I
woke up this morning with the blues; so I was glad to see your call to
rekindle the mental health peer group movement (Cf. “How to Recover
from the Addiction to White Supremacy”) and the connection to Dr. Frantz
Fanon’s prescriptions in regard to the oppressed in “The Wretched of
the Earth.” Although Fanon seemed somewhat taken with existentialism if
not romanticism, I can nevertheless appreciate his recognition of the
therapeutic benefits of revolutionary action. This had seemed to be
confirmed in the mid-1960s by the research of a white psychiatrist at
the Howard University School of Medicine, finding that activism in a
community decreased rates of crime rates criminalization. We could
later see this in the Black Panthers as well as the Nation of Islam,
both of which impressively rehabilitated persons criminalized and/or
incarcerated for crime, from Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver on down.
Note that both lacked any considerable degree of formal education or
certification in the oppressor’s paraphernalia of socialization.
I
also note your concern that there are not enough mental health workers
available to us. This is compounded by the hijacking of the mental
health market and essentially all medical care by the insurance
companies that even tell the white doctors what to do and what they
cannot do or treat and how. The result is we are either short of or
without mental health care, or we are confined in hospitals and prisons
even as elders suffering dementia when there are not enough family
members to handle us in the home and community, the alternative is
involuntary confinement (“incarceration” to use the word independently
derived by my wife, Julia, and psychiatrist Thomas Ssazz, M.D. “The
Medicalization of Everyday Life”). Confinement, including segregation,
emerges as both a form of social control and medical treatment of
choice.
So,
the violence isn’t so much new as magnified by the circumstances of
today, including the mobile facility of the “cell” phone as well as the
presence and availability of guns and illegal and addictive
tranquilization. The same with confinement as “the new slavery.” If
anything, the jump in incarceration is not so much new enslavement as a
product of our continued enslavement and sociological and psychological
obsolescence in the cybernetic world outside.
Emancipation
from what? They never really paid us before or after slavery. Not from
work and not from the consequences of never being fully integrated and
assimilated into the labor force or the educational system presumed to
prepare us to engage in a socially acceptable role in a prejudiced and
heartless world in stark opposition to our involvement in the outside
world. If prisons are the new slavery, then the new slave trade is a
labor force that says no to us and continues its use of the cheap labor
force of immigration, including continental Africans. We forget that
Africans in America (African Americans? What exactly is an “American”?).
Our
ancestors came here as immigrants albeit against their will. When the
slave trade came into disrepute in world opinion, we were then
segregated (confined us) by the oppressor’s law and cultural ritual in
“ghettoes” and set us aside. while the use of immigration as a cheap
labor supply persisted in a kind of “ethnic succession” in which
immigrants from other lands were and are used to replace the immigrants
as they are assimilated and moving up in the labor force. Alex Haley’s
“Roots” was so popular in part because it was as much their story as
ours. But the African American has been the only group confined here by
de jure segregation and enslavement. True, the Native American was
placed in confinement on reservations and set aside but left with some
legal sovereignty and reparations, if not linguistics, denied to us.
Thus their casinos and access to a degree of autonomous education
persistently denied to us today,
That
is why I have been so gratified to see the return to activism on our
part. It was a long time coming since the retreat from combat with our
oppression in the search for social acceptance and psychological
identity as “free persons of color” in the twilight of the Sixties. The
mental health peer group anticipated and is also in itself a return to
“revolution,” to social action instead of the world of “make believe,”
however “afrocentric”, of the petite bourgeoisie noir derided by E.
Franklin Frazier in his book, “Bourgeoisie Noir,” later translated from
the French as “Black Bourgeoisie.” (See also my use of Stokely
Carmichael’s term “Nouveau Blacks” in the “Epilogue” to the second
edition of “The Black Anglo Saxons”).
Anyway,
good luck with the mental health peer group movement. As Mao told
DuBois, the only mistake an oppressed people can make is to do nothing
to oppose oppression.
Nathan Hare
Phone: 415-474-1707
Comment by Marvin X
Elijah
told us we live under the shadow of death in America. I'm amazed pigs
are not trained to deal with the mentally ill, perhaps, it is because
they suffer mental illness themselves!
A
low information person told me today America is not Iraq or Syria, and
this mental state that we are not in a long protracted low intensity war
with America is precisely why we are shot down like dogs. They taught
us in Boy Scouts to be prepared. Yet we make our daily round in the mind
fields of America totally unprepared for war. How can anyone be
prepared for war with pants hanging on their behinds? How can we be
prepared for war without a united front that Amiri Baraka talked about?
Fanon
said the only way the oppressed can regain their mental equilibrium is
by joining the revolution. We must resist the white supremacy global
bandits and their slave catchers in blue uniforms.
As
per the mentally ill, i.e., those suffering traumatic slave system
diseases, either mild, moderate or severe, must attempt the mental
health peer group. There are simply not enough mental health workers in
our community, so we must heal ourselves. See my manual How to Recover
from the Addiction to White Supremacy, Black Bird Press, introduction by
Dr. Nathan Hare.---Marvin X
Subject: Mentally ill Black woman murdered by NYC pigs
This just in from Charles Barron!...
NYPD kills a mentally challenged 66 year old grandmother...called a 'good shooting'!...How can shooting down a 66 year old grandmother in anyway be called 'good'!...
Eleanor Bumphers all over again...
Stay in the streets yg people!...
And o yes, Saturday, Oct 22nd, the 80th birthday of Chairman Bobby Seale is the 15th Nat'l Day Against Police Brutality!
Keep the pressure on the pig!
Her name was Deborah Danner...
Say her name!...
NYPD kills a mentally challenged 66 year old grandmother...called a 'good shooting'!...How can shooting down a 66 year old grandmother in anyway be called 'good'!...
Eleanor Bumphers all over again...
Stay in the streets yg people!...
And o yes, Saturday, Oct 22nd, the 80th birthday of Chairman Bobby Seale is the 15th Nat'l Day Against Police Brutality!
Keep the pressure on the pig!
Her name was Deborah Danner...
Say her name!...
--Baba Zayid
Newark, NJ
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