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If we consider that Elkins's Sambo is an example of white people "playing the dozens" on us-as Robin D.G. Kelley states in the opening pages of Yo' Mama's Disfunktional44¾then black folks can flip the script by dissin' and dissecting white folks, placing the white personality type and white behavioral scripts under the microscope. Among the Afrocentric texts which have taken on this mission are: Marimaba Ani, Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior; Bobby E. Wright, The Psychopathic Racial Personality and Other Essays, Frances Cress Welsing, The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, and Amos Wilson, The Falsification of African Consciousness: Eurocentric History, Psychiatry and the Politics of White Supremacy. White anti-racist scholarship has also put the white racist personality under the microscope, e.g., Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory, and Michael Bradley, The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man's Racism, Sexism and Aggression. While all of these script-flippin' theses about white racists emerge from the academy, script-flippin' myths¾and elaborations upon myths¾continue to emerge from the organic intellectuals of the inner city "cults" such as the Nation of Islam, the Five Percenters, and the Hebrew Israelites. Most of the above is grist for my courses The Psychology of the Black Experience and Critical Issues in Black Psychology; but here I wish to concentrate on the scholars who flip the Elkins script by subverting, deflating, or undermining the major contentions of his argument.

Of the two dozen or so propositions and corollaries in the Elkins thesis which I listed earlier, there are about six major areas of contention which most critics and respondents to Elkins have been concerned with. These may formulated as questions:

1) Was the Sambo personality real, or was it a fiction created by Southern folklore?

2) Was the Sambo personality the dominant or most prevalent personality type on the Southern plantation, or were there other very prevalent personality types?

3) Was the Sambo personality internalized or was it a masquerade?

4) Was the Sambo personality unique to North American slavery, or was it a universal slave personality which also appeared in the Caribbean and/or Latin America?

5) Were the North American slaves docile or were they revolutionary and rebellious?

6) Was the concentration camp experience truly analogous to slavery?

Due to space constraints, I will address here only the first five questions. One other key question, which most critics and respondents have not addressed, is the gender issue: How did slavery specifically affect African American women? Was there a dominant female slave personality? A final key issue concerns African cultural retentions: Were the North American slaves detached from African culture or did they retain significant African beliefs, values and practices? This question had already been the basis of a classic debate between the anthropologist Melvin Herskovits and the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier,45 and thus was not taken up with intensity by Elkins's critics.

The majority of responses to and critiques of the Elkins thesis appeared in 1971 in The Debate over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics, edited by Ann J. Lane.46 My discussion will refer to three of the chapters in this volume: Eugene Genovese, "Rebelliousness and Docility in the Negro Slaves"; Christopher Lasch & George Fredrickson, "Resistance to Slavery"; and Orlando Patterson, "Quashee," which explores a Caribbean cognate of Sambo. Other critiques I will draw upon include: Kenneth Stampp, "Rebels and Sambos; The Search for the Negro's Personalty in Slavery," which discusses Herbert Aptheker's important 1943 work American Negro Slave Revolts (which Elkins disregarded); John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South; Randall Miller & John David Smith, Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, which includes entries on "Sambo," "Slave Personality," "Slave Resistance" and related issues; and Howard McGary, "Resistance to Slavery," in Tommy Lott, ed., African American Philosophy: Selected Readings. I also gained insights from conversations with sociologist/Women's Studies scholar Barbara Omolade, on the gender issue. Finally, filmmaker Haile Gerima makes profound observations about the slave personality in his critically-acclaimed film, Sankofa.

1. Was the Sambo personality real or was it a fiction? In attempting to answer such a question, the issue of stereotyping immediately comes to the fore. Elkins was well aware of this, as he states early on:

The name "Sambo has come to be synonymous with "race stereotype." Here is an automatic danger signal, warning that the analytic difficulties of asking such questions about slave personality may not be nearly so great as the moral difficulties. The one inhibits the other; the morality has had a clogging effect on its theoretical development that may not be to the best interest of either. And yet theory on group personality is still in a stage rudimentary enough that this particular body of material-potentially illuminating-ought not to remain morally impounded any longer.47

