Moving Against the System

The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness

David Austin, David Austin

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786803795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1968, as protests shook France and war raged in Vietnam, the giants of black radical politics descended on Montreal to discuss the unique challenges and struggles facing their black comrades all over the world. Against a backdrop of widespread racism in the West and ongoing colonialism and imperialism in the Global South, this group of activists, writers, and political figures gathered to discuss the history and struggles of people of African descent and the meaning of black power. For the first time since 1968, David Austin brings alive the speeches and debates of the most important international gathering of black radicals of the era. With never-before-seen texts from Stokely Carmichael, Walter Rodney and C.L.R. James, these documents will prove invaluable to anyone interested in black radical thought and political activism of the 1960s.

Chapter 1

THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF
SUBJECTION

Race Relations in the United States of America

ALVIN POUSSAINT

BEFORE I go on to the body of what I want to talk about, I want to give you a framework, a little bit for thinking about what I’m going to say. I’m a psychiatrist, which means that I was trained, basically, in Freudian-type psychoanalytical methods with some variations on a theme, which is basically a European, Western, white science. You have to remember that Freud got most of his theories from analyzing upper-class white women in Europe and that, from this, he developed a whole type of psychoanalytic theory. So, there’s some question of how relevant this type of thinking might be to black people, and particularly for people who are from different cultures—the Asian people, the African people—and whether we can really see them in a type of Western, Freudian framework.

The other thing about psychiatrists is that they tend to see psychopathology. We’re trained as medical doctors and we’re trained to look for problems, disease, and illness. So we tend to be negative or lean toward picking up disease without taking a look at the strengths of people, what their assets are, what their abilities for a good adaptation are. And this is very true in terms of the black man. When sociologists or psychiatrists study the black man in the United States, they’re looking for problems, for a hotbed of pathology that social scientists rush in to study; and not just white social scientists, but also black social scientists. And this goes on so much that you would think that black people were completely mad, or completely diseased in some way. We have to remember, too, that psychiatrists, by the very nature of their operation, tend to support the status quo because they’re usually dealing with individual sickness. They take out an individual and they define him as sick.

Now frankly, it doesn’t matter to them too much that the society may be sick because they don’t know how to deal with the society. So, they take the patient and they try to help him adjust or adapt to that society. Scientists frequently will tell you that they’re letting people be themselves. But often this can’t be so. The very nature of the operation frequently gets them to help you to feel better, and sometimes to feel better you have to come into more harmony with the system. So that if you define black people’s problems in terms of psychopathology or individual psychopathology, you’re letting the system off easy, you’re making the victim of the problem somehow responsible for the illness in the larger society.

Let me give you an example of how this works. Suppose you have a family and you have a child in it, say a college student. And the college student develops a problem. And his family sends him to a psychiatrist and defines that student as sick. Now, suppose the psychiatrist learns through the patient that really a lot of his illness is because, say, the family—mother and father— are oppressive. Then what is the psychiatrist’s duty in that case? By accepting the patient as sick in the first place, he may be supporting the oppressive system if he doesn’t also address himself to that. So that some psychiatrists now take in the whole family because they want to deal with the oppression or the problems in the family unit or that little society.

Now, how do you deal with the problems and sickness in the larger society? You have to remember too that frequently psychiatry, although based on some scientific principles, is basically a value system. That is, instead of defining things as good or bad, we have developed other types of words to describe these phenomena. So, we call things sick, unhealthy, neurotic when actually what we may be saying is that thing, you know, this is good and that’s bad—a morality sometimes similar to religion. And that’s why you can find so many different types of “scientific” approaches among psychiatrists themselves and physicians, because they basically act on what their values are, frequently, and not out of an objective, scientific approach.

When I was working in Mississippi I had some contact with the University of Mississippi’s psychiatry department. And these were psychiatrists trained to be “objective and scientific,” and we have to put all of that in quotes. When it came time for them to integrate their unit—not integrate it, I shouldn’t say that. The unit was all white. They didn’t bother to set up a segregated in-patient service for black people, they kept all of it for white people. But the federal government was putting pressure on them, because of the new laws, to integrate the unit. Psychiatrists sat down and had meeting after meeting in conference to talk about this and each time came up with the feeling—objective, scientific conclusions—that it would be detrimental to the mental health of both white and black patients if they integrated their unit. So they were using their science to directly support the status quo.

