because he told Moses, Moses would have to what? Did Moses have to do to get that land? They had to what? Fight. They had to go to war. They had to go to war to get a land promised them by God. That's right. You must understand what that is. God promises, and this, and you got to fight for it.

And they went over there and got psyched out. "All them, that was Aaron and two of them. There are giants in the land. We can't beat them. They're so big, they're so tall." Whoa, whoa. You know? And boy, the Israelites were having fits that night. That was another night they nearly hung Moses, by the way. He was within an inch of his life, you know. They almost hung him. "You brought us all this way to make us starve? We were doing better in Egypt. Take us back." They got so raising so much hell, God even got mad with him. So let me get to him. I'm going to second. He, no, no, he negotiated with God. Hold on now. You know what would look like? You know, you, you promise. See, people that saying you brought them all this way now, and you killed them. Read it. You don't have to believe me. Read it. A very human negotiation went on between the two things.

But what to say as my time is running, that they had to fight for even that which was promised them. And the problem was, even though it was promised to them, they were still spooked by the people they were to fight. And what happened after that? They were then sentenced to remain in the wilderness for another, what? 40 years or whatever, so that that scared, cowardly, civil, uh, group would die out. And only those who had faith that they could defeat the other people would inherit the land. And only those two that said, "We can win. We can fight them. We can win, man. If we would just go ahead and fight." They saw the land. And this reminds me again, very much, you know, of our situation here today. We have a land promised to us, ladies and gentlemen, but we got to fight for it. We got to struggle for it. Our children have been well-armed with intelligence and creativity, beautiful bodies and minds, and so forth. But they must be armed to win the land promised to us. It's not going to be handed to us. But if we permit them to be psyched out, as they were psyched out at this point, then we will be lost in the wilderness for another generation or two.

To a good extent, our young men and our people who are rolling in these, and in these back alleys with crack and heroin and the other kinds of things, are those people who have been psyched out by the white man, who have come to accept the white man as supreme and invincible, who have come to accept the belief that they do not contain within themselves the talents and abilities to transform this world and to change its very nature and make it a home for themselves. And therefore, they have given up. And in their agony and in their fear, they try to steal their pain and their pain and their cowardice and their emasculation with drugs and other forms of narcotics and psychological rationalizations. And many then commit suicide. And many hurt and damage each other.

The white man is but a man. He bleeds like any other man. His mind and his brain is no greater than any other man. And he can be defeated. And we have the will and the power to do so. But until we exercise that will, we will remain in the wilderness, and we shall suffer and die in that wilderness.

And I'll just wrap it up here. There's so many things. But sometimes then, what we have here, what I'm saying here, then, is our children and that magnificent mind that they've been given is destroyed by a system of racism. And it's very important that we understand what racism is and what white supremacy is. Many people think, you see, that racism means attitudes that people hate you. Racism has very little, ultimately, to do with hate or negative attitudes or stereotypes. See, a lot of us think that once we really convince these Europeans that we are Egyptians, you know, and you know, they really learn about our great and glorious history, they're going to step back and give us some of their money. You got another thought coming. Oh, they, oh yeah, you Egyptian, you're right. But you still ain't getting none of this money. Oh yeah, you, you wrote first, and you did this first, but we're still holding on to this bread. We're still holding on to this power because we are addicted to it. We believe it belongs to us. You see?

So in the end, after you reveal all of this knowledge to them, there is no automatic shift in power relations. The battle we are fighting, ladies and gentlemen, is not so much a battle of truth and lies, but it is a struggle for power. And you have to face that. That's a reality. You can see in the magazine here last week or two weeks ago, whatever, Newsweek was, "Cleopatra Black?" And they even made some concessions. But they're only making concessions to maintain the system. There's not going to be any fundamental change. None whatsoever. Because ultimately, you see, racism, as defined by W.E.B. Du Bois in his book, racism can be seen to systematically provide economic, political, psychological, and social advantage for whites at the expense of Blacks and other people of color. The determining factor of race relations is not prejudice. It's not really stereotypes. That's just to support it and rationalize it, you see, toward Blacks. But rather, the superior position of whites in institutions, ideological as well as structural, which maintain it. Racism is more effectively analyzed as a strategy for the maintenance of privilege than as prejudice. You see, even if I know you, the great sons and daughters of Egypt, I still like this money I got in my pocket. And I still don't plan to turn it loose to you. And that's what I've been struggling all along. My denying to you that you were still a part of that struggle to maintain my wealth and advantage. Now that you forced this truth on me, I'm going to use another reason to maintain my wealth and my advantage. So the ball game goes on.