The line between a personality type and a stereotype, for Elkins, is a very thin one-one which I believe he traverses. As he mentions, the study of group personality-i.e., generalizations about the behavioral characteristics of different ethnic groups or nationalities- was an emerging topic in social psychology at that time. Social psychologists and psychological anthropologists used terms such as modal personality and national character  to refer to, for example, distinctive German traits or British personality types or Chinese behavior patterns. Hence it was theoretically possible to talk about an African American (or, in 1959, an "American Negro") personality profile as well. However, the study of culture and personality is empirical rather than speculative. It involves measuring how different nationalities scored on systematic inventories of values (e.g., power, achievement, self-direction, conformity) or specific dimensions (e.g., individualism vs. collectivism) instead of relying upon the speculative generalizations that Elkins proffered. Furthermore Elkins is skating on thin ice by adopting Southern racist folklore as his point of reference. Can members of a dominant or "majority" group in this society make generalizations about members of a subordinate or "minority" group without being influenced or prejudiced by the ideological racism which permeates the society? It is a short (but dangerous) jump from making empirical generalizations about national character or modal personality to making the kinds of exaggerated generalizations that constitute a stereotype. In that sense, Sambo was certainly a fiction.

John Blassingame makes a similar observation when he states that "any attempt to generalize about individual and group personality traits must assess the degree to which "outsiders" are able to perceive someone else's behavior correctly." Blassingame refers to psychologists Gustav Ichheiser's concept "sham" characteristics- characteristics which are the result of either misinterpretation by the outsider or pretence by those who supposedly possess them.48 He further points out that the roots of this conception of the black slave are in the American attitude towards Negroes or Africans as a race, e.g., "ignoble savages, who were innately barbaric, imitative, passive, cheerful, childish, lazy, cowardly, superstitious, polygamous, submis- sive, immoral and stupid."49 He notes that writers in slave and caste societies representing and identifying with the ruling class have historically drawn unflattering stereotypes of the subordinate caste. He cites historian David B. Davis,50 who states that "almost universally slaves have been described as loyal, faithful, lazy, irresponsible and untrustworthy." White slaves and Russian serfs have been characterized this way. Even more revealing is Blassingame's statement that Southern writers were so committed to drawing unflattering stereotypes of subordinate groups that they characterized "non-slave-holding white Southerners as 'poor whites' who were densely ignorant, irresponsible, lawless, lazy, shiftless, dirty, careless, stupid, listless, unambitious, dishonest and morally degraded."51 Blassingame cites two other factors which contributed to the Sambo stereotype: 1) Southern writers felt compelled to disprove the allegations of abolitionist novelists, and 2) Southerners needed to relieve themselves of the anxiety of thinking of the slaves as men and as potential rebels: "the public [Sambo] stereotype only partially hid a multitude of private fears which reached the point of mass hysteria at the mere mention of the word 'rebellion.'"

Norman R. Yetman's entry "Slave Personality" in the Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery52 cites Richard B. Erno's dissertation, "Dominant Images of the Negro in the Antebellum South,"53 a content analysis of the diaries of Southern slaveholders, which shows that there were several images of slaves in the slaveholder's worldview that were used to justify slavery. The dominant image between 1800 and 1860 was "Caliban" (I assume that Erno borrows Mannoni's phrase54), "a form of being that was neither animal nor wholly human . essentially a beast of burden, servile, slothful, indolent, incompetent and stupid..." A Satan image was the second most pervasive image of blacks at that time; it refleceted the perception that slaves were a "troublesome presence.. At best they were dissemblers-inherently untrustworthy, deceptive, deceitful, evasive and prone to lying and stealing; at worst they were imprudent insolent, recalcitrant, rebellious, and lascivious, representing a threat to the established order." Sambo, "the comic slave," was a distant third image. Erno shows that each image was related to a specific geographic region of the South: Caliban was "a product of areas characterized by large plantation agriculture where a high proportion of the slaves were unskilled and there was a relatively high rate of blacks to whites in the general population." The Satan image appeared in the upper South in the early 1800s; after the 1830s it spread to parts of the lower south with high percentages of blacks in the population. Sambo was "restricted to the more urbanized areas of the South and to the border states. " Erno states that toward the end of the antebellum period, in response to abolitionist claims that slavery was dehumanizing, proslavery apologists, contending that slavery performed a "civilizing" function, offered three new images depicting blacks as personal servants rather than unskilled laborers: "the noble and loyal Friday, the wise, intelligent and nurturing mammy and the pious, long-suffering Uncle Tom."55

