Dr. Amos Wilson Black Love Black Male and Black Female Relationships

It's a pleasure. I was asked to speak on male-female relations, and I will do that, as well as, uh, deal with some other issues related to the survival and the advancement of the black community.

I'd like also to invite you down in about two weeks to our new location, as the introducer indicated here. Uh, I am part owner of the Harlem Graphics Arts Center, a print center, copy center, uh, book center. We'll have quite a collection of books, both Afrocentric books and other general books. We are right at 125th Street, 5th Street, near 7th Avenue. Uh, I'm right down the street from the Apollo Theater, on the same side. I'd like to see you come down. We are trying there not only to, uh, build a business but to build an institution to serve as an example for the youth and others and adults, uh, of what can be done if black people work together. We recognize that, uh, it's necessary for us to build an economy to provide jobs for ourselves and for our children, and this is our first step in doing that. We recognize that we must get access to our own monies and use those monies to our advantage as people, and that's what Harlem Graphic Arts is about. We will also give courses there that will provide education that is relevant, relevant to the black community as well. So I hope when you're down in that, uh, part of the woods, you'll come by and see us. We'll be happy to see you.

Now, we're going to talk a bit about, uh, men-women relations. The thing that we have to recognize, of course, is that the relationship between men and women, or between a man and a woman, is not an isolated, uh, situation. That the way you love one another, the way you love your girlfriends, your boyfriends, your husbands, your wives, your children, is rooted in a political social system. Love, it just does not flow out of your heart, you know, and it's just not natural like we tend to think of it as being. It is influenced by your own experience as an individual, as well as by your experience as a people.

One of the reasons why I wrote the, um, book, *The Developmental Psychology of the Black Child*, is the fact that I wanted to bring to people's attention that you just couldn't read a standard book on developmental psychology and apply what was found in that book to the black child, because black people have a unique history. The history of the black child is not the history of the white child. The history of the black parent is not the history of the white parent. The political social position that black people are in in this country is not the political social position of whites. The psychology of black people flows from the history and experience of black people.

If you went into a psychologist's office, he would want, or she would want, to know your own personal history, because it is only through understanding your personal history as an individual that your behavior can be understood. A psychologist or psychiatrist could not take the history of another individual and just apply it to you and say, "Well, I know this other person very well, so therefore you must behave this way, too." And the values they have and the ideas they have must be the same you have. The only difference between you and this other person is that, uh, they have a different color from you. That is not the way psychology is built. Ladies and gentlemen, you can only be understood as an individual in terms of your own history and experience.

When we talk about then the psychology of black people, we must understand that psychology in terms of the experience of our people. You cannot go and get a psychology from another people whose history and experience has been different and just impose it upon yourself. You will create problems. And therefore, I looked at the history and experience of black people. I talked about psychology in those terms. We must talk about education in those terms, business in those terms, and anything else that is relevant to us in those terms. We must recognize that the love relationship between the black mother and her child, between the black father and his child, between the mother and the father and the sisters and the brothers in the black family is shaped by the political social situation in which we as people live, and that has to be taken into consideration. So love, you see, under those circumstances, does not just flow up out of the heart. It's influenced by social political circumstances.

If there was a difference in the family in terms of who was the darker or who was the lighter, or who had the good hair or who had the bad hair, that means that racism in the political social system has entered into the parent. And the parent then transfers that racism, even in the way he or she relates to the children, onto the child and creates in that child then an attitude toward itself and toward the world that flows from being in a particular social political position. You see then, when the white psychologist talks about, uh, the parent and the child, they can talk as if it is the relationship between the parent and the child that makes the child what it is. However, when we talk about the black parent and the black child, we must talk about that black parent's relationship to the white world, that black parent's political position in the world. How black people have been dealt with in this society must be considered. And all of these things influence, to a good extent, how that black parent is going to relate to his or her child, what they're going to say to their children, how they're going to prepare their children for life, how they are going to express their love or not love toward their children. So then, you must understand then that love, what we call love, is shaped, created, and maintained by social political systems. Therefore, as you will see when we go through this lecture, you must see how then your social life and existence itself is going to influence the way you relate to your husbands, to your wives, to your boyfriends, to your sisters, and to your brothers.

I want to talk a moment or two, uh, in terms of, uh, what we call, um, the relationship between love and community. I want to want us to understand that love between a man and a woman, or between a parent and a child, thank you, is ultimately a gift to the community itself. Thank you kindly. I have emphasized before that when you have a child, you just don't have a child for yourself. The child just does not belong to you as a mother or as a father. A child is born into a community of people. The child is a gift to the community because the child is not going to live in a world by itself. It's going to live in a community where it relates to other people. Its behavior is going to influence other people in the community. If it turns out to be a delinquent or crime-oriented, it's going to negatively affect the lives of other people. The community has to share in educating that child. The community has to share in supporting that child, feeding that child, providing jobs for that child, providing protection for that child. The community, if the child is not, does not turn out well, has to provide rehabilitative services and supportive services and other kinds of services for that child. So then, when a child is born, it is not only the responsibility of the parents who gave it birth, but it is also a community responsibility. And so consequently, when one has children, one must not only think in terms of the, uh, how the child is going to relate purely to the mother or the father that gave it birth, but also how it is going to relate to the people itself. A child must ultimately grow up to contribute to the community, to the community's ability to support it and to support its family, to protect its interests, because it is only with the community's support that the family and the child itself continues to survive.

So we must keep in mind then that children are ultimately born to the community because they will influence the nature of the community. If the children that are born in the community are self-hating, as we will talk later on, or have problems with their identity or self-control or destructive and so forth, you will see a community that will fall apart, a community that is at odds with itself, a community that is divided, a community that by its very nature will continue to destroy other children and other people. The greatest gift that a parent can give to a community is the gift of beautiful, healthy children, well-behaved children, children who know themselves, who have a firm identity and so forth. Children who are able to love healthily and love in a righteous type of manner. So in a sense, you may not be great, or you may not be famous, or whatever, but we all have the potential of being good parents, and that is a major contribution to the advancement of a community and to its, its, uh, survival.

I say that also to say that love is a gift to the community as well. How well you love yourself as an individual. The sins of the first generation are visited now until the 14th generation. Often it will take sometimes three and four or more generations for a family to live out the hate between a mother and a father. The children get it, their children get it, their children's children get it, and it can go right on before it's finally worked through. Uh, the children's reactions to poor love relations between mothers and fathers can lead to their own personal problems, their own interpersonal problems with other people as well. Those problems sweep out into the community. Children suffering from a feeling of a lack of love from their own parents may then deal with that by becoming delinquent in their behavior, by not reaching their own potentials, by not, uh, functioning in schools the way they should, by themselves getting into trouble, by themselves becoming impregnated at too early an age and so forth. And this in itself affects community services, community resources, the kind of community that the individual lives in. So when we love as men and women, as sisters and brothers, this love also is rooted in community and is necessary for community functioning. Love, romantic love or whatever love, is not a selfish, uh, undertaking, and it should not be perceived as something just between you and your partner. It moves beyond that. It's going to influence more people than just you and your partner. It's going to influence the community itself. And consequently then, the community has a right to concern itself with the so-called nature of love.

Love, along with the related concepts such as oneness. And we see people wanting to get a sense of oneness when they're in love, unity, uniting, being together, identity, identifying, becoming one with the person you love. It becomes interesting. We talk about love in terms of blood, blood relations. And yet the person you marry is really not your blood relation in actuality. But yet somehow that love, if it's right, becomes as strong, or sometimes even stronger, than blood relations. You see? So because love tends, as we see it in this culture, to unite and bring about identity between two or more people that goes beyond their biological relatedness, that often is stronger than their biological relatedness. Love, along with commitment, caring and sharing, belonging, relatedness, commonality, having things in common, is that which creates a community. Is that which supports a community and maintains a community. So then, the thing that keeps a community together is, of course, the nature of love that inheres in its families and between its families, and ultimately the nature of love that is put out toward the community itself and toward one's people. And all of this influences the nature of romantic love.

When you want to destroy a community, when you want to destroy a people, as we will talk a bit about later on, you destroy the nature of their romantic love, destroy their ability to love one another in a healthy sort of way. And we will see. When you see and you think about the problems we have as people and as individuals in loving each other romantically, you must recognize, in good part, that problem and those problems have been set up by a political social system. Because we shall see that love, the love that we have for one another, is the greatest threat to the people who rule over us. And it is necessary for those people who rule over us, and who rule over African people the world over, if those people are to stay in power, they must destroy our ability to love each other in a healthy sort of way. This is why, even if you're concerned with your individual love for your boyfriend or your husband, you cannot separate that love from what is going on in the world politically and socially, because the nature of that love is defined by political social circumstances. And if you can't understand why you have problems in your love relations, perhaps a good part of it is because you have not taken time to understand the nature of the political social situation in which you live. Because you have been made to think that your love is merely the concern of you and your partner and not rooted in what is going on in the world. Love is a part of the world you live in. The community ultimately defines love.

