HOTEP brothers and sisters. I said HOTEP brothers and sisters. It's good to see you. Welcome to the United African Movement's continuing African History Month program.
It's good to see you filing in. I know we have some stormy weather. I know that for those of you who haven't been to a meeting recently, this is kind of early. But we're trying to start our meetings more and more on time. I told you we're moving.
We're moving from CPT to BPT. And very soon we're going to be functioning on APT, African People's Time. How many of you were here last week? How many enjoyed the program we had with Dr. Justice last week? Okay, good.
Last week, our talk served as an introduction. to a continuing series in which we're really exploring one topic. One topic.
And that topic is how to organize and liberate our people. Our topic last week was mental health. And this week, continuing in that same vein, we're going to be talking about the war to control the African mind.
I know a lot of you didn't think that such a war might be going on, but that's exactly what's going on. If you look in the dictionary, the word war comes from... The Norman word, the Norman French word, where, W-E-R-R-E, and what it means is an open and armed conflict between principalities. And if you look up the word control, it comes from the Anglo-French word, which means to counter by rolling on its axis.
It's a means of opposing. And I know that all of you know what the African mind is. When we say African mind, we're talking about that mind.
that originated along the Nile Valley. We're talking about that mine that erected the mud brick pyramid-shaped tombs down in the lower Nile Valley. And then as we moved up the Nile...
Valley or down the Nile Valley, depending upon your perspective, but northward that began to erect pyramids made out of hewn stone. When we say African mine, We mean that mind which has spread all over the world and whose contributions have made those good things in the world, those good things. We're talking about the mind that laid out the plans for Washington, D.C. through Benjamin Banneker. We're talking about the mind that introduced medicine and introduced science and technology to the world.
So when we talk about the African mine and the war to control it, we are talking about a very vital subject when we talk about liberating our people. Because if there's a war to control that mine and we don't even know that it's going on, then we actually are going to have to first learn that and get into that before we can even take our next step. Today's speaker, Dr. Amos Wilson, and we have conferred a doctorate on him.
We don't have to wait for anyone else to confer a doctorate on him because, as I would say of Professor Clark, and I've said it before, fortunately I've said it before, for those of you who remember, I'm not saying it because Amos is here today. If Professor Clark... and Amos Wilson aren't doctors, you could take the doctorates, the PhDs and the MDs of most of these people out here and make toilet paper out of them.
This brother's classic work, the developmental psychology of... The Black Child is a book that every person who works in the field of mental health and even lay people who are not working in the field of mental health need to get into. Amos is one of the most intelligent people. that I have ever seen.
He's also one of the most intellectually honest people that I've ever seen. And if you get into a conversation with him, you'll find out that he doesn't want to tell you a lie. So what he'll do is he'll ask you a couple of questions to see if you're going to respond to him with some rhetoric or respond to him with some nonsense.
And if he sees that you can't handle it, he would just rather not say anything. But if he sees that you can handle what it is that he has to tell you, it may not fall along the political lines that you think are correct. It may not fall along the religious lines that you think are correct.
But it's going to be the truth, and it's going to be something that wakes you up. I remember... I remember that it was in a talk that Amos gave about maybe four or five years ago, in which he raised a question which should have been really in every African person's mind, and it was about the disease AIDS.
And it was a simple thing. The activities that people say caused AIDS Been going on since the Greeks, some of the earliest Europeans. So how did, in the 1980s, a disease spring up at the same time all around the world in homosexuals and... the United States, in heterosexuals, in Haiti, and in Africa. And it's a very basic kind of question, and it prepared our minds for the information that...
Francis Welsing later brought to us, showing us how this bug from the so-called green monkey had been worked on by scientists for decades before the epidemic spread around the world. And I just use that as an example to show you the kind of critical thinking that Amos does in all kinds of fields. You can get a good talk from Amos about medicine, about psychology.
about history, and there's always going to be a new and intelligent twist to it, and it'll always be whatever your mind can stand. Brother Amos, are you ready over there? You said you came here ready, right?
Okay, this is a very good brother, Brother Amos Wilson. We first met him, I would say, about nine or ten years ago when he came. came and spoke at the Black Family Collective Series over at the County Cullen Library, which eventually moved and became the Harlem Hospital Series. This is a brother who, if he just concentrated on selling... his book and giving speeches could be a wealthy man.
But he has more in mind for us and more in mind for himself and our people than that. This brother doesn't just talk black business and buy black. He's actually been for years struggling with a venture called the Harlem Copy Center on 125th Street there.
He's had his ups and downs, but he's hanging in there with it. He does lecture. It's a treat when he lectures because the brother does not want to spend his time doing this. Doesn't want to spend his time doing this.
And we're very appreciative at United African Movement that he took time from his busy schedule and from the very heavy and significant things that he's doing to come and pay us a visit and to come and share some information with us. I hope you'll give him a big round of applause by way of introduction. And I won't delay things any further.
I'll just say, Brother Dr. Amos Wilson. Thank you kindly. I'm very honored and... It's a pleasure indeed to be invited to share this bit of time with you. I, of course, congratulate you in terms of the work you're doing and the support you're giving our brothers here.
And I very... I very much encourage you to continue. I hope, of course, that it wasn't the cause of our lateness.
We got caught up with some traffic on the train and had to even go back uptown and come back down again and catch a local. We're going to talk a bit today then about the war to control the African mind. In fact, I remember quite some time ago when I started out on the lecture circuit, I talked about war, particularly.
psychological warfare. The idea being that we as a people have been subjected to psychological warfare for hundreds and hundreds of years. In fact, I talked about how we let the Europeans structure our history for us.
I was in Newark last week when I tried to indicate there that culture is not only concerned or not, is not only about the behavior of a people, the habits, the dress, the dance, the language and customs of a people. people, but a culture has a time dimension, that there is a time dimension relative to culture. At that point, I tried to show how our children, to a degree, are miseducated as a result of the fact that the time dimension the very time schedules for classes, archived history is not only a way of sequencing events, it's not only a series of dates and events. History involves the demarcation of time, the division of time, that our sense of history is actually a geometrical, mathematical concept, that history is a system of coordinates wherein we locate ourselves in time and space. We determine past, future, and present in terms of our...
sense of history and therefore when our history is rewritten or when history is distorted our sense of time and place is distorted as well and when we let them Europeans write history and divide history up in terms of their time system they're also then distorting our identity and distorting our sense of location and place distorting our sense of of the past as well as our destiny. So we get a history that's divided up, let us say, in terms of World War I, World War II, Korean War, the Vietnamese War, and so forth. And yet, as African people, when we look at war, we may date the history of war quite differently. We may recognize that we have been at war with the European continuously for the past 2,000 years.
and therefore we cannot accept their demarcation of wars because that distorts our perception of ourselves and distorts our relationship with the rest of the world. Beside the military war, actually psychological war is probably the most important factor involved in the conquering and domination of a people. It is not enough just to physically conquer a people. people or militarily conqueror people. That requires vast expenditures of money, men, power, military force, police force, and other kinds of things.
The ultimate captivity, of course, involves the waging of a psychological war against the people so that they can be controlled without military outlays. changing their minds and shaping their minds, they will literally become self-controlling. They will literally then, through their own self-determination, fit into the needs and purposes of the captive armies. of the armies that are in control of them.
