There's a kind of a fundamental basis for post-traumatic slave syndrome. How many of you are familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder? Okay. So these are things, I mean most of you are people who are in the field that have done the work, you're here representing the people who are really in the trenches, and I appreciate and respect that.
The theory very often, when people hear it, post-traumatic slave syndrome, I try to think of it as a way to say, I'm not going to do this. try to kind of get at kind of what's going on in the room. There's ambivalence, there's feelings of, you know, well, come on now, what are we saying now about the slavery thing? It's over.
You know, it's get over it. We're done. We have that kind of feeling.
And how possibly is she drawing a connection between something that happened so long ago and contemporary society? You know, come on, are you trying to find an excuse? Are you trying to blame people? You know, these are the natural kind of knee jerk reactions to hearing the term post-traumatic slave syndrome. However, I would I would submit to you that, you know, it's based on research.
So I did about six years of. of research specifically looking at violence. My area of focus is violence.
And I'll cover that in my PowerPoint. Also, some of you may not be able to see points of the PowerPoint, but we're going to make it available to you. So you don't have to worry about it. There's a website where you'll be able to download.
in my PowerPoint. Isn't that correct? Did I say that right?
OK, so that part you don't have to worry about. But I kind of want to set the ground so that we can all advance and move forward together. Now, the reason I do that and the reason why I began that way is because there's an assumption, a fundamental assumption, in a room this size with people very well educated, people very well exposed, that we're all entering this discussion at the same level. And we are not. I can guarantee you we are not.
We all have our ideas and our beliefs, and then we all have our experience. For example, the people of color that are in the room, all the people of color that are in this room are arriving in this room at a different level because they have lived in this skin. And we're rarely given any kind of appreciation or understanding of what you have to live with walking through the world with this skin.
So it... you kind of come in at a different level of awareness about the discussion. And then you have folks that come into this discussion that are educated around it, that are clear about it, but can't really empathize their way through it. In other words, it's not a feeling thing, it's a cerebral thing.
So some people stay intellectual because that's a level of comfort. Nothing wrong with that. But very different from the person who lives in the skin, it is personal and it is emotional. Okay, so all of that's going on.
in this room even before we get started. But as people commit it, you know, it may get a bit uncomfortable. But that's okay, because it's been uncomfortable living in this skin.
It's been uncomfortable. And we have to learn how to deal with that discomfort and stay in the room. So, when we look at the fundamental premise of trauma, and we understand the nature of trauma, we know that there have been... other groups that we've looked at the etiology of their contemporary behavior based on multi-generational trauma. One group, Jewish Holocaust, families of Jewish Holocaust, and the fact that the Jewish community is very, very clear about honoring that Holocaust.
So much so that Spielberg will probably make another movie. And I'm not mad at him. Because what he's doing is ensuring that the generations that come will never forget the Holocaust and its impact upon Jewish people.
You'll look at folks throughout the world, even aboriginal folks in the United States, where more focus is being done on what colonialism has done. We've looked at Japanese internment. We've looked at Australian aboriginal folks. We've looked at multi-generational impact of trauma.
On people who have had tragedies like the tsunami victims, we'll look at everybody, but when it comes to looking at Africans, there's a visceral response. Oh, come on, let's not. Why are you? And it's a curious thing as a social scientist to me that you get so much pushback when you talk about Africa. And we look at the legacy of slavery.
You get so much pushback, but more importantly, it's why do you get the pushback? See, as a social scientist, I'm less concerned with the material, which I'm clear about. I'm more interested in why the behavior.
Why is there such reticence at looking at this issue? And the answer is, when you peel back the layers of this, we peel back everybody's layers. Everyone gets naked in this room, and that's not always comfortable.
It's also very comfortable to talk about the other's pathology. And the reason why I think that becomes important... is so that when we begin to engage in this discussion, we don't find ourselves falling victim to the fear, guilt, all of that stuff that's not useful to anyone. It's not useful.
This means we're going to peel the layers back. And while 246 years, as it were, in American history of American chattel slavery, starting with 1619 to the ratification of the 13th Amendment in the United States, we're looking at 246 years of... American chattel slavery. And it's very comfortable, and I think to some degree people can say, you can't have 246 years of trauma and expect that nothing happened, especially when that trauma was followed by more trauma, especially given the fact that there was never a point of healing. Not difficult to do the math here.
This is not deep and philosophical. It really makes sense. But you know what else is true? You can't have 246 years.
of folks engaged in a traumatic experience that were white that went unaffected. That means everybody has been affected and infected by this thing. So that's the part that gets uncomfortable, because it's usually okay to look at the other. We're going to look at everybody.
