For centuries people of color have been taught that they are nobody, that their color is a sign of their biological depravity, that their being has been stamped with an indelible imprint of inferiority, that his history has been soiled with the filth of worthlessness. All too few people realize how racist ideas have scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man. The whole dirty business of slavery was based on the premise that black people was a thing to be used, not a person to be respected.
The historian Kenneth Stampp, in his remarkable book The Peculiar Institution, has a fascinating section on the psychological indoctrination that was necessary from the master’s viewpoint to make a good slave. He gathered the material for this section primarily from the manuals and other documents which were produced by slaveowners on the subject of training slaves. Stampp notes five recurring aspects of this training.
First, those who manage the slaves had to maintain strict discipline. One master said. “The slave must know that his master is to govern absolutely and he is to obey implicitly, that he is never, for a moment, to exercise either his will or judgment in opposition to a positive order.”
Second, the master felt that they had to implant in the bondsman a consciousness of personal inferiority. This sense of inferiority was deliberately extended to his past. The slaveowners were convinced that in order to control black people, the slave “had to feel that African ancestry tainted them, that their color was a badge of degradation.”
Third step, in the training process was to awe the slaves with a sense of the masters’ enormous power. It was necessary, various owners said, “to make them stand in fear.”
The fourth aspect, was the attempt to “persuade the bondsman to take an interest in the master’s enterprise and to accept his standards of good conduct.” Thus the master’s criteria of what was good and true and beautiful were to be accepted unquestioningly by the slave.
The final step, according to Stampp’s document, was “to impress people of color with their helplessness: to create in them a habit of perfect dependence upon their masters.”
Here, then was the way to produce a perfect slave. Accustom him to rigid discipline, demand from him unconditional submission, impress upon him a sense of his innate inferiority, develop in him a paralyzing fear of white men, train him to adopt the master’s code of good behavior, and instill in him a sense of complete dependence.
Out of the soil of slavery came the psychological roots of the Black Power Cry. Anyone familiar with the Black Power movement recognize that defiance of white authority and white power is a constant theme; the defiance almost becomes a kind of taunt. Underneath it, however, there is a legitimate concern that people of color break away from “unconditional submission” and thereby assert his own selfhood. ~ MLK
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