ARE TODAY - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 45
About This Presentation
Title:

ARE TODAY

Description:

'It was...the first time in history that one race had been uniquely selected for ... This can lead to the discovery of a strong and resilient new Black Self' ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:47
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 46
Provided by: NeemaMa
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: ARE TODAY


1
ARE TODAYS UNACCEPTABLE AFRICAN, CARIBBEAN
MENTAL HEALTH STATISTICS A LEGACY OF THE CHATTEL
SLAVE TRADE?
  • Peter Scott Blackman
  • C.E.O. The Afiya Trust
  • peter.blackman_at_afiya-trust.org
  • Tel 020 7582 0432

2
Please make note of the following websitesFor
fresh and helpful information concerning
racial/cultural psychology look
upwww.roberttcarterassociates.com For a novel
insight into stereotyping please look
upwww.implicit.harvard.edu Or search on the
internet for Implicit Association Tests
3
  • Contemporary Black and Minority Ethnic mental
    health and criminal justice figures are not just
    very worrying, they are atrocious.
  • Those concerning to the young African, Caribbean
    population are particularly unacceptable.
  • As successive generations come of age, we are
    incubating and reiterating the crisis. And black
    families, generation after generation, watch as
    the lives of our loved ones are destroyed.
  • This curse is epidemic in our community. Our
    parents, our children, our brothers and sisters,
    cousins, nephews, nieces, our friends, hardly a
    black family is untouched.
  • If these same statistics concerned white people,
    loud alarms would have long ago declared a
    national emergency.

4
  • Mental health studies in the Caribbean showed the
    incidence of acute psychotic diagnoses in
    Trinidad and Barbados was lower than within the
    UK black African, Caribbean population and no
    higher than within the wider, general population
    of the UK.
  • This suggests there is an active and selective
    environmental determinant within the UK that can
    drive black people mad.

5
  • To understand the present it is necessary to know
    the past.
  • Todays unacceptable BME statistics, above all
    those for the African, Caribbean population, have
    their source in the legacy of centuries of
    chattel slavery and imperial colonialism. The
    typical socialised European view of black people
    is a fiction concocted from the traditions of
    slave traders and slaveholders.

6
  • The insult of that legacy is the unremitting
    psychosocial and economic oppression that, my
    people suffer today, in the face of socially
    assumed white privilege.
  • Todays appalling BME mental health and criminal
    justice statistics reflect the black mans
    struggle to make it in a white world.
  • This is also my struggle.

7
  • The French government recently declared May 10th
    as a national day of remembrance for victims of
    slavery. The French President, Jacques Chirac
    stated
  • A countys grandeur means it must take
    responsibility for all its history, with its
    pages of glory as well as its periods of shadow.
  • Slavery fed racism. When people tried to justify
    the unjustifiable, that was when the first racist
    theories were elaborated. Racism is a crime of
    the heart and the spirit, which is why the memory
    of slavery remains a living wound for some of our
    fellow citizens.

8
  • The Church of England also recently voted to
    apologise to the descendants of victims of the
    slave trade. They recognised they were at the
    heart of it, were directly responsible for
    what happened and acknowledged the dehumanising
    and shameful consequences.

9
  • We need our Prime Minister to apologise to the
    world and to the British BME population for the
    role Britain played in the chattel slave trade
    and for the damage and blight its legacy still
    brings to modern day BME families.
  • This would be a positive step towards healing the
    suppurating societal lesions that lead to the
    unacceptable figures. It presents an opportunity
    for the Prime Minister to do something positive.
    By demonstrating genuine humility, an apology
    would help to alleviate the current climate of
    BME anger and resentment.