The attempt then has been, and if we look at the history of neocolonialism and the history of the European psychological warfare, has been one then where the Europeans have withdrawn their governing forces, where they've withdrawn their armies and so forth, but through education. through cultural imperialism, through the control of information and other things, have continued, unabated, a psychological war against the African mind. And ultimately then, it must be this war we have to fight and win.
When we talk about then the war to control the African mind, We of course should sort of define our terms and I'm not going to define mine in the fullest sense of the word because of course there are many definitions and many perceptions of what mine is or what it may be. I'm going to look at it though from a perspective that sees it in a dynamic sense, that sees the mind as a sort of what we call a nodal point, as a point of conversion and diversion of what we may call field forces. In other words, the mind is at the point where internal forces from the personality and from the body and external forces from the environment impact upon one another. The mind then is a coherent system of operations that is more than a thing. because we cannot locate mind in a place.
We cannot look into our brain and say, this is where the mind is located. When we look at the brain as it thinks, we note that the full brain usually is involved, and there is constant oscillation, shifting, and moving in the electrical, chemical activity of the brain. There have been psychologists, for instance, who've tried to really locate something we might call mind or aspect of the mind. the mine and, of course, have failed at the attempt.
So under these circumstances, it's more to our advantage then to look at the mine in an operational sense in terms of what it does. So in this sense, we can say it is a relatively coherent and active set of operations. which is influenced and influences the field which surrounds it. That is, it is a set of operations that is influenced by the inputs from the environment, of which it is a part and a product in a way, and it is affected also...
acts on the environment. So it's a situation, the mind then is a set of operations that seeks to coordinate and regulate those forces, those energies and vibrations that flow into it from the environment, from the body, and to regulate those forces and reactions that flow from the body and from itself on to the environment itself. The mind, though, is not only then pushed back and forth by the forces that come into it from the environment or that push it from the inside of the personality or from the body. It is also self-controlling and self-regulating.
One of the things and one of the supreme characteristics of the human mind is that it is self-aware. We are aware of... of our own thinking.
That is, we can think and at the same time be aware that we are thinking. The human mind is self-reflecting. That is, it not only performs an operation, solves problems, it not only regulates those forces inside of itself and inside of the body and seeks to regulate those forces coming into itself and into the body. It uses...
its own activities as a means of self-regulation, which means then that the mind can transcend itself. It can utilize the forces and the information coming from its own memory stores and from its own knowledge bases. It can use the information coming from the environment, coordinate that information, and create a synthesis with that information and create new knowledge.
knowledge and use that new knowledge to transform itself. So in that instance, it is self-transforming. But let us get back to the basic premise of the mind, and that is Is the mind as being at the center of forces that flow in from the environment? It is the receptacle of inputs from the environment. Current perceptions and evaluations and moods and the geophysical, socio-psychological circumstances influence its operation.
What do I mean by that? I'm simply saying this. That the very physical environment in which we exist influences the operation of the mind.
And of course we shall see as we proceed with this lecture then, it is no wonder that the European seeks to control the very living physical circumstances under which African people must exist. That these very physical circumstances themselves help to shape and mold and influence the operation of the African people. and mind. I often tell my students that we not only live under certain conditions, but the conditions we live under live in us. We not only then live under certain conditions, those conditions become a concrete part of our minds and those conditions speak through our mind and through our behavior.
That is one of the reasons often in listening to people talk, looking at them behave and dress and so forth, we can get a good idea from where they come and get a good idea of under what circumstances they have perhaps lived. We can get a good idea of their educational and social background. So then when we live in an environment, we not only exist there, the environment begins to live in us and literally uses our body as it is. an instrument of its expression and uses our mind as an instrument of its expression.
Why do you think then that the European's chief tool against the African mind and against African people is that of physical separation? Is that of redlining our neighborhoods and seeing to it that those neighborhoods are too often deteriorated and deteriorated? declining in nature, those neighborhoods ultimately are reflected then in the mental operations of African people. Not only then is the mind biased and influenced and molded by the very physical environment in which we exist, but of course it is influenced by what I call the socio-psychological environment in which we exist.
That simply means that our minds mind is shaped by the nature of the people we live among. This is what I mean. By the nature and character of the human interactions we have in daily life.
I often tell people when you move to a neighborhood or you buy a house you're not only buying a house you're buying a neighborhood, you're buying a set of people, you're buying a set of relations. And of course, one of the reasons why people want to move when they are concerned with the rearing of their children is... is not only so that the children may exist in more pleasant physical surroundings, such as a house or such as a neighborhood, but to also change the human associations of their children, recognizing that these associations, the relationships with neighbors and others, will also influence the character and mental development of their children and the personality of their children.
So the mind is like a vast computer. It operates on its inputs. And a common statement in computer technology is garbage in, garbage out. And in a sense then, the computer reflects its input. And as we shall see momentarily, it is through the nature of the inputs in the African mind that Europeans seek to control that mind, to create its character and its structure, to create the personality of the...
African individual. The mind is not only been controlled and biased and distorted and influenced and shaped to a degree by its circumstances and by its surrounding and environment, it is also of course influenced by the environment. influenced by what is referred to as its teleological perceptions. What do we mean by that?
We simply mean the mind's view of its future, the mind's view of of its destiny. We not only live in terms of our past experience and in terms of our current circumstances, we also live in terms of what we expect to happen in the future. I've often admonished our audiences that in rearing our children, we not only must rear them in terms of their past experience, of current circumstances or past circumstances we must rear them in terms of the future and it is very important that we have a view of the future and a long-term view of the future when we look at our present circumstances as African people and when we look down the road at the future we should quickly recognize that the tasks of the African child are not the same as the tasks of the European child.
And this is a very important percept and it is hooked into education and into so many other things. Because we often hear black parents say, I want my children to have the same. education as the white children. And of course I rail mightily against these archaic concepts such as same education.
We must get rid of that concept. Equal education is another concept that we should get rid of. They are destroying our minds and our ability to form a true education for our children. I've often indicated I often indicated there's no such thing as a standard education.
To a very great extent, the kind of troubles we see our children in today are the result of the fact that we have accepted your... European words and definitions and seek to operate within the confines of those definitions. This, of course, is one of the major means by which war is made against the African mind.
I've urged black professionals... to take up the banner and take up the war of redefinition, that as long as we operate within the definitions of Europeans, that we will be subject to their determination of our behavior. I've talked often about European constants, that is certain European programs that have not changed since we first met the Europeans and which are not intended to change.
the superficial changes that we are now experiencing are only brought into being to maintain the constancies, that we must develop the ability to look beyond. the superficial changes and see the constancies being maintained by those changes. We are getting ready to elect an African mayor of this city but beware this change is still another version of neo-colonialism. Its intention is ultimately to put a black face on white power. You must recognize the intention ultimately for the European is not to give up his power.
He may even force integration upon his people. He may even elect our people to operate. and so forth.
Because in the good old neo-colonialist fashion, these people elected to offices are a means by which the ultimate economic, political, social, and other controls are maintained. So we must not see these changes as substantial and basic changes. I'm not advising you not to vote and not to put our African into office, but let us not be deceived. During. During this Black History Month, I often advise our people that while it is good and wonderful and fitting to celebrate our heroes and to celebrate great events in our past, past, we must also use this time to meditate upon the lessons taught by those events and by those heroes.
