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5. Were the North American slaves docile or were they revolutionary and rebellious? Herbert Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts69 is the basic work on slave rebellions, and it was first published in 1943, long before Elkins Slavery. The picture of discontented rebellious slaves painted in Aptheker's study-which documents 250 slave rebellions and/or plots and conspiracies involving at least ten slaves whose aim was freedom-stands in sharp contrast to the docile Sambo image projected by Elkins. Elkins, in fact, in his only mention of Aptheker, dismisses the significance of the rebellions in the United States, stating that the two largest and best-organized (those led by Gabriel Prosser and by Denmark Vesey) were "easily suppressed" while the most dramatic uprising-led by Nat Turner- was naught but "aimless butchery." In contrast, Elkins lavishes praise on "the bloody slave revolts ... in Latin America," which "were marked by imagination and a sense of direction and . often involved large scale military operations," stating that he is "impressed both by their scope and their variety."70

Kenneth Stampp in "Rebels and Sambos," his review of the contrasting images of slaves, is unduly critical of Aptheker, whose book, he says should be renamed "American Negro Slave Revolts, Conspiracies and Rumors of Conspiracies."71 What Aptheker demon- strates is that although most uprisings were either brutally crushed or aborted through informers (who were handsomely paid for their snitching), attempts at rebellion still persisted. This is all the more amazing given the "examples" that were made of rebellious slaves- public hangings, burnings, and displays of decapitated heads-to deter any future attempts. Stampp acknowledges that Aptheker's evidence "shows how persistent the fear of rebellion was among white Southerners and how frequently insurrection panic drove them to near hysteria"72 Aptheker quotes a typical expression of Southern fears: "We regard the negroes as the 'Jacobins' of our country, against whom we should always be on guard." The speaker goes on to qualify his statement, saying that "we fear no permanent effects from any insurrectionary movements on their part [yet they] should be watched with an eye of steady and unremitting obser- vation." What this qualifying statement means is that the Souther- ners had confidence in the ability of their military forces to put down rebellions. Yet the important fact here is that slavemasters viewed the slaves as Jacobins not Sambos. This in itself refutes the Elkins thesis. As John Blassingame argues, the Southerners' literary and folkloric portrait of Sambo was akin to "whistling in the dark"; it was an attempt to dismiss the intensely felt fear of rebellion.73

Eugene Genovese, having rejected Elkins's assertion of a sharp contrast between North American and Caribbean/Latin American slave systems, explores the question of why the latter systems nonetheless saw a higher incidence of successful rebellions. One factor was that both the sheer numbers of slaves and the ratio of blacks to whites were much higher in Latin America than in North America. (Only 10% of the slaves brought to the Western Hemisphere wound up in North American; 90% were sent to Latin America and the Caribbean, with Brazil as the main destination.) Sugar cane plantations manned by 500 slaves were not unusual in Latin America, whereas the typical large North American plantation was worked by some 20 to 25 slaves. While Elkins points to the quilombos or maroon republics (republics set up by fugitive slaves), neither he nor his critic Genovese mention the Seminole Nation of Florida, a maroon society of escaped slaves and Native Americans which waged three costly wars with the U.S. government over a span of forty years.74 Because many researchers on slavery, are unaware that the Seminole Nation was composed of black as well as red Seminoles, they fail to take it into account when making their inventories of North American slave rebellions.