10
  • People ask, why should we apologise today for
    crimes other people committed so long ago? The
    slave trade was abolished 200 years ago. This is
    the 21st century, so why keep dragging up the
    past?
  • Well, for many of us, even in 2006, that past is
    inescapable. My very name Peter Scott Blackman is
    a slave label. This is true of the vast majority
    of African, Caribbean people with European
    surnames. Slaves were property. They were given
    the mark of their owners. Our original African
    titles were stripped from us.
  • Scott, my mothers maiden name, denotes that a
    plantation owner called Scott owned her African
    ancestors enslaved in Jamaica. Likewise, Blackman
    denotes that a slave owner called Blackman owned
    my fathers ancestors. Scott Blackman is the mark
    and brand of chattel ownership.
  • Thus the legacy of oppression began. It involved
    the complete and thorough degradation of the
    African and their descendants. That legacy still
    thrives today deep within in the collective
    subconscious of modern Europe.

11
  • How do modern Western European societies value
    people of colour?
  • And how did those values arise?
  • Where is the psychic toxin of racism rooted?
  • Lets take a quick look at just one example from
    the story of sugar.

12
  • The following quotes are from Seeds of Change -
    Five plants that transformed mankind by Henry
    Hobhouse (1985)

13
  • the sugar story how an unnecessary food
    became responsible for the Africanisation of the
    Caribbean
  • one ton represented the lifetime sugar
    production of one slave who had been captured,
    manacled, chained again on board ship, sold on
    the island market, and then naturalised to the
    conditions of the Caribbean (seasoned).
  • on average, for (the sugar consumption of)
    every 250 English men, women, and children a
    black died every year.
  • Every ton represented a life. Every teaspoonful
    represented six days of a slaves life.
  • It wasthe first time in history that one race
    had been uniquely selected for a servile role.

14
  • ..The novel feature of this particular slave
    trade was not only that the slaves were Negroes
    and the traders were white, but that a whole new
    mythology grew up to justify the industry. The
    Negroes were the children of Ham, and therefore
    were unworthy of consideration as human beings
    free white men could not be expected to work in
    the sugar plantations the Negro was discouraged
    from becoming a Christian, and forbidden to read
    and write, so that he could continue to be
    regarded as hardly human. These theories became
    accepted within two generations of the first ship
    load of slaves arriving in Lisbon in 1443, and
    were perhaps necessary to blunt mens minds to
    this monstrous aberration in the history of the
    western world.

15
  • Financial accounts from sugar plantations in
    Barbados, the birthplace of my late father, show
    clearly that black people were counted in with
    the beasts.

16
  • The following quote from A True Exact
  • History of Barbadoes by Richard Ligond
  • (1657) is an entry from the planters
  • annual account

17
(No Transcript)
18
  • As also for the moderate decays of our Negres,
    Horses, and Cattle,
  • notwithstanding all our Recruits by breeding all
    those kinds - 500
  • There were also huge differentials in annual
    allowances made for clothing
  • Annual clothing for 30 white servants
    164.40
  • Annual clothing for 100 black slaves
    35.00
  • That is
  • For each white servant 5.48
  • For each black slave 0.35
  • Thus black African humanity was valued at around
    1/16th the value of white
  • European humanity, i.e. each white servant was
    worth 16 black people.

19
  • The degradation of African peoples was codified
    by academia.
  • The quotes that follow are sampled from a
    lecture delivered by Georg Wilhem Freidrich Hegel
    (1770 -1831). They demonstrate the approach of
    learned 19th century Europeans to Africa.

20
  • Hegel was perhaps the greatest of the German
    philosophers.
  • Hegel thought the role of philosophical science
    was to link the development of the rational
    powers of the human mind to lived experience.
  • He taught that reality is absolute mind, reason
    or spirit, made manifest in history and human
    affairs.
  • One of my favourite sentences, the whole is far
    greater than the sum of its parts had its roots
    in Hegels teachings.
  • Perhaps no thinker since Kant has had a
    comparable influence on European philosophy, art,
    religion, and literature.

21
  • During 1822-83, at the age of 52, just 9 years
    before the end of his life, Hegel held the Chair
    of Philosophy at the University of Berlin. When
    introducing a course on The Philosophy of
    History, this is what he taught his students
    about the people of Africa.