Anyway, you see, many of us are raised in this culture, and we've been raised to think love is, is, is something, uh, just natural and just flows out of living. I'm speaking now particularly of romantic love, but actually, you have to learn how to love. Love is taught to you. You, uh, teenagers, you're being taught what love is. How are you taught that? You're taught it by listening to these records all the time. And you hear your idols singing about love. "You make me feel so good. I can't eat. I can't sleep. I can't live without you." And then what do the people say? "I must be in love." You see? And, uh, you know, "I can't go on. Here's my heart. Don't break it." You see, uh, "My life has no meaning," and all of these kinds of things. And you read what? Poetry. And of course, many of you are in this age now where you're writing from the city of love and from the street of this and so forth. I've forgotten my old rhymes when I was a kid. You know, we all wrote those things. Uh, you look at TV and you see *Dallas*, and you see *Knots Landing*, and you see show after show after show, and you think you're just looking at entertainment, but actually they're teaching you what love is, or what love is about, how you're supposed to feel when you're in love. You see, if you feel this way, if you can't eat and you can't get him off your mind, if you dream about him all the time, if shivers run up your spine, what you see, and all that, that means you're in love. In a sense, if there was no one around to tell you that, you wouldn't feel it. You wouldn't feel love.

Now, romantic love, believe it or not, is only in this culture about two or three hundred years old. Prior to, say, the 1700s, people didn't marry for love. In fact, they saw love, what we call love, as a terrible basis for marriage. They fought against it. They married in terms of maintaining family lines, in terms of maintaining property, in terms of maintaining political and other kinds of associations, class associations. Your husband might have been picked out for you at birth. You might not have even seen your husband until your wedding day. You would not have had anything to say about who your husband or your wife was. That would have been a result of negotiation between your parents, between your whole clan and your family. Because these families recognized that when marriage takes place between a man and a woman, the families are married as well. That you don't marry just an individual, you marry into a family. You see? And consequently, it was the family that came first in determining marriage and marital relation. Now, this sounds very harsh to us today because we've been brought up, uh, with this other concept of marriage that is, you marry who you love. But it took, we can trace the history of marriage based on romantic love, and it, to a great extent, was built on novels and poems that came out of the courts of Europe to a very great extent, which is why we still use the word "courting." Many of those people had nothing to do all day but, uh, develop rules about how you used to court and how you deal with the man and woman and so forth. And eventually, that worked its way down into the society. Poets started writing poems about love and emotion, and eventually the average person started picking it up. As the society changed, uh, toward industrialization and so forth, and the families began to break up, where aunts and uncles and three and four generations didn't no longer live in the same household, then people started making their own individual choices about who they would marry and so forth. And often, those choices started being made in terms of emotions and feelings.

We have found out in this culture, though, that merely marrying someone because you love them does not guarantee the unity of the marriage, hardly anymore than the other forms of marrying people, as well. But the point then I'm trying to make here then is this: that even the community you live in defines what love is and teaches you to love in one way or the other. So even in that sense, love is community, and it is a part of community to a good extent. Some of the problems that we have in this country and in our communities is a result of the wrong definition of what love is, where the community has come to accept a concept of love that works against its interest. When people are getting married because they are in love, and yet half of those marriages or more fall apart, and the other half, half of those are living in conflict and hostility, then it must make you think that there is something wrong in the way we define love in this system and in our community. It means there is a time, perhaps, for the community to redefine what love is and what love is about. It is in your interest as young people that the community teaches you a new form of romantic love and loving one another. Why? Because it will enhance your ability to stay with the man you love and to stay with the woman you love, to keep your children with you in your family, to develop healthy people, and to develop a healthy community. So your interest, even as young people, should be in how your community defines what love is. Not only should you listen to these records or just dance to these records, you should take out some time and think about what kind of love is this record projecting. Is this a kind of love that is ultimately going to be productive for me and my boyfriend, for me and my husband, for me and my children? And you may find that some of these records you're listening to are really not in your best interest. While they're making you feel good and they're good for the party, when you look down the road, the way they're defining love and how a man should relate to a woman may ultimately destroy you and destroy your love relationship, the one that you want to keep so much.

So then, there is a very definite relationship between love and community. And the community itself has a very deep and abiding interest in what love is and how love should be, uh, defined and expressed.

I want to indicate here then, uh, some things about the consequences of what we call the love instinct. Freud has a very interesting theory of, of, uh, what he calls the id. We won't go into detail, uh, there, but however, he sees the id as containing two major instincts, along with others: a love instinct, what he calls sometimes Eros, and a death instinct, you see. And we'll see in a minute what he meant by that death instinct, and it's a very paradoxical kind of theory, once you think of it, particularly about the death instinct, the idea that people also have an instinct that moves them toward death as well. But, um, when you get a little chance for some heavy thinking, I think you might see it's not as paradoxical as it sounds. In a sense, we are born to die, and in a sense, we die from living. So death is almost a side effect of living. So they are kind of intrinsically related one to the other.

But love, let's look at the love instinct and some, and how that instinct is expressed. Certainly, it's expressed sexually. And certainly, it's expressed in terms of reproduction. So love and sexuality are closely related because they lead to the maintenance of the species and the reproduction of the species. Love involves the preservation of oneself. If you love yourself, you love your body, you love who you are, you love your family, you love your man, you love your woman, you love your community, you want to preserve those things. You want to see them grow and develop. And this is, of course, what the love instinct does. It not only preserves the self, it preserves others. You want to preserve the people that you love. The love instinct expresses itself in procreation, in the giving of birth, in reproducing. This is how, of course, we maintain the life of the group itself.

Love also is involved in growth, because life is about growth. It is about development. It is about transcendence. It is about enhancement. It is about fulfilling one's potential. The child, the little baby, is filled with potential. It is born a few inches long, but it has the potential to grow feet long. You see, it is born then at a certain level of mental activity, and yet there's a potential of great intellectual growth, social growth, psychological growth, and all types of growth. Love will permit this potential to express itself, to actualize itself. So you can see love is an enhancing element, a growth element, a developing element. Love then that exists in a community is the element that makes that community grow and develop and fulfill its potential. When a community is shrinking and falling into destruction, you can bet there is an absence of the right kind of love in that community. When it is falling in upon itself, and the people are killing one another or hurting one another or destroying one another, you can bet it is because the love instinct there has been misdirected or is not functioning in the way it should function.

Love, of course, is geared towards survival, protection, and liberation, freeing people instead of restricting them. It moves toward discovery, goodness, and healing. Love is reconstructive. It repairs the individual. It rebuilds the individual and stimulates growth and development. Love is elation. And I'm sure this is the side of love we hear most about, isn't it? Elation, euphoria, feeling good. Love has its own natural high, its own euphoria. When you're loved by your family, you love, and when you love your family. When your family has permitted you to grow and develop and fulfill your potential. When your community is concerned and cares about you and shares with you, and you do the same with it. When you can sit down and not be afraid to walk the streets of your community, not be afraid to speak and say hello to people on the streets of your community. When you can have a decent conversation without feeling you have to manipulate someone or someone manipulates you, there is a beauty and there is a euphoria about that kind of feeling. There is a tendency to smile, and a tendency to be happy, and a tendency to be free, and a tendency to be honest and open. This is what love does when it operates well within a community itself. It takes you beyond yourself. That is what we call transcends. It moves out beyond. You glow, and people pick up your glow. Your love becomes infectious, and people reflect it back on you, and you reflect it back on them, and therefore you feel good. It feels wonderful to dance and to sing and to be even a little silly sometimes, and to joke with them sometimes, and to play with people that you love, and you just, it just makes you glow with health and glow with happiness, and it's a beautiful kind of thing, and you naturally want to stay with your people. You naturally want to be around your community. You naturally want to be a part of its movement forward and so forth. So love has in it a built-in beauty and glory, a built-in euphoria.