It will do us very little good to build up a pride as a result of looking at these heroes and as a result of looking at our great accomplishments if we truly do not learn the lessons of those events and accomplishments. We must recognize that in a way we are now undergoing a second reconstruction period. That this is not the first time we have been down this road in America.
Those of you, of course, who read Lerone Bennett's Black Power USA are familiar with that fact. I've often noted how Bennett did not finish that book. Of course, he then talked about what Black... mayors, black lieutenant governors, black legislatures, black voting power, black corporate leaders, black men in the Senate, black men in the Congress. And yet, in the 1870s, when Andrew Johnson changed his program, when the Supreme Court changed its program, our people were disenfranchised, and it took us 100 years to get back to the same point that we were at then, which means that we are now in a time of disenfranchisement.
It means then that the people who can give are people who can take. And simply because we may be voting in a black mayor, doesn't say that this is going to go on forever and ever. We voted them in before.
And because we did not change the basic power relationship. Between ourselves and the Europeans, we were disenfranchised. In this context, I often want that we are not protected by laws.
We are not protected by courts. We are not protected by presidential mandates. They are but words on paper.
Words cannot protect your interests. The law is only as strong as those who enforce it. and the laws that now so-called protect us are written by our enemies and enforced by our enemies, and the day that they decide that they will not enforce them, the law will be null and void, and they will remain neutral on the books. So that the ultimate thing then is not laws, not civil rights laws and rules, not fair housing laws and rules. I've told you again and again that if one day the European has to...
to choose between feeding his child and your child. I don't give a damn what law is on the books. He's going to feed his first. And you may cite laws and rules, but the reality will be the one. with the most power is going to be the one that rules under those circumstances.
So that the ultimate goal for African people then is not the placing of laws on books, nor even the election of mayors and governors, but ultimately the building of power so that we can prevent those who would wish to destroy us from doing so, regardless of the laws they may write, regardless of the laws they may enforce or not enforce. So when we look at the mind then as a teleological instrument, it is determined by its teleological perceptions. Thank you very much. And again, I'm saying teleological is just one big word.
future is hooked into our word telephone which means distance just distance that's all we're talking about here we look and we see the condition of african people today on the bottom As Garvey noted so many years ago. Everywhere he went, the African man, the black man, is on the bottom of the economic, social, and political ladder. Those circumstances have not changed. In many instances, they are getting worse.
We will find, if you go to Bonds and Nobles and some of the others, numbers of books asking, can the African survive? Our very survival into the next century is in question. Thank you. I often note that our children looked at the series Star Wars.
And I noted that in the beginning of that series, there were no black people in the movie at all. And I noted that whenever then the European looks into the future, there is not a black man there. They had animals, robots, and everything else operating rocket ships and so forth, but not a black man was there.
Which means then, ladies and gentlemen, those who think that they're in control of creating the future do not see the African man there at all. This means then ultimately if we look at the task that our children must perform, that the basic task of the European child is conservative. To conserve and maintain the advantages that the European already has.
And to enhance those advantages. So that means they're rearing in their homes, in their communities. That means their education then is basically conservative.
Because since they already have the advantage, they seek then to maintain that advantage. When we then look at the African child, we see a very different future. And I've often said then, that future is revolutionary.
Given the condition that our people are in today, our education cannot be then conservative. If we are to save our people from starvation, if we are to remove our people from the bottom of economic, political, and social ladders, then we must overturn the current orders of the world. That in and of itself makes it very clear that they cannot receive the same education as the white child. They cannot be reared.
the same way the white child is reared because they have very, very different tasks to perform. It is when we recognize then the future task that our children must perform and when we... reflect on that task, we then use those future tasks and knowledge of those future tasks to reorganize our present circumstances, to reorganize the schools, to reorganize our relations one to the other, to reorganize our perception of ourselves, and yea, even to reorganize our history. Because history is alive and history is present.
As I pointed out in Newark of last week, history is the present and history is the future. In European systems we have a linear approach to the world, an approach that makes one believe that history is something that is left behind, history is something that can be forgotten. No, ladies and gentlemen, history is never left behind. In the human mind the history is now and in the future.
In the human mind, the history is present, for the future is made of things that were made in the past. Without past, there is no future. And so we must then see.
So the Afrocentric view of the world is non-linear. It is one that sees past, present, and future as simultaneous. And we must recognize that.
recognize this factor. Our knowledge of our history and our perception of our history is intimately tied up with our knowledge of our future and our ability to determine that future. To forget history and not to operate on history is not to control the future. Therefore, we will see then those who wish to control the African mind seek to control our perception of the future.
The mind then is not only influenced by its inputs, but of course is influenced by its own native characteristics. It uses the sum of its currently available intellectual, emotional, and behavioral characteristics. And it brings those characteristics. characteristics to bear on its environment and to affect its adaptation.
It uses then its own potential powers. The control of the mind and related personality, their characteristic functioning and relationships to the world and self perception is significantly achieved through the manipulation and the quantity and quality of inputs. through the structuring of its environment, through the manipulation of reinforcements and experience, and the control of its perceptions and interpretation of these perceptions, and finally through the feedback from its output.
Let us make it simple. I only mean this, then. that the mind essentially is controlled by the nature and quality, by the quantity of information that flows into it.
It is also controlled by its native characteristics. By his thinking characteristics, by his reasoning characteristics, by his current mood state, by his current perception of itself and of the individuals. by its current perception of the environment, and it is also controlled by its expression, by its output. That is, when we express something and when we We act upon the world. We look at the effects of our acting upon the world.
How the world reacts to our action reflects back on our mind, and our mind is often changed and biased as a result of what we call the feedback mechanism. So then this gives us the basic insight then into how one controls the mind. You can manipulate the mind then in terms of manipulating the information that goes in it. And this is another one of the European constants I often talk about that is hidden behind what is apparent change, and that is the European control of information, which I'm sure you as an audience are very familiar with. We are still fighting to get the videotapes of the court scene.
On like it is, or on TV, period. You're still fighting to get other information that you have in the Tawana Brawley struggles and other struggles on the public television. The Europeans, of course, are manipulating that information. Despite your election of mayors, despite your election of governors, and so forth, the Europeans still intend to control the nature of information that is available to the African mind. And since this mine operates on the basis of information fed to it, then the control of information by Europeans is an attempt to control the nature of the African mine.
I was very happy at the time when the City Sun made a major coup in terms of the Tawanda Brawley case. That was a... That was a monumental event, ladies and gentlemen.
I hope that you recognize the great historical value of that situation. For the first time, a black newspaper, I may not say the first time, but at least the first time in current history, a black newspaper threatened to become an authority within itself. And African people began to look at a source of information created by themselves as a source of authority and not a European instrument.
Because it becomes very, very dangerous to the status quo when we begin to listen and follow our own authority and our own sources of information. And you can see then the New York Times as it attempted to take back the authority that it had lost to the city side. Through either the ignoring of that information or by this two or three-page.
spread that it made concerning the so-called grand jury findings. But it had been wounded, and we must continue to wound it until it is ultimately destroyed. Information is controlled and I often talk to college students about this. One of the constants that still remains with us and that is intended to remain is what I call the control of the domain of discourse. What does it mean?
It only means the control of what it is that is important to talk about. The determination of what is worth talking about. What is worth learning. The European seeks then to control this domain of discourse. What is news?
