We Want Some Mo, We Want Some Mo - Day 27

Creating a Slave Mentality

Daudi Ajani ya Azibo, in African Psychology in Historical Perspective & Related Commentary (page 75) lists six factors from Vincent Harding's book, There is a River, involved in the creation of the slave mentality:

1) The establishment of strict discipline over the captive African community in America; the development of "unconditional submission";

2) The development within the Black people of a sense of personal inferiority, especially in relation to their African ancestry;

3) The development of raw fear, "to awe them with a sense of their master's enormous power" (of course, behind the power of the master stood the power of the local and national governments);

4) The establishment within the enslaved person a sense that the master's welfare was really synonymous with his own;

5) The creation of a willingness of the Afro-American captives to accept the slaveholder's standards of conduct as their own;

6) The development within the captive people of "a habit of perfect dependence" upon those who claimed to be their masters.

Don't allow them to metastasize