Black People : The African Mind

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Mar 22, 2004
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Do you know what it is?

We who were raised in the west and emersed in eurocentric culture from our earliest memory have come to reject the concept of a eurocentric mindset. We want to embrace Mother Africa. But do we know what that means on a day to day practical level? How can we strive to become something unless we have a clear understanding of the nature of what we are striving to become?

Family, I want to challenge each of you to discover three aspects of a truly Afrocentric mind that clearly distinguishes it from a eurocentric mind.

It's not enough to merely reject Europe and embrace a romanticized image of Africa. This leaves us in an identification void which the mediacapitalist network will fill with what looks like Africa but is really Europe dipped in chocolate.

Once you discover the difference ask yourself are you there yet? Are you on your way? Are you aware of and willing to make the sacrifices necessary for having an afrocentric mind in a eurocentric world?
 
If only the African people truly embraced us. It is my experience that the majority have not.
I do agree with you that we should strive to be centered on loving ourselves as we are and our blackness...I just wonder why it has to be from and African cultural standpoint? why can't we create our own culture, or own traditions? we are a creative and blessed people surely there are more choices than one mindset or another. that being said...
in order to survive we do have to at least understand the euro-centric mindset, because these tricksters are extremely manipulative. buying into it is a mistake. we agree there.
 
Deculturalization and Black America

Deculturalization and Black America: 1500 to Present

Deculturalization is a method of pacification and control perfected over the past 500 years by European ruling elites. This practice involves first the systematic stripping away of the intended victim's ancestral culture and then systematically replacing it with European culture. According to educators Felix Boateng (1990) and Joel Spring (1997) Africans, Asians, Native Americans, (and I would add Native Australians and Pacific Islanders), have all been the victims of this form of psychological and spiritual abuse. Early American slaveholders called this practice seasoning. Today, the academic community calls it deculturalization, but the popular term is brain-washing.
As it affects Africans in the United States, decultualization is a three-stage process. First, African Americans are quietly taught to feel ashamed of so they will reject their African and Native American heritage. Next, they are taught in schools and churches to admire and respect so they will adopt and practice only their European heritage. And finally, if they obediently submit to this indoctrination, they are rewarded with opportunities to receive even more indoctrination. And ultimately once they have been effectively indoctrinated, they are allowed an opportunity to compete for a "professional" job in the "main stream." And a rare, handpicked few of the most thoroughly indoctrinated (brain-washed) are allowed access to the inner sanctums of White power, prestige and privilege.
The American system of deculturalization has been an extremely effective process. It has successfully brain-washed the majority of African Americans to accept the dominance of Europeans and European institutions over their lives. History teaches us that African prisoners of war (POWs) were subjected to a vicious, European-orchestrated, three to four years of seasoning during which the most important expressions of their African heritage were brutally stripped away from them and brutally replaced with the European colonizer-slave master-oppressor's cultural practices and beliefs.
Africans enslaved in the North American British colonies, for example, were forbidden to use their original African names, languages and religions. They were forced to use their European colonizer-slave master-oppressor's names, language and religion. This is why most Africans born in the United States have European surnames, speak English and practice some form of Christianity. Slavery imposed these European cultural practices on their African ancestors and their descendants blindly continue them unless they take steps to open their eyes to and free their minds of all remnants of European slavery.
Both Boateng (1990) and Spring (1997) identified the public school as a major agent of African American deculturalization (brain-washing). I agree; however, I would add that nearly all American educational institutions - Black, White, public, private, day care to college - must be placed along side the public schools as agents of deculturalization. In fact, no aspect of American education is free of this curse except the African centered independent school whose sole mission if it is functioning properly is to decolonize or re-Africanize Black students and their families.
Liberatory Practices​
Decolonization - Process of overthrowing and then removing the Europeancentric or Arabcentric value and belief systems (colonies) implanted in our minds by our public school mis-education, our Christian or Islamic indoctrination and mass media manipulation that keep us psychologically, emotionally, materially and spiritually tied to Europeans or Arabs as their victims or servants. To decolonize the African mind is to cleanse and liberate by re-Africanizing the African mind (Chinweizu, 1987).
Intellectual Disobedience - Twenty-first century corollary to Henry David Thoreau's (1860) notion of civil disobedience that holds that African people have a moral imperative to resist all attempts by the European dominated educational hegemony to constrict, restrict or regulate the content of their education (Hotep, 2000).
Ma'at (Mdw Ntr) - Seven thousand-year-old Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) term for the divine law of truth, justice, order, harmony, balance, in short, righteousness. The restoration, maintenance and preservation of ma'at was considered the highest social ideal by the ancient Africans of the Nile River Valley civilizations. Today, it is the motive and goal of all conscious, African freedom fighters (Karenga, 1986;Hilliard, 1994; Carruthers, 1995; Ashby, 1996).
Re-Africanization - Intergenerational, family-based process of reclamation, revivification and reincorporation of African cultural knowledge and values as the prerequisite for establishing a 21st century African social order rooted in the traditional wisdom of African people (Akoto & Akoto, 2000).
Sankofa (Twi) - Akan concept, symbol and social practice adopted by late 20th century Pan African nationalist scholars and activists, which refers to the practice of learning from the past to build for the future. For African people, this means having the desire to not only to understand the worldview of our ancient African ancestors, but also the wisdom to adopt or adapt their social practices and philosophical beliefs when they will help us establish financially independent, emotionally wholesome and nurturing families and autonomous, sovereign, self-sufficient communities. Sankofa practice demands confronting the Maafa by respecting life, nature and the wisdom of our African ancestors, establishing viable extended families, supporting African centered institutions and organizations, and creating social and economic ties throughout the African World Community (Wase, 1998; Akoto & Akoto, 2000).
 
Dwt: A Tool for Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery

...Today, what has changed is not the game or the playing field, it is our understanding of game (war) theory and game (war) strategy. For example, psychologist Wade Nobles (1986) coined the metaphorical term conceptual incarceration to help us better understand a key aspect of the psychological slavery that shackles African people. Conceptual incarceration results from our unwitting adoption of erroneous concepts, ideas, views, opinions and theories about ourselves as African people, about Europeans, and about the world. It is Nobles' contention that the debilitating anti-Black, anti-African attitudes in the belief systems of virtually all Black people regardless of class, education, or religious orientation are largely to blame for the underdeveloped state of African communities in the U.S. and abroad.
Dr. Nobles also believes that since our behavior is influenced by what we think about ourselves and the world, large numbers of African people are imprisoned by false beliefs about themselves and the world which generates behaviors that keep us among the poor in every nation. We all, in varying degrees as Black people socialized under White supremacy, have internalized a set of beliefs that compel us to serve the needs of our oppressors while blatantly neglecting our own group development. These are the "invisible chains" that bind us.

 
If only the African people truly embraced us. It is my experience that the majority have not.

I do agree with you that we should strive to be centered on loving ourselves as we are and our blackness...I just wonder why it has to be from and African cultural standpoint? why can't we create our own culture, or own traditions? we are a creative and blessed people surely there are more choices than one mindset or another. that being said...

in order to survive we do have to at least understand the euro-centric mindset, because these tricksters are extremely manipulative. buying into it is a mistake. we agree there.

We do, indeed, agree there, OnTyme!

However, I think if we can ever learn how to teach each other the past and present tools of the "tricksters," we can parlay that into uplifting our own in America.

And perhaps, we can even do that while also connecting with and uplifting Blacks throughout the Diaspora.
 

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