You know, the New York Times then sees itself as what the paper record and this and that, which means in a way that it is not news until the New York Times says it's news. It is not news unless it occurs on the major networks. Anything that doesn't occur on the major networks that does not make the Eurocentric papers then is not considered news.
It is not considered worthy of learning. We see this in college catalogs. I said often many of our students go to college, they look in the catalog, they see the listing of courses, and they assume then that the courses listed there must be worth knowing. If they are not worth knowing and studying, then they wouldn't be in the catalog.
Of course, the adverse reasoning is, if it's not in the catalog, then it must be what? Not worth knowing. Is it no coincidence then that the things that are most pertinent to our advancement and liberation as a people is left out of the college catalog? Is left out of the news, which then subtly creates in our minds that news that is important to us, news that is relevant to us, is unimportant and not worth knowing. So the very desire...
mind of the catalog, the very news stories that appear in the paper, the very news stories that are projected on the television set create a value system in and of themselves. And the very fact then that certain things are called news and other things are not then biases information and ultimately biases the very nature of our minds. And ultimately it biases the very character of our minds. and capacities and abilities of our minds to operate on that information and future information. The mind also then has some, I wouldn't say innate characteristics, but at least innate potentialities.
Those potentialities such as reasoning, logical thinking, critical analysis, comparisons, contrasting, evaluative stuff, these kinds of things. Calculating, weighing, measuring, looking at cause and effects, looking at relations, abstracting, those characteristics are the very operation the mind uses to operate on the world itself, to operate on information, to transform information, to synthesize information. to store information, to compare information, to use information that is ultimately projected in behavior and ultimately projected on the environment. then that cannot look at implications and develop implications, a mind then that cannot perform simple syllogistic reasoning, a mind that cannot perform comparisons, a mind that that cannot contrast, a mind that cannot calculate, weigh, and measure, a mind that cannot determine causes and effects, a mind that cannot determine relationships, a mind that cannot perform organization, a mind that cannot perform planning, a mind that cannot evaluate its effect upon the world is a mind then that has no real influence upon the world and is a mind that has lost control of its own. itself and is a mind that cannot protect the interest of the personality and the person in which it is a part This type of mind, this type of structuring is the result, to a good extent, of the nature of the inputs of the mind.
And is the nature then, as I said earlier, of the kind of conditions under which the mind operates and lives and exists. One of the reasons then our children have problems often in their thinking skills and reasoning skills, as a side issue. here I'll say for a moment that we as people can only be in the condition we are in as a result of being robbed of our common sense, as a result of being robbed of our thinking skills, as a result of being emotional.
And not reasonable. So that our behavior can come under the control of reason and logic. Under the control of critical analysis of possibilities and probabilities.
for the European in order to control the African mind to emotionalize that mind. And if you'll note the ads on TV and radio and the other propaganda appeals to which we are subjugated time in and time out are designed to speak directly to the emotions, not to the rationality of the individual. You can only hypnotize an individual once you get around his critical analytical thinking.
And the African then is often emotionalized as a prelude to his behavioral manipulation. So then, it is no accident that our children are placed within certain schools. Or as I said earlier, that we are forced to live under certain psychological and physical conditions.
physiological circumstances. For it is supposedly in the schools and in the institutions that these inherent characteristics and potentialities of the mind are developed. It is supposedly in the schools that thinking skills and reasoning skills and comparative skills and implicative skills and other skills are trained and developed in the mind so that the mind then can operate autonomously and independently in the world and bring then the world under its will and under its subjugation and protect the individual in the environment and, if necessary, from the environment. But a thinking black man and woman is a dangerous black man and woman. I have to tell you again and again that all of the institutions of the society I don't care whether you're talking about the family institution, the so-called criminal justice institution, the so-called religious institution, the health institutions, the educational institutions, the economic institutions, all of them have one thing in common, and that is maintaining European domination.
And I've said often and I will say again, that is the reason why when you meet those institutions, they will operate in relationship to you in a way that is the very opposite of what their name implies. And I've said again and again that the church will often send you to hell, that the economic system will keep you poor. that the health system will keep you sick, that the justice system will met out injustice?
How else can it maintain the European power if the institutions don't do it? And I'm surprised by how often we are surprised as to why our children are not learning in these schools. We don't understand.
In order for us to be in the condition we are in, we must literally be turned backwards as a people. We must be reversed because this world can only be ruled in terms of lies. When you have a minority of people, a 10% of the world's population, a 10% of the world's population whose lands are not inherently wealthy, whose lands have no natural resources, ruling over the other 90%, then that other 90% must be kept out of its mind.
That other 90% must exist in a state of deception. That other 90% must live then in a reversed situation and in a backward situation. Therefore, that other 90% must accept the lie as truth and the truth as lies. I've said that the major differentiation between Eurocentrically oriented psychology and Afrocentrically oriented psychology under oppression is that it is a political necessity.
that the black man be out of his mind. It is not merely the result of the interaction you had with your mother or your father. It is not merely the result of the absence of your father in the home or the absence of your mother.
absence of role models in your communities or all of these other things we hear day in and day out, it is not merely the result of that. It is ultimately the result of the need for the European to maintain power and domination. And these things are but an effect of that need. You had two Sundays ago a bunch of Negroes trying to explain the disparity between the education of black...
females and black males. A pathetic situation. Pitiful. They went to Yale. Went to the University of Chicago.
The experts that they had what? Set up. And of course those experts gave them the answers that they wanted to hear.
And then they are presented to African people as experts. But if they had gone to the people themselves, I'm sure they would have got a different set of names and a different set of people. But those people did not appear in that paper.
So we get people putting effects as causes. You say, oh, it's the absence of the black male model in the neighborhood. But how does the absence of the black male model occur? Why is it necessary for that absence to be there? That is never dealt with.
and discussed. It never gets around. So you have a bunch of experts discussing secondary situations and minor situations and making them appear to be major.
That is why they are teaching at the University of Chicago in Yale. Because those institutions are just as much and more of a part of European domination as any other institution. And yet we say that they give us a good education. And we talk and we feel so good when we send our children there.
Without any African consciousness, they are being sent there to be destroyed. So then we have to then look at the schools. Because it is in the schools, it is in the colleges and universities, that the black man and woman, the black child, the black boy and girl, must be taught to be dumb. That is the purpose of the schools.
Let us recognize it. If the European can only exist to the extent that we are not in control of our common sense, that we are not in control of our identity, that we are not in control of a shared... collective activity level. If the Europeans can only exist and dominate as a result of the fact that we are not in love with ourselves and with our people. If the European can only be in control as a result of the fact that we have not fully developed our technological thinking capacities and the ability to concretize those capacities, then why do you think...
those abilities and those personality characteristics are going to be taught in European oriented schools. It doesn't make any sense. The European is not going to teach his enemy to overthrow him and yet some of us think that that will be the case. There is hardly any African in the world that has ever given a European education. You know, we hear some people talk about, well, he has a white mind, or he thinks like white folk.
Black people are not taught to think like white folk. You can sit in a white university as long as you want to, you'll never be taught to think like a white man. You can even learn the same thing in terms of course content as the white boy.
girl, the white student. You can learn it even better. You can come out summa cum laude and you still have not received a white education.
