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The Sambo Thesis Revisited: Slavery's Impact upon the African American Personality

By Yusuf Nuruddin

... And William Siren is going to commit suicide
when he finds out that Nat Turner
made love to his great great grandmother
And he has taken our most violent and militant leaders
and stuck lollipops up their ass to pacify
their black power farts
And he is beginning to assume that all of us
were born under the sign
Taurus the Bull
Because all we do is
Bullshit...

¾"This is Madness"
Umar Bin Hassan of
The Last Poets

1. Historical Fictions
("Turning Nat Turner Over in His Grave")

In these penultimate lines of his disturbingly political and hauntingly surrealistic poem, "This is Madness" (1970),1 Umar Bin Hassan-of the legendary black nationalist spoken word/recording artists ensemble, The Last Poets-deftly manages to strike three well-placed blows in swift succession. First of all, he lambasts William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966)2 for its historically revisionist emasculation of the infamous slave insurrectionist. Secondly, he decries the white man's co-optation, pacification and defanging of sixties era black radicals. Thirdly, he laments and critiques the failure of these radicals to move beyond mere rhetoric and demonstrate true revolutionary resolve. This is a social commentary knock-out combination, since Bin Hassan's lines are hardly disjointed or fragmentary. In the psyches of Americans, black and white, there are powerful links between slave insurrections and modern urban revolts. Published during the apex of Black Power's civil disturbances, Styron's distorted portrayal of Nat Turner served not only as a fallacious psychohistorical study of plantation uprisings, but also as a searing reactionary commentary on the riots and rebellions of the sixties. White reactionaries and black nationalists battled over the hotly contested image of Nat Turner, each regarding him as a distant mirror reflecting their divergent perceptions of contemporary black militancy. This battle prompted the publication of William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968),3 edited by the late eminent Harlem-based historian John Henrik Clarke. In this volume, Clarke, historians Lerone Bennett and Vincent Harding, novelists John Oliver Killens and John A. Williams, political scientist Charles Hamilton, psychiatrist Alvin Poissaint and others take Styron to task for his "hoax," his "imaginary," "impotent," "celibate," "homosexual"4  image of a Nat Turner "pining for white women." Furthermore-and herein lies the crucial point of departure for my essay-Styron's Nat Turner, according to Clarke and Bennett, incorporates the image of Sambo which was projected as the dominant plantation type by "the classical apologist for slavery" historian Ulrich B. Phillips and the "sophisticated modern apologist" historian Stanley Elkins.5

2. Historical Paradigms of Slavery
("Turning Ulrich Phillips on his Head")

Historians generally agree that the historiography of slavery has been dominated, defined and developed by three landmark studies-each in turn supplanting its predecessor as the prevailing model.6 These landmark studies in chronological order are: Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (1918); Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956); and Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). Histories of slavery written in the ante-bellum period by both Northern abolitionists and Southern pro-slavery advocates were characterized less by objective research than by polemics-understandably so, since the issue was so politically explosive that it led to the Civil War. Written five decades after the Civil War, Phillips's American Negro Slavery set new standards of scholarly comprehensiveness and exactitude in its field. Nevertheless, in its attitudes toward race, American Negro Slavery was a pro-slavery panegyric.7 Though he was a masterful historian, Phillips, a white southerner who grew up in the post-Reconstruction era of jim crow, was undoubtedly an ideological product of his times. He sought to dismantle the arguments of the ante-bellum abolitionist historians through a meticulous, monumental empirical investigation of plantation life, records, and statistics. In spite of Phillips's exacting empirical research methods, his work, while not polemical, was laden with Southern white supremacist values. His biased selection and interpretation of data underscored the Southern notion that slavery was a rather mild and benign institution-nothing like the harsh and cruel system portrayed by the anti-slavery exponents. More insidiously, Phillips argued that slavery had a "civilizing" and Christianizing effect on blacks, whom he saw as an inferior race. In a passage unfavorably comparing the humanity-or the human urge to resist oppression-of the black slaves on the American plantation to that of the white slaves in ancient Rome, Phillips stated that "negroes ... for the most part were by racial quality submissive rather than defiant, lighthearted instead of gloomy, ingratiating instead of sullen, and [their] very defects invited paternalism rather than repression."8 This characterization of the plantation slave was nothing more nor less than a rephrasing of the classic descriptions of Sambo in American Southern folklore: docile, contented, happy-go-lucky and childlike.

Phillips's American Negro Slavery cast a long shadow of influence over the historians of American slavery for more than three decades until the mid-50s when Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution was published. Stampp's perspective challenged and eventually over- turned the Phillips paradigm of slavery. Stampp used the same methodology as Phillips-the fastidious amassing of plantation life data-but he drew upon more varied sources of information, sources that demonstrated slavery's harsh, inhumane and oppressive conditions.9 Like Phillips, Stampp was also an ideological product of his times and social environment. Writing in the backdrop of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement-the 1954 Brown vs. Board decision and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott-Stampp rejected Phillips's antiquated Southern beliefs about racial inferiority of blacks, stating that "innately, Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less."10 Specifically, Stampp was rejecting Phillips's notion of racial or genetic determinism-the idea that one's race or gene pool determined one's behavior, as well Phillips's corollary that the black temperament could be charac- terized as submissive, light-hearted, ingratiating and inviting of paternalism. In documenting the widespread resistance to slavery, Stampp deflated the myth of a docile, infantile, contented, happy-go-lucky slave.