This is going to be one where we really show the elephant in the room, and only for the purposes of recognizing that unless we do so, none of us can heal. This is not a process that any of us can do individually by ourselves. This is a collective process.
And so therefore, we're all going to be engaged. And it's not just a pointing of fingers at anyone. It's recognizing that you and I, all of us, have been impacted by historical multi-generational trauma.
Now, let's look at it very specifically. When we look at trauma in its very, you know, clinical sense, you know, my background, clinical psychology, understanding what trauma is. People can experience a single trauma, one trauma, indirectly, meaning that they didn't have to be present for the direct trauma.
Meaning, say, for example, you all heard about 9-11 and taking down the buildings in New York, right? Yes? 9-11.
Everybody in the world got told about that. Matter of fact, I think everybody in America got diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of that. But I would submit to you we were traumatized long before that. But there were individuals that were at ground zero, and I know them.
My niece was in one of the buildings. So she decided, while she was in one of the buildings, they kept telling her, just stay where you are. They kept saying, stay where you are. We think people should stay where they are.
She said, and everything in her mind said, get out. So she got out. Matter of fact, she leapt over the security guard to get out of the building. And it's a good thing she did.
But during that time, there were people at Ground Zero, for example, like my niece. And there were people who watched it on television. And then there were people in other countries who heard about it. So there are varying levels of understanding around this trauma that happened in the United States.
There were people at Ground Zero, were there, had saw folks falling out the sky, got videotaped footage of it. Watch it on television, invite the folks over and drink beer. Not traumatized. No trauma. There were people in, maybe in another country, in Brazil, saw it on television, in psychotherapy right now.
Can't get on planes, on medication, and people talk softly to them twice a week. So the variance in terms of those who are traumatized by a traumatic event. And those who are not, we're unique as individuals. Everybody's not traumatized by a traumatic event, whether it's direct or not. But when we start talking about chattel slavery, we're not talking about one trauma.
We're not talking about a specific event. We're talking about generations of trauma with no intervention. Based on what I know about sugar plantations, tobacco, the Caribbean, what I know about American chattel slavery and the plantations there, does anyone right now ever recall mental health assistance?
to slaves. Anybody remember sending in the therapist after I sold off your son, daughter, raped folks? At any point? Never. Second question.
After slavery was officially over, now you're free. Anybody remember any therapy then? We know it's been rough, it's been deep for you, it's been difficult, we're going to do a little group therapy. Anybody remember that? That would be no.
Number three, after slavery officially ended, both in the States, in the Caribbean, the British ended, do you remember whether or not trauma continued? Did the trauma continue for people of African descent? I need to know. Okay, so now let's do the math. Hundreds of years of trauma, no treatment.
Freed. More trauma, no treatment. What do you do to math? Do you think there may be residual impacts of that trauma? Of course there is.
It didn't end, friends, and it hasn't ended yet. So I think, one, on one point, African people and people of African descent are extremely resilient. Matter of fact, I think we're a miracle. Far be it for us to pathologize or to... look and cast this idea of weak and sick people.
Oh, on the contrary, I'm profoundly resilient because we've done everything we've done thus far with no help, with not even the ability to have this discussion. As though it were possible, we escaped injury in all those hundreds of years and the years that followed. So this kind of journey I'm going to take you on is going to be one that really gives a perspective. on what this trauma was, what it looks like, and clinically, what is post-traumatic stress disorder?
What does it look like? Let me give you a little snapshot. We'll get into it in more depth a little later, but post-traumatic stress disorder, if in fact you are diagnosed with that, again, remember, direct or indirect trauma, here are some of the symptoms.
A feeling of foreshortened future. Now, what does that mean? A feeling?
Well, you're not going to live long. How many of you are running into young people that don't believe they're going to make it past their 20s? Feeling of foreshortened future, exaggerated startle response, outbursts of anger, difficulty falling or staying asleep, hypervigilance, right? These are symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
This is like DSM stuff, Diagnostic Statistical Manual Mental Disorders. It's in there. And there's a whole listing of all these symptoms.
Now, I want to roll it back so you can understand what the transmission theory is, because I'm going to talk about transmission. So how does a person that's been traumatized by post-traumatic stress disorder, literally has a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, and can we, if we are logical and we are reasonable people, assume that a fair number of Africans had to have had post-traumatic stress disorder? You think?
I'm not talking about us, I'm talking about them. Untreated, though, right? Okay, so now let's do the math. Mom who saw dad sold or sister raped has post-traumatic stress disorder. Still mom though, right?
Only mom now has outbursts of anger, feeling of foreshortened future, difficulty falling or staying asleep, hypervigilance. That would be mom. Now, Johnny or Mary or Shakwesha does not have, did not have the original trauma.