No, sir, you get a Negro education on my way here in the system. I wouldn't complain. I often tell people, you know who thinks more like a white man?
If you want to use those terms, I'm putting those in parentheses, a firecracker. Yeah. Yes.
How do we say that? Because, you see, if you're taught to think like a white man, like white people, you want your own nation. That's what white folk want. You'd want to own your own neighborhoods.
That's the way white folk think. You'd want to control your own economy. That's the way white folk think.
You'd want to have your own army. That's the way white folk think, ladies and gentlemen. These people going to these colleges don't think like white folk. They don't come out determined to... control their destiny.
They don't come out determined to create their own nations and places in the world. They don't come out determined to control military strength and economic strength and other strength. They are coming out the same way their slave-wage grandparents came out, that is to be servants and to be highly educated servants.
That is why a Farrakhan frightens them, because they see themselves in a Farrakhan. Who says, I don't want to sleep with your women, I don't want to marry women, I don't want to live among you. I don't want to have anything to do with you, you're dirty, rotten and regressed.
as a people. You represent a destructive force in the world, and we are going to remove you from power, and we are here to see that your influence on the world ceases and is put to an end. We are here to take rightful control of the wealth that is under the lands of our people and take rightful control of our minds. We are here to put you in your 10% place in the world itself. They see that.
Where are you getting that kind of education? In the Yales and Harvards? And yet, ladies and gentlemen, that's the only kind of education that's worth anything. I've often said there that the function of education is not to get jobs and all this other baloney you hear every day. Secondary.
Secondary. The ultimate function of education is the security survival of the people. What good would it do you to know computer engineering and all the other stuff if you can be blown away at any moment by another people? If you're manipulated by another people? If the other people continue to maintain the instruments and the power of production.
What does it mean to have knowledge when AIDS can be let loose on the African community and destroy our communities? Knowledge is not enough. Knowledge must be welded to purpose. It must be welded to a sense of peoplehood. It must be welded to a sense of destiny.
And that is when it becomes protective of a people. You may fill your head with knowledge and skills all you want to, but you can be destroyed by AIDS and all other kinds of germs and all other kinds of warfare and lethal weapons and all other kinds of controlled instruments that the European has in its power. Until that knowledge and education is welded to a sense of nationhood, you are not receiving a good education at all.
And therefore, a good education must be measured in terms of the degree to which it protects your survival and interests as a people, and not otherwise. So then we see an attempt then in the European school to distort and to retard the potentialities of the African mind. And the education is designed to do that. And you say to yourself, well, okay, but I know some people who think technologically and this and that, and they got through, you know. Of course, we can say a lot about that.
But let us just note this. Sure, you know some people who are very important at NASA, who have made great instruments, perhaps that have flown out on the space shuttle and all of this kind of stuff. Great. But look at the nature of that knowledge and look to where that knowledge is applied and to whose benefit it is applied before you get too happy about it.
The chief thing that happens when the African person educated in Eurocentric schools does manage to maintain a mathematical mind, a highly logical, brilliant mind, is often that that mind is alienated. In the sense that it is permitted to maintain its logical and other functions only at the price of separating that individual emotionally, socially, and culturally from his... of her people so that the knowledge and skills cannot be used in the interest of the people but in the interest of the enemy.
As we often say when one is alienated so that one's capacities and ability can only be used for whose benefit? The benefit of aliens. That's the source of strangers, of people other than ourselves. That is the reason why I've said often that the more degrees we get in business administration, the fewer businesses we have to administer. That is the reason I've said often...
That there is almost a monotonal relationship between the number of blacks and African Americans receiving degrees in economics and the number of Korean businesses on 125th Street. It's no strange coincidence then that as we get more and more MBAs out here, we get more and more career businesses on under 25th Street. Isn't that a strange situation?
Paradoxical? But it's really not that paradoxical. We've noted here now that on 125th Street, there are approaching 70 Korean businesses on that street. You try to name me 20 black ones on that street, and yet there are 95 percent of the people on that street that shop on that street are black people, African Americans.
Where are the NDAs? Where are the PhDs in economics who went to the Wharton School of Finance? Where are those people with their knowledge? Because the knowledge is alienated, it cannot work for African people. It can only work for the other people.
So don't be so proud of yourself because you might have gotten through MIT and you may be a mathematical genius. See where and how you can apply that genius in the interest of the survival of African people. If you cannot do so, then you have been alienated and you have become a part of your own oppression. So we can see then this mind is controlled by the nature of its inputs. In the light of time, I'm going to have to move on here, but I wanted to look at a few things to indicate just how...
intimately related the nature of the mind is and how much the mind is biased by the nature of input those of you who've gone in psychology who've taken psychological courses perhaps have run across the chapter on sensory deprivation where the where a person is deprived of his sensory contact with the world where you can be put into a sensory deprivation tank some of you might have seen the movie last week a couple of weeks ago i think it was last week a so-called altered states where the and and that movie of course is based on current psychological research where people are put in tanks and where the environment is is made to reduce their sensory input so they can hear little or nothing, they can feel little or nothing, they often lose sense of their own body. In a sense, try to imagine what would happen if you lost your sense of hearing and if you lost your sense of sight on top of that. And in addition to that, you lost your sense of touch, you lost your sense of smell.
You lost your sense of taste. You lost even the sense of feeling your own body. When you get into that state, then your mind begins to do peculiar things. A similar state to that is a state that we undergo each night when we sleep and dream. Dreaming is a form of...
hallucinating, wherein as we shut down our senses and connections to the external world, the mind and sense is left to run free, and it creates then its own world. you've undergone nightmares and other kinds of dreams can see that that world can be fantastic and amazing and sometimes it can be so vivid until you don't know that you're out of reality until you wake up and you can confuse then the hallucination that the dream represents with reality and often then people who put in these desensitization tanks or sensory deprivation tanks must get out immediately or soon thereafter because they start hallucinating, they start having strange feelings, their minds start playing tricks on them and so forth, and it becomes a punitive experience. It means then that the mind maintains its balance and maintains its characteristics and maintains its consciousness and control of its processes by the connections that it maintains with the environment and by the quality in nature. of inputs into it.
And if these are distorted, if these are cut off, if these are biased, if these are evaluated in the wrong sort of way, if these are put in the wrong context or different contexts, the mind reflects this biasing and distortion and qualitative changes. And we must then recognize that when we let another people write our history, and let another people furnish our information, we let another people interpret reality and define reality, we have been letting that other people determine to a good extent the character and the operational nature of our minds. That is why, of course, black history, African history, has been written the way it is written.
And I'm going to come back to that in a minute. I just want to look at another thing for a quick second. Some of you may get a chance to. Read the introduction to Michael Hutchinson's Megabrain, which is a very fascinating book.
And so, of course, those of you in psychology have run across some of that information before. There is, he talks about a series of experiments there that are classic in psychology. Those experiments, of course, was done with the old classical rat, but they are of some interest.
A psychologist back in the 1920s noticed that some rats were better at running mazes than other rats. And, of course, what he did then was to select what he saw as maize bright rats and maize dull rats, separated those rats, and had them reproduce so that he developed a genetic strain of smart rats and dull rats. You see, by continuing to reproduce, they then passed on the genetic characteristic.
of brightness, of dullness, as far as mazes were concerned. An interesting situation here, again, trying to control the breeding characteristics of rats. Of course, that's not too unfamiliar in our own history, the controlling of breeding characteristics.