2. Was the Sambo personality the dominant or most prevalent personality type on the Southern plantation, or were there other very prevalent personality types? It is inherently difficult, of course, to answer this question, given our critics' response to the previous question, which casts Elkins's personality types as mere stereotypes. Nevertheless, Blassingame finds not one but three slave characters in the literature of antebellum Southern novelists, dramatists and journalists: Sambo, Nat and Jack.

Nat was the rebel who rivaled Sambo in the universality and continuity of his literary image. Revengeful, bloodthirsty, cunning, treacherous and savage, Nat was the incorrigible runaway, the poisoner of white men, the ravager of white women, who defied all the rules of the plantation society. Subdued and punished only when overcome by superior numbers or firepower, Nat retaliated when attacked by whites, led guerrilla activities of maroons against isolated plantations, killed overseers and planters or burned plantation buildings when he was abused.56

The rarest portrait in the antebellum literature was Jack:

Jack worked faithfully as long as he was well-treated. Sometimes sullen and uncooperative, he generally refused to be driven beyond the pace that he had set for himself. Conscious of his identity with other slaves, he cooperated with them to resist the white man's oppression. Rationally analyzing the white man's overwhelming physical power, Jack either avoided contact with him or was deferential in his presence. Since he did not identify with his master and could not always keep up the façade of deference, he was occasionally flogged for insubordination. Al- though often proud, stubborn and conscious of the wrongs he suffered, Jack tried to repress his anger. His patience was, however, not unlimited. He raided his master's larder when he was hungry, ran away when he was tired of working or had been punished, and was sometimes ungovernable. Shrewd and calculating, he used his wits to escape from work or to manipulate his overseer and master.57

Blassingame advances these two literary images in contrast to the image of Sambo, stating that if we must examine Sambo as a stereotype we may only do so in the context of these other stereotypical images. Sambo may have been the most fictive image, as "the more fear whites had of Nat, the more firmly they tried to believe in Sambo to escape paranoia."58 Blassingame gives a much more subtle analysis of slave personality types¾not looking only at stereotypical literary characterizations¾in his chapter "Slave Person- ality Types." He summarizes the complexity of the slave personalities by saying, "there was great variety in slave behavior.. The slave was no different in most ways from most men. The same range of personality types existed in the [slave] quarters as in the mansions."59

The stereotypical slave personalities Sambo, Nat and Jack, are all male, yet there was a certainly a female slave stereotype, the mammy. In Ethnic Notions, Marlon Riggs's PBS documentary film about distorted black images, the stereotypical mammy is depicted as desexualized, fat, shiny black, maternal and nurturing to the slavemaster's children but mean and cold to her own children; a strong matriarch and head of the household (boss over her husband); very much the opposite of the dainty white female. Variations of the Mammy stereotype continued to define the African woman even after slavery: for example the desexualized, fat, shiny black Aunt Jemima and the sassy, hands-on-her-hips, nagging Sapphire. There was also another negative but contrasting female slave stereotype, the sexy Mulatto: "high yellow," attractive, and an alluring temptress, a highly-desired "belly-warmer" or "bed-warmer" for the slavemaster. But without the "shiny black" female slave being sexually attractive to the rapist slave-master, there would have been no mulattos. Why was the dark African woman desexualized in the Mammy stereotype? Marlon Riggs suggests that the white woman on the plantation played a role in creating this stereotype, because she was in denial about how sexually threatening the African woman was to her white womanhood.

