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THE OTHER END OF THE STICK The social revolution for the control of the black image had a profound impact on the sistas as well. Oppression was not solely a franchise for the black male because harnessed to his very existence was the black woman. After 1865, once she was no longer needed as a breeder of slaves, she posed a definite threat. By the start of the 19th century, the black woman was no longer viewed as a “transitional” figure in the dark menace. She was the producer of it. And as the creator of this scourge, what to do about her only became a matter of timing. All things considered, white America exercised uncommon restraint regarding the black woman. That, considering their disdain for her sons, was admirable. Initially, white tolerance was exemplified by the government’s ban on having more than two children, ads while this was a blanket decree to all women, it was no doubt a nasty strike at the black population explosion. Yet, black births continued. Once it became apparently clear that black procreation couldn’t be legislated, a vicious sterilization program was enacted. By the mid 1930s, under the banner of Psychiatry’s Racial Purity :aw, over 15,000 sterilizations were performed in this country, mainly by Dr. Lorthup Stoppard, an avowed racist, who believed what he was doing was humanitarian. In 1939, the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, proposed a plan to eliminate black babies. She hired black preachers with “engaging personalities” to spread the message that sterilization was the solution for poverty. However, just before this phase of the sterilization project could kick off, worldwide protests shut it down as a human rights violation. America would be forced to halt its sterilization program------or to justify it. Conveniently, it was around this time that the concept of IQ was used by Uncle Sam to continue his project under the guise of :scientific justification”. Within a short time, Lewis Terman, declared that blacks were so feeble-minded that they should not be allowed to reproduce. Now, with so-called scientific justification. The program finally had legs, and in New Orleans, black prisoners were experimented on, and given electrode implants. The psycho-surgery was performed by Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University, who bragged that “niggers were cheaper to use in experiments than cats because niggers were everywhere.” Not wanting to miss all the fun, the CIA funded the infamous Dr. Heath to conduct LSD experiments on brothas in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Not to be outdone, The National Institute of Mental Health got their licks in by feeding brothas a drug, B3, which is 100 times more powerful than LSD. Some of the brothas hallucinated for 77 days in a row! The Civil Rights Movement helped little as The Mental Retardation Facilities and Communities Health Centers Act was passed in 1963 which placed black school children at great peril. Funded by NIMH, and founded by Dr. Robert Felix, this was white America’s boldest strike against brothas and sistas. This time, they were going for our jugular-----the children. The government, at every level, gave Felix the absolute power to administer powerful psychotropic drugs known to induce aggressive and violent behavior! Dr. Felix’s Mental Health Center’s Act put psychologists and psychiatrists in public schools in ever=growing numbers, and as the numbers increased, the SAT scores decreased. All at once, teachings about morals, ethics, and human cooperation were substituted with a new “value clarification” system devised by who else---the psychiatrists. These programs led to a moral decline as students were conditioned to choose personal choice over social responsibility. And this was merely Headstart. In 1965, “Special Education”classes were established via the US Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Now, let’s pause for a bit of reflection. In 1930, 80% of African-Americans over 14 could read. Sixty years later, after twenty=five years of Special Ed, only 56& of the black population could read. Since Dr. Felix, the suicide rate for brothas, 15-19, has zoomed. Surprised. Well, it was known that the drugs would result in violent and suicidal behavior! On any other planet, it would be astounding that a nation that had tricked unsuspecting black kids into taking mind-altering drugs known to cause violence would a decade or so later want to hunt them down because they were violent and irrational. Additionally, Lonnie J. West, a psychiatrist, formerly of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, preached that the violence of black, urban males was genetic, he recommended castration as a remedy. It was only after nation wide protests that federal funding dried up, but it was revived in 1982 when Duke University’s Medical School was provided funding to study aggression in black children. A report by the African-American Coalition for Justice in Social Policy indicates that NIMH’s research parallels the skyrocketing violence in the hood. Jim Brewer of the Coalition stated that “most of the violence in the last three decades has been the results of experiments in the form of drug therapy and psychological school programs. Theses have ravaged our inner cities and manufactured criminals out of young people, all because we unwittingly allowed psychiatrists and psychologists to study behavior in our schools instead of leaving teachers to teach education.” If you, by now, entertain the notion that we have been set up, then welcome to the club.

