Changing the Black Psyche

...In Black Messiah, the Reverend Cleage reveals a deeper understanding of the problem...

...Yet as a mode of escape it remains, like entry into the black middle class, highly individualistic and competitive and offers the black masses only some vicarious satisfactions...

...Obviously, there are few escapes for individuals confronting massive hostility and repression on the one hand, and constantly finding members of their own race running themselves down on the other...

...It is a significant book for every psychiatrist and for the general public as well...

...But the authors bear witness to the eternal optimism and infinite adaptability of man...

...Although the book is a collection of sermons, the Reverend is an extremely bright, creative man, and his implicit assumptions are profound...

...Reviewed by ETHEL SPECTOR PERSON Practicing analyst...

...The Black Nation will commit itself to the Black Revolution, which is to command economic and political power on behalf of black people...

...Whether this thesis was valid at some point in the country's history is open to question...

...But the authors offer a simplisitic solution for the crippling identifications of blacks: "The white man has crushed all but the life from blacks from the time they came to these shores to this very day...

...The historical truth of this thesis is irrelevant...

...it certainly is not valid today, for it fails to consider the effects of oppression on the psyche of the individual black and on his group identifications...

...staff member, Psychoanalytic Institute for Training and Research, Columbia University Recognizing that blacks have been systematically denied their legal, social and economic rights, well-intentioned liberals have believed for years that reversing these inequities would make the black man's situation comparable to that of other minority groups...

...Under particularly favorable circumstances, as the authors are aware, some blacks may avail themselves of seemingly complete escape —gaining middle-class status and adopting the values of white America...

...The petty personal morality emphasized in the Slave Church comes from slave Christianity...

...What is the solution...

...God is concerned in the Old Testament and Jesus is concerned in the New Testament with social morality...

...The black man suffers as much from insufficient self-esteem, from being a member of a group that is looked down upon, as from his external miseries...

...There is another escape from misery—through the sense of manliness generated by violence...

...He knows that divisiveness has plagued the black community, as successful blacks try to dissociate physically and psychologically from their black brethren, and that a "black nation" can only be welded around the matrix of a unifying myth or belief...

...Cleage contends that the Black Church can be the unifying force...

...Black Rage, written by two black psychiatrists, is a very good, if unsystematic, account of the evolution of black self-depreciation...

...Jesus was a man engaged in everyday revolutionary activities designed essentially to free the Nation Israel from oppression and bondage...

...we are convinced, upon the basis of our knowledge and historic study of all the facts, that Jesus was born to a black Mary, that Jesus, the Messiah, was a black man who came to save a Black Nation...

...A man's well-being depends not only upon his circumstances but also his self-esteem...

...But it is difficult to know whether he possesses the necessary charisma without seeing him in action...

...How...

...We speak of those Negroes who make it by emulating the white man...

...Thus the patois and the other demeaning attributes are turned to a positive and elevating use, and continue to bind black people together with a sense of identity and group solidarity...

...The group concept is historic Christianity...

...If you are going to believe that you are somebody, that you have worth and value, then you must know that that worth and value was built into you...

...This belief was passed from generation to generation and reinforced by white attitudes...

...In this way they develop a contempt for themselves, because, however much they avoid it, they remain black...

...The only valid judgment will be the pragmatic one?whether or not this myth can integrate the black people into a nation...

...While the authors make several references to the "bad nigger," they do not trace the development of the folk tales about him...

...Mothers squashed any signs of as-sertiveness in their male children to help them survive, since it was an invitation to a lynching for an adult black man...

...Recognizing the need for unity and political action, he writes: "We were afraid to fight because we felt that if we fought we would fight alone and we would die alone...

...Individualism is slave Christianity...

...Reverend Cleage's sermons have power and beauty...

...By simply doing it—now...

...We are no longer just individuals...

...Cleage's position is fairly complex, offering a religous ideology and myth around which a black nation could coalesce...

...The only way out, if indeed it can be so considered, is a poor one at best...

...Blacks found their morsel of self-esteem by developing themselves in the pitifully meager areas left open to them, achieving group pride in their music and in the poetry and symbolic complexity of their patois...

...Black Rage is a sensitive account of the black man's psychological burdens, his disparaged group identifications, his essential strength in creating islands of self-esteem in an ocean of despair...

...Enslaved and subsequently oppressed, torn from his tribal traditions, deprived of education, placated by the white man's religion, most blacks began to believe in their own inferiority and stupidity...

...Oppression does not destroy a people...

...We are the chosen people in a religious sense, in a historic sense...

...It seems possible that these folk tales, imported from the South, were incorporated into the values (manliness, fearlessness, violence) of ghetto-street culture, which serves a serious adaptive function in allowing black men to preserve their self-esteem when avenues such as educational and professional eminence are closed...

...If, as was suggested by Malcolm X among others, the black middle class traces its spiritual roots to the "house nigger," then violence as a philosophic stance owes much to the precedent of the "bad nigger...

...Typically, though, it derives from identification with a group—from ethnic affinities and historic recollections, from belief in a religous or political ideology, from participation in a national or cultural myth...

...that Christ welded together a black nation in an historical situation analogous to the one blacks face now...

...The effectiveness of a myth is also related to the charismatic qualities of its proponents...

...The authors trace the effects of self-depreciation on love, marriage, child rearing, and education...

...We are becoming a Nation...

...Most blacks succumbed to "grief and sorrow," apathy, hopelessness, and sullenness...

...The Reverend preaches that blacks can weld together a nation, that the process is mystical but blacks must realize they are a chosen people...

...He argues that Christianity, as interpreted by most people, is a perversion of the teachings of Christ...

...Cleage sees Jesus as a Black Messiah, a revolutionary trying to unite an enslaved black people...

...The bad nigger is a defiant nigger, a reminder of what manhood could be...

...Get off their backs...

...He knows that some blacks have been successful, but that this offers no answers for the black masses...

...For some people this is provided by personal achiev-ment (particularly for a creative person in an individualistic society...

...Since there is pervasive knowledge among blacks that Christianity (bastardized or not) has been an adjunct to oppression, this seems unlikely...

...The hazards of this route have been voluminously noted, especially the persistence of self-hate and alienation from one's people...

...It is the acceptance of oppression that destroys...

...Clearly, his situation must be changed, but then he must still find a way to reconstitute his image of himself...