If we view racism as a culturally sanctioned rational response to struggles over scarce resources, and this is the thing you got to understand here, that's at the base of this thing. A struggle over what? Resources. That there are not enough resources for everybody to enjoy them equally. Well, particularly when some people want to live high off the hog. See, when I talk about the Black male, I try to get to get this understood that the male is designed for struggle and war. Yes. And I know some of you feminists don't want to deal with it, but it's set up that way. I try to get people to understand that the definition of what it means to be a man is a social definition. There is a difference between being a male and a man. Yes. That is why male boys must be trained to be men. Men are created and trained to be. We must understand that. You also must understand that the word man, man is a nurturing term. Yes. A man is a nurturer of his people. He does not have babies, but he still nurtures his culture by protecting those babies, by protecting the family, and by protecting the culture that is his sustenance. This is how he nurtures, you see. That is why what it means to be a man must be defined by the group, you see. So that a man, in defending his manhood, defends his family and defends his people. That's why the definition is what? A social one.

When you study the history of African people, then you will see that a boy became a man when he showed and demonstrated his ability to feed his people and to do what was necessary to gain resources to maintain the life and survival of his people. That is why when he was sent out to make a kill, this is not a symbolic thing. And after he made that kill, he would bring the larger portion of that kill back and lay it before his mother to indicate to her, "Just as you fed me when I was a boy and nurtured me, now I have arrived at the point where I am to feed you." In other words, the ultimate definition of manhood is inextricably related to the concept of producer. A boy moves into manhood when he moves out of the position of consumer into the position of producer. You must understand that. And he is not given the title of a man until he proves that he is a producer and not a consumer.

Consumer under European oppression, we have permitted the Black man to define himself in terms of his consumption and not in terms of his production. And therefore, he will kill another Black man for a pair of sneakers and for jump and garbage. And we see him selling poison and death to our children so that he can buy and consume and not produce and protect his people. As a matter of fact, he becomes a menace to the very life of his own people. And what do we mean here then? We mean then, if the word man, which is a social definition, is not defined correctly, then your males become antisocial. That is why we must go in the process now of redefining under these conditions what it means to be a man. And that is why a large part of Afrocentric education is involved in the training of men. Because there comes a time when men must struggle with other men to feed their families. There comes a time because resources are scarce that men must be prepared to go to battle with other men to feed their people. That's what it's about.

European man came over here. It was not a result of his organizational ability that built this great nation. It was the result of the fact that he attacked and destroyed other men and established himself on top of those people and laid a foundation for his people and built himself an army so that he could protect his people and feed his children and dare other men to challenge him. In African societies where the society depends on cattle, and often that cattle has to be rustled. Now, you can get into a moral deal with this if you want to. The boy was not seen as a man until he rustled his first cattle. And that meant that he had to go through guile and courage and strength enough to take the cattle from someone else to protect his people. That's what it's about. And therefore, Black men must come to realize that if the Black race is to survive, and if it involves in our struggling with the white race or any other race, they must be prepared to undertake that struggle and win. And those who have not decided on that death, then must die the death of cowards and must join their enemies in the killing of themselves and the destroying of their own people.

And this is what we are facing here today, ladies and gentlemen. It's a struggle over scarce resources. The Black man is on the point of extinction if we are not careful as a people. Why is there so much violence out here between us? And there are many reasons, but one of the major reasons is that the Black man is no longer of great value in this society. In other words, his youth is diminishing rapidly. Now, what do we mean by that? You know, we, we pat ourselves on the back about how we survived slavery. Oh, we survived slavery, and we praise to the Lord, and he got us through. Well, that's fine. I have no problem with that. But you also survived slavery. We also survived slavery because we were a valuable commodity. The white man didn't fill out insurance forms and finance these ships and all these other things just to bring you to America to kill you. He brought you to America to keep you alive. And it was in his interest as an investment property to maintain your life. So besides the Lord seeing about us staying alive, there was some white folk who also saw about us staying alive because if we weren't alive, who was going to tend the plantations and do the other kind of thing? At one time, a Black slave was much more valuable, sometimes, than a free Irishman. Yes, definitely. Because there was an investment there. There was wealth in these people. You understand? And therefore, it was in the interest of many of these masters to maintain the life of our people. And this, and this, and in this sense, then, we were exploited. You see, because we produced value.