O black woman, do you know who you are? It is you for whom the birds sing when the dawn opens itself for inspection. It is the glow in your eyes that the stars imitate when they sparkle. It is the color of your flava that makes the rainbow dull in comparison, and it is via your beauty that we can physically witness God’s artistry.-Gibran- • O black woman, do you know who you are? You are the secret that only reveals itself when a man is truly ready to experience the joy of having his dream transformed into reality. You are God’s private blessing to men who know what to do within the point between birth and death. To dwell within the kingdom of YOU is where heaven begins. -Gibran- • O black woman, do you know who you are? You are both the starting point and the finish line for everything I could ever aspire to be. You are a force of nature that has broken my shackles so that I can walk freely. You have erased my doubts so that I can think clearly. You have repaired my broken wings so that I can soar beside you. -Gibran- • O black woman, do you know who you are? You are the magic that awes the universe, the splendor that amazes the earth, and the glory that makes men heart beat with pride when they attempt to possess u. -Gibran- • O black woman, do you know who you are? You are the beautiful gift that God left on the doorstep of my heart. You are that special moment in time when nothing else matters but most importantly, you are YOU! Unmistakably YOU! -Gibran- • O black woman, do you know who you are? You are the sunshine that lights my life from within. You are the fire that warms every fiber of my being and that illuminates my path so that I am never afraid of the darkness. -Gibran- • O black woman, did u know that when I stare in the skies the stars spell your name? I feel your touch in the wind and I see your face in the clouds. And when I stand under the shadow of your smile, I find shelter from the storm. -Gibran- • O black woman, do you know who you are? You are that warm safe place where all roads lead at the end of a day when I have slayed all my dragons and find that all of my strength comes from you. You melt on my life and I become complete. -Gibran- • O black woman, do you know who u are? You are chocolate, dipped in mystery, a specially-designed flava whose smile is brighter than the rainbow. -Gibran-

<<<<<< And what about the beloved black woman? No doubt, she still represented a sizable threat, and there was no great willingness on the part of white America to insanely believe the ‘black male’ problem could be effectively neutralized or fixed by their pet projects (sterilization, mental health centers, prisons) so they had, by necessity, to adopt a more proactive approach when it came to dealing with the black woman’s complicity. Here is the essential point. And in all fairness, it must be understood that the black woman, like the black man, is a finished product of white racism, so at best, many of her reactions/responses are instinctual/automatic. Having said that, the black woman is ‘possessed’ with the most idealized concept of the white man as a savior-in-waiting. To the older sista, it’s Jesus. To the sista in the ‘hood, it’s Uncle Sam with his welfare checks. And to the young sista, it’s Santa Claus. Sadly, this super-sized Mighty Whitey image is still alive and well in certain circles. What’s worse is that sistas are extremely disillusioned with brothas-----or at least our capacity to address, or even better yet, to satisfy their expectations of us. Since day one, there has been little doubt about what black women wanted. Sistas have always demanded security, and had every reason to initially believe that we would be able to sponsor the notion. And why not? The black woman was no idle spectator in what black men had done for the white man. She, indeed, was a personal witness to the manner in which we had labored to grow this country from nothing. She, with her own eyes, had seen the magic emanate from our hands as we had conjured up crops from a barren earth. At no point was the sista absent as we went about the business of making cities out of wilderness, of making cotton king, or of making the white man wealthy. So after this visual testimony, how could the black woman expect less from us. CHAPTER 6 The Blank Slate/Full Plate Syndrome One of the primary difficulties facing the post-slavery black female was the ability to make herself a woman. Slavery, no doubt, where sistas had toiled in the fields as long and as hard as the brothas, rewarded her nothing due to gender. Sure, sistas gave birth and, for a period, raised children, but more times than not, the major characteristic of sex was to breed which was simply another chore to be performed. The end of slavery should have brought about, for sistas, a return to femininity, but just what was it? After a lengthy 250 years of being treated as chattel property with no true opportunity to grow psychologically as a woman, black women had no clear knowledge of the African rituals and customs that defined womanhood, and since black womanhood was heretofore unknown on these shores, sistas were left with a blank slate on which to define themselves. But how was this to be accomplished? Since she had worked as an equal in the back-breaking work of the field, had shared equally the horror of servitude, had eaten the same coarse food, and had worn equally coarse, unflattering clothes, did sistas demand full equality with brothas? Or did they borrow heavily from Miss Ann, the slave mistress which provided the only comprehensive view of womanhood that black women had ever seen? Either way, ultimately, black women would be compelled to become feminine, and essentially this shift in perspective would be as traumatic for sistas as learning to be breadwinners would be for the brothas. For certain, both these factors had an obvious impact on the complexities of black life today. Notwithstanding anything else, black women had to acknowledge that the essence of womanhood did not evolve from the authority of their vaginas because on the other side of their fertility, there were such subtle cues as hair, makeup, nails, attire, etc, whose proper use tended to legitimize the arts of feminine seduction. Since sistas had no experience in this, the arts of femininity would have to arise out of the black woman’s imitation of Miss Ann since they possessed nothing from their personal experiences as slaves that could provide them the wealth of information required to become more than ritualistic caricatures of true womanhood. Titties and ass only set men off in pursuit of them sexually, and though physical assets may not have offered the true secrets of femininity, they became the initial building blocks of black femininity. With not much else, titties and as became the physical electives that awarded sistas the ‘everlasting life’ of womanhood. The invention of a black femininity, never accomplished in the new world would not be easy following a lifestyle of being a sexual object. Additionally, when compared to Miss Ann, sistas could not identify anything about themselves that would brand them as sexy. Their entire image was organized around the ‘plantation mammy’, an apron-wearing, dirty-faced, rag-headed matron. Surely, no pin-up model, and hardly the ideal on which to base their collective worth. And what of the ethical behavior that would, most definitely, have to accompany the new, black femininity? Sistas simply could not establish an image without the underlying ethics to maintain it since the freedom to be true to themselves would be more a condition of good decision-making rather than physical attributes. What would be crucial when black women made their new covenant with themselves would be---for the most part---how much slavery had affected their opinion of themselves on three very vital levels. They undoubtedly would have to determine how bondage had affected them as (1) humans,(2) as women, and (3) as black. And since all three were closely related to their most innate sense of being, if anything that had happened during slavery which could not be rationalized or repressed on any level, then they would lack the power to confirm themselves as complete or healed. There can be no argument that bondage was a unique experience for the black woman, one where her capacity as a human was ignored, her womanhood denounced, and her blackness pronounced a curse. Admittedly, not much to kindle optimism, but the sista had to be reborn out of these ashes. But what kind of self-worth could possibly evolve from a prior life where she had been a possession of the white man, and an obsession to the black man?