We're going to see then that love can develop from love. I think, uh, Whitney Houston has a song out now. What's the title of it? The current one. I know you know it's very popular. Pardon me. "The Greatest Love of All." And part of it is, "She found her love when she found what?" She found herself, and she found her love in herself. You cannot love, as we shall see in a moment, others without self-love. You cannot be filled with hatred and hostility toward yourself and love somebody else in a healthy manner. You can only get to know other people through knowing yourself. It is through the self that you reach others. You will only get to know yourself if you're surrounded by people who love you and love you in a healthy sort of way. As we shall see, when you're around people who don't love you in a healthy sort of way, you're going to hide parts of yourself from yourself. You're going to become blind to parts of yourself. You're going to be caught up in the emotions of hatred and hostility and revenge and resentment, and your energy and your tension is going to be caught up in those nasty emotions, and you're going to be a nasty person as a result thereof. And as I'll show you in a minute, you're going to be able to love. You're going to be able, with all of this nastiness, because nasty people do fall in love, okay? Hateful people fall in love, and we'll see. But we'll see in a minute. It's going to be a peculiar kind of love. It's going to be a love ultimately, though, that's going to destroy them and the people they love. Many people, I would say a large percentage of children and wives and husbands are destroyed in the name of love. "I'm doing this to you because I love you." And yet, when you look at what's being done, it's often projecting hate, but hate covered with a veneer of love.

So then, love that comes from love permits the self and other people to develop. Love that comes from love is liberating. Love that comes from love permits other people to develop their potential. We will see later on that love that comes from hate is love that's destructive. Is love that restricts. Is love that's possessive. Is love that makes the other person a servant of oneself. Is love that ultimately degrades other individuals. You see? So in a family, a child has to be raised with love, in a loving sort of way, so that when it loves, it then will create more lovely people and lovely children.

Let's look a moment then at the hate instinct. We talked about the love instinct, or the life instinct, and now let's look at the death instinct. And there is a death instinct within us. Freud talks about it as saying, uh, in man, there's an inherent need or desire for him to return to his origins. We, of course, are people, our bodies are made of the earth. Some of you, of course, are familiar with the Bible verse, "Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." And so he builds this philosophy to a degree by saying then, ultimately, the endpoint of life is a returning back to the earth itself. And of course, there are philosophical issues that this implies. But I think what is more interesting is how the death instinct is expressed. We saw earlier that the love instinct is expressed in many different ways. So is the death instinct. Let's look at some of the consequences.

The death instinct expresses itself in terms of hate. That's an expression of death. When you hate somebody, you also often want to do what? You want to kill them. You want to destroy them, hurt them, make them feel pain. So death comes through you onto the other individual. You say resentment is a death, is an expression of the death instinct. Hostility, hostile aggression, retarding other people's growth and development, what we call disenhancement. Just as love leads to enhancement, hatred leads to disenhancement, disenchantment. Just as love leads to harmony, hatred leads to disharmony. Just as love then leads to growth by the person you're dealing with, hate leads to restriction, holding them back. We, of course, as people, have been the victim of hatred, and hatred has locked us into ghettos, and locked us into poor schooling, and locked us into all kinds of corners, ghettos of all types. Uh, hatred then brings about ultimately the death and destruction of other people.

We must recognize that the world is a perfect place. And I've often said, though, that means you don't confuse perfection with good. I didn't say it was necessarily a good place. Perfection and goodness are not one and the same thing. You can be perfectly evil, as well as perfectly good. Perfection has to do with the precision of a thing, the precision of relations, the lawfulness between a cause and an effect. It talks about then, when you talk about perfection, you're saying surely this thing is always followed by that thing. Now then, the point I'm trying to get at here then is this: If you have hate in your heart, if you have resentment in your heart, if you have anger and fear in your heart, and hostility in your heart, the law of perfection says you are going to create a world that is destructive. You cannot have these emotions in yourself and not produce a destructive kind of world. This, of course, was what Jesus was talking about when he talked about the gospel. Gospel implying what? Good news. When he talks about "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Greet your enemy with what? Love. Because it is love, what? God before all else. Be filled with the love of God. And to be filled with God is to be filled with love. And therefore, a nation of godly people is not a nation that is racist. Is not a nation that kills and destroys the earth and kills and destroys its people. You cannot have war, death, and destruction where true and righteous love exists between people. And what Christ was trying to get at then was this: If we could come to love others as we love ourselves. If we could come, and notice it says "as ourselves," which means we love ourselves as well. And it is through the process of loving oneself deeply that we love other people deeply as well. Out of that then becomes a world filled with love, and the kingdom of God comes to earth itself.

In a world filled with hate and resentment and anger, you're going to get a world then filled with war, murder, death, suicide, robbery, rape, violence, and all the kinds of things we talk about, we see so much about in the everyday news. This is one of the reasons why, you know, that this nation is not a Christian nation. You've got people who go to church. The Christian, so-called religion, is the predominant religion. But the people are not filled with Christianity by any stretch of the imagination. Ladies and gentlemen, if this country was a true Christian country, we wouldn't even be here talking about black men and black women loving and all that kind of thing, would we? We wouldn't be talking about our problems as a, what? As a race and as a people, because that kind of problem would not exist with people who truly love and had the love of God within them. But it is because we don't have that love that we have the kinds of problems we have today. This is why ultimately Jesus and the other prophets can predict the end of the world as being one of death and war, because ultimately people filled with love and egotism and false pride and other kinds of things are going to bring war and death upon themselves. And this is, of course, what we see today. Reagan has no love, no righteous love. Gorbachev has no righteous love. People with righteous love cannot make guns and weapons that threaten to destroy the whole of the human race. Out of these weapons come out of what? Hate, fear, anger, pride, resentment, and the other kinds of things.

So then, when we express hatred and hostility, we are expressing the hate instinct. And when you see then that death instinct, the hate instinct, being expressed, you see then ultimately it leads to the destruction of something. It can lead to the destruction of the buildings you live in. You hate the landlord. You hate the people who live in it. You hate yourself, and then you destroy the buildings around you, destroy the people around you. Anything that gets next, gets your neighbor's goat, you do. You like to see them upset. You like to blow their cool. You like to do things to them out of this instinct. Well, some of us can take hate that is expressed against our enemies. So, hey, they deserve whatever they get, right? And they deserve death, or they deserve the pain that we put on them. But, you know, there's one thing peculiar about the hate instinct and the death instinct. It has no respector of persons. Your own death instinct can turn around against you as an individual. You not only can hate other people, but you can hate yourself. And that hatred that destroys other people, that pains other people, that kills other people, that same hatred, when it's curved around toward you, it's not going to stop doing it, is it? It's going to do the same thing to you. It's going to turn right back around into self-destruction, suicide. In some instances, we say the person that could commit suicide is the individual who really wanted to kill somebody else, but for some reason, they lacked the courage, or they didn't quite know who they wanted to kill, or what have you. And ultimately, they turned then that instinct upon themselves.

Hate then leads to self-alienation and self-destruction. It leads to depression. You know, when you're depressed, you talk about yourself. "I am no good. I'm a low so-and-so. I don't deserve to live. I'm worthless." The same kinds of things that you tell another person when you hate them. "You're low. You're this. You're a dirty dog." So forth. When you're in depression, often you'll do what? Turn it right around on yourself. "I don't deserve to live." When you tell the, when you hate medicine, you say, "You don't deserve to live. I'm going to kill you." Often then, when you're into self-hatred, you tell yourself the same thing. "I hate myself. I don't deserve. I could just die. I wish I would die." And often people will proceed to die and to kill themselves. It leads then to descendence, where the love instinct leads to transcendence and moving beyond the self. Often then, the hate instinct moves to descendence and going into oneself, to decadence.

Hatred leads. It has its euphoria. But it's an unnatural euphoria. That is, you're going to get your kicks not from self-love and the loving of others, but from trying to deal with your own self-hatred, trying to escape your own self-hatred. You can only feel good when you've hurt somebody. You can only feel good when you've slandered someone, when you've cut someone down, embarrassed them, conquered them, beat them in some kind of way. So you have some people, they get a euphoria from hate, but it is a euphoria that leads either to the destruction of themselves or the destruction of someone else. Or in dealing with that euphoria, then they have to go into drugs and alcohols and the other kinds of things as a way of getting a good feeling one way or the other, because hatred is not a good feeling, whether it's expressed outward ultimately or inward.

It leads to sadism. The desire to hurt someone else and then get a pleasure from seeing them hurt. You have some people we call hate sadists, right? Who get whose only pleasure and sexual pleasure is putting someone else in pain. Often the rapist does not really want sex from the woman. And sometimes with the rapist, you can say, "Well, here it is. You can have all you want." And at that point, he loses his interest. He wants you to struggle and fight, and he wants to degrade you and hurt you. And it's only through the degrading of his victim and hurting the victim and forcing the victim against their will and seeing the victim in pain that he gets his climax or gets his sexual jollies. You see? And this is what the sadist is about. A person filled with hate is often the person who can only get pleasure through hurting in one form or another.