The folkloric Sambo was not yet laid to rest, however. It was to receive its most vigorous and robust incarnation in Stanley Elkins's 1959 work, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Whereas Phillips had merely alluded to Sambo with descriptive adjectives, Elkins gave Sambo definitive nomenclature. Elkins borrowed the name "Sambo" from folklore and introduced it into the realm of history and social science. For Elkins, Sambo was a very real historical personality type; for the historians and social scientists who read and responded to Elkins, Sambo was a theoretical construct with which they wrestled. Coming in on the heels of Stampp, the Elkins thesis heralded yet another revolution in the historiography of slavery.

To contextualize Elkins, we should understand that he accepted Stampp's, rather than Phillips's, portrayal of the slave system. For Elkins, as for Stampp, slavery was a harsh, brutal, oppressive system, so oppressive in fact that Elkins believed that its victims were transformed into docile, irresponsible, child-like dependents. In this latter sense Elkins is a Phillipian, for he accepts Phillips's description of the behavioral temperament or personality of the slave. But as Clarke has noted, Elkins is modern and sophisticated. Elkins rejects theories of racial, genetic or biological determinism. Yet, proverbially, he refuses to "throw out the baby with the dirty bath water." The dirty bath water is the hereditarian argument; the baby is the Sambo personality. Elkins asserts that a genetic explanation for the Sambo personality is outmoded and unnecessary, that we simply need to look to environmental factors for causation. Sambo was real-it was the environment of the oppressive American slave system which created him. To adapt a phrase describing the relationship of Marx to Hegel, Elkins is a modernist Phillipian, a neo-Phillipian who has turned Phillips on his head.

3. Elkins's Sambo
("Turning Us Black Folks Sick on Our Stomachs")

The name "Sambo" has come to be synonymous with "race stereotype..."

...The characteristics that have been claimed for the type come principally from Southern lore. Sambo, the typical plantation slave, was docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing; his behavior full of infantile silliness and his talk inflated with childish exaggeration. His relationship with his master was one of utter dependence and childlike attachment: indeed it was the very key to his being. Although the merest hint of Sambo's "manhood" might fill the Southern breast with scorn, the child, "in his place," could be both exasperating and lovable.

 ¾Elkins, Slavery

Something is rotten in academia. It's called institutional racism. It's not merely the gatekeeping system which denies meaningful numbers of students of color entry into graduate school; it's not merely the glass ceiling which prevents administrators or professors of color from advancing up the ranks or getting tenure. No, it's not just the tokenism. It's also the white supremacy which permeates scholarship and lurks under the guise of scientific objectivity and value-neutrality. In a "publish or perish" profession, a sure-fire way of getting into print is to label the downtrodden and oppressed as deviant, deficient or dysfunctional. Careers and reputations have been made by bad-mouthing black people. Black-bashing generates controversy, controversy in turn generates peer response (a spate of articles pro and con), and widespread peer response ensures fame, mobility, promotion and tenure. Hence, "blaming the victims"-or more specifically "blaming the negroes"-has become an academic cottage industry.11 Unfortunately millions of people in the real world are wounded by the resulting volleys. From the Moynihan Report to The Bell Curve, from the theory of the meritocracy to the "culture of poverty" thesis, African Americans have suffered the slings, the arrows and the semi-automatic bullets of outrageous social science.

The Sambo thesis must be examined in this light. Yet it cannot be readily dismissed, as in the case, for example, of The Bell Curve theory. Of course, "to readily dismiss" doesn't mean "to simply ignore." There were spirited rebuttals of The Bell Curve-in the forms of articles, books and conferences12-but never for an instant did the opposition have to weigh the plausibility of the thesis. For all of its hooplah, Herrnstein and Murray's Bell Curve theory, when stripped bare, was revealed to be simply bad science (discredited heredi- tarianism/genetic determinism) coming to the behest of a bad social policy agenda (neo-Conservative/reactionary/anti-poor people). Bad, warmed-over, re-hashed science. It was Social Darwinism all over again, eugenics all over again. It was Arthur Jensen and William Shockley all over again.13 In fact, it was Richard Herrnstein all over again. We had been treated to Herrnstein's IQ in the Meritocracy theory in the early 1970s.14 In a nutshell, Herrnstein's earlier theory stated that one's place in the class hierarchy was determined by one's merit, skill or talent, especially one's innate intelligence. Hence the gifted high-IQ creme rises to the top of the social ladder and the low IQ dregs sink to the bottom. And that's how the rich become rich and the poor become poor in this competitive but "equal opportunity" society. >From the ruling class to the underclass, we all sift out to where we naturally belong by dint of brain-power; it's all a matter of "survival of the smartest."

