Designed & Powered by MediaTek_

<<< Previous Viewing Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Next >>>

Proposing the image of Sambo, however, as a representation of this psychic wound was tantamount to pouring salt on it. Sambo had long been the prototype, the progenitor and/or the most notorious example of a host of caricatures and distorted images of black people. In the PBS documentaries, Ethnic Notions, produced by the late Marlon Riggs, and The Black Caricature, produced by Deirdre Leake Butcher, several distinct caricatures are listed: Zip Coon, the Mammy, the Uncle, the Pickanniny; yet Sambo was the "pre- eminent" caricature.20 A "first among unequals," if you will. The title of Donald Bogle's study of the black image in American films delineates another list of caricatures: Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks.21 In addition to these generic stereotypes there were specific media personalities such as the characters of both the radio and tv renditions of Amos 'n' Andy22 and advertising icons such as Aunt Jemima of pancake fame, Uncle Ben, who no doubt worked the rice plantations, and Rastus the Cream of Wheat chef. And, of course, there was blackface minstrelsy typified by Al Jolson. All of these distorted images were descendants, relatives or permutations of Sambo, and they permeated American popular culture during the era of segregation. Quoting Dr. Marguerita Ross Barnett, a political scientist and a museum curator of black artifacts: "In advertising, entertainment, popular literature, and artifacts of everyday material culture, such as household, workplace and souvenir items, Blacks were depicted as slow, lazy, ignorant, stupid, amoral, criminal, unclean, bestial and subhuman."23 Barnett states that these "negative stereotypes performed a political function." The images of blacks projected, disseminated and reinforced by the popular culture "defined, rationalized and circumscribed their identity in ways consistent with the maintenance of both legal segregation in the South and informal separation and discriminatory patterns in the North."

In Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester, Joseph Boskin surmises that the name Sambo may have been derived from naming practices in at least three different West African societies, but that it more likely came from Hispanic or Portuguese sources. In two of those three West African societies, the Mende and Vai cultures, "sambo" means "disgraced" and/or "shameful."24 In Spanish and Portuguese-speaking cultures, the word "zambo" means a "bowlegged" or "knock-kneed" person or, in short, a person who resembles a monkey.25 The appellation of Sambo for a black man, was thus another example of the racist European perception that Africans resembled apes or simian creatures. Boskin states that in the North American colonies, Sambo appears as a proper name given to slaves in records dating back to the late 1600s. It became a fairly common name for African slaves throughout the colonies during the 1700s. By the1800s, the name begins to appear in plays and literature, children's books and joke books-all with comic allusion. Sambo became synonymous with the fool or buffoon. He became the American Jester-but was devoid of the European court jester's underlying sagacity. In comparing Sambo to caricatures of other ethnic groups or immigrants, Boskin states that "Sambo could not be outdone or matched. No comic figure played to wider audiences, received more thunderous applause, or lasted as long in the popular theatre."26 In fact, as Boskin points out, the name Sambo did not disappear from American popular culture until the 1960s and early '70s when Black Power advocates demanded that books bearing his name be removed from libraries and that blatant images of him be removed from restaurants.

No wonder then that the Elkins thesis should cause such a furor.

4. Bamboozled!
(Sambos, Calibans and Fridays)

In [1851] Samuel Cartwright published a paper in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal in which he attempted to substantiate the association of blackness and madness by specifically identifying psychopathologies to which blacks alone were prey. Among the classes of illness he pinpointed were "Drapetomania" or causing slaves to "run away" and "dysaethesia aethiopus or herbetude of mind and obtuse sensibility of body-a disease peculiar to negroes¾called by overseers 'rascality.'" In both instances, mani- festations of the black's rejection of the institution of slavery were fitted into the medical model of insanity.

-Sander Gillman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness

"You've been had, you've been tricked, you've been hoodwinked, you've been bamboozled."

