"As a man thinketh": Slave Mentality?

My husband & I have the privilege of enjoying a friendship with a very active Conservative named Mr. Ken Raymond. We met Ken several years ago, when I was active with Young Republicans. Mr. Raymond was President of the group. In more recent years, Mr. Raymond & Mr. Susannah were impromptu 'bouncers' at an Elizabeth Dole event when some strange characters menaced the proceedings.

These days, writing for his 'cause' is one of the many fields that Mr. Raymond plays. He actively engages the African American community (& any who wish to follow) through venues such as Facebook and face/face involvement with local organizations. (And every so often, he comes by GTBI!) I'm grateful to have his permission to present the following article to you, which was recently published @ Yahoo.

Thanks, Ken!

The Slave Mentality
Do African-Americans Think like Former Slaves?
Ken Raymond, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Mar 16, 2011

Are There Any Similarities found in the Mindsets of Southern Slaves and Today's African-American Americans?

Many within the African-American community continue to talk about a phenomenon called "the slave mentality." It's a very controversial topic that's discussed during African-American forums, in African-American media outlets, and at just about any gathering where the attendees are all African-American.

The reason is likely because both blacks and whites feel very uncomfortable talking about this in racially mixed company--especially and when you consider America 's history of slavery.

But is it real? I believe it is and a clear definition is needed. But I was never a slave. And neither was anyone else that's tried to define this term in modern times.

But this mindset that needs to be examined and understood by all, but especially by those in the African-American community if certain issues are to be dealt with.

And I think the most qualified people to define the term are people who were former slaves themselves—Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

Both Douglass and Tubman escaped slavery and spent their lives helping others do the same. As outstanding members of the Abolitionist Movement, they contended with the slave mentality on a regular basis. And they walked among those that had this mindset. As far as I'm concerned, that makes Douglass and Tubman leading authorities on the subject.

What is the Slave Mentality?

Frederick Douglass documents his experience with other slaves in his autobiography, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass." And among the many things he says, we find this statement: "I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right...."

Harriet Tubman, who led many slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad, said this about the slave mentality; "I freed a thousand slaves. I would've freed a thousand more, if they only knew they were slaves."

Based on Douglass and Tubman's experience, we can define the slave mentality as follows: A person conditioned to quietly, and without objection, accept harmful circumstances for themselves as the natural order of things. They're also conditioned to accept their master's view and beliefs, about themselves, and strive to get others, within their group, to accept the master's view.

I think this definition summarizes a slave's way of thinking. But is this phenomenon thriving in African-Americans today? If so, where is it clearly seen?

Do People with Enslaved Minds Act Alike?

Nowhere is it seen more clearly seen than in the relationship between the African-American community and the Democrat Party. Let's take a closer look and see if our definition accurately applies.

For decades, black people have supported the Democrat Party at every level of government. As a result, the Democrats have maintained control of inner cities across America . And, until the 2010 elections, they maintained control of many state governments.

But let's examine the results of this alliance. According to the U.S. Department of Justice Department of Criminal Statistics, African-Americans account for more than 45 percent of all murder victims in 2007. And about 90 percent of those murders are committed by other African-Americans. And this trend has been going on for decades.

And consider the trend of the African-American population itself, which is in full reverse! Statistics from the U.S. Department of Health show that three out of five African-American pregnancies, in New York , end in abortion. And nationally, African-Americans account for 36.4 percent of all abortions but account for only 13 percent of the country's population.

On the education front, many African-American children, in junior high and high school, are unable to read at their grade level. This has been going on for a long time also. And with the Democrats in charge of education, the literacy rate for African-Americans has been on a downward spiral.

And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, African-American unemployment was at 12.6 percent in January of 2009. It now stands at 15.3 percent as of February 2011. Yet the Democrats will, undoubtedly, receive over 90 percent of the black vote in 2012.

African-Americans never express their dissatisfaction Democrats in general. In fact, African-Americans reward them by voting them back into office each election year.

This behavior meets our definition of the slave mentality, in which African-Americans appear to accept harmful circumstances quietly and without objection.

The same can be said about the African-American murder rate. However other aspects of the slave mentality apply here also. Many of today's African-Americans appear to accept the 19th century slave owner's view of themselves. During that time, a slave's life was worth little or nothing. In fact it was not illegal to kill a slave whether the murderer was black or white.

And can the Democrats argue that they value the lives of African-Americans when they support and promote the abortion industry, which has most of their facilities in minority neighborhoods?

Frederick Douglass' statement about "a contented slave having his moral and mental vision darkened" clearly explains why the African-American community tolerates extremely high murder and abortion rates.

It also explains how the African-American community can embrace the use of the N-Word within its culture. The N-word carries every horrible, degrading concept used, by their oppressors, to justify the enslavement of black people. And no matter how hard black people try to justify its use among them, it'll always carry those meanings. And when African-Americans use it to describe themselves, it's very destructive.