22
  • The Negro exhibits the natural man in his
    completely wild and untamed state. We must lay
    aside all thought of reverence and morality all
    that we call feeling if we would rightly
    comprehend him, there is nothing harmonious with
    humanity to be found in this type of character.
  • Cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary
    and proper. Among us instinct deters from itBut
    with the Negro this is not the case, and the
    devouring of human flesh is altogether consonant
    with the general principles of the human race to
    the sensual Negro, human flesh is but an object
    of sense mere flesh.

23
  • Among the Negroes moral sentiments are quite
    weak, or more strictly speaking, non-existent
  • Through the pervading influence of slavery all
    those bonds of moral regard which we cherish
    toward each other disappear, and it does not
    occur to the Negro mind to expect from others
    what they are enabled to claim.

24
  • It is manifest that want of self control
    distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This
    condition is capable of no development or
    culture, and as we see them at this day, such
    have they always been .The only essential
    connection that has existed and continued between
    the Negroes and the Europeans is that of
    slaveryWe may conclude slavery to have been the
    occasion of the increase of human feeling among
    the Negroes.

25
  • Africais no historical part of the world, it
    has no movement or development to exhibit.
    Historical movements in it that is the northern
    part belong to the Asiatic or European
    worldEgypt does not belong to the African
    Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is
    the unhistorical, undeveloped spirit still
    involved in the conditions of mere nature, and
    which had to be presented here only as on the
    threshold of the worlds history.

26
  • In like manner in universities throughout Europe,
    the indigenous, African disciplines of communal
    and spiritual management, philosophic conviction,
    worship and law making were mocked by academia
    and misrepresented as so much superstitious
    clap-trap.
  • European distortion globally promoted a
    generalised view of traditional black African
    cultural life as an object of contempt. It was
    depicted as a manifestation to be associated with
    fear, fecklessness and bizarre life-threatening
    rituals.

27
  • For example, common English usage of the term
    Mumbo Jumbo is associated with gibberish and
    meaningless nonsense.
  • Mumbo-jumbo /.... n. (pl. -jumbos) 1 meaningless
    or ignorant ritual. 2 language or action intended
    to mystify or confuse. 3 an object of senseless
    veneration. Mumbo Jumbo, a supposed African
    idol - (The Concise Oxford Dictionary 9th
    Edition, 1995)

28
  • Yet, the truth is that Mumbo-Jumbo is a Mandingo
    phrase from West Africa. It refers to a spiritual
    leader who protects his people from evil.
  • This relates to the ancient, sophisticated
    African spiritual community of stiltdancers, who
    practise their art in Africa and the Caribbean to
    this day.
  • In the Caribbean this practice survives largely
    as a carnival masquerade called Mocko Jumbi.
  • Jumbi means spirit in the Caribbean and
    Mocko refers to a doctor who cures illness and
    who also sees' in the spiritual sense.
  • In action, the colourful, fourteen feet tall
    Mocko Jumbi stilt dancers seem to defy gravity.
    Whirling and twirling precariously, they bend
    over backwards and stumble as if about to fall
    all to the pulsing, hypnotic rhythms of the Mocko
    Jumbi drummers.
  • It is a very spiritual art that represents the
    balance between this world and the next

29
  • Please bear in mind the profound impact Hegel and
    others had on modern European thinking.
  • Echoes of the academic codification of crass
    ignorance and frank racist domination still
    resonate today in contemporary mainstream
    thinking.
  • The BME populations bear the oppressive burden of
    coercion and suffering that results from this.
  • Nowhere is this more obvious than the
    disproportionate over representation and
    treatment of the African, Caribbean population in
    our mental health and criminal justice systems.
  • And the proposed contentious Mental Health Bill
    will serve to further reinforce the relentless
    racist intimidation.