This continued right up until after the Second World War, when we were hired in their industries and all these other things to continue to produce and add to this company's strength, this country's strength. But now, let's look at this situation today and ask ourselves, in this day of automation and so forth, is the Black man any longer needed in this society? Can this society survive without it? You see, now that these companies, you have companies now that find it easier to send information to Ireland and Scotland and other places, have that information processed over there and brought back over here. It costs them less to do it that way than to hire and train people in this country to do it. McGraw-Hill has all of this magazine subscription information processed in Ireland because those people over there have a direct connection to their computers right here in New Jersey. So they talk to each other as if they're in the same room. And they pay these people $11,000 a year or less than that. And for the same kind of work, they'd have to pay us $20 or $30,000. Now they got people doing the work of MBAs that have paid $45,000. They're paying people in Ireland, the Philippines, and other places $20,000 or less to do the same work. In other words, then, the new world order involves the fact that the United States is now arriving in the position where it can hire people anywhere in the world. It does not have to hire them within its own borders. And otherwise, it also can import them into its country to do its work. Which is one of the reasons why they feel no compulsion anymore to invest in the education of Black people.

If you then read the history of this country, you recognize that something is coming. Why was the Indian destroyed? In good part because he was economically useless. And his destruction did not represent a loss from their point of view. We are moving toward that position of economic uselessness. And if history serves us right, that is followed by decimation. And often, if it is not followed by direct decimation, which is occurring too, it follows by the twisting of the mentality of our people in such a way that we literally begin to kill ourselves and to destroy ourselves. That's why the subtitle of my book is "The Psychodynamics of Black Self-Annihilation in Service of European Domination." The Black on Black criminal is an ally of white domination. He is a mercenary for white folk. As a matter of fact, though, and in a sense, then, instead of the white man having to lynch you directly, he will use your own hands to do it. But frankly, that is not really new in the history of Black people, is it? As a matter of fact, when we look at the history of imperialism, we see a situation where Africans under the captaincy of Europeans were used to fight other Africans to conquer African territory. Where Africans from the Caribbean were used to maintain European territory in Africa. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, this imperial system has used Black men against Black men throughout its total history. And so consequently, what we see here today of Black men killing each other is but really a dramatic example of what has been going on all the time. And it dramatizes the very nature of imperialism. Because the very nature of imperialism means that the subordinate group must be used to operate against its own interest. People do not build an empire to favor the ones conquered. They build an empire to favor themselves. So therefore, the one conquered must be used against themselves. That's what imperialism is about.

See, some of you who are out here are deceived. Oh, man, some of you out here deceived. You know, you look at old Thomas, he's nominated. You look at a few other Negroes, and they're moving up into society, and you swear America is getting better. Remember this, ladies and gentlemen, about imperialism. Usually, imperialism is a situation where a small, relatively small population is ruling over a large population. Usually, the imperial group is much smaller in population and so forth than the people it rules over. Which means then, it reaches a point where it has to recruit from its subordinate population to maintain control of its empire. Do you understand what I'm saying? And therefore, some people in the subordinate population will move up in the system and will be given some power. So the movement of our people up in this system and their gaining of a little power doesn't imply that the system is dying. It can imply that it is well and alive. That it has just reached the point where it is recruiting from our own ranks to work against us as a people. And therefore, both on the bourgeois level and on the level of the streets, the Black man is at war against himself in the interest of imperialistic racism. This is what you have here. And you got to escape this.

Oh, I've eaten up some of Brother Akbar's time. I got to let you go. All I can say is this: Keep the faith. We're going to win this thing. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. I'm not here today to leave you with a message of despair. Because in a sense, now you know what to say. The darkest hour is just before dawn. There's a silver lining in these dark clouds I've talked about here today. We are talking about this merely to confront reality. And once confronting reality, we shall take care of business. Thank you kindly for your attention.