But what are they learning? This is called social learning theory. What am I normalizing? Exaggerated startle response.
Outbursts of anger. Are you following me? So I didn't have to be traumatized.
Now the other thing is, do you think Johnny and Mary got traumatized too? Do you see, so what happens in your environment, you learn from the significant others in your environment. And if they're broken, guess what you're going to be? You're learning from broken people. And you're normalizing that behavior.
And then it becomes, years later, 2008, that's their culture. That's just the way they are. That's their culture. So there's poison in the cookies, right? But how are you going to tease out that poison?
That means you have to look at the etiology of the behavior, which is what I spent many years doing. And it's not rocket science. This is not deep.
Like I said, this is not required that someone has... It's just common sense. How many of you in the room think you can cook? Come on now, I know it's a strange place.
You all have the oddest food in the world. I'm trying to tell you that now. Those of you that know how to cook, who taught you how to cook? Mom, dad, family. Who do you think taught them?
Hello, social learning theory. You learn from those in your environment. And if they couldn't cook, yeah, likelihood is you can't either. So there's things that we, and we don't question them. This is what goes in the curry.
What are you talking about? This is how you make curry. Well, how you know? Because that's the way my mother made it.
Well, maybe, you know, she didn't get the recipe right. Actually, I wrote Post-Math Slave Syndrome, the book, which is here, the book. It's called Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome, America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing.
I recently have written a study guide, which is being edited now. But the reason why I wrote the book is really to put a name to what I was looking at. I started to look at behaviors in African people and people of African descent. A long time, people ask me all the time.
I just was interviewed by ABC, and they wanted to know, where did this come from? It came from growing up black. No, there's nothing deep there.
I grew up looking at black folks and wondering why we behaved the way we did. Very little had to do with white people. Very little. I was looking at black people and I wanted to understand our behavior. I am 50 years old and I remember looking at people who were, you know, growing up in South Central Los Angeles.
That's where I grew up. My parents are from the South, from Louisiana and from Belize. And one of the things that I started to notice are certain behaviors that...
black people engaged in that I started realizing not just African Americans, African Caribbean people, I came here, heard the same thing, behaviors around what we look like. Like, for example, I would hear people, and you all, most people here, white or black or wherever you are in the spectrum, you've seen the behavior and wondered about it. I know you have because I wondered about it.
Well, you have black people that aren't black. How many people have met black people that actually aren't black? Now this is an interesting phenomena.
These are black people that will tell you before, you know, first of all, they certainly look black to me. They look black. But they don't say they're black.
Well, you know, I've got quite a bit of Indian in me. Did I mention that a lot of my family are from? You know, all of a sudden, there's something else, right? And you're looking going, sure, could have fooled me.
You look black to me. Now this would be something that I could ignore. if it stopped when I was a child in South Central, but it didn't.
You can hear it in rap music today. Same behavior. Matter of fact, the rap videos, they just need to clone the same girl, right?
I can draw her right now, what she looks like. The little wavy hair, and, you know, she's black, but not too black, okay? And what is that about? What is its ideology and why does it persist?
That means that it's an intracultural phenomenon that's being passed along through generations. But why? What is this self-loathing that I see in contemporary black folks?
I'm not going back to slavery. I'm talking about today, who hate and despise the reflection in the mirror. That's what I wanted to know.
So that's what led me on my journey, if you will. Again, not an unusual journey. In our course, I'm going to kind of pop back and forth through British history and American history.
James Madison was a very important figure in American history, President of the United States. 1751 to 1836. He said, blacks are inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants, which regards the slave as divestment of two-fifths of the man. This is called the three-fifths compromise. And what they were trying to figure out is, what are we going to do? How are we going to count these black folks?
Because, you know, based on how many people you have residing in a particular state, the more representatives you can send to the House of Representatives, and thus the more power that particular state can wield. So the question was, how do you count the slaves? Well, Southerners, who of course enjoyed slavery, they wanted to count them.
They said, yeah, count them, that gives us more power. Where the Northerners saw it as an opportunity to abolish slavery, said, well, you can't count them because you don't consider them human. How can you count people who have... absolutely no freedom that you do not count or be treat as human beings. So the agreed upon solution is to count three-fifths of a state's total slave population.
And so as a result, they became three-fifths of a man, divested of that. But it's almost as though you're not talking about a human being anymore. And that's what's scary about this.
And I always start my talks by saying that when you see folks dressed up like this, and I know you all see a lot of them, you should get worried. I always get concerned when I see them dressed up like that, like this guy here. This next guy was someone that I struggled with.