Barbara Omolade has suggested that at least four types of slave personalities could be attributed to the enslaved African female. Some of these personality types were characterized by positive heroic (or "sheroic") traits, others by a blend of positive and negative traits. Three personality types are taken from historical personages; a fourth is culled from Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved can be interpreted as a metaphor for the alienation/estrangement, identity- crisis and psychosis resulting from enslavement. These are Sally Hemings, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Sethe. Hemings, of course was the consort of Thomas Jefferson; she represents the slave as mistress. Harriet Tubman, as leader of the underground Railroad, represents a militant slave woman devoted to liberation; though she is not an insurrectionist, she is a rebel, in many respects a counterpart to Blassingame's Nat. Sojourner Truth represents the slave woman who turns to religion, spirituality and mysticism as a source of strength. The fictional character Sethe represents woman for whom family-protection of offspring from the ravages of slavery-becomes an obsession.

 Filmmaker Haile Gerima adds a new dimension to the issue of personality types. All the typologies that we have examined thus far suggest that personality is a firm, fixed and static entity. In the film Sankofa, we are reminded of one very simple truth: personality is dynamic; it changes over time as a result of experience and interactions with others. In this fictional account of a woman's experiences on a Southern slave plantation, we are introduced to several stereotypical characters: Shula, a docile pacifist house-slave who is repeatedly raped by the slavemaster; her lover Shango, a rebellious slave of Caribbean origin, who wears the name of the Yoruba orisha (the deity of fire, lightning and thunder) and who embodies Blassingame's classical Nat personality; and Nunu, an Akan priestess, who most reminds us of the importance of African cultural retentions. Born in Africa, Nunu is fearless and self-reliant because of the spiritual and occult forces at her command (one of the other slave-women animatedly recounts to a group how Nunu killed an oppressive slavemaster simply with the power of her gaze). She stands in bold contrast to the muted and somewhat defeated slaves who were born in the States. Ironically it is Nunu's own son Joe, a tragic mulatto, a product of rape, who is the most Euro-assimilated and self-hating of the slaves. Joe is overly attached to and dependent upon a Catholic priest, Father Rafael, and reveres the European images of Christ and the Virgin. He thinks that he is different from and better than the rest of the slaves because of both his devotion to the Church and his high-yellow skin tone. He hates his own mother because of her devotion to "pagan gods." Lucy, a beautiful dark-skinned slave, has an unrequited love for Joe who alternately sleeps with her and rejects her. Nobel Ali is a "headslave" (slave-driver), who administers whippings to the other slaves. He is very conflicted about this role. Musa is a head-slave by day but at night he is one of the leaders of a highly organized coalition of maroons and plantation rebels, who torch acres of fields.

The maroons or escaped slaves who have created a free republic in the hills, and who risk their freedom to ensure the gradual escape of their enslaved brethren, certainly constitute a type-a maroon personality which neither Elkins nor his critics have addressed. It is also noteworthy that there is no real Sambo character in the entire cast. Many of the slaves are variations of Blassingame's Jack. The interaction among these slaves results in the increasing radicalization of the pacifist Shula, who finally hacks her tormenter to death; the radicalization of the conflicted Nobel Ali, who becomes one of the secret rebels; and the awakening of Joe, who after committing matricide suddenly realizes that he has been duped and brainwashed into hating his Africanity, and in a fiery suicide/homicide torches the church, all of its European saint-idols, and Father Rafael. At a ripe moment when the slaves catch the slavemaster off-guard and unarmed, they rise up in insurrection and kill him and the other overseers. Shango who has been preaching an uncompromisingly revolutionary message all along, to seemingly deaf ears, is the Nat Turner-like character whose views are vindicated. The title of the film, Sankofa, is Ghanaian/Akan for "return to the source, return to the ways of the ancestors." Throughout the film, those who are most revolutionary are those who are free of Christian influence and, in fact, practitioners of traditional African religion. One potent idea that we are left with is that the revolutionary slaves, exemplified by Shango, are possessed or imbued with the powers of the orishas or African deities. For those involved in the Elkins debate, Gerima's most important message is that slave personality is not etched in stone; it is dynamic, it evolves and transforms-usually in the direction from conflicted Jack to rebellious Nat. Not developed in the action of the plot, but implied by the very presence of a free and structured society of escaped slaves, is the transformation/evolution from Nat to Maroon-from stateless revolutionary to sovereign revolutionary.