A number of psychologists then wondered. If these rats, the bright rats and the dull rats, run the mazes differently, do they then have a different chemistry, brain chemistry? And I'm emphasizing this chemistry because often we think that words are just sounds. And I try to get across again and again that words are more than sounds.
Words are physical. Words cause physical changes in the brain. Each time you hear words, each time you perceive something, each time you experience something, chemical, electrical, and other changes.
take place in your brain. There are physical changes that occur in the brain itself. So these psychologists reason that if these rats are dull and if some of them are brown, right, then they must have a different brain chemistry. So they then looked at the brain chemistry of these two rats, these two sets of rats. And they noticed then that these rats had differing levels of a brain enzyme referred to as acetylcholinesterase.
We won't go into exactly what that is. It's an enzyme, though, that is the result of a certain... certain neuronal activities. An enzyme that controls the effects of various other chemicals on the neurons themselves. Each time we behave, each time we think, there is a transference from one nerve cell that makes up our brain of a chemical to another nerve cell.
And this chemical, when it impacts upon the receiving nerve cell and on the receiving nerve cell, receiving hundreds of thousands of nerve cells has an effect on the way we behave, have an effect on what we do, on how we think and how we feel. There are other chemicals that are necessary then to control these effects. So acetylcholinesterase is one of those chemicals then that turns on and off or that regulates then the effects of those chemicals that are passed between neurons and that are ultimately... responsible for learning and other forms of behavior.
These psychologists then found that rats with higher levels of acetylcholinesterase learned better than those with low levels. The maize bright rats had higher levels of acetylcholinesterase than maize dull rats, so that their very brain chemistry was different. Now, the psychologists then went on further to reason that if the brain chemistry between bright rats and dull rats is different, can we then manipulate the chemistry of these rats and the brain chemistry of these rats by manipulating the environment of these rats? So of course, many of you are familiar with this then, what these psychologists did were to place three groups of rats from the same genetic background. Let us say they took the maize bright rats, one set of rats who had the same genetic potential, put them in a cage, in three different environments, in a so-called standard laboratory environment, in a so-called impoverished environment, and in an enriched environment.
They then add to placing these animals in this environment remember now they have essentially the same genetic potential they're all maize bright rats after placing them in these different environments it was noted that the chemistry in the brains of these rats reflected the environment under which they existed in other words those rats which started out on an equal basis genetically who had been exposed to the enriched environment, where they had greater challenges, greater stimulative challenges, where they had a varied environment and so forth, had higher levels of acetylcholine esterase than the other rats that were raised in the standard environment and raised in the impoverished environment. In other words, the very chemical nature of the brain was regulated by the brain. by controlling the very environment and the very sensory input into the brains themselves.
The very nature of the inputs from the environment in which those rats live determines the chemical nature of their brains. I can't go into it in detail because of the time factor here, but I'll point out one other thing that these experiments showed very clearly, that not only did the chemical nature of the rat's brains reflect the... conditions under which they live, but the very physical nature of the brains reflected the environments under which they live. Their actual brain weight changed.
The actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain and the brain, the actual number of connections between the brain between neurons increased. The actual number of synapses, which are those parts of the cell that are interconnected and a part of the communication network with other cells, increased. Many other aspects of the brains were transformed physically and chemically as a result of the experience under which those rats had lived.
Under the influence of the nature of the information. that they had received and that had gone into their very minds. It was shown that the weight and chemistry of these rats could be changed when they were in old age.
That is, they took rats that were the equivalent of 75-year-olders and 90-year-old human beings, and these rats'brains were made to change chemically as well as physically. as a result of being exposed to varying information and varying environments. So they indicated then that the brain is eternally plastic and that its ability to operate and process information, to control behavior, to manipulate the environment, to control itself, is intimately related to the quality of information put into the brain itself.
I don't have time to read this piece, those of you. who want to look at last, this Tuesday's New York Times science section, and I urge that you read this section. If you don't read any other section, read the science section in the New York Times on Tuesdays.
On one of the pages there, they talk about test hint, drug may invigorate. On one of the pages there, they talk about test hint, drug may invigorate the older brain. And they talk about then a drug that was used to deal with stroke. has also been shown to reinvigorate the learning capacities of older adults.
And that adults who were treated for stroke with these drugs also rediscovered their memory and and learning and their past learnings, which indicates again then that to change the nature of the chemistry of the brain is to change the very nature of its intellectual capacities and ultimately of its intelligence. Now let us get back in the light of this. Then what I'm telling you in simple terms then, that the control and manipulation of the environment under which we live is a the people.
The control and manipulation of the school environment, the control and manipulation of information, the control and manipulation of definition, the control and manipulation of reality is a control and manipulation of our minds and a control and manipulation of our very physical brain and a control and manipulation of the very chemical. nature of this brain and ultimately a control of our minds as such. That is why we cannot let the European any longer control information and any longer control this world and any longer define the nature of the universe in which we exist. Let us look then at the writing of African history.
And I would urge you perhaps to check with African Echoes, and perhaps they can set up some kind of relationship. African Echoes located there in Newark. Last week I did... and address in terms of European history and its effects. And I talked about history in the psychological sense.
I talked about history in terms of social amnesia. and the fact that amnesia is seen as a pathological state in abnormal psychology, and how then being disconnected from one's history, being disconnected from one's culture, is to be put in a state of amnesia and therefore to be put in a state of pathology. We then look at the nature of that amnesia.
And I'll just quickly list a number of the effects and results of our not being in touch with our history. Because too many of us are made to think history is something that you learn about the past, and history is something... about dates.
I started that address off by indicating that the very fact that history in the United States is projected as something that is irrelevant, is projected as something that is not economically relevant, that it is a series of dates and events in and of itself is an attempt to manipulate our mental nature. This society does not project an image that does not work in its interest. Russell Jacobi in the book called Social Amnesia stated, exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged.
I tried to demonstrate in that address last week that simply because you forget your history, simply because you don't know your history, does not mean you have escaped its effects. As a matter of fact, it is more effective to the degree that you're ignorant of it. It is the absence of knowledge of history that permits history to more effectively control current behavior.
That the African youngster in school today is more effectively controlled by the slave experience of African people because that youngster does not know of that experience than otherwise. And therefore, keeping our children from a knowledge of that experience is only to subject them to deeper control by historical experience. of the people.
I try to then indicate that amnesia then, the social amnesia by the absence of knowledge of our history, by letting our history be manipulated by another people, means that our life is determined by fear. Fear, anxiety, terror, and trauma. When you run away from your history, you must run away from it for a reason. You must run away from it because you're ashamed of it.
You must run away from it because it creates anxiety in your mind. You must run away from it because it terrorizes and traumas you. because it makes you angry and therefore you repress the knowledge and refuse to know it. But the problem is then the terrors and the anxiety becomes the means by which one is manipulated. So the very absolute...
absence of the knowledge of history means that we are controlled by the fears of that knowledge and therefore the personality falls under the control then of fear and anxiety. And consequently we become pathological. Our behavior then becomes one that is determined by avoidance rather than by affirmation. So social amnesia then does not get us away from the effects of history.