-Malcolm X [statement popularized by Spike Lee
in his movie Bamboozled, a penetrating and disturbing examination of distorted black images and minstrelsy in American popular culture]

As with any rich language, there are words in Ebonics which convey powerful concepts that are lost in translation. "Tricknology" is one such word. "Tricknology" is a street corner word, an integral part of the inner city lexicon. It was coined by the Nation of Islam (NOI), and used in at least one public speech by Malcolm, but it was popularized by the Five Percenters, an NOI splinter group which appeals mainly to youth. The Five Percenters made the word an essential part of the black urban vocabulary. Switching gears momentarily from urban street corners to fairy tale wonderlands, "tricknology" is an example of a "portmanteau word" which signifies, as Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, that there are several meanings packed into one word. As the Five Percenters say, if you "break down" (analyze the etymological components of) the word "tricknology," you will discover: the word "trick," the word "knowledge," and the suffix "-logy" which means "the science, doctrine or theory of." Tricknology, then, is the "science of trick knowledge. Tricknology is not simply "plain ol' trickery"; nor is it exemplified by your average street hustler's con game. Tricknology denotes a much more subtle and sophisticated level of deception. The "science of trick knowledge" means the science of using respected fields of knowledge (or one's official or expert capacity) in a cunning, devious or deceitful manner. The term "tricknology," therefore, denotes the usage of any of the following techniques for purposes of fraud, deception, or the creation of ideological hegemony: sophistry, academic jargon, legalese, double-speak, psycho-babble, disinformation campaigns, lying with statistics, political chicanery, spin-doctoring, double-dealing, playing both sides against the middle, creating smoke-screens, subliminal advertising, media manipulation, the manufacture of consensus, etc. Of course, tricknology also includes any artifice used to divide and conquer people and any legally-sanctioned scheme employed by the wealthy to defraud poor people of their money or property (such as predatory lending practices). Most importantly, tricknology is almost exclusively the tool of the white man. (The Native American expression "the white man speaks with forked tongue" denotes that he lies; tricknology denotes the complex and elaborate machinations involved in his lying.) Hence, the word typically appears in these contexts: "the white man is using his tricknology on you" or-as when casting aspersions on a suspected ruse or ploy by whites to pull the wool over black people's eyes-"that's just the white man's tricknology." In short, tricknology is what the oppressor uses to keep black people deceived, misdirected, misinformed, baffled, duped, confused, torn between two poles, lulled into false security or false consciousness, distracted, diverted, un-alert or preoccupied, and powerless and impoverished.27

A clear example of tricknology is the specious argument by Samuel Cartwright in the first quotation above. The 19th-century context of Cartwright's statements makes them especially absurd or transparent to us, though evidently the publication of the analysis in a prestigious medical journal means that this racist lunacy was once accepted as scientifically valid. Hence our very serious question: Is the Elkins thesis any less specious, any less bogus than Cartwright's? In short, is the Sambo thesis scientifically valid or is it just tricknology? More subtly, we may have to ask if there are parts or portions of Elkins' argument which are valid. We can begin to answer these questions by outlining the main contours of the Sambo thesis.