3. Was the Sambo personality internalized or was it a masquerade? If such a prevalent personality existed (which seems to be in serious doubt), it was probably in the context best captured by Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poem "We Wear the Mask," whose first stanza reads:

We wear the mask that grins and lies
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,¾
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.60

Kenneth Stampp makes it clear in his article "Rebels and Sambos"61 that the slaves were dissemblers-i.e., concealers, disguisers, pretenders, who hide their true thoughts and feelings, their true personalities, from the slavemaster. Paraphrasing Stampp, the slave behavior which whites saw was conscious accommodation to the Sambo role. The Sambo routine was a form of ritual acting; the slaves went through the motions of playing this role, and some played it with great skill and consistency. But they were not authentic Sambos, as they did not invest themselves wholeheartedly in the role and the role did not become a part of their true personalities. Stampp says that most slaves avoided internalizing the Sambo role because 1) when they were in their own community they were able to play different roles, 2) the Sambo role did not pre-empt all of their time, 3) the master was not the only "significant other" in their lives as Elikns presumes, 4) they had abundant opportunities to behave in meaningful adult roles, and 5) in contrast to the concentration camp, life was not so brutal that the slaves were destroyed as human beings.62

Stampp quotes John Dollard, who wrote about the dissem- blance that black people engaged in after slavery, during the era of jim crow:

[T]he Southern Negro played two roles, one that he is forced to play with white people and one "the real Negro" as he appears in dealings with his own people. What the white Southern people see... is the role they forced the Negro to accept, his caste role... .63

Evidence about the external as opposed to internalized nature of the Sambo role, which Stampp collected from folklore of black people themselves and also from whites who wrote about the management of slaves, is summarized by Stampp in the concept of pseudo-Sambo;

Whatever the masters may have said about the loyal, childlike "darky" in their public defense of slavery, the dissembling pseudo- Sambo was the most common reality that confronted them in their daily lives. As one planter wrote, "The most general defect in the character of the Negro is hypocrisy; and this hypocrisy frequently makes him pretend to more ignorance than he possesses; and if the master treats him like a fool, he will be sure to act the fool's part. This is a very convenient trait, as it frequently serves as an apology for awkwardness and neglect of duty."64

4. Was the Sambo personality unique and particular to North American slavery or was it universal slave personality? Orlando Patterson counters Elkins's claim that the Sambo personality-or, in light of Kenneth Stampp's insight, "the pseudo Sambo dissembling role"-was unique to North America. In the Caribbean, there was a folkloric Sambo counterpart "Quashee."65 Patterson states that the descriptions of Sambo bear a strong resemblance to the Jamaican Quashee, whose name originally came from the west African Twi language denoting "one who is born on Sunday." But the name had come to connote "fool," and the name and attribute were sometimes even paired in the phrase "Quashee-fool." Women did not escape this designation, as the name also had the feminine form, Quasheba. The other traits of Quashee/Quasheba were: a compulsion to lie, evasiveness, distrustfulness, capriciousness and laziness. He was also described as gay, happy-go-lucky, frivolous and cheerful. There was one major difference, however, between the North Asmerican Sambo and the Jamaican Quashee: Quashee had a "dark side" of his personality; he was vengeful, harbored grudges, possessed strong and ungovernable passions, had an irascible temper, and if placed in positions of authority, was likely to be cruel and tyrannical-blending, therefore, the Sambo image and the Satan image as described by Erno.

Similarly, Eugene Genovese cites several examples which demonstrate that Sambo-like behavior (or in the words of Stampp "pseudo-Sambo dissembling") was witnessed in Latin America, in spite of Elkins's claim that Latin American slavery was an open rather than a closed system.66 Genovese's ultimate point is that Elkins has not described the personality of the Negro Slave in North America, nor has he, for that matter, described the personality of the Negro Slave in the Diaspora; what he has described is the personality of any slave regardless of race or ethnicity. In Genovese's words, "On close inspection the Sambo personality turns out to be neither more nor less than the slavish personality; wherever slavery has existed, Sambo has also."67 Genovese also cites David Brion Davis: "Throughout history it has been said that slaves, though occasionally as loyal and faithful as good dogs, were for the most part lazy, irresponsible, cunning, rebellious, untrustworthy, and sexually promiscuous."68

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