Masochism is also in there. The individual who can only get some pleasure from being hurt, from being dominated, from being ruled, from being degraded in some form or another. And you have, you have places in the village where masochists hang out, waiting for someone to come along and treat them like a dog for the night so that they can get, so that they can get at some kind of sexual pleasure. It's a pathetic kind of situation. A lot of this hatred comes out of, a lot of this pleasure comes from enslavement.

Now let's look then at the kind of love, as we said earlier, that comes from hate. We said nasty people love. Oh, they, you know, they get all these great feelings we talk about in the records, and they go for trying to hook into someone and get someone to love them only, and they experience this great love. But ladies and gentlemen, it is not enough to love. The love must be based on the right foundation. One of the reasons why so many marriages are falling apart today, even though the people, when you see them on that wedding day, they say they're getting married because they love each other, is because they love each other for the wrong reason. It is not enough for you to have a feeling of love. To be caught up in the cuteness of some boy, or to be caught up in how sweet he is. To be caught up in how you can't get him out of your mind. How he makes you feel. How his touch just makes you go off all over. It's not enough. That's not enough. You cannot base a family or a long-term relationship on that kind of love. You cannot base having children on that kind of love. You see, you must stand back and look and see upon what kind of love, on what kind of roots that love is growing from. And you may note then that that love is growing out of hate, that that love is growing out of resentment, that it's growing out of an unhealthy situation. And even though you have this great feeling and this great longing and this great need, those feelings and those longings and those needs will ultimately destroy the one you love and destroy the children that you claim to love. Because a love that flows out of hatred is a love that's ultimately selfish and self-centered. Is a love that ultimately does not give the other person humanity and does not recognize them as an individual. This kind of love is a love where you love yourself, but you can only love yourself at the expense of destroying the ones you love, only at reducing them in some form or another.

Love that comes out of hate. Enemies, because often you pick them because they do not confront you with truth. They do not confront you with your reality. They help to maintain you in your own self-deception. They don't say, "Hey, you're wrong. You're destroying yourself. It's terrible." Often we get rid of those people. They make us angry. "Hey, I'm having fun. You blew my high, man. You know, you blew my head. You know this person hanging around here, they're not smoking and partying with me. You know, you put a wet blanket on the whole party." And of course, the thing you're running from, of course, is that they may be pointing out how foolish and self-destructive you are, but you don't want to face that right now. So, what do you do? You move toward people who support this. So, the self-hating person falls in love surely, and experiences love surely, but more nine times out of ten, they're going to move toward a person who maintains their self-destructiveness.

A part of the problem with the black love situation today, ladies and gentlemen, is that we have been duped into self-hatred by the European. You see, he's made us hate our heritage, hate our skin, hate our hair, hate our noses and our lips. He's made us hate Africa itself and the whole African heritage. He's made us hate being black as individuals. So consequently, we're going to love somebody who doesn't remind us of who we are and what we are. You see? And we move then in our love toward people who can help us escape from that which we hate. And that's why we will often love our enemies, if those enemies can take us away from ourselves. That's why we love our over-eating. We love our over-sexing ourselves. We love our drugs. Anything that does what? Takes us away from our situation, we love it.

And you will see, ladies and gentlemen, when you're in an oppressed situation, your world must be reversed. The European is 10% of the world's population, but yet rules over the other 90%. Europeans have no real natural resources or whatever real natural wealth in their land, but yet they are the richest people on earth. Japan has no natural resources whatever, but yet it is seen as a powerful nation. It can only, these nations can only achieve that by maintaining the other 90% of the world in a state of deception, in a state of craziness and madness. That's the only way it can be done. You can only be robbed when you're deceived and you don't know what to do with the wealth that you have. And this is the community we have here today. The black community here, if we looked at it as a nation, would be the 10th or 9th richest nation on earth. But yet you call yourself poor. You don't want to educate your own children using your own money. You can't build your own schools and build your own universities and build your own nations. Not because you don't have money, but because the love you have makes you spend the money with your enemy. And you spend it then with the pusher and with the other person. And they make you feel good. And you love them because they supply you with this. And this love then, of course, takes you away. You hate the people who don't supply you with that, even though they are your best friends, you see, and you attack them.

So then, this self-hatred that has been introduced into the black man means that often, if we do not clear this self-hatred out, we will love each other. Yes. But the kind of love we have for each other will often end up destroying us. It will destroy our children. And we see many of our children are destroyed in the name of what? Love. Many of you youngsters will have children out of wedlock before you're prepared to have children. Before you've grown in wisdom and knowledge. Why? Because, "I love him. He loves me. I wanted to have someone I could love all to myself." You've got to know how to love. And sometimes you haven't grown enough yet to know what real love is about and how to truly love an individual. Love is not just a good feeling. It is about more than good feelings. As I will show you later, heroin makes you feel good, too. Crack makes you feel good, too. All kinds of destructive things make you feel good. And so, if you love simply because you feel so good, then you can still love in a way that's going to destroy you and destroy the people that are with you. So, it's not enough for you to have a baby for a boy because he makes you feel so good when you're with him, or because you have this great feeling. You see, it's deeper than that. And it involves more than that. People then who have

Not come to terms with that self-hatred are people who are going to love in a way that's going to destroy them. In order for us to be ruled over by this minority of people, we have to be backwards. Our minds have to be turned backwards.

As I said earlier, this people who rule us today, we are a minority people in the world. We're not we we are a what? A majority people in the world. We're not minorities. There are many many more black people in the world than there are white people, ladies and gentlemen. Many more. However, we've been deceived into thinking of ourselves as minorities.

The European countries are dependent on us. We are not dependent on them. They must get their mineral resources from Africa. They must get their oil from Africa. They must get their diamonds from Africa. These computers and these technological instruments you see here today are only made possible through the minerals taken from the southern the southern tip of Africa itself. Because the minerals and metals are not found in this country at all. Up to almost 100% of the metals and other things that make space uh uh probing possible, that make satellites possible, that make jet planes possible and so forth, come right out of the soils of Africa. And yet we see Africans over there starving to death, ladies and gentlemen. And then they are projected as being what? Dependent nations. But it is the European who is dependent. But he must make you think what? That you are dependent. It's the old con game, isn't it? Yeah.

This is the only way a minority people though can rule over a giant. You see, is by conning them. Say you're the weak one. You're the dependent one. You need me. You can't live without me. You can't have all these TVs and this stuff if I didn't exist in the world. And of course, when you think that, you didn't submit and give your wealth away and hand it to them and let them have it. And then they of course use that same wealth against you to destroy you to restrict you in various sorts of ways.

So we must be so when you're filled with self-hate your mind is reversed. What it would what it means is this. You move you will love the things that destroy you and you will hate the things that advance your growth. And you watch and look at your behavior. Look at the behavior of your compatriots and watch if if what I'm saying is not true. I hate to read. I hate to study. I hate to learn. Oh, but I love to party. I love to smoke. I love to drink. I love to screw. I love to ho ho. And all the loves often you will find will be loves that what that don't advance you one bit. And yet you can't get over them. You you you you're addicted to them. You see? But the things that lead to growth, growth in wisdom, knowledge, you see, self-standing and self-discovery, healthy relations, self-control, how those things uh are hateful. And but this is the only way a minority can rule over a majority of people is by turning their minds backwards so that they love the things that destroy them and hate the things that move them forward.

In order for these people to rule over us, we must hate learning. It's it has to be built into us. We must think that we can't do math. Because you see, if we do math, if we were into learning, if we were into research and into thinking and into, you know, real philosophical uh ideas and abstractions, we would defeat those people. They know it. So consequently, what they must do is rob you of all of these things so that they may stay in their place.

And you'll see that even in the man-woman relationship, a man often robbing the woman of any intellectual growth, any personal growth, any knowledge, any wisdom because he sees that is the only way he can rule over her and maintain her under control. And if she shows that she's growing and developing, he gets angry and resentful and hateful. I tell many of my students sometimes, my female students in into my classes at the college, you know, before you get through educating, get through being educated, many of your husbands are going to leave you or your family's going to break up. And of course, some of them get angry. You know what? Who are you to say to us? So and so, but I know the nature of what many of the men you deal with. Jealousy. You're hanging out with those college boys. You see, or now you're getting too smart. Or now you're trying to move past me. And I've seen women had to leave who had to leave college because the husband is giving them such a hard time or the boyfriend is giving them such a hard time or he's hanging out in front of the school or going through all kinds of changes. I've even seen families have their children removed out of the college because this is the first one in college and they are wrestling with uh this one may be moving in in some kind of way and so in in almost all kinds of blocks are thrown in that way even if it means keeping up noise or disrupting them in some form or another often then they destroy the individual.