While Stampp accuses Aptheker of not distinguishing between "slave discontent, which was widespread," and "slave rebelliousness which was only sporadic and always local," the articles by Fredrickson & Lasch and by Howard McGary discuss whether or not other forms of resistance besides open rebellion were important. Fredrickson & Lasch75  are actually responding to Stampp's book, The Peculiar Institution, which argues that the slaves offered resistance through non-compliance or non-cooperation: sabotage of crops through inefficient work; theft, "willful destruction of the master's property by destroying tools, mistreating animals and setting fire to plantation buildings,"76 and running away. Fredrickson & Lasch question whether such non-cooperation constitutes political resis- tance, which they define broadly as individual or group activity "designed to create a consciousness of collective interest," which is the "prerequisite for effective action in the realm of power."77 To address this question, Frederickson & Lasch look at the behavior of prison inmates. Prison, they argue, is a better analogy for slavery than the concentration camp. Using Ervin Goffman's fourfold typology of adaptation to total institutions, they theorize that slaves, like prisoners, "instead of banding together . typically pursue strategies of personal accommodation," i.e., "situational withdrawal," "colon- ization," "conversion," and "intransigence." Situational withdrawal is a descent into "fatalistic apathy... with disastrous psychic conse- quences" for the individual; colonization, another neurotic response "is a conscious decision that life in the [total] institution is preferable life in the outside world"; and conversion is "the internalization of the view of the view of himself held by those in power" (the authors surmise that a Sambo conversion may have taken place among some of the slaves). The authors are most concerned about the strategy of intransigence, which they say may often be confused with resistance. Intransigence (or "bad attitude"), as seen in a small number of chronic "trouble-makers" and in larger numbers who engaged in "occasional insubordination," was a way of sustaining "high morale"; but it could just as often lead to futile and self-destructive acts of defiance. Fredrickson & Lasch surmise that this intransigence made slaves, like convicts, difficult to manage, but that it did not constitute a form of political resistance, given that "the most defiant of inmates are paradoxically those who are most completely caught up in the daily round of institutional life" and therefore partially accept its values.78

Howard McGary79 takes issue with Fredrickson & Lasch as well as with Elkins. However, he uses an essay by Roger Gottlieb entitled "The Concept of Resistance: Jewish Resistance during the Holo- caust"80 as his primary foil, to advance a philosophical argument about what constitutes genuine resistance. McGary takes examples from the concentration camp, plantation slavery, the Civil Rights Movement and urban insurrections to illustrate his philosophical arguments. His main line of argument is that the intentions or beliefs of the actor should not be the criteria by which we judge whether an act constitutes genuine resistance. First of all, firmly held beliefs and intentions may be false, as in the case of people who would reduce oppression by "wishing it away or calling on spirits." Secondly, mental states are not directly observable to a third party. After dismissing intentions as the criteria for judging genuine resistance, McGary emphasizes that neither should the effects of the act be the criteria. McGary suggests instead that "historians, sociologists and other analysts . should focus on the conditions that the agent faced when he or she acted or failed to act and the avenues available for reducing oppression." (Conditions of oppres- sion in a concentration camp and on a slave plantation were not the same, e.g.: inmates faced extermination but slaves did not, as they were valuable property; most inmates had known freedom whereas many of the slaves were born into slavery; and likewise available avenues of resistance might have differed.) Finally, the analyst should ask how a reasonable person would resist under those specific conditions of oppression and with those available avenues- realizing, of course, that what is "reasonable" is a culture-bound concept. From this perspective, "stealing by slaves from their masters, under certain ciscumstances, counts as 'day-to-day' resistance to slavery."81 In Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class, historian Robin D.G. Kelley, uses the term "infra- politics" to describe such daily acts of resistance. Theft, acts of sabotage, footdragging, etc., are all interpreted by Kelley as part of a dissident political culture through which oppressed groups challenge those in power.82 Whereas analysts such as Fredrickson & Lasch question whether non-cooperation constitutes political resistance, Kelley states:

One measure of the power and historical importance of the informal infrapolitics of the oppressed is the response of those who dominate traditional politics. Daily acts of resitance and survival have had consequences for existing power relations, and the powerful have deployed immense resources in order to avoid those consequences or to punish transgressors.83

Howard Mc Gary states:

Scholars have offered a variety of reasons for why slavery lasted so long. Some incorrectly include that its longevity was due in part to a failure on the part of blacks to resist their oppression. Not only do these scholars indulge in blaming the victim they also fail to appreciate... the destruction of farm tools, suicides, and the Sambo personality as genuine acts of resistance.84

The lying, stealing, "lazy" Sambo was a race rebel!