Slaves also nurtured a concept that told them they were completely dependent on their slave owners. They believed they couldn't survive without them. And no one can dispute that the same thinking was planted in the minds of African-Americans by the Democrats since the Lyndon Johnson era. And whenever the government talks about cutting programs, many black people don't believe they'll survive.

And recently we've seen the slave mentality work through Rev. Al Sharpton. When pro-life groups placed billboards in New York 's black neighborhoods, Sharpton led the charge to have them removed. This places Sharpton in the role of the slave who strives to get other slaves to accept their master's viewpoint and accept their circumstances.

Based on all of this, we can conclude that many within the black community make decisions according to the judgment of a slave.

But is this type of judgment exclusive to black people? No, it's not. The slave mentality is the result of conditioning that's been learned and passed down from generation to generation. And since it was the black race that was enslaved in America , this mindset is easily found in their descendants.

However, if you look and compare eastern European races to their ancestors that experienced the same thing historically, it's very likely that you'll see the same behavior.

What Can We Do About It?

Constitutional amendments cannot abolish the slave mentality. So how does someone stop thinking like a slave? For the answer we must, again, consult Frederick Douglass who said "I prayed for freedom for 20 years and received no answer, until I prayed with my legs." Douglass also said "To educate a man is to make him unfit to be a slave."

Black people must find the courage to assert their independence and individuality in the face of their peers and their slave masters. While living in Maryland , Douglass was constantly warned, by other slaves, to stop reading for his own safety. Other slaves told Douglass that he must sound and act like them. As a slave, Douglass was also denied reading and writing material by law. But he used rocks, lumber, and anything that would make, or leave, a mark as his pen and paper.

Douglass understood that other slaves were concerned for his welfare, but knew that he couldn't accept his master's view of him. Douglass accepted God's view. And after he found the inner strength to resist his peers and his master, he educated himself and became a free man.

Today, that translates into African-Americans asserting their independence from Democrats, who were the supporters and practitioners of slavery anyway.

Black people must also resist the self-destructive aspects of their culture even when other African-Americans, like Al Sharpton, say they must accept them.

"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,"—Proverbs 23:7

Ken Raymond is a member of the Frederick Douglass Foundation

~~~

Wow: Charles Krauthammer. Really - wow!

The Last Refuge of a Liberal

By Charles KrauthammerFriday, August 27, 2010
*(all emphases mine)

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion" or -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities -- often lopsided majorities -- oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays -- particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -- blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims -- a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

~~

Ouch.

Perfect.

Thank you, God, for Charles Krauthammer!

~~~

Upon whom the President rests his support...

Have you heard?

Your president bestows his full support in some of the most surprising places...

Curtsy to

IronicSurrealism:
King Samir Shabazz of the NBPP, sharing the opposite side of the race hate coin with the KKK. Each just as caustic and virulently racist as the other. Both deplorable. Both evil. If you denounce the KKK or any racist white supremacist group (as any decent human being should) you should by all rights denounce the NBPP as well. And call them out for what they truly are, and what they stand for, pure unadulterated hate.

Samir: "My job is to educate black people, whether they want to be educated or not. I don’t give a damn what they may think about white people, I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker I hate him..."

Narrator: Samir will use any opportunity to shout his message. Even at a festival to celebrating African heritage.

Samir: "We didn’t come out here to play. There is to much serious business going on in your black community to be sliding through south street with white, dirty cracker whores on your arms.……What’s a matter with you black man, you got a doomsday with a white woman on your arm. Your enemy can not make you free fool. You want freedom you’re going to have to kill some crackers. You’re going to have to kill some of their babies..."

The incitement of murder on the basis of one’s race. Evil incarnate. A fine example for today’s youth. Blood may already be on his hands.The New Black Panther Party, who as you may know, had their Philly voter intimidation case dropped by the Obama Dept of Justice...

A surprise??

Shouldn't be...

(Um, we tried to tell you...)

Now, how 'bout that "outreach" to the Muslim, jihadist world??

Just who is this guy supporting?? Read on:

Professor T.J. Joseph was attacked on July 4 in while returning home from Sunday mass with his mother and sister, a Catholic nun...the attackers used the vehicle to block Joseph’s car before dragging the professor from his vehicle and chopping off his right hand. The attackers then threw the hand away before fleeing.

Church-managed Newman College in Thodupuzha had suspended Joseph, its Malayalam professor, on March 25 for allegedly preparing a question paper with insulting references to the Prophet Muhammad.

St. Joseph Sister Mary Stella said the assailants attacked her brother with an axe and swords.
“They also attacked our elderly mother,” before fleeing, she said...

But don’t worry though. At least our tax dollars being sent to NASA will help with the so called “Muslim outreach” that Obama has turned NASA into.

This is who our country elected. Did we not SEE who he was??

We'd better see it NOW, people.

It's time to shut this operation DOWN, & take back our country! Vote in November, cut off the $$! Repeal the damage that has been done. And never, EVER go down this road again.