There are several propositions and corollaries in Elkins's Sambo thesis. The enumeration which follows is an attempt to provide a concise yet nearly-exhaustive list: (1) child-like behavior and dependency, docility, irresponsibility, loyalty, laziness, and petty lying and thievery are the characteristics attributed to Sambo; (2) Sambo was the dominant-that is, most prevalent-personality type existent among the Southern plantation slaves; (3) Sambo is a real personality type-the image of Sambo in folklore or popular culture is too pervasive for it to be merely a fictional product of a slaveholders' "conspiracy"; (4) moral issues (racial equality) and the scientific discrediting of racial determinism have impeded scholars from exploring the Sambo personality; (5) the explanation for the Sambo personality need not rely on theories of either racial or cultural inferiority; (6) feudal West African societies and cultures were not inferior to those of feudal Europe and they did not produce a Sambo type but a proud warrior type; (7) the Sambo personality can be explained entirely by the trauma and the social structure of American plantation slavery; (8) though the shocks or traumas of enslavement endured from capture through the Middle Passage to sale on the auction block were powerful, the plantation environment was the most defining experience; (9) Sambo is uniquely a product of the closed system or total institution of North American slavery-the relatively open systems of Caribbean and Latin American slavery did not produce a Sambo personality; (10) one explanation for this is the total detachment of the slaves from African culture in the closed North American system as compared to the strong African cultural retentions, strong attachments to African religion and insurrectionary religious "cults," in the Caribbean and Latin America; (11) more importantly, the North American system was closed because the slavemaster had absolute authority over the slave; in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Catholic Church and the Crown (kings of Spain and Portugal) protected the rights of the slave, allowing slaves to marry, earn money to purchase their own freedom, etc.; (12) the docility of the unique North American Sambo personality accounts for the paucity and failure of slave revolts and conspiracies in the U.S., as compared with the numerous and successful slave uprisings in Latin America and the Caribbean; (13) the closed system or total institution of North American slavery is analogous to the total institution of the Nazi concentration camp; (14) there is ample written evidence from concentration camp survivors, including the psychologist Bruno Bettleheim, about the childlike behavior and dependency exhibited by camp inmates; (15) one can infer that the same debilitating psychological processes which occurred in the concentration camps also occurred on the slave plantation; (16) there are three psychological theories that can be employed to explain the dramatic personality changes in masses of slaves and camp inmates: Freudian theory, Sullivan's interpersonal theory, and role theory; (17) a Freudian model involves processes of "acute depersonalization," "infantile regression," a new "father image" personified in the SS guard or slavemaster, and identification with the aggressor; (18) Sullivan's model emphasizes the utter child-like dependency on the "significant other"-the SS guard or slavemaster-who supplied food, warmth, security, etc.; (19) role theory states that role-playing mediates the interaction between an individual and his cultural and institutional environment and that personality is actually made up of the roles that an individual plays; (20) role-playing involves several related concepts such as role expectations or role script, role performance, pervasive roles vs. limited roles, role clarity, etc.; (21) the two social psychology theories-interpersonal theory but most especially role theory- provide a more salient analysis of the Sambo personality than does Freudian psychoanalytic theory; (22) Sambo was a role that was expected on the plantation; (23) the punishments for stepping outside of the Sambo role were severe and the rewards for performing it well were very comforting; (24) it was more difficult for the early generations of slaves to accommodate to the Sambo role but easier for those generations who had been born into slavery; (25) the Sambo role became internalized, it was not merely a mask or a superficial performance.28

Elkins's work was unique because it was cross-disciplinary, a marriage of history and social psychology. Social psychologists hailed his work; they were eager to see their theories used by historians. Social psychology was itself a hybrid or interdisciplinary field, a marriage of sociology and psychology. A relatively new field, it was in a position in academia similar to the insecure new kid on the block. Hence it was a great advertisement and ego-booster for social psychology to be associated with a guy (the history discipline) who had a well-established reputation in the scholarly neighbor- hood. It didn't matter whether the social psychology theories were being used in a wrong-headed or racist manner. The mere fact that a historian borrowed from, and acknowledged the utility of, social psychology was enough for social psychologists to express their eternal gratitude. Elkins's Slavery became required reading for first-year graduate students in social psychology. It made a perfect companion piece to O. Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, a hidden treasure of racist psychoanalytic theory that one can inadvertently discover upon reading Frantz Fanon's Black Skin White Masks-wherein Fanon takes Mannoni to task.29 Originally published in French in 1950, Prospero and Caliban30 borrows from character sketches of the protagonists in Shakespeare's tragicomedy The Tempest, and from sketches of Crusoe and Friday in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, to construct a model of colonizer- colonized relationships used to analyze European-African encounters on the island of Madagascar (then known as Malagasy). Both literary works are about whites shipwrecked on "primitive" islands. Although Mannoni attributes an inferiority complex to the whites who leave European society to become colonizers (they do so because they cannot compete successfully with other Europeans), he more tellingly attributes a child-like dependency complex to the Africans-anticipating Elkins's 1959 Sambo thesis. Friday and Caliban are the two polar extremes of colonized African personality types-Defoe's Friday is friendly, Shakespeare's Caliban is hostile. About the Friday personality type we only get a meager passing reference, as Mannoni is preoccupied with the hostile reactions of "natives" to Europeans. (Unlike Elkins, who is intensely curious about the contented slave, Mannoni is only concerned when the natives are restless. The portraits drawn by Mannoni and Elkins are nevertheless strikingly similar.) Caliban we are told is an anagram for "cannibal." In The Tempest, Prospero calls Caliban "a born devil on whose nature/Nurture can never stick."31 That is, his primitive genetic endowment can never really be civilized. For Mannoni, "primitive" peoples, colonial "subjects" cannot be granted inde- pendence because they are fixed in a childlike state of dependency. When these "servants sever ties with their masters" they suffer a sense of "abandonment" and "betrayal" and undergo an "adolescent crisis." The "docile" Malagasy civil servant is incapable of initiative, "loses his head and appears quite unintelligent" when he attempts to solve a question without reference to European-derived "rules or precedents." "The presence of the European is very comforting. In him the Malagasy sees ... the absolute master, the protector." His fear of abandonment is revealed in Caliban's lines from The Tempest: "When thou camest first,/Thou strok'dst me, and mad'st much of me.../... and then I lov'd thee."32 Mannoni adds to Shakespeare the line : "And then you abandoned me before I had time to become your equal," explaining "In other words, you taught me to be dependent and I was happy; then you betrayed me and plunged me into inferiority."33 Mannoni goes on to describe how feelings of abandonment lead to guilt, and how guilt leads to violence. Through this long convoluted process of racist psychoanalytic theorizing, Mannoni the French psychiatrist seeks to explain the violent political uprising against the French which took place on Madagascar in 1947.