6. The Psychology of Oppression
(The "Patriot Act," Thug-Life, Bling-Bling and other Colonized Roles)

Though we can refute Elkins's thesis that slavery produced a Sambo personality, there is a more general thesis that we cannot refute: the thesis that slavery has had an adverse impact upon the African American personality. A more pernicious corollary to this thesis is that this adverse impact was not merely a historical reality but continues to have lasting effects on contemporary African Americans. As stated earlier, contemporary Afrocentrists have coined the phrase "Post-Slavery Trauma Syndrome" and borrowed the phrase "Stockholm Syndrome" which are indicative of this lasting impact-as are terms like "mental slavery," "slave mentality," "colonized mind," "internalized colonialism," which have long been part of African American radical political discourse. The terms "colonized mind" and "internalized colonialism" imply that the injuries which have had such a lasting impact were not merely inflicted during the era of enslavement, but continued to be inflicted through the experiences of domestic colonialism or American apartheid, i.e., jim crow (de jure segregation) and ghettoization (de facto segregation). It is an academic matter whether we attribute the negative impact to slavery alone or to slavery and continued oppression.

In a classic study, The Mark of Oppression: Explorations in the Personality of the American Negro, the psychiatrists Abram Kardiner and Lioney Ovesey, state that certain psychological effects of the slave status can be inferred with certainty:

(1) degradation of self-esteem, (2) destruction of cultural forms and forced adoption of foreign cultural traits, (3) destruction of the family unit with particular disparagement of the male, (4) relative enhancement of the female status, thus making her the central figure in the culture, by virtue of her value to the white male for sexual ends and as mammy to the white children, (5) destruction of social cohesion among Negroes by the inability to have their own culture, (6) idealization of the white master; but with this ideal was incorporated an object which was at once revered and hated.85

In Black Rage, another classic work, black psychiatrists William M. Grier and Price M. Cobbs state that...

The black man of today is at one end of a continuum that reaches back in time to his enslaved ancestors. [.] The culture of slavery was never undone for either master or slave.. The practice of slavery stopped over a hundred years ago, but the minds of our citizens have never been freed. [.] We must conclude that much of the pathology seen in black people had its genesis in slavery. The culture that was born in that experience of bondage has been passed from generation to generation.86

 In Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, the black psycho- logist, Na'im Akbar, echoes the statements of Grier and Cobb:

 300 years of brutal and unnatural slavery have constituted a severe psychological and social shock to the minds of African Americans,... so destructive . that the current generation of African Americans though we are five to six generations removed from slavery, still carry the scars of this experience in both our social and mental lives.... In order to fully grasp the magnitude of our current problems, we must reopen the books on the events of slavery... Slavery should be viewed as a starting point for understanding the African American psyche.87

Akbar's work is a deceptively simply-written book which offers many insights about Black attitudes and behaviors. Acknowledging that the list of attitudes and reactions "inherited" from slavery is extensive, he identifies some of those which are most blantant and destructive: 1) work is viewed as forced labor or punishment; 2) "slavemaster's" property is either resented, resulting in destruction or vandalism, or conversely envied, resulting in conspicuous consump- tion; 3) disrespect of African American leadership; 4) playing the clown role; 5) low self esteem/feelings of inferiority; 6) community divisiveness; 7) destruction of the family; 8) color discrimination/ internal politics of skin complexion; 9) worship of white images of God.