It puts us under the negative effect and pathological effect of history. I indicated then that social amnesia means that the individual operates on the basis of denial. So we have bunches of African people operating and defining themselves and relating to other African people on the basis of denying who they are and denying their history. So life is lived negatively. Life is lived in terms of escape.
And that... Everything they are about is the escape of their history and of themselves. And you see, when you're made to fear yourself, when you're made to fear your history, when you're made to devalue your culture, when you're made to devalue...
your your your your experience then you come under the control of fear and terror and life becomes determined by a constant attempt at denial life becomes determined by constant attempt at escape. And one of the major reasons then our people are subjected to the use of drugs and subjected to the use of alcohol and narcotics is that those drugs and narcotics aid them in denying reality and denying and escaping their history and themselves. So a forgetting of history distorts one's perceptions of the universe and makes into self alienation and ultimately to self-destruction because whether you know your history or not it is a part of yourself and to repress that history is to separate you from yourself and you can only be alienated to the degree that your personality has been split in two it is only in the vacuum created by being split from history and culture that a new identity is interjected into the African mind and the African being becomes possessed by another identity. I have often stated then. One of the key steps in brainwashing and recreating a personality is to first separate that personality from the ground of his history, experience, and background.
It is no accident then that we were separated from our culture. We may look then at the slave camp not only as a camp that's used, that was designed to exploit our labor. but as a camp that was cheaply designed to reorient and reconstruct our personalities, African people.
To not only use us as servants, but to inculcate and interject into our very bodies and minds a servant's mentality. So that after the inculcation and interjection of that personality, we could then be emancipated and be given freedom. which means that we are only free to do the wrong thing.
We are given a freedom of choice because the mentality has been set up in such a way that we will always make the choice that works against our interests. And it's been designed and set up that way. But in order for that to occur, we must have first been separated. from our African identities. And an emptiness and a vacuum created so that we could suck in the new identity and that identity then could take control of our bodies.
We are possessed by demons. We are possessed by a demon interjected into us by demonic people. And as you saw, and as you saw in the movie, The Exorcist, and it's so amazing.
We sit in these movies. and are entertained and don't see the insults that these movies represent. And don't learn the lessons that these movies teach. The exorcist is a supreme lesson in interjection and demonology. The demon then gets into the body and literally uses that body and manipulates that body.
The demon only serves its creator. When you let then another people create... personality, when you let another people create reality, when you let another people separate you from your identity and yourself, when you let another people give you a name, when you let another people let you deal with the world in terms of the names they've given the world, they have introjected a spirit and a demon into the personality and that demon only responds to their call.
The very appetites of that demon, the very tastes of that demon, the very thing it desires are those things which abuse the body in which it is a host and are destroyed. the body. It hungers for unhealthy things. It hungers to take destructive things because it has no concern about the body it inhabits. Its purpose is to work against that body and to use that body in service of its masters and of its creators.
This interjection then of the spirit can only occur as a result of a separation from the identity, from our African identity and identity with ourselves. And so this is what social amnesia does. The rewriting of history then is set up as a means of separating us from ourselves so a new identity can be created. can be interjected.
So I want you to understand then that history is not just about knowledge and facts and information and about time and so forth. It is intimately tied up to who you are and what you are, how you see the world and experience yourself as a person. Social amnesia then means that the life is based on negation versus affirmation. Life is unintegrated and misunderstood.
When you don't know your history, then you don't know the source. of your motivations, you are a puzzle to yourself. You start asking yourself, why did I do that? Why do I behave the way I do? Or you hear some of us say, why do we act like we do?
One of the curious things about human nature is the very experiences that create our personality are the very experiences we don't remember. The personality essentially is formed by age two. two and a half.
How many of us can remember in detail the experiences we had from birth to two and a half? And yet it is those experiences during that time period that pretty much makes us who and what we are as a people. So then our absence of memory of that period does not mean that that period is not manipulating and controlling our behavior as a people.
It means then that the very way we behave. and the very basis for the way we behave is inaccessible to us, then we don't know why we behave as we do. When a people then rob you of your knowledge of history and culture, your own motivations and behavior then become a puzzle to yourself, and you cannot then engage in self-understanding or the understanding of the universe that's around you.
Motivation is puzzling and uncontrolled. When then we are separated from our... our history and yet that history is the basis of our motivations, then those motivations control us. Those motivations become habits and we then become weak in the face of those motivations and we find ourselves in creatures of habits rather than creatures of reason, rather than creatures of wisdom. When we are then put into social amnesia by having our history controlled, in forgetting our history we forget our history.
...get and misinterpret the history of others and their motivation. I indicated that you cannot deeply understand African history without deeply understanding the history and psychology of the European. It is through the understanding of yourself that you understand the psychology of your enemy.
From history we assume the wrong identity and we identify with our enemies. We are given identities by others. We lose a sense of shared identity and collective response.
I must run through this. We forget the debt that we owe. to the past and future generations. We then misinterpret our accomplishments as our own individual accomplishments. I often say to college students, don't you think that you're in these European colleges simply because you are so smart?
or you come from the right families, or you made the right SAT scores and all that other nonsense you're told. Africans have always been from the right families. They've always had the intelligence. They've always, but despite all of these things, they were not admitted into these schools. So you're not here as a result of your great intellectual skills.
We've always had that. You're here because a people put their... their lives on the line, made sacrifices and so forth to get you here. And you owe those people a debt. But without a knowledge of that history, and without a knowledge of that sacrifice, and with this bogus view that you're here because you're smart, you then do not repay that debt.
You become a ready servant for the other people. Not only though do you not pay the debt for the people who made the sacrifices, because you've forgotten that history. You forget the debt that you owe to those coming behind you.
You then don't become concerned about the school politics and other things. You just want to get your credits, get out and make a big buck. When then these schools decide that they want to put you out, it will be those same people you must call on to keep you in. Therefore, you cannot forget that history. We cannot plan for the future without a past.
I talked about this situation, and I wish I could talk about it today, of where people were hypnotized and their past was removed, and the behavior that occurred as a result of having their past removed. The psychologists then told them they had no future, and they had a different behavior. The psychologists then told them that they had no present, and a different behavior occurred.
What are we saying then, ladies and gentlemen? The manipulation of history has concrete. results on behavior, has concrete effects upon the world.
History, as I said earlier, is a grid. It is a set of coordinates by which an individual determines his place and position in the world and places himself in space and time. And therefore, a people who have forgotten history and a people who are not concerned with the future are a people who have lost their orientation. There are people who have a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of purposelessness, a people then who are manipulated by current fads and current fashions, not a people whose behavior is determined by purpose and by a sense of destiny.
That is the reason why history is rewritten, not only just to rob us of facts and information, but as a means of controlling the future. Intellectual structures and powers are undeveloped and restricted. Our talents are alienated. I showed in that lecture in the prior week how through the forgetting of our history, we actually have lost economic power. I showed how Africans on the continents, by recalling African tradition, were able to raise and are able to raise large sums of money to finance their businesses.
How they are able to get away from Eurocentric. I come to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there's no such thing as a black bank. That banks retard black economic progress.
Is it little wonder that Freedom National Bank, sitting on 125th Street, lets 17 Korean businesses inhabit that street, while black businesses cannot flourish there? What good is freedom and karma doing us sitting on that street if they cannot establish business? and economic development over there. It is because they are not ours.