30
  • As young black adults reach puberty and grow away
    from the relative shelter and nurturing
    protection of school and family, they are
    increasingly exposed to more and more explicit
    racism and prejudicial treatment.
  • In my view, and relating to my own personal
    experience, this is a significant contributory
    factor to the high rate of, apparently sudden
    unpredicted onset of crises among BME young
    adults.

31
  • As they explore their independence in society,
    most BME young people become aware that racism in
    the wider populace can frustrate their most
    fundamental life aspirations.
  • Experiences of racism, at this point in their
    lives, become inescapable, concrete and upfront
    personal.
  • This almost invariably leads to sensations of
    dysphoric confusion.

32
  • For young BME British who were socialised to
    self-identify as English, it is shocking to be
    faced suddenly with the fact that you do not
    really belong
  • That you are disinherited of those privileges
    that are the naturally assumed inheritance of
    the white British social family
  • That you are denied things the dominant
    population takes for granted.

33
  • You discover that doors open to your white
    friends are politely shut in your face.
  • That you must now work twice hard and be twice as
    good as them to (if then) receive the same level
    of recognition.
  • You learn on all fronts to anticipate
    discrimination and rejection.
  • Thus young BME British people have to come to
    terms with the fact that UK society has a
    duplicitous morality that really is divided along
    black (punishment) and white (reward) lines.

34
  • It is well known within black British society
    that our young people, when internalising this
    reality, often go through a process of critical
    and very distressing self-confrontation. This can
    lead to the discovery of a strong and resilient
    new Black Self. It can also lead to serious,
    often life threatening mental health and/or
    criminal justice crises.
  • Few black families in Britain are free of
    complications generated through this negative
    experience.
  • It is a stage in black British life that has, to
    date, been largely ignored by the establishment
    and one that must be taken seriously into account
    by both mental health and educational services.

35
  • The diversity of British BME social cultures and
    their variable levels of access to supportive
    social capital will cause such coming of age
    crises to present in different forms and levels
    of severity.
  • Thus mental service providers need to take
    account of diverse imported and indigenous
    cultural, religious, linguistic and social mores,
    as well as issues of social class, single parent
    families and other social pressures.
  • Service providers need to reflect on the
    importance of such factors and how they might
    affect individual experiences (in both service
    user and provider), and thus the perception,
    presentation and interpretations of such
    distress. A system is needed that can interact
    with the community.
  • The Delivering Race Equality programme is a
    first significant step in that direction.

36
  • It must also be noted that social factors, being
    dynamic, constantly evolve over time.
  • Unfortunately British racism, although it too
    evolves with time, is a constant factor
    distressing the well being of BME populations.
  • It is important for white people to recognise
    that you too have been observed from a BME
    viewpoint.
  • More than fifty years ago my late father penned
    the following words. Unfortunately for us they
    still ring true today.

37
  • This is a quote from The True Negro written in
    1953 by Peter MacFarren Blackman (1908 -1993)
  • That offensive person, the vain, swashbuckling
    arrogant white man, the scourge of our epoch who
    struts across the world setting his skin in the
    face of the nations and claiming their awed
    submissionis a product of bourgeois industrial
    technique. His extravagant claims and equally
    extravagant cruelties have kept pace with this.
    Today he brandishes the atom crying bow down or
    burn, his aim the peoples obliteration or
    obeisance. Experience teaches he gets neither.

38
  • Perhaps you feel this is offensive commentary
    that it is too harsh a judgement.
  • You may say that too was all in the past 21st
    century British society has since moved on.
  • You may think that such views are not appropriate
    that they do not reflect modern Europe. I
    disagree. More than 50 years have passed, and as
    we speak today, its still happening.

39
  • The pejorative ideas about BME peoples were
    codified and made universal.
  • Even today they resonate deep within the European
    collective subconscious as a powerful subsonic,
    subterranean rumble.
  • They play a significant, active role in the
    socialisation and personality development of all
    modern Europeans.
  • As such they contribute to the racial identity
    profiles of every white and BME person growing up
    in Europe.
  • Our current racial-cultural psychological and
    racial-cultural socio-political difficulties are
    embedded in peoples' socialisation and
    personality development.
  • These problems are profound and very pervasive.
    They affect each one of us and infiltrate every
    aspect of our society.