As the tv host Arsenio Hall used to say: "Things that make you go: 'Hmmm!'"

The racist conspiracy in social science, the tricknology, was worldwide. The African Americans had Sambo personalities, the Africans had Caliban complexes (when they weren't being well-behaved, sociable Fridays). In 1972, Stanislav Andreski, a social scientist who was alarmed and disgruntled by what was going on in the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, political science, economics, etc., published a work entitled Social Sciences as Sorcery,34 with chapter titles such as: "The Witch Doctor's Dilemma," "Manipulation Through Description," "The Smokescreen of Jargon," "The Uses of Absurdity," "Evasion in the Guise of Objectivity," "Hiding Behind Methodology," "Quantification as Camouflage," "Promiscuous Crypto-Conservatism," and "Ideology Underneath Terminology." Andreski's analysis was right on the mark: social science is witchcraft. White witchcraft.

5. Flippin' the Script
(Orishas, Guerrillas and Maroons)

The self-fulfilling prophecy constitutes only one manifestation of the much more general disposition of human beings to be influenced by what is said of them and their environment. On the individual plane everybody knows that one can make a person discontented by deploring the circumstances under which he lives, encourage his endeavor by praise or discourage it by sarcasm...

Even such purely academic theories as the interpretation of human nature have profound practical consequences if disseminated widely enough.

- Stanislav Andreski
Social Sciences as Sorcery

Social science, I teach my students, is a double-edged sword. It can be used as a weapon for you or against you. It's all a matter of "flippin' the script," which as my colleague Keith Gilyard points out, is simply Ebonics for "shifting the discourse."35 Shifting the discourse in our favor, turning the tide-and "turning the tables," I might add. In my freshman year of college (which began in the tumultuous year of 1968),36 long before the term "culture wars" became part of the American academic lexicon, my classmate, Glen Costa, and I came to the conclusion that we had to consciously resist the institutional programming that would turn us into the Black Bourgeoisie and instead chart and embark upon our course of study and activism that would turn us into Scholars and Warriors. In other words we would have to create a black revolutionary pedagogy that would teach and liberate our people, and we would have to be actively engaged in struggle-at all levels and, in Malcolm's words, "by whatever means necessary." We even fantasized that we might some day form an ensemble and cut a revolutionary spoken word album à la our heroes, The Last Poets. It would be called Scholars and Warriors, and on the front cover (in those days we had big vinyl albums not little CDs, and the aesthetics of album covers counted a lot), we would be pictured on campus-perhaps seated on the steps of Low Library in front of the famous statue Alma Mater-studiously reading books. On the back cover would be the shocker: we would appear standing tall and proud in dashikis, rifles in hand, ready for the revolution. It was probably the spring of 1969; we were barely 19 years old and still prone to flights of adolescent fantasy.