They are institutions of foreign powers. It does not matter if they are black people in it. As long as they are regulated by the federal government and regulated by European tradition and history, they belong to Europeans and not to African people.
And therefore you put your money in them, and that money is used to finance your enemies, and to finance highways, and to finance factories, and to finance all kinds of warfare and other kinds of stuff going on in the world. And when you try to repair your house, or your landlord tries to repair your building, you're redlined, so the very money that you put into the bank are not even made available for your own use. We can do without them.
We have to have our own banks. Banks that are not regulated by the federal government. And we can do it looking at African tradition.
I showed where there were Africans in the Cameroons who were able to lend each other as much as a million dollars a month by the knowledge of African tradition and African psychology. The African American, because he is amnestic about African tradition, even though he's the ninth richest nation on earth, cannot use his wealth to create his own economic system. Don't tell me then that history is irrelevant to economic development. It is all a part and partial of economic development. Why do you think the people rob you of it if it doesn't work to their economic advantage?
So we must look again then at amnesia. Amnesia means then an undiscovered self, an emptiness, a self incapable of self-understanding, a self that is incapable of understanding its own motivations, a self incapable of self-direction and self-determination, a reactionary self, a self that does not understand others or the world in which it exists, a federalistic externalized self. Let's then wrap it up. I just want to show again, we're still talking about the theme of how one controls the mind, by controlling input, by controlling the development of its potential characteristics such as reasoning and thinking and so forth, by controlling its outputs. Our children are destroyed, for instance, by the fact that when they make a brilliant answer, they are met with a stony silence.
They are not rewarded. The mind looks at that situation and says, well, when I make a brilliant statement, the teacher seems unhappy. The teacher seems uninterested. The teacher seems annoyed. Then I had better what?
Stop making them. The mind then reflects back on itself and begins to make itself dumb, begins to turn itself off, begins to restrict its behavioral possibilities and retards its own development. The individual then becomes functionally retarded in the sense that there is nothing organically wrong with the brain, but the person is behaving as if the brain has been damaged.
When you let another people then be in control of the... reinforcements, be in control of the A's and the B's and the C's, be in control of the scholarships, be in control of the various rewards, then those people then control the expressions of your children, and those expressions are fed back to your children's mind, and the children literally then recreate themselves in the image of those who control the reinforcements. And so we see the European on both sides of this mind. On the front end controlling its input, and on the back end controlling the effects of its output. And then squeezing the mind in between, destroying the mind.
it and restricting it and ultimately bringing that mind under control when it does not utterly destroy it and kill it and make it dead. Then in summary, the struggle for control of the African mind and personality should be obvious from what I have said. If we as African people are going to get control then of the African mind and personality, it means that that we must get control of the input to our own minds. We must get control of how the mind's potential is developed.
And we must get control of the effect. of the output of the mind, of the African mind. It means then that we must engage in self-creation as a people. When you can control what goes on in the world, in your mind, when you can control the nature of development of the characteristics of your mind, when you can control the effects of your mind's output in the world, then you're engaged in self-creation. I've often said then that we as so-called African people today, or as Negro people in a better sense today, are a created people, a Frankenstein.
people. A people put together by the program and intentions of another people. And it is as the result of another people having control over input, development, and the effects of output. We see it in the skin of a rat, where that rat is put into a situation and its whole personality and capacities are controlled by having its situation controlled. What does that mean then ultimately, ladies and gentlemen?
It means that we even move beyond a knowledge of history. We move even beyond a sense of pride. And that's wonderful. And those things are wonderful.
We must ultimately go for the real goal. And that goal is power. That goal is real, concrete, solid power.
The capacity to control. If, as I said earlier, the mind can be biased and distorted by the very physical. physical environment in which one lives, then it means if we are to gain control as African people, we must control then what?
The very physical environment under which we live as a people. If it can be controlled by the very nature of the information fed into the African mind, then if Africans are to gain control of their own mind, they must gain control of what? The information that's fed into that mind.
If it is controlled by the evaluation of that information by the very context of that information, then if we are to get control of ourselves, we must control then the evaluation and the context of that information. It means ultimately that we must control these schools in the profound sense of the word. I have said often the education of the African child is education in search of an African rationale and in search of an African theory of education. One of the major reasons why I have been we are caught in the confusion that we are caught in today about the education of black children is because we do not have an African theory of education.
That African theory of education must come out of the organic ground of African experience. When you see then what your children have been robbed of, what kind of personalities must be missing in order for the society to be controlled the way it is controlled. role, when you see that it is necessary that thinking skills must be robbed from black children, when you see that it is necessary that the ability to identify themselves as African must be robbed from African children, when you see that it is necessary that these children do not like themselves and reject their history, when you see that it is necessary that they have problems loving their opposite member, when you see that it is necessary that they have problems in conceptual thinking and abstract thinking and so forth, you will then recognize what the curriculum of the education of your children must be.
When you see then how these characteristics are robbed of the personality and how it is accomplished, then there's an implicit educational program in that, not looking at the way other people educate their children, not looking at the way they do it somewhere else. The education of children must come out of the ground and experience of African people. So don't tell me history is a set of events and dates and so forth.
History is your very life. It is through the understanding of history that an educational theory is developed. Then you know exactly how long you want to teach.
You know exactly what you want to teach. You know exactly where you want to go. You know you want to get rid of these standardized tests. You know you want to get rid of these reading exams.
Who told you that I say, that your children must know the same thing at the same time at the same point that the other children know it. To take these standardized tests and so-called achievement tests is a way of letting the other group determine the nature and content of the education. education of your children.
You cannot say then that you've been through a slave experience, a Jim Crow experience, a scandalizing experience of your history and of your personality, and then assume that you can just throw your children in a Euro-centrically designed system and they are just going to come and learn the same thing at the same time that the other children learn. When are you going to then inculcate within your educational system a therapeutic and other kind of model that gets them over this kind of destruction? of their mind and concept of themselves so that then they can move forward in the development of their academic and intellectual skills.
So it means that what we do with our children in the first two, three, or four, or five years of their life cannot be what the... the European is doing to his child in those first years of his life. Get rid of standard education.
Get rid of the concept of equal education. It is not about that. So ultimately then the strategy for the regaining of the control of the African mind means the recapturing of the African identity. You are African. You are African.
You are African. You cannot escape it. You can hide behind abstractions and all other kind of games, but you cannot escape it. That's at the very center of your intellect. Culture is not just the way people behave, not just the way people dress, not just the way people eat, not just the way people dance, not just the way people make music, not just a...
superficial history of a people, culture ultimately is an intellectual tool. It is an intellectual structure. When a culture is passed on from the mother to the child and from the parent to the child, an intellectual structure is passed on to that child because the culture determines how the world is to be perceived the culture determines how the world is to be organized the culture determines how the world is to be processed the culture determines how the world is to be attacked the culture determines how the world is to be evaluated how it is to be weighed and measured so therefore when you pass on a culture you are passing on an intellectual frame of reference that can be used to compare, to contrast, to see causes and effects, to see relations, to plan, to organize and so forth. And therefore when you rob your children of your identity, when you rob them of their history, and rob them of their culture, you rob them of their minds. And that is why we have it written the way we have it today.
So ultimately if you want to get back in your mind... and recapture control of your mind and recapture control of your destiny and recapture the control of your lands and the economics and so forth you must first recapture your African identity thank you very much