Now, they finally did integrate—that is, they allowed a few Negro patients on the ward (I don’t know any of them)—when the federal government threatened to withhold about three million dollars’ worth of federal research money for the unit. And after they had this little experiment with some patients on the ward, the chairman of the department told me in private that all of the things that they thought were going to happen, that would happen, most of them didn’t happen. It was all in their minds. And because they were products of the system, even as psychiatrists, they were unable to cope or deal with, essentially, what was a social-political problem. And you wonder about psychiatrists being in this whole area. Again, they’re writing about black people, and even if you talk to these psychiatrists in Mississippi, any psychiatrists, they could tell you all the problems about blacks. And there’s much more a danger in this, I think, than people realize, because most of it is very, very unscientific to begin with.

There are books and articles coming out defining the psychology of the black man that we really have to take with a grain of salt and be very, very careful about. See, white society in America very seldom writes about white psychopathology; they don’t do that because they don’t see their problems in terms of psychopathology because they are the society. Yet they seem almost titillated, over and over again—you can write book upon book upon book about the messed up mind of black people and it sells. And whom does it sell to? To the white population. And they read over and over again about the black man’s anger, the black man’s sexual hang-ups in relationship to racism, but they never talk in detail about the racism.

Now you have people writing about black psychopathology who start off by saying, “Well, all of this is secondary to racism, white racism,” but that’s all they say about it. Then they spend the rest of the time talking about the sickness that black people have as a reaction to racism. In some of this you get the feeling that the white society, even some black people writing about this problem, seem to think that somehow black people are putty, their minds are putty in the hands of white racism; that they don’t see it or understand and know how to deal with it—or haven’t known, it supports, how to deal with it—or that black people are somehow robots reacting to white racism and doing all the things that they’re supposed to do and adapting to this. Because the effect of writing about all this black illness really reassures the white man and confuses, I think, black men about the nature of the problem. Somehow you think that, well, if you tell them about the problem, if you tell them how messed up we are because of racism, you’re gonna win friends and they’re gonna be sympathetic and that you’re gonna change attitudes—it doesn’t work that way.

We have probably thousands of books talking about the sad predicament of the black man. It doesn’t change white attitudes. In fact, it might do exactly the opposite. Because if you define someone as sick, even though you say, well, it’s due to racism—you know you can say, well, someone’s got that disease that’s making his skin fall off, and so on, and it’s due to cancer, that doesn’t mean you’re going to want to deal with or be around that person with that illness, or who you see as having that illness. Or you might even cause further division among black people themselves because some start thinking they’re “healthier” than others. And it also provides a type of thinking that gets away from the fundamental problems, because if you see things as individual psychopathology, then you think, well, that’s the way you treat it, you know, let’s support mental health. Then you set up community psychiatry programs. You start getting psychotherapy and other programs for poor people, black people, and you let the system that’s producing the problem and turning out defective individuals go untouched. So that again, even in community psychiatry programs, you might be supporting all the factors that produce the problem in the first place.

Psychiatrists, I guess, have to determine what they want to do. And we’re basically clinicians, supposed to make people feel better, and some want to do that, and that’s fine. But I don’t think that we should kid ourselves about what we really are doing. In a book I recently read, speaking about black pathology, blacks were defined as having paranoia—and I think this will clinch the whole thing for you about how the status quo and everything works together— blacks were defined as having a paranoia, a cultural paranoia produced by the culture. Now, paranoia, in psychiatric terms, means that you’re delusional and you’re psychotic, that what you perceive is not in reality. Blacks don’t have that. Blacks have an appropriate suspicion about the motives and intentions of white men based on concrete experience. That is not sick behaviour. In fact, if you wanted to even think in such terms about cultural paranoia then you would have to define the white man in America as having this problem because he has acted in a paranoid, out of reality fashion to the supposed threats of black people in the country—what they’re going to do to them: what they’re going to do to them economically, what they’re going to do to them sexually. That’s mostly a matter of their fantasies.

But we get stuck with your labels. I think there’s even some joy on the part of some people in somehow exposing themselves or having a catharsis about, you know, their hang-ups, say, as black men or black women. And that’s a curious thing too—that blacks are able to do that. And what does that mean, particularly when a lot of it is not scientific? So that you’ll get people writing, say, about the black man’s hang-ups on white women and they’ll generalize this to all black men. And that, scientifically and statistically, is not true.