Gil Scott-Heron, another spoken word artist and hero of my college years, recorded a famous poem entitled "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" circa 1971.37 There were probably several layers of meaning that one could assign to the lyrics, but certainly one oft-repeated interpretation was that the revolution was above all an ideological, psychological, mental and spiritual event. I'm not being metaphysical here. What I mean is best illustrated in the words of a historian whose name I don't recall, in a July 1976 special edition of the Daily News Sunday Magazine celebrating the bicentennial of the American Revolution. Paraphrasing the words that stuck in my mind: "The American Revolution did not take place in 1776. It took place some 30 to 40 years earlier, in the minds and hearts of the American people. The events of 1776 were only the aftermath of that mental and spiritual revolution."

In that sense, some 34 years after my freshman fantasy, I still remain a committed Scholar and Warrior. It is as true for me today as it was in the spring of 1969, that scholars must be warriors; they must engage in a radical pedagogy that confronts and satirizes the enemy-and forces black people out of their comfort zones and makes them grapple or wrestle with ideological issues. The war that scholar-warriors must fight is a mental war, an ideological war, a war to win the hearts and the minds of the people. Black students-and also white students, for this is not just a war for national liberation but a class struggle as well-have to go through the internal revolutionary process. That demands a proactive, rather than reactive, ideological engagement. There are many levels of proactive engagement. One, is to go on the offensive¾to bring one's own issues to the forefront-instead of merely responding defensively to the oppressor's constant attacks. But another pro- active strategy is to keep issues burning, to keep the attacks alive. A reactive posture is one, for example, in which we confront ideological attacks such as The Bell Curve or the Sambo thesis issues head-on but in the same manner that we horrifyingly would confront a large hairy spider crawling towards us on our living room floor-we trounce the monster quickly and hurriedly sweep the remains under the rug, hoping never to see the likes of it again. A proactive engagement is to catch the spider, encase it in a jar, and put it on permanent display for everyone to see.

In 1972, as a first-year graduate student in social psychology, I was introduced to Stanley Elkins's Sambo. Some thirty years later, as a professor of African American Studies and social science, I teach a popular but rigorous course entitled The Psychology of the Black Experience where I continue to keep the issue of Sambo alive. I never swept him under the rug like some bête noire (pardon the pun). He's encased in the glass on display. Each semester, I introduce Elkins's Sambo to a new group of students, black and white, and force them to grapple with him. Due in some small measure to my efforts-and hopefully the efforts of many other teachers like me-there are a lot of young folks who know about Elkins's Sambo-and know about him in great depth., because we also dissect him with opposing views. We read and discuss Stanley Elkins's critics. We flip the script. Most of the criticisms that we discuss are rebuttals in the form of scholarly articles. One rich rebuttal, however, is anecdotal-or part of my oral presentation. This anecdote, which follows, is my "guerrilla attack" on Elkins.38

More than by the Sambo of Southern folklore or the Caliban or Friday of classical literature, the image of black people in the white mind has been captured by King Kong, one of Hollywood's classic films. It dredges up from the collective white American psyche, the collective white unconscious, all of white America's most repressed and deeply-rooted fears and anxieties about black people. The great nightmare of white America, from its colonial beginnings up through the Civil War, has been a massive slave uprising; the Southern aristocracy created the image of Sambo to ease their own fears. They desperately needed to believe in Sambo so that they could sleep easy at night. But buried deep in the Southern white psyche was the fear that one night, while sleeping their throats would be cut-or worse that they would be awakened to witness that final moment of horror-by the people whom they had enslaved. In enslaving and oppressing black people, America slept each night with an uneasy conscience knowing that they were sitting on top of a volcano that could erupt at any moment. In modern times, the nightmare of an uprising took on the semblance of a black urban revolt¾an inner city insurrection.