We love those then who keep us from realizing our self-hatred. You see, one of the reason why we get so euphoric when we are in love is that by focusing our minds and our energies and our obsession upon another person, by trying to live through another individual, by trying to make that individual our total world, by idealizing that individual and making them some goddess or some god, we think by that it's going to lift us up beyond who we are. It helps us to avoid knowing who and what we are. It keeps us from hating ourselves. Through their love, we come to love ourselves. And in that sense, that's why we get stuck on. We feel that we need them. And when they leave us, we we experience what? Depression and suicidal uh kinds of drives and so forth because that self-hatred which they've made us escape from while they were with us now comes back to haunt us again. And we get involved. Some people get drunk and some people actually commit suicide when their lovers leave them. You see, and so forth. So often then this love that this euphoria that we feel for other individuals is a euphoria based on the fact that they have taken us from truth and taken us from reality and taken us outside of one of the reason why we say love is what? Blind. Blinds the individual to reality. So that person you're in love with is not and who claims to love you back, particularly if that love feeds your self-hatred or helps you to escape your own reality is not doing you a favor. As a matter of fact, they are part of the problem. That is why often the ones we love are the ones who what? Hurt us and destroy us. In a way, we almost set ourselves up for it when our love is based on unhealthy roots.

The consequences of the fear instinct. There's also fear there as well. We often hate the things we fear. The love for our aggressors come out of fear. What do I mean by that? You know, a very peculiar thing happens. You ever ask yourself the question? The Europeans enslaved us. Hundreds of thousands of our ancestors died on the ships coming over here. And some of you youngsters and others when you have a chance to read about how the African was transported over to this country, it if it doesn't fill you with with with uh hurt and tears, then of course you I guess I don't know. It's hard to describe what you would be.

Take time and read this kind of situation where people had to go uh for weeks at a time with no headroom with maybe about this much room between them and the floor where they could never stand up. Where they laid down on the rough planks and the sea as it moved the ship rubbed the very skin and meat off their bones. Where they had to lay in their own urination and their own defecation, where they were chained often to people who were dead next door to them and so forth. Look at that kind of thing. You see, many of us can only love our enemies because we haven't read it and we've forgotten. Many of us don't want to read it because it does fill us with anger and and hatred and and fear and so forth. Many of us avoid black history because we try to avoid the fear and the anger and the bad feelings it's going to produce in in us. But when we avoid it, it also means that we avoid knowing ourselves and who we are as a people.

Of course, the slavery is another adventure. Jim Crowism, racial discrimination, all of this. Yet at the end of all of this, why is it that we want to marry these people? Why is it that we want to sleep with them and live with them and roll with them? Why is it that we we just forget all of the things that they have done to our grandparents and our great-grandparents and the things they're doing to us right now and the things they're going to do to us in the future? You see, why do we do that? You see, why do we want hair like them? Why do we want noses like them? Why do we want skin color like them? Why do we want to talk like them and walk like them and be like them after they have done all of this kind of stuff to us as a people? Why do we love them more than we love ourselves? Have you ever thought about that kind of issue? And yet this happens all the time and it is a very standard thing in psychology. We call it love for the aggressor, identity with the aggressor where one loves the one that persecutes them, you know, in an unhealthy sort of way and identifies with the person that persecutes them.

This goes on in families. We don't have time to go into the psychological details of this, but this is a part of what Freud talked about when he talked about the Edipus complex that the his theory is that the boy comes to be like his father because the boy hates his father. And it's very interesting kind of concept there. He wants to get rid of his father. Then how does he come to be like his father? We say because if he comes out and actually tells his father how much he hates him, the father might do what? Destroy him. You see, he's dependent upon his father. He needs his father. And that need and dependency, that fear that his father will hurt him or destroy him, the fact that he feels weak relative to his father then sets him up to say, "I can't express my hatred. I can't express my hostility." And and yet this hostility is tearing me apart. This hatred is tearing me apart. How can I get rid of it? And he he gets rid of it by saying then, I'll do what my father says do. I'll be like my father if I think the way my father thinks, if I behave the way my father behaves, if I look at the world the way my father looks at it, if I have the values that my fathers have. He has, if I be as much like my father as possible, then I will escape my father's punishment and death. If I can show my father that I love him, that I'm the same as he, then then my father will not victimize me. And it's a peculiar theory, but it has some interesting aspects about it.

To a good extent, the relationship between African peoples and white people is a father child relationship. We think of ourselves as weak, powerless against the white man. We see him as the source of gifts, the source of blessing. He gives us the jobs. He gives us the protection. He gives us the food. He provides the water. He provides the housing. He provides this. He provides that. You see? And we also think because we're weak, we cannot go directly against him to destroy him. Even though he hurts us, even though he degrades us, even though he frustrates us, even though he enslaves us and discriminates against us, we still don't quite get up the drive to say, "Well, I'm going to destroy this person who who degrades me and who who is destroying me because we feel as if we need him in some kind of way, that we can't live without him."

He also tells us that you suffer because you have a different color. You suffer because you have a different kind of shaped nose. You suffer because you have a different hair. You suffer because you you come from Africa. You suffer because you don't look like me. And what do we go for then? We say, "Well, if I want to get out of this suffering, then I should be as much like him as possible. As a matter of fact, if I get so much like him where he can't tell the difference between me and himself, he won't punish me anymore. I will no longer be what? A victim. So therefore, we are motivated then to come outside of ourselves to move toward the person that is destroying us and victimizing oursel hoping that if we can get them to love us and if we can show them how much we love them and if we show them how much alike we can be, we can get them to not see us as colored. You know, look at me. Don't look at me as a black person. Look at me as a person. you know, to abstract us. In other words, in order for other people to love us, they must not see the blackness of our skins. They must see some kind of invisible abstraction before them. True love is a person who sees you for all of your blackness and your big lips and your big nose and your kick and still does what? Loves you. If they got to remove your hair and they can't see you standing before them as a black person, they don't love you. Ladies and gentlemen, for a person to say, "I don't see you as black." How could you not see me as black? I'm standing right in front of you. But this is the kind of thing we want these people to do to abstract who we are. And therefore, if we become a distraction, it means we leave who we are. We have to come outside of ourselves. That's why we want to be educated with them and educated like them and so forth. We want to to not identify in any way with Africa, African people because to identify with Africa and African people is to suffer. So consequently, we even come to hate ourselves and come to hate our people and come to love the people who destroy us. But it's an unhealthy kind of love. We come to resemble those people. We want to take their values and their orientations toward life. And when they accept us, we escape from our self-hatred. And therefore we look as if we look for their love to take us outside of ourselves as a people. So consequently even when we don't love them when we love even within our own group we still often look for a kind of love that will take us outside of ourselves which mean then we become false and unreal and untrue and and dishonest and deceptive unknowing. And how can you develop then a beautiful household and beautiful children and a beautiful community with a love based on this kind of hatred? Too much of the love in this system, not only among black people, but even in this country as a whole, black, white, blue, green, and yellow, is love based on hatred and resentment on people trying to escape from themselves. It's a love based on fear. You see, fear of rejection. Why do you have that baby? I figured if I didn't have him, he'll leave me. Because the man says, "If you don't have it, what? I'll leave you." The only way I could hold on to him is by having this. What kind of love is that? It's not a productive kind of love. And the problem is it always what? It almost always fails. It doesn't work out. And you can see hundreds and hundreds of our people, our women and men trying to hold on to love and hold on to a man and hold on to somebody by having children and families for them. Even in marriage, you know, I figured if we have these children, this will bring us together. Big lie. Rarely does having children bring a man and a woman together. You got to be together on your own terms. You cannot put children in that kind of position where they are used to hold you and your man together. That's a misuse of the child. That's then a love that becomes destructive. You see, so it's a love developed out of fear.