Maulana Karenga, in Kawaida Theory: An Introductory Outline advances his own theory about the impact of slavery on the African American personality. Karenga begins with the notion of ethos, which is very similar to concepts of national character or modal personality:

Ethos is the sum of characteristics and achievements of a people that define and distinguish it from others and give it its collective self-consciousness and collective personality. The ethos of a people is often called its national or ethnic character which is not only defined by itself, but also assumed by others.88

Karenga states that "ethos is developed by a people's thought and practice." Paraphrasing him, Ethos arises from a people's social and historical actions, a people's struggle to overcome all oppositions and to realize itself, which means to both create itself and recognize itself, through its labor, struggle, and achievements. A positive ethos is centered around achievements which confirm a people's capacity for greatness and distinct historical contribution; conversely people with few or minor achievements will develop a self-consciousness of a similar stature. African Americans have a serious problem estab- lishing a positive ethos because they have an identity crisis which is manifested in the passionate debate over the proper ethnic nomenclature: colored, negro, black, Afro-American, African Ame- rican, Afrikan, Moor, Creole, etc., a debate which few other people engage in. "This identity crisis is essentially a psycho- historical problem, a problem of self-consciousness rooted in three historical processes Africans encountered and endured" in enslavement: 1) land and labor dispossession, 2) deculturalization, and 3) dehumanization. Removal from the ancestral homeland amounted to removal from a geo-cultural point of reference. The appropriation of African American manual and mental labor was an appropriation of African Americans' productive capacity, their capacity to produce and know themselves in their production. As African American labor did not shape the world in its own image and interests, African Americans could not recognize their true selves in what they had done. Without the ability for self-definition, self-development and self-confirmation, African Ame- ricans became strangers to themselves. The deculturalization process turned Africans into negroes. Without a specific historical identity, i.e., suffering from historical amnesia, we were dehumanized.

The damaged ethos and identity-crisis of African Americans- and its negative impact not only on the mental health and personal efficacy of the individual but on the collective struggle for liberation-has been noted by commentators from Du Bois, who spoke of the problem of double consciousness/"two warring ideals in one dark body"; to Malcolm X, with his characterization of the house negro and the field negro; to Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved is a metaphor for the alienation/estrangement, identity-crisis and psychosis that resulting from enslavement;89 to Louis Farrakhan, who, at the Million Man March popularized to the level of mythology the "Willie Lynch Letter," a document allegedly written by a slavemaster about the science and the conspiracy of making and breaking slaves;90 to the Council on Black Internal Affairs, which released its own indictment on suspect individuals, The American Directory of Certified Uncle Toms: Being a Review of the History, Antics and Attitudes of Handkerchief heads, Aunt Jemimas, Head Negroes in Charge, and House Negroes Against the Freedom Aims of the Black Race." And of course Umar Bin Hassan, of The Last Poets, summed up the impact of oppression in the title of his poem, "This is Madness."

Madness calls for therapeutic intervention. Theory must never be divorced from practice; knowledge never divorced from appli- cation. Illuminated by theory and moving from self-denial to the admission of a collective mental illness is the first step towards recovery. And that self-recovery is urgent. One does not have to accept a vanguard theory to realize that African Americans because of their position in heart of the international capitalist system, in "the belly of the beast" as the most exploited and most oppressed, are the most potentially revolutionary force in the world.91 COINTELPRO and cooptation derailed a movement which sought both national liberation and the end to capitalist exploitation. How do we get that movement back on track? We have to examine the roles that we are playing on the contemporary political stage.