The nightmare of a black uprising is told in detail in this Hollywood classic. But it is a masterful work of cinema because the true import of the story is being communicated just below the threshold of our consciousness, and we all pick up the meanings on a subliminal level. As with any great myth or fairy-tale, the great psychological insights are veiled from our conscious perception as we are spellbound by the entertainment. Still, our emotional instincts "understand" the true meaning of the story-we feel it on a gut level. And it all becomes startlingly clear, once we have the interpretive key that brings the symbols to our conscious awareness. Here is that key:

Africans have always been derogatorily depicted as apes,39 and a giant ape depicts millions of Africans, the masses of black people in America. The title of the movie itself suggests the great Mani Kongo or King of the Congo who has been captured from his homeland and shipped in chains to America. Once he reaches these shores, this great physical specimen is locked in chains, penned in a cage and placed on stage, thereby representing the four roles to which black men have been relegated in America-the slave (in chains), the prisoner (locked in a cage), the entertainer (a great spectacle on stage), and the athlete (great physical prowess). Kong breaks his chains and goes rampaging through the inner city (riots, insurrections, slave revolts). Having been guilty throughout slavery of the wholesale rape of black women (manifested by all of the mulattos and variations in skin tone in the black community), whites have always feared that black men would retaliate by raping white women. (Hence the violent history of lynchings in the South for even "looking the wrong way" at a white woman; and the present day "legal lynching" in the north of five innocent young men for the Central Park jogger rape.) Fay Wray represents the pure and pristine white womanhood that Kong supposedly lusts for.40 The climb to the top of the Empire State Building is interesting on many levels, for the building embodies at once a phallic symbol and the peak cultural and technological achievement of Western Civilization. Hence Kong is challenging the white man's manhood and his technological and cultural "superiority." Reaching the pinnacle of the building, Kong has reversed societal roles: in the ultimate "flippin' of the script," the black man is on the top and the white man is on the bottom looking up at him. (In a 1976 remake of the 1933 classic, Kong climbs to the top of the Twin Towers, which says a lot about the symbolism of white supremacy that was embodied in the World Trade Center.) The denouement, which ends the nightmare of the black uprising, is that Kong is shot down-just as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the Panthers and Nat Turner were shot down. End of threat, end of nightmare, white fears are assuaged. And the subliminal lesson to African Americans is, "If you ever rise up in rebellion, this will be your fate."

I like the story line: Gorilla Warfare in America. I just want to re-write the ending. Gotta keep flippin' the script.

There are many ways, of course, of flippin' the script. For example, there was a favorite poster of mine from the sixties (now sadly lost) which showed an Afro-coiffed, muscle-rippling Samson figure shedding-or rather ripping his way out of-the outer skin of a Sambo/Coon figure. The caption accompanying this illustration was a quote from Kwame Ture né Stokely Carmichael: "Inside of every Negro, there is a potential Black Man." That whole poster was a shorthand for the Nigrescence models41-originally termed Negro-to-Black Conversion models42-which analyze the process of flippin' the role-script or role-expectation that Elkins speaks of, from a personality type that could be caricatured and ridiculed to one that would be respected (and feared).43 This is not to suggest that these models refer to Elkins in any way (they don't), nor is it to suggest that I have accepted Elkins's Sambo designation; but it does suggest that black people can and do accept the idea of black personality types that run on some continuum from those which are negatively-evaluated to those which are positively-evaluated (and that black people be their own evaluators not whites). Afrocentrists are of course more interested in the Negro-to-Black-to-African Conversion experience, and works such as Wade W. Noble's African Psychology: Toward Its Reclamation, Reascension and Revitalization, Na'im Akbar's Light from Ancient Africa, Asa G. Hilliard's SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind, Linda James Myers's Understanding an Afrocentric World View, and Kobi Kambon's The African Personality in America provide a role script through ancestral wisdom from Africa of great antiquity. Other Afrocentrists have flipped the script by "signifying."

<<< Previous Viewing Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Next >>>