But people who are fearful love, but they love in a way where they make other people fear them. You see, if they fear and the greatest thing that that a an oppressed person fears is really himself and self-nowledge and self-knowing because they're afraid when they look at themselves, they're not the big person they think they are. They're not the big hero they think they are. They're not the smart guy they think they are. They're not the cutest guy they think they are. They, you know, they they they're they are not God's gift to women and God's gift to the earth. They have many weaknesses and and lacks in their own personality, but they don't want to face that because if they face that, they figure other people will reject them, will not accept them for who they are. So they project a front upon the world and they love people who help them support that kind of front. They're running away from anxiety. So their life is built around avoidance. And but in order for them to maintain your love, they must make you fear losing their love. So you live in fear of them. Oh, if I don't do this, he'll leave me. If I don't do this, he'll hurt me. And as long as he got you anxious about whether he leave you or whether he's going to reject you or whether he's going to pay you an attention and you're caught up and build your life around that, it keeps you from seeing who this person really is. He keeps you from seeing his real weaknesses. He keeps you from seeing the emptiness of his life. You see, and therefore he loves you to the degree that you're blind to who and what he is and to the degree that you also cannot bring forth and let him see what he is about. And therefore, these fearful people love too. But they love only by injecting fear into the ones they love. They terrorize their wives. They terrorize their children. They terrorize their neighborhoods. and they just terrorize people in general.

People have a fear of suffering. A great part of the problems in this world is a fear of suffering. You know, we get we we've grown a generation of people here who feel like there's something constitutionally wrong with suffering, you know. And I guess that may be this movement from the country to the city. You see, if you're born in the country like I, you learn how to suffer and bear it, you know, to get up at 4:00 in the morning before sunrise and whether you feel like it or not, and get out there and do what has to be done whether you feel like it or not, to to do what to to solve your problems, to sit down and study, to do your work whether you like it or not. You like it or not, has nothing to do with it. But the but we got a generation here that says, "If I don't like it, I have no right to do it. I have a right to be happy all the time. There should not be any suffering in my life at all." That's crazy and it's stupid. And people who try to escape suffering and try to escape pain because it is through pain and suffering that often you come to know yourself and you come to grow and you get strength and you get character and you know how to commit yourself to something and do something. But if you get caught up where you're going to escape all kinds of suffering, you're going to lead yourself into destruction. You see, then you want to stay what? High all the time. You want to stay coked up and doped up and smoked up and lick it up and sexed up and all the other kind of ups. You see, but in the end, it keeps you out of school. It keeps you from learning. It keeps you from growing. It blinds you to yourself. It it it destroys your families. You got to steal from them. You got to rob somebody. You got to mug somebody. You got to leave your children starving on the floor. You got to leave your wife and the whole bit because you can't stand what? Suffering. You can't take a little what? Pain. You fear it. You're not a man. You're a child. When you fear pain, when you fear suffering, when you fear doing something even though you don't always feel like doing it, that's childish. And yet then many of us because we have suffered we figure we have a right now to live happy the the you know forever after. And the only way you can live happy forever after is often by getting into synthetic happinesses drugs and other kinds of things and getting away. And if the thing that you fear most is your own self, it means that the only way you're going to get happy is by escaping from yourself. Which mean you're going to live a totally false life. a disconnected schizophrenic type of life. So then the ultimate fear then is a fear of self-nowledge.

You love someone who helps to maintain your self unknowing who keeps you out of your don't talk about that African stuff. Hey, I would go with that dude, but he's always talking about black people. Always talking about Africa. He's into that 1960s stuff. You a lot of us like to view people who are dealing with the problems and issues of black people as in the 1960s. I'm talking about now. That wasn't my problem. I wasn't back there then. You have not escaped it, ladies. I don't care how young you are. You can be a babe in arms. The history of your people is with you right at this moment. In fact, that very attitude is the result of the history of your people. When you have it, it means you have been had. You have been suckered and made a chunk because you're set up now to destroy yourself as a people. And out of that then comes a fear of women and and fear of men and ultimately a fear of intimacy.

Why do people a good part of love you see involves opening yourself up to somebody letting them see your weaknesses. No, I'm not all Mr. Man. I'm not all Mr. Right. I tell you in a minute I'm no saint. Okay, I have all kinds of flaws and weaknesses the but there are some people who feel that they have to project this in this what this image of what perfection saintliness I'm the greatest and some of you now got these foolish rap songs I'm the king of the world and I can do this and that I can hook up and notice it it's the weakest most powerless depressed, rundown people coming up with all of that hype and nonsense. And instead of actually being what they're saying, they're just ready to hear the bumps and the knocks and get off on that. And so that very hype, instead of motivating you to move forward and do something is the very thing that maintains you right into and listen to the lyrics, you know, I'm Superman and I'm the super lover and I'm the and look at all the use often that's in you know, I'm going to do the girls and I'm going to do the boy and I can kick this and do that. Watch it. It's it's filled with unproductive kinds of behavior, but at the same time, it hypes people up, you see, in some kind of way. And at some of our concerts, we've seen people even fighting and struggling with each other at the very concerts where this kind of thing is happening. Even though I grant you many of the rap lyrics do have positive things. So, I'm I'm I'm making a generalization and I I listen to the rap. Some of the rap is very good and it's an excellent medium for getting across some good messages as well. So, I'm not condemning the rappers. I'm condemning the kind of rap though that creates false pride and takes you outside of yourself and outside of reality and keeps you outside of because some of you those radios have grown to your ears. You can't get rid of it.

Look at what Nakasota said about us the other day. The reason why America is behind what is because of the presence of blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans and women don't when I'm on TV don't remember what I say. They only remember the color of my tie. These are the people though that you keep in business and watch the arrogance come out of them. Still seeing us like what? Dogs and children. Hardly any of you with these radios can go to a black dealership and buy it. But yet you support Japan. You support it in every kind of way. And the premier of Japan shows you the contempt that he has for you. You give your money to every other group but yourself. You can't spend in your own grocery stores and your own supermarket and your own places and then you complain about how the people treat you bad. But they can't. How can you be respected when you take your money and instead of spending it with your own people and supporting your own families and building your own economics and hiring your own children and making the system for yourself, how can you be respected? The people can see that you're a fool. Right. Right along with that. You indicate what a fool you are. And then you you want to be a fool and yet you want somebody to act like you're not. They're doing you a service when they tell you that you're a fool. Nakasani don't it did people of service because hopefully it woke some of us up to recognize that these Japanese don't think any more about us than these whites think about us. They're willing to take our money and willing to drive you crazy with this music that we listen to day in and day out that we can't live without. But at the same time they don't think a damn thing about you and what we want from them. An apology. No, don't worry about the apology. Think about what the thing says. You see? And this is the kind of love that uh yet we love that radio. We love Panasonic, we love Sony, we love Mitsy Beatsy, we love Japanese cars, we just anything Japanese, we want it. And yet you don't even see the Japanese going crazy with that music, but driving other people crazy. And we love it so much until we don't say, "Hey man, since you're selling us all these radios, why don't you give a dealership to black people so we can at least make some money off of it?" You see? No, we we we're too busy wrapped up in the music. Your black people make over 60% of the money in the music industry is made by black people. And what do you look at? You're wrapped up in the stars, but stars come and go. Some of them get one hit and they're gone. Some of them a year or two and they're gone. Who gets the money though forever? It's the lawyers and the promoters and the other people you don't see up front that the the star gets only a few pennies from each record. It's the company itself that gets the real dust. But we don't want to be those people because we're caught up in the star. We're caught up in the stage action. We're caught up in the in in the video. You are giving billions of dollars away to another people that you can give to yourself and to your children. But because you're caught up in the music and the music takes you outside of who you are and what you are, you are then robbed and you wonder why you can't make it in the world. You see, because we're hung up into what? Good feelings and fear.

So then when people are raised in in fear and and hatred and self-hatred, their love based on that self-hatred is going to be a love that's ultimately destructive. It means then that we want to escape intimacy and yet intimacy is a major part of love. Exposing oneself to being hurt. You see many people I can't love because what? I'm gonna be hurt. I can't stand it. I can't stand being hurt. So either I want love or else if I do fall in love, as the song go, when I fall in love, it will be forever. That way I won't have to feel the pain if it leaves me. And so you drive a man crazy. You drive a woman crazy because even when they spit in your face, you still cling on and hold on because you you say, "Oh, it's raining." You see why? Because you don't you you you're afraid that you don't have enough strength and power to survive and be on your own. So then often then you don't want to reveal yourself and open yourself up because you tend to think if they really knew who I was, they wouldn't love me. You see? So then you cut yourself off and you love with a part of yourself. That leads to frigidity, that leads to impotence, that leads to unsatisfactory sexual relationships, that leads into deception and dishonesty in your relationship with your boyfriend, in the relationship to your husband, in relationship to your wife because you're afraid. And the man says, "What? If I let her know I'm weak, she'll take that weakness and manipulate me with it, take advantage of me with it." And the woman says the same thing. So you have two people here who live in hypocrisy, one with the other. So consequently we escape intimacy.