40
  • Thus mental health professionals have a unique
    opportunity and power to truly catalyse genuine
    social change.
  • However this can only happen if, and only if,
    they learn how to understand and cope with the
    racial influences in their own lives and in the
    lives of their service users.
  • Even relatively minor changes can have amplified
    and positive outcomes.
  • In this context, wherever we refer to cultural
    issues or cultural competence we need to
    expand the term to refer to racial and cultural
    issues, or racial/cultural competency.
  • When we refer to culture only, it negates the
    profundity of our predicament.

41
  • I quote from Robert T. Carter (The Influence of
    Race and Racial Identity in Psychotherapy -
    1995)
  • One might argue that, in part, race has become
    less salient because mental health clinicians,
    scholars, and researchers are more comfortable
    examining presumed cultural and ethnic issues.
    Many writers seem to suggest that race is
    included within analyses and explanations of
    culture and ethnicity. I contend that race is not
    understood when culture and ethnicity are assumed
    to encompass racial issues. When race is subsumed
    in ethnic and cultural phenomena, our
    history.our current socio-political climate, and
    the operations of our institutions are ignored.
    Emphasis on ethnicity and culture, particularly
    when it is grounded in broad definitions of
    culture, obscures how central race isin the
    delivery of mental health services, and in
    psychotherapeutic encounters.

42
  • It is very important to take this into account.
    We are helping to set the future agenda for
    progressing mental health outcomes for Britains
    BME population.
  • An apology from the Prime Minister for Britains
    role in the slave trade would have significant
    influence.
  • The time is right.
  • On a universal scale, such a demonstration of
    good will would undoubtedly contribute towards an
    improved mental health status for Black and
    Minority Ethnic Britons.
  • To achieve this, the Prime Minister could take
    advantage of the bicentenary of the Slave Trade
    Act (1807) that marked the abolition of the slave
    trade.
  • It would mark a significant step towards the
    turning of the tide. It would also go a long way
    towards reclaiming the Union Jack flag from the
    extremely racist British National Party.

43
  • I finish with another quote from my father. It
    is an excerpt from a longer poem he wrote during
    my childhood.

44
Excerpt from My Song is for All Men - Peter
MacFarren Blackman -1952
  • To all my wide continent I welcomed these they
    came to
  • Africa
  • Seized all they could lay hands upon
  • Took the best lands for their tilling to build
    them white
  • houses
  • I pass them each day cool deep-shaded in green
  • Their dwelling places wanton in lovelinesses
  • Spread for their senses by sky river and sea
  • I am unlearned in the philosophies of government
  • I may not govern myself children must learn of
    their elders
  • Till they are elders themselves
  • I know nothing of science never created a great
    civilisation
  • Poetry song music sculpture are alike foreign to
    my
  • conceiving
  • I have never built a monument higher than a
    mudhut
  • Nor woven a covering for my body other than the
    passing
  • leaves of the grass
  • My faith in the living mounts like a flame in my
    story
  • I am Khama the Great
  • I helped Bolivar enfranchise the Americas
  • I am Omar and his thousands who brought Spain the
    light
  • of the Prophet
  • I stood with my spear among the ranks of the
    Prempehs
  • And drove you far from Kumasi for more than a
    century
  • I kept you out of my coasts and not the
    mosquitoes
  • I have won many bitter battles against you and
    shall win them again
  • I am Toussaint who taught France there was no
    limit to
  • liberty
  • I am Harriet Tubman flouting your torture to
    assert my
  • faith in mans freedom
  • I am Nat Turner whose daring and strength always
    defied
  • you
  • I have my yesterdays and shall open the future
    widely before
  • me

45
  • THANK YOU!
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com