Actually, if we are going indulge in such metaphysical prattle in order to explain class structure, I personally prefer ancient mysticism to this modern social science fiction. Reincarnation and karma-the universal law of cause and effect-gave rationale and legitimacy to the oppressive caste system in ancient India. "You reap what you sow" ("What goes around comes around") was the karmic law governing the transmigration of souls. The dark-skinned Dalit ("Untouchables") were suffering the punishment of their outcaste status for the evil deeds they had committed in their past incarnation; the light-skinned Brahmins were enjoying the reward of their upper caste status for the good deeds they had performed in their past life. An ancient mystical doctrine-yet a much more enchanting theory about social stratification than the 20th-century science fiction version: the dark-skinned negroes are suffering the punishment of their underclass status because of the bad genes they inherited from their ancestors; the light-skinned whites are enjoying the reward of their ruling class status because of the good genes they inherited. (How about a global apartheid theory; dark-skinned peoples worldwide suffer their oppressed status because of the military conquest, domination and exploitation imposed upon them in the name of materialistic greed and Aryan/white supremacy?).

Then, too, Herrnstein and Murray's theory that high IQs were not distributed equally throughout the class structure was counter- intuitive for black folks. Those of us who grew up in ghetto neighborhoods, all knew someone like the brutha in the numbers rackets whom comedian Richard Pryor so aptly described: "The boy was a genius! He booked the numbers without pencil or paper!" Without access to equal opportunity, brilliance was often manifested in criminal behavior-illicit capitalistic ventures.

In 1977, the New York Times Sunday Magazine featured two cover stories about "geniuses"-one black, one white.15  The white genius was Saul Kripke, then a young philosophy professor at Princeton and a dazzling rising star in the field of logic. The gifted black man was Nicky Barnes, whom the Times described as "an organizational genius." He was the kingpin of the largest dope ring in Harlem and had been described as "Mr. Untouchable" because law enforcement could not get any hard evidence on him. While temporarily jailed (before being released on $300,000 bail), he exhibited his genius once more-this time by subscribing to and reading 37 different law journals in order to search for loopholes in the law from which to fashion his intended legal defense. (Not your ordinary jailhouse lawyer!) Unfortunately for Barnes, this New York Times cover article hailing his brilliance and elusiveness drew the ire of President Jimmy Carter, who put federal heat on him. Barnes subsequently was convicted in 1978 and sentenced to life in prison.16 Some meritocracy¾Princeton for the white geniuses and prison for the black ones! In the early '90s, at the height of the crack epidemic, a front-page story in the New York Times reported that a young generation of black street-wise entrepreneurs were operating drug cartels with sprawling inter-city networks that had the structure, the intricacy, sophistication and efficiency of major corporations. Black ingenuity, of course, is not merely expressed in pathological ways; there are the endless lists of black inventors and their inventions, black cultural innovators and their innovations, which are celebrated annually in inner city schools and community centers during Black History Month; but these expressions of black genius rarely grace the cover page of the New York Times.

While we rationally, empirically and intuitively knew that The Bell Curve was wrong, Sambo was a construct that we had to wrestle with. Elkins's fundamental premise was that the harsh brutality of slavery had impacted negatively upon the African American psyche. No one would argue with this point. For example, within certain circles of the culturally aware and politically informed black public-those highly literate, articulate and counter-hegemonic community-based circles which might be characterized as "the Afrocentric public"-contemporary discourse includes the concept "Post-Slavery Trauma Syndrome." This phrase-an obvious parody of the term "Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome"-coined by one of the Afrocentric lecture circuit professors, refers to a condition of trauma resulting from the holocaust of enslavement which black people collectively suffer from even to this day.17 Another concept in the Afrocentric public discourse, the "Stockholm Syndrome," has been borrowed directly from mainstream social science. The syndrome, first observed in four hostages who were held in a bank vault for six days in 1973 during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, refers to a strange bond or attachment which hostages form with their captors. Observed also in many subsequent hostage situations, the syndrome is now recognized as a psychological response to terrorism. The captives begin to identify with the captors, to seek favors from them "in an almost childlike way," and even fear their would-be rescuers (realizing that action taken by these rescuers¾gunfire, etc.¾might result in their being harmed rather than rescued).18 The Afrocentric public drew the obvious parallels between Stockholm syndrome hostages and enslaved captives who learned to love their "massa." Still suffering from the Stockholm syndrome, the masses of black people even feared militant, revolutionary or Afrocentric blacks (whose ideologies and activism held the key or blueprint for black liberation) just as hostages feared their potential rescuers. Already two and three decades ago, before the community-based discourse became so sophisticated, the politically-conscious circles of that era-the black nationalist and Marxist-influenced public-were sprinkling their conversations with terms like "mental slavery," "slave mentality," "colonized mind," and "internalized oppression." The popular literature read by the present-day Afrocentric public (books sold in black bookstores or hawked on street corners by ubiquitous inner city book vendors) has titles such as Slavery: The African American Psychic Trauma and Breaking The Chains of Psychological Slavery.19 All this terminology, heard in the conversations of intellectual and political activist circles in Harlem, Bed-Stuy and other ghetto communities, acknowledges and confirms the underlying premise of Elkins's thesis: the brutality of slavery has damaged the African American psyche.

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