In the academies, the universities, important think-tanks from which revolutionary theory should emanate ("educate, agitate, organize"), we have exchanged the role of Scholars-as-Warriors for the role of Scholars-for-Dollars; on the streets, where the masses, the grassroots folk, should be working in unity and solidarity to make change from the bottom up, we have exchanged the role of Brothers and Sisters for the roles of "dawgs" and "ho's"-instead of seeking to build a nation we seek thug-life. Segments of the working class have exchanged the role of moral vanguard and social catalyst for the role of conspicuous consumer. Instead of seeking freedom, justice and equality, instead of seeking Black Power, instead of seeking national liberation, we now seek "Bling Bling." Those of us who purport to be conscious have abdicated the role of activists for the role of spiritualists, believing that we can meditate and levitate our way to freedom. While spiritual regeneration is essential, it is so that we have internal fortitude to struggle, to build for the future, not to escape into the past. The transformation, the evolution is into Afrikans, not Fundamentalist Afrikans, not "Born-Again" Dogmatic Afrikans-holier than thou/more authentic than thou-but New Afrikans! Twenty-First Century Afrikans! We must stand on the shoulders of Our Ancestors, not in their shadows! Then there's that Du Boisian double-consciousness splitting us down the middle. Since 9/11, the other half of our population have put on a "patriot act"92 rather than acting in our best interests. Our struggle for reparations93 suffocates under ubiquitous banners of red, white and blue-forgetting all the while that red, black and green are our freedom colors. Thinking that we're now secure because someone else is the new scapegoat in Amerikkka is not too cool! When martial law is declared, first they'll come for the Arabs; then they'll come for me and you! Patriots, Gangstas, Witches and Ho's: all of these colonized roles, attitudes and behaviors impede not only our freedom but the freedom of humanity. Ghetto Fabulous, Scholars-for-Dollars, Buppies and Boojies, Dawgs, ChickenHeads, HoodRats, and that ubiquitous *N-word* we love to call ourselves! We are all willing participants and collaborators in our own oppression. In the end it does not matter if we are Sambo, or if we have exchanged that role for one that is equally demeaning, counter-revolutionary, and counter-productive. In the final analysis, the only real question is whether we will continue to inhabit the role of 21st-century slaves, or whether we will be our own liberators.

In the words of the late Shaykh Suliaman El-Hadi of The Last Poets:94

Blessed are those who struggle
Oppression is worse than the grave
Better to die for a noble cause
Than to live and die a slave

Notes

1. The Last Poets, "This is Madness," Douglas 7 Records (1970). The poem written and orated by Umar Bin Hassan (who then spelled his name Omar Ben Hassen) is the title track. Earlier lines in the poem paint an ugly and vivid portrait of the white oppressor (i.e., the white liberal establishment, Uncle Sam, the U.S. government, the white corporate state) as a modern sinister Machiavellian Prince, basking in white supremacist arrogance and overconfidence, while disdainfully misusing and emasculating civil rights leaders and sabotaging, co-opting and misdirecting the movement and its non-violent philosophy. The satiric reference in the poem to a tv commercial of 30 years ago (an ad for a cleanser or cleaning fluid which "cleans like a white tornado") may not resonate well today, but the other images are still potent: "And all the while he sits on a throne of eagle shit/ with DDT in one hand and a white tornado in the other/ wearing the crown of castrated black dicks/ and reading the non-violent thoughts of Ghandi/ And I watch him relax by playing golf with Boy Wilkins balls/ with Baynard Rusty glued to his thing/ while Xerox copies of Martin Luther King are popping from his skull/ (To dream the impossible dream)."

2. William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1966). Styron's novel begins with a quote from the original "Confession of Nat Turner," a 20-page pamphlet drafted by Turner's judges and executioners. The following excerpt from the introduction of this pamphlet testifies to the fear that the slave uprising had wrought: "The late Insurrection in Southampton has greatly excited the public mind and led to a thousand idle, exaggerated and mischievous reports. It is the first instance in our history of an open rebellion of the slaves, and attended with such atrocious circumstances of cruelty and destruction, as could not fail to leave a deep impression, not only on the minds of the community where this fearful tragedy was wrought, but throughout every portion of our country in which this population is to be found. Public curiosity has been on the stretch to understand the origin and progress of this dreadful conspiracy and the motives which influence its diabolical actors. The insurgent slaves had all been destroyed, or apprehended, tried and executed (with the exception of the leader) without revealing any thing at all satisfactory , as to the motives which governed them, or the means by which they expected to accomplish their object. Every thing connected with this sad affair was wrapt in mystery, Until Nat Turner, the leader of this ferocious band, whose name has resounded throughout our widely extended empire was captured... ."

