Posted on 10/15/2005 10:21:03 AM PDT by paulat
Saturday, October 15, 2005
'Slave syndrome' may still affect black behavior Professor's theory set for talk today
By JOHN IWASAKI SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
The troubling images of African Americans displaced by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans' impoverished neighborhoods didn't startle researcher Joy DeGruy-Leary.
"All Katrina did was reveal what was already there. I wasn't confused, wasn't surprised," she said. "I knew what the 9th Ward was about. The difference was, (before the disaster) everybody was OK about it. It was business as usual."
DeGruy-Leary, an assistant professor in Portland State University's Graduate School of Social Work, will discuss her theory of the relationship between race, culture, poverty and history today at the third Seattle Race Conference and tonight in a separate talk.
Her theory of "post-traumatic slave syndrome" concludes that African Americans needed to adapt to survive more than two centuries of slavery, and that those adaptations are reflected in their behaviors today.
Even though slavery symbolically ended after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, DeGruy-Leary said, African Americans were "virtually re-enslaved" through legislation reflected in peonage such as sharecropping, black codes and convict-worker leasing, all of which restricted blacks and allowed white-owned businesses to have cheap labor, and Jim Crow laws, which enforced segregation.
Add the horror of lynchings -- more than 3,400 from 1882 to 1951, according to records of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama -- and African Americans in the United States have undergone tremendous trauma, she said.
She contends that no one acknowledges that trauma, much less has allowed African Americans to heal from it.
[SNIP]
(Excerpt) Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com ...
"Meanwhile, in Africa, blacks who were never slaves have built a remarkably advanced civilization."
Now THAT just cuts through all the horsefeathers most succinctly!
Worse than that, it's dehumanizing and emasculating (for males). To be told, and believe, that you are powerless to improve your situation without someone else doing it for you is about the most crushing thing I could imagine. I would resist it with all my might.
Even more, if you go back 40 years, black americans were MUCH more likely to have functional family units, and their schools (seg or not) enforced discipline and educational basic skills versus the current madness.
The modern society has destroyed their family unit's central role in black america and turned their schools (all schools actually) into zoos.
Anyone alive during that time as an adult care to add or comment?
If you go back far enough in any civilization through out the world, it's early beginnings included a slave class. I suppose we should all blame ancient egypt, greece, rome, etc. for all our syndromes, eh? Can we file grievances and reparation cases against those modern day governments? Let me know where to sign up.
There are no lenses in those glasses. It's just to keep people from "hitting someone with glasses."
That's how smart he is!
My grandmother worked as an indentured servent in Sweden when she was 8 years old and her father's farm burned down.
I'm still waiting for some kind of repartations
(obvios sarcasm!)
LOLOLOL!!
... perhaps because it does not exist?
Just another example of the increasing irrelevance of the university system in the real world.
POOPS = Post Owned Offshore Person Syndrome
DANG YOU!!! I was wracking my brains for a POOPS!!! LOLOL!!!
This sounds so obvious. There must be a lot more to it.
Well, finally. At Reply 33, a response that is not a knee jerk.
I have read where some folks wanted to wrest control of the Internet from the US.
Many of the children of that neighborhood worked their way out of it and now populate middle class suburbs.
And, then, something terrible happened to the Lower 9th Ward. And, we know what it had become before the Hurricane hit it.
So, does she really know what the 9th Ward is about? I don't think so.
"The eternal mystery to me is why many American blacks cling so hard to their victim mentality."
I think because historically, it has paid well. Stick with what you know and what works.
And, they had their own baseball league, too. The Great Society came along to "improve" their lives. How sad.
You are a real PISSER!
I do not deny that there might be something like a post-slavery syndrome. There has to be. No other group of people, even Africans from other nations who immigrate here, don't act in the same way. It is clearly not biological but sociological. That being said, the solution to the problem is not with more "programs" hand-outs, western civilization bashing re-education, but with internal change in the black community itself. No one except them can change it. However, this appears unlikely given the "keeping it real" crowd. This explains why most of us, almost all of us who have had family members who were slaves (think Rome) got over it. Because we did not want to "keep it real", not because we had a government program help us. (To date, Rome has not asked for forgivness or paid reparations for their conquest and subjugaton of Spanish peoples after the Punic Wars).
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