Now, you can come up with a whole lot of theories about it, that this is the way it’s supposed to be because of, well, the racism. But is it? Or are the people writing about it, do they have a special type of experience and a special type of concern? Were people and blacks in the Civil Rights Movement a special type of black that was looking for a special type of thing? That’s not the major point I wanted to make there. But you know the black writers will do this over and over again. Do you know of any white writer anywhere in the United States, including the South, who’s ever talked, say, about their hang-ups on black women? They don’t write about that. It’s almost as if they know better than to write about that, that they wouldn’t be that foolish to expose themselves. So, we know that, particularly in the South and in the North, white men are continually cruising, looking for black prostitutes. The black woman has been continually sexually exploited and we know that the white man has all sorts of hang-ups about that, but they don’t write about it. And if someone knows of a book or even a good novel where this is taken up—and don’t say The One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding,¹ because that’s a nonsense book.

But I raise this again, to have you think about why you have these types of differences? Is it, somehow, that coming out with a lot of these things on the part of the black writer, actually an acceptance of the stereotypes, the racist stereotypes, they really have come to believe themselves inwardly, and then sort of have a catharsis of confession and truth? Or are they, too, really just victims, even though it may be done under the guise of attacking the system or attacking racism?

Now that I said those things, I just want to talk in a general way, and it has to be a general way, [about] some things I feel are important about the psychology of blacks. And I feel they’re important because they’re things that we can have a program around, a planned program. I’m not denying that there are overall effects of racism on people, both white and black, but it may not be as clear-cut or as defined as some people would like to have it. And blacks have things that are unique to their experience—slavery, segregation—but I think the most profound effect, if you want to call it that, is that the black man has been sort of forced into a very submissive role. And you don’t have to be a mental giant or a psychiatrist to figure that out.

Blacks have been made to be docile and accepting of a very oppressive system and you had to be docile in the face of that system for survival. If you wanted to live, you frequently had to make the choice between being assertive and aggressive or being acquiescent and docile to the system. And since most human beings usually choose to live, blacks frequently tended to go in this direction. That doesn’t mean, though, that there wasn’t rebellion, because there was rebellion. And that doesn’t mean that in many different ways blacks fought back on very simple things, and all you have to do is talk to, you know, a Negro maid and she’ll tell you the many ways they had of letting anger back out at the oppressors without being murdered.

Now, it’s also a fact that the whole oppressive system in America was particularly directed toward the black man, to keep him emasculated and to keep him castrated. And that’s not too subtle either. Their courts do it, the schools do it, all the racial etiquette does it. I’ll just remind you that, you know, even now the “courts of justice” in the United States inflict severe penalties on black folks for aggressive behaviour, particularly black men, and there’s very much of a double standard that operates. But right now, some people seem to be clouded in their thinking about it or don’t see it, and it’s still very obvious. I just want to mention a few of them to really remind you that it still very much exists.

Rap Brown was caught with a gun on an airplane and they sentenced him to five years in jail for that violation. At the same time they give gun lessons, target shooting lessons, to white housewives in suburbs in how to shoot. And that’s legitimate behaviour. They sentence LeRoi Jones to two to three years in jail for carrying a gun—he didn’t shoot anybody—during the Newark riots. At the same time, white vigilante groups with rifles and all sorts of things are not touched, not even arrested, and probably very frequently encouraged. Mr. Hatchett, a fellow who was just dismissed by New York University because he called Nixon, Humphrey, and Albert Shanker of the United Federation of Teachers racist bastards—and that, you know, is impolite [laughter]—and they kicked him out. Now we have a man running for president of the United States [who] legally calls niggers “niggers.” [Laughter]

We have a man, governor of Georgia, who used guns publicly to violate the law and threaten to kill Negroes, and he is governor of Georgia. Now, you know what would happen if LeRoi Jones or Rap Brown ever tried to run for governor of anything in the United States. Do you think they would let him on a ballot? Whose crimes—and it goes without saying—we know whose crimes are greatest, and those are the crimes of the racist. This double standard in order to keep blacks submissive also operates in relationship to violence and there’s a campaign going on now in the United States to scapegoat the black community and make them responsible for the violence in the society. And I want you to know that we haven’t produced one assassin in the black commun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Dialect of Liberation
• 1. The Psychology of Subjection
• 2. The Haitian Revolution and the History of Slave Revolt
• 3. The Fathers of the Modern Revolt
• 4. African History in the Service of the Black Liberation
• 5. The Civilizations of Ancient Africa
• 6. Black History in the Americas
• 7. Race in Britain and the Way Out
• 8. Moving Against the System
• 9. Frantz Fanon and the Third World
• 10. Black Power in the USA
• 11. “A Black Woman Speaks Out”
• 12. “You Don’t Play with Revolution”
• 13. On the Banning of Walter Rodney from Jamaica
• 14. Letter to C. L. R. James from Rosie Douglas, June 9, 1968
• 15. Letter to Rosie Douglas from C. L. R. James, June 27, 1968
• Notes
• Index