These people then who love out of fear and hatred uh then fear being self-revealing because it makes them vulnerable. They also fear commitment which is another part of love. To commit oneself to another person to commit yourself to their protection and to sharing with them and caring for them. to put your resources at their disposal to struggle to make life better for them and yourself. But people who have self-doubt, people who have self-hatred, people who've been outside of themselves and therefore have not developed their talents have problems with commitment. PE because they want to appear often to be successful and powerful and great and and filled with beauty and all this other kinds of stuff and they feel if they make a commitment then they will fail. They will be shown for what they really are. their inability to provide for their families, their inability to protect their women, their inability to educate their children, their inability to provide for their community and their race and their group. So if you don't want to be embarrassed, if you don't want to be perceived as a failure, then you make no what? No commitments. You see, and therefore people who love out of fear, who love out of self-hatred, who love out of their inferiority complex, love people who don't demand anything from them, who don't require that they what? Commit themselves in some fashion or other. So, you're going to find that you love this woman to the degree that what? She doesn't ask you for anything. But when she starts demanding your time, demanding your energy, demanding a bit of your commitment, all of a sudden that love what? Disappears.

You get married, you you've been making love every weekend, you've been getting high together every weekend, you've been kissing and hugging and having fun. You know, that weekend love can deceive you. You know, because many people when they get into the weekend love, they figure, "Oh, well, when I get married, that just means seven weekend days per week." You know, it's just going to be love and sweet beauty every night. But it doesn't work out that way, unfortunately. And when that child arrives, then you begin, what the heck have I got myself into here? Now, I've got a whole life now to take care of. I got a wife and a family I got to take care of. And all of a sudden, it's not as much fun as it used to be. All of a sudden, uh, it's the the stuff's not quite as good as it used to be, you see, and you get a little bored with it, and you get a little tired of it. And the woman starts asking, "When you going to get a job? What are you going to take feed the baby and bring some diapers here and move to a better place and you start hating her for that? You see, and you think she's unfair and you want to beat her sometimes or leave her or do something else. And sometimes you desert her because now your weekend love has turned into reality because now you have you are you you you you you're forced to make a commitment and now you're forced up against the reality of yourself because you had to question, can I do it? Do I have the talent? Do I have the abilities? Do I have the education? Do I have the drive? Do I have the ability to take the suffering and go through with it like a man? Or is it that I've been so much in love because it didn't require any commitment on my part? I've been so high all the time. I've been having so much fun. I didn't take time to develop these kinds of things. Now the woman tricked me. She she brought me into this. Now I hate her for it. The children are out after me. You see? And this is the kind of love then that comes uh from fear.

And this is the kind one of the reasons why we then hate intimacy because often uh many times even your woman or man doesn't want you to be intimate because their love depends upon their idealization of you. Oh, you're the greatest. I've never had it like this before. It's the greatest I've ever had in my life, you know, and oh, we're going to be so happy and I'm oh, here's this young muscular man and I'm going to have this body to myself every night and all of this. You know, we we're caught up in all of these these fantasies, you see. And he's caught up in this fantasy, his own fantasies again. Oh, I'm going to have this at home waiting for me, cooking dinner, taking care of my children while I tip out and get a few more pieces somewhere else. However, I'll still, you know, I'll still make it. She's not going to complain too much because, you know, if I love her, right, and everything, she'll like that. you know, you know, all these kind of fantasies that that we put in uh to each other's uh heads, you see. But then when you when you're faced with the children in the family, you're faced then with yourself and who you really are. But what I'm saying here too is often the person with you doesn't want to see who you really are because they're getting such a great thrill from who they imagine you are. We often then fall in love with love. You see, we fall in love with the feeling. Hey, don't spoil this thing with reality, man. Please. You know, so even when the person is really acting out and showing you what kind of a nasty, selfish, self-centered individual they are, you sit there and decide not to see it. Or you say, "Well, with enough love, I'll change him." A woman's greatest mistake. You are not going to change a man. You can have all the kind of love and often because you had wrong love anyway, but you can have all the kind of love women that you think you have for a man. Do not deceive yourself. It is very very difficult to change a man. And to think that you're going to change a man after you get married to them is to to wallow in deep selfdeception. If he's not halfway right or three4s right before you get hooked up, leave the man alone. I'm telling you, leave. Cut it out. If you cannot make him what he should be before you get committed and before you have the children, watch out. When you have the children, it's going to be too late. But often because you feel so good, you you you you give yourself these lies. Oh, with enough love, with understanding, we are going to communicate with each other and all that kind of stuff. And it doesn't happen. It doesn't get around to it. And to a good extent then the woman ends up getting what she deserves because often her friends, her parents, her elders, other people are telling her all the time, "Guy's no good using you." But what do you do with that friend? Curse him out. Mind your own business. You know, and the whole you just jealous. You and we rationalize it in all kinds of ways. And and consequently then we want to act surprised and disappointed when the truth finally comes through and then we want to leave. We want to sometimes we want to hurt the children. Well, nobody cares about me. Why should I care about somebody else? And often this it's it's this is done in in reference to the children. You look at the children and you see your husband or the man who left you and you hate them for it and you project into them their hatred. Boy, you you sit around them and you talk about how evil and terrible men are. And you make the boys not want to be men, and you make the girls grow up hating men, tricking men, playing games on them because they've heard sitting at your knee all the things you've had to say about him, how you've projected yourself as Miss Victim, and the man is Mr. Monster. You see these games that people play. So you cannot ma if you truly love a person you cannot maintain that person in their illusion. True love means you have to be truthful as well to the individual. And I'll wrap it up here shortly.

Happiness gained from hatred and fear serves to maintain your oppression, to strengthen your pusher, to maintain your nonproductiveness. You see, a lot of us, we want to be happy, but we view happiness as a feeling. As we said earlier, pardon me. Heroin can make you feel happy. Crack can make you feel happy for a while. Smoke and dope can make you feel happy. Overeating can make you feel happy. Alcohol can make you feel happy. And to do these things, you have to hate yourself. To sit and watch yourself become enslaved to a drug. To watch yourself become degraded where you have to sell your body in order to get a few seconds high. To go through beggory, to have to rob, to have to steal, in order to get a moment of what you call happiness. To take a man's abuse, to take his degradation to get what you call a few moments of happiness means ultimately then that you are serving that person. You enrich the pusher. You enrich the people that oppress you. You give false pride to that man. When he misuses you and you put up with it, he grows in his pride and grows away from himself. He gains power through your own destruction and putting you down. It makes you unproductive as an individual. You get caught up then in trying to get this feeling. This often happens to our people as a people. We are so much and we want to be loved by these Europeans so badly until we forget to spend the money with ourselves. A part of getting them to love us is that we must spend the money. Let me go in here and buy this $500 suit and show them white folk that I can buy I can spend like they do, you know, and let me go down here maces and let me go whatever, you know, go to this shop, you know, and prove something to these people and they see I'm not like the rest of them [ __ ] out there. You see, when you need their love, you see, in that sense, because it comes out of you hating yourself, you have to take them your money. You see, you have to work for them and whatever you produce has to be given back to them as a people. Basketball players, football players making millions of dollars have to end up giving it back to the other people. Cannot give it to their own. You have to spend it with the other people because you want them to be nice and they grin at you and pat you on your butter, talk about you in a very snide sort of way at the same time reaching for your dollars and later on they're like Nakasa. talk about you like a dog and you wonder why you get no respect. But love that grows out and happiness that is based on self-hatred is only a happiness that can lead to the strengthening of other individual. It's time for us to have an Africa car. Ladies and gentlemen, not one built in Japan, but one built in Africa and and to build things coming from ourselves. But we think happiness is buying from some white person, buying some white house, buying into some white community, going to some white school. That's happiness for us. When you define and because what? I feel good. Oh, they don't treat me like I'm colored. You know, I forget about I'm black when I'm around them. Ah, I just feel so good. But see, when I'm around my own, I I I I'm reminded that I'm black, so I don't really want to be around them. You see? So, it means what? You take all of your talent, all of your resources, and everything then has to be given to the people. And of course they see what look at these fools and I just giving us our money. You you you go on the picket line and you you you fall before buses and force your children into their arm and they say we don't want to be bothered with your children. We don't want to educate your children. It is to our advantage that they stay stupid and ignorant. Oh, take them any. I'll be happy if they're so happiness leads to this kind of happiness too may be rooted in hatred and fear. And often the kind of happiness we move toward is a happiness that takes us from oursel. When happiness becomes an exclusive goal when happiness is defined as only a feeling you see just feeling good you see and not looked at in terms of where it comes from. That happiness is going to be the source of your destruction. Many of us have been destroyed because we have this feel-good definition of happiness.