3. John Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston: Beacon Press , 1968)

4. An alleged homosexual encounter was Turner's one and only sexual liaison according to Styron's fictional portrayal. Clarke and other contributors to Clarke's volume emphatically deny that Turner was either gay or celibate. They cite historical records which show that Nat Turner was married. Styron asserts in a prefatory Author's Note that "During the narrative that follows I have rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt of which he was the leader. However in those areas where there is little knowledge in regard to Nat, his early life and his motivations for the revolt (and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events... " (The latter emphasis is mine).

5. Lerone Bennett, Jr., a contributor to Clarke's edited book, states in his essay entitled "Nat's Last White Man": "Styron is so determined to prove that his dream [elsewhere described as "the Elkins-Phillips-Styron dream" of the Sambo myth] exists that he gives his main character the mind and the vocabulary of U.B. Phillips. And he performs the amazing feat of actually putting the Sambo thesis in Nat Turner's mouth. On pp. 55 - 56 [of Styron's Confessions], Nat is filled with rage by the 'harmless, dull, malleable docility' of Hark and he discourses in the best 'new history' mode on the 'unspeakable bootlicking Sambo,' all giggles and smirks and oily, sniveling servility."

6. See Carl N. Degler, "Why Historians Change their Minds," Pacific Historical Review 45 (1976),167-84. While Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross (1974) created a temporary stir with its cliometric approach, it did not have a lasting impact on historiography.

7. One must split hairs on this point. Phillips argued against the continued viability of slavery as an institution from purely economic standpoints. According to his research, the system was becoming increasingly inefficient and less financially profitable. He argued that southern plantation owners could have invested their capital in more lucrative endeavors. In this economic sense Phillips was not a pro-slavery advocate.

8. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York, 1928), p. 391f.

9. According to Norman R. Yetman, An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives, Phillips "quoted extensively from contemporary newspapers and travel accounts as well as various pre-Civil War tracts, diaries, correspondence, and government records. Kenneth Stampp ... used many of the same sources, although he relied more heavily on diaries, journals, and a few slave narratives. Stampp also utilized an important source not available to Phillips: Helen Catterall's five-volume summary of appellate court cases on slavery"

10. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York, 1956), p.11. In the aftermath of the black consciousness movement or black cultural awakening of the sixties, students and scholars of African American history challenged Stampp's assertion as it minimized the importance of the distinctive African cultural retentions-worldviews, values, beliefs, norms and practices retained from the African past-which sustained African Americans through the ordeal of slavery.

11. "Culture wars" is the current name for this cottage industry-the endless cycle of academic attack, defense, rebuttal, concurrence, extension and spin-off that produces papers, books, dissertations, symposiums and conferences. Are there "good guys" and "bad guys" in this war? Certainly there are altruistic and heroic defenders of truth-located primarily on the left end of the political spectrum. But let us not forget that intellectuals are often seduced by the comforts of academia; there are many cases of intellectuals who have started out on the left and drifted to the right, attacking people and policies they once defended, in their bid for career-advancement. For those without moorings grounded firmly in praxis, these culture wars-which are the critical ideological struggles of our era-can devolve into nothing more than an academic game, i.e., a strategy for tenure. In the career-driven climate of the ivory tower, self-indulgent academicians can become primarily concerned about their livelihoods and reputations-and aloof and callous about the repercussions of this paper fight.

12. One collection of rebuttals was a volume entitled The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence and the Future of America edited by Stephen Fraser. Another volume entitled The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions edited by Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, attempted to capture "the fervor, anger and scope" of the argument by presenting responses pro and con. The Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School sponsored a widely attended forum "Out from Under the Bell Curve: A Teach-in on Confronting Right-wing Ideology and Social Policy" on April 1, 1995; WBAI Pacifica radio also sponsored a widely attended forum in Brooklyn.

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