Heaven help us.

~~~

In Which Obama says 'It's Miller time'

Obama invites Officer Crowley & the professor to the White House for a beer. He concedes his words had been ill-chosen, but he stopped short of a public apology.

Just what we need…a President who butts his nose into police matters at the ‘local’ level, infers the worst --“racial profiling" -- presumably because the accused is of-a-certain-race & 1 of 3 arresting officers isn’t; makes a public statement besmirching the police department, stirring a racial firestorm that he struck all by himself…

Then it’s, ‘Oops. My words were ill-chosen…but we can see how racial issues are still very sensitive in America...’

Sure; when the President makes it so!

Just what we need in times like these. (His supporters call him cool-handed, steady & level-headed, remember? And they said Sarah Palin wasn’t ready for Prime Time…??)

His answer to the problem that he created? ‘Hey guys, come on over to the White House & let’s have a beer.’

Classy, Barak; real classy.

Just what I want of the American President: micro-managing law enforcement based on deluded perceptions of racism. (Those Reverend Wright tapes just keep on playin'...) Then we get – the whole world gets - this dignified image: regular beer guzzlin’ Joe, yucking it up with the fellas.

Not that I’m against having a beer with friends, mind you. But the President of the United States of America should be of a more dignified persuasion. The ‘office’ should carry authority & honor. A meeting with him should assume a higher caliber of social intercourse than poppin’ tops in the Oval Office.

I said from the beginning, this guy is a low-class, ill-refined, undignified, socially unsophisticated boob. He proves me right almost daily, friends.

If that makes me sound like a snob, I apologize to your sensibilities. I won’t, however, back away from my position.

The Office of the Presidency deserves better.

The American People deserve better.

I deserve better - than this.

~~~

Race Relations.

Hi friends~

There’s a bit of brouhaha in blog-land about a friend named B who has been allegedly ‘race baiting’ other bloggers, ostensibly to draw traffic to his site. Several (including me) were lured by ‘bait’ only to end up ensnared in some of the most toxic, racially charged speech I’ve seen on blogs. This whole deal is not helpful, folks; not helpful to go there & certainly not helpful to participate. I tried very hard to leave carefully worded, respectful comments only to be ignored by the author. It seemed that only remarks which carried incendiary content were addressed, usually w/ equally toxic content from the author.

I've decided not to return to that blog, but did make one last trip to retrieve my comments. It’s important for me to state my case here, & below is one of them. (BTW, when my friend B decides to engage in authentic, productive discussion of ‘race relations’ I'll gladly return to his site. I invite him to comment here at any time, stating his intention to do so.)

Sus' response to B & P's comments:
B said: "All African Americans do not curse, listen to crazy rap music or dress in ways that are beneath me morally nor professionally. We do not run around the streets as drug addicts stealing and killing, and driving drunk." & then P said, "There is NO racism where we live. But in the South, racism is still prevalent."

Okay, I was pleasantly surprised to have B visit my blog & we had an interesting exchange in my comments. Regarding his comment above - of course not! Anyone who buys into that offensive stereotype is a boob. My Senior Pastor (a very kind & wise, Spirit-filled black man) would no doubt agree.

As for P's comment: Sorry, but do you live in the South? How would you know about which you speak except for the stereotype you've heard & perpetuated? I'd like to challenge your stereotype of 'The South.' To use B's template: we aren't all beer drinkin', redneck, KKK sheet wearing, hayseed, skinhead racists. My experience is that people go out of their way to dispel the stereotype. Maybe, just maybe, we're more aware & sensitive than the rest of the country. Ever contemplated that?

Folks could try to understand MY life perspective one of these days...I'm so weary of being lumped into such an offensive 'type' simply because of where I live. (MY ancestors were Scots - basically enslaved, brutalized, raped & murdered by the Brits for hundreds of years. Finally, we were stripped of our own culture -annihilated it, really- pushed out of our country & forced into indentured servitude in the 'New World' where we were unwelcome...sounding familiar??)

Sorry, but I am proud to be Southern, NOT racist, Master's level educated from a University who just lost (badly) in the NCAA Tournament. And I’m not complaining because nobody wants to try & understand me. I don't even care!

I'm living my life, serving my Savior, loving my husband & raising our family. I did NOT support Barack Obama, cannot abide what he & his friends doing to our country. But my politics versus Mr. Obama's has NOTHING to do with his race. NOTHING. And I will not be quiet about that.

Sad thing is, I'll be thought to be racist b/c of where I live & my politics. THAT's what really bugs me. Folks that are so quick to be offended @ perceived racism really don't see that they're doing the SAME thing to people like me - w/o even knowing who I am.

Whew! On my own blog, on a fresh day, I’m happy to share my true thoughts about race relations. Here it is in a nutshell:



People. The universe doesn’t revolve around humanity. It really isn’t all about us…

& thanks be to God for that!

~~~