I talked to one man one day. He says, "I live in a white neighborhood. My children will play with my children. What should I do?" And someone in audience said, "Move, you know, go to a place where it ain't. Oh, no. I have the right to live wherever I feel and so forth." And I said, 'Well, isn't it interesting that uh the black the white man can feel like he has all kinds of rights in the world, and it doesn't necessitate him living with black people at all. He doesn't feel like he's been deprived of a thing for not living with black people. He doesn't feel like he's deprived of a thing for not spending money with black people. He doesn't feel like he's been deprived of a thing for not sending his children with black in black schools. But we are the ones who feel deprived. You see, we feel deprived if we can't live with them. We feel deprived if we can't spend our money with them. You see, we feel deprived if our children are not in school with them. You see, we would be happy when this can happen. Which means that we give them our children, we give them our money, we give everything to them. And means and ultimately that we cannot give our children anything and then when they have to rob and steal and and and fil and carry on, we wonder what's wrong with them. It is not what's wrong with the children, ladies and gentlemen. It is what's wrong with us as black adults that set these children up for this because we are looking for a happiness that is bound if it's based on fear and self-hatred to destroy our children. And we'll though we'll justify it by saying we love them and we want them to get the best which often ends up what the other way around.

I got to end it here. Uh one other thing marriage marriage is an opportunity for self-growth. It's an opportunity for selfdiscovery. You see having children is also an opportunity for further maturing of your personality for further personality development. Because

Of course, as you, if you work honestly in your marriage, you work honestly in your love relationship, it, it's, it helps you to see who and what you are. If you have a good honest relationship with another person, that person serves as a mirror to help you see the real you. And in seeing the real you, you correct the flaws and you correct the weaknesses and you deal with the weaknesses and so forth.

So if the other person is understanding and not condemning, if the other person is not over-idealizing you and needs to make you some great hero or some god or goddess, it then will give you a chance then to grow. If they accept you for who you are with the idea though that their acceptance means that you could continue to grow and develop. You see, then they are providing a real, natural, and healthy kind of love for you. Marriage and having children provides that kind of opportunity.

If the people are not afraid, if they're not hiding things, if they are not filled with self-hatred and hostility, if they want to be honest with each other and open with each other, then they will grow in strength and power and love, and their families will grow beautifully and wonderfully.

When you have children, often they make you reflect back upon your own childhood. Often we use our children to correct the things that happened to us as children. Some of us do it the wrong way, though. We're so determined that they're not going to have the kind of childhood we had as children, we end up spoiling them and creating problems for them. But if we look at them and watch them grow and watch our relationship with them and we look at ourselves and see our own selves in terms of our relationship with our children, then we can grow and develop and be healthy for ourselves and for our children.

But people who go into marriage out of fear and self-hatred and the kind of love I talked about earlier that makes them escape themselves are people whose marriages are going to be filled with conflict, unproductive conflict quickly. You have a lot of kinds of love that destroy marriages. Now let us say often when you go into a marriage trying to defend yourself and defend your weaknesses and so forth instead of coping with them and solving them. What is your defense becomes an offense against the other person.

You have the narcissist. You know, many of us, nobody loves us. Mama don't love us. White folk don't love us because white folk don't love us. Mama don't love himself. Daddy don't love himself. He hates us. And now if I'm going to get any love at all, I'm going to have to do what? Love myself for myself. But often, you see, that's not a healthy kind of love. That's a narcissistic kind of love. And many people move into that.

This kind of love that many of our people have, by the way, because we've been made to feel inferior. And often the way we, we get over feeling inferior is by inflating who we are. And that's a part of the rap tradition, you see, in some people there. These people who really feel weak must project the image of what? Being superhuman, super lovers, beyond life itself, you know, beyond law, be a law unto themselves and everybody else is subordinate to them as people.

This narcissistic love, he can only love then the love. Narcissistic love, love is only possible if the other gives up their individuality and rights for the benefit of other. I've seen some African types, by the way, those who go into African tradition also go in it with a narcissistic uh motivation. I am the African king and the African woman is to support her man and not object to anything he says and she gets identity totally through me. She must live for me. Her whole identity is with me. This is what the true African woman does. Doesn't save your marriage, I'm telling you.

And many people holler and I get people who are into Afrocentric tradition, ladies and gentlemen, who call me who have problems with their marriages because they're trying to live some kind of mythical African concept or the woman is what I'm the African queen and my man is supposed to do this and supposed to do that and live for me and the whole bit. Unrealistic. Totally unrealistic. It's a narcissism.

Often people jump, you see, to be Africanist in orientation is fine, but you got to be an African toistness also for the right reason. Many people have jumped into African nationalism and jumped into the African tradition not out of true love but out of reaction. The whites people hate us. They never love us. So let's jump back and be African. If they did love us, I wouldn't have to be this. You see? So it's a reactionary kind of thing. And you see it then expressed sometimes even within a so-called African-oriented uh organization.

Love is only, and the the narcissistic woman. Love is only possible if I can sacrifice myself for you. You know, I'll die for you. I'll, you know, give up everything I have for you and I live exclusively for you and what's yours is mine and and so forth. You give up your own your own individuality. But a narcissist can only love somebody who gives up everything for themselves and they can see love operating on this.

Then we have the dependent types. I want to be cared for and protected. You know, I've been robbed. You know, a lot of us as black people love out of deprivation. We've been deprived of freedom. We've been deprived of housing. We've been deprived of schooling. We've been deprived of love. We've been deprived of this. And what are we going to do? We're going to find this man who's going to make up for all of our deprivations. You see, and and we're so deprived. And of course, the men are willing to oblige you until they get a piece, right? Oh, baby, I'm everything to you. When you love me, I'm going to be all the whole bit to you. And they, they'll go along with that for a while until it's enjoyed.

Then after a while, though, that kind of love stops. You know, you're everything to ladies and gentlemen, another person cannot be everything to you. And the idea of moving towards somebody who's going to be everything to you is is a sign of madness and craziness and and but yet there are so people who are caught up in their needs so badly. They have so many strong needs to the only thing they can think about is what they need. Now the other person is only supposed to bow to what they need. You don't love me unless you supply what I need. You should be happy to what? Serve me. That's the way the the narcissist is. You know, you should be happy to even be hooked up with me. You shouldn't ask for anything else, you know. And some of us think that way. Oh man, if I could only just hang out with him and love him, I'd be happy. I want to ask for nothing else. Crazy. But you will ask for something else in here. I want to be cared for.

So many of us want to become children again. And many black women get into this thing. You know, I want some man that can permit me to be like the white woman because that image is, you know, she's careful. Her husband protected the white man all. So I want this kind of man. But at least unrealistic kind of things. You know, you must recognize your man is in bondage. He's got struggles on his hand. He is not going to supply you like a white man supplies his woman because the his his economic, social, and political reality is not that of a white man. And for you to hold those images, those old Dallas images in your head and even those Bill Cosby images in your head and even these other images in your head are often going to mislead you. Look at what is real and deal with what is real.

We have that dependent type. It's the consumer type. I'm afraid to be a man. I'm afraid to be a woman. A father or mother. So I need a mother and I need a father. So instead of you marrying a man and sharing equal with you want to marry a daddy in disguise or you want a mama in disguise in one way or you want to be taken care of. You want a sugar daddy. You want to be a a baby for the rest of your life consuming and buying to fill up for the emptiness in your life and so forth.

And then we have the master-slave love. Well, the white man dominates me and they rule over me. I'm going to be what? The boss in my house and I'm going to, you know, often what happens, the slave turns over to try to enslave other people. And so the if he can't enslave the white man, he feels like a slave to the white man. He'll make sure one thing, his wife is going to be a slave to him and his children are going to be a slave to him. And nobody is going to have a right to to rule over him or have anything to say. He who does not want to be dominated must dominate others. And he sees his wife as being independent, as having a mind as of her own, has her attempt to dominate him, to rule him, to make him look bad. So often he can only love a slave, a dumb woman, somebody who doesn't have who he figures will not challenge him or see through his weaknesses.

We have the phallic lover, you know, the Mr. Man. He's totally man. You see, he has no femininity in him whatsoever. You can love me to the and I love you only to the extent that you make me feel that I'm a man. Very difficult. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very.