You all know him, Richard Oswald. He's the son of a Presbyterian minister, international trader of enslaved Africans. What's so deep about this gentleman is how wealthy he became as a result.
He would be worth, based on the 1700s, right now he would be worth 68 million, based on the number of slaves, the slave trade and colonies, ships, all the stuff that he basically utilized. But again... These folks are held in high regard. When I read about him in your history, one would, you would never know, Google him, you'd never know the ugly trade that he was engaged in because we've sanitized it, you see.
It all got kind of sanitized. But what's important is to understand the wealth amassed. And see, this is where people get afraid, particularly Europeans.
This is where the whole, oh my God, dare I say the big ugly word. Most folks are afraid of it because we don't really care too much about the healing, the healing stuff. Go on and get better, you people, but don't try to touch the resources.
That would be reparations. We don't want to have that conversation. We're okay if you all go heal, however you're going to do that, but let's not talk about the reparation story, but when you start looking at the wealth amassed, then you've got to look at the Church of England. It gets real ugly because then you start realizing what is a foundation for the Church of England, folks that bless the slave ships.
And then, of course, and this is interesting about John Newton because we all know about in every the first thing you hear John Newton, what's the next thing you hear? Amazing Grace. John Newton, Amazing Grace. Well, let's figure out what happened before he got Amazing Grace.
He said slaves are lesser creatures without Christian souls and thus are not destined for the next world. Now what becomes important about this kind, and you'll see it both in American history as well, there is this kind of dehumanization of African people. Because you've got to ask yourself this question, how do people who deem themselves superior, who see themselves as the civilizers, who recognize themselves as the what we call manifest destiny, the white man's burden of civilizing all the rest of the races. How do you reconcile being the superior being and engaging in barbaric behavior?
What that produces is something called cognitive dissonance. How many people are familiar with that? Cognitive dissonance is really thinking discord.
It's when you begin to feel cook. conflict between what you believe or understand or hold to be true, and you are then faced with behaviors, either in yourself or others, that conflict with your fundamental belief. It produces cognitive dissonance.
Human beings don't function well with cognitive dissonance. You must remove the cognitive dissonance in order to function. So in order for people to perpetuate slavery and to perpetuate that whole system that lasts for centuries, You had to remove all dissonance associated with it. Can't be anything wrong with me.
Certainly isn't us. We're the civilizers. We're the superiors. So it must be them.
Oh, yes. Well, you see, they don't even have souls. Now I can go to sleep because I'm not really dealing with a human being. Are you following me?
Okay, let's see what else he said. He said, when the women and girls are taken on board a ship naked, trembling, terrified, they are often exposed to the wanton rudeness of white savages. The prey is divided upon the spot.
Look at the choice of words, the prey. Resistance or refusal would be utterly in vain. And then he says, I sinned with a high hand.
Yeah, and then he wrote Amazing Grace. So it's really important to understand that hand in hand with the behavior was a mindset that is so damaging. You see, I call it the secret, not the secret that everybody's been talking about, that secret.
The secret is the kind that makes you sick. How many people here are in mental health, do specific, have done direct mental health treatment with folks? You know that the secrets make us sick, yes? Isn't it the secrets that cause people the pathology?
Right? How long have white people had to hold this secret? How long and how many generations had to stop and pretend Grandpa didn't do what he did? That the wealth we enjoy was not on the backs of some of these little girls?
Think about how long one had to keep that secret. And the only thing you could do is either pathologize the other, it's all their fault because it certainly wasn't great granddad. Look how well he dresses. Do you understand what I'm saying? So when I say that this pathology goes hand in hand, I kid you not.
Then you have science. And whenever we are in a process of trying to legitimize things, it's so amazing. You know, people always say this to me, even black people, when they hear about post-traumatic.
Because you know it's not correct unless you can count it and measure it, right? Science is the final. It is the number one.
If you can say it's scientific, then you basically trump everything else, right? Science determines reality. So if we can scientifically assert a thing to be true, then in fact it is true.
Because it's scientifically proven. It's a scientific fact. Matter of fact, that's what people will tell you when you try to say to them, I don't know if I agree with you.
You know it's scientific. It's a scientific fact what I'm saying here. Right?
Which somehow makes it what? True! And it's also in a book. Now let's do the math. It's in a book and it's scientifically proven.
Did anybody here realize that recently we lost a planet? Anybody know what planet we lost? How you lose a planet? You know, I was, I became fond of the little picture with the, we lost a planet. We didn't lose a planet.
You know what it means? Science was. Wrong! Now have they ever said, you know, we were wrong about that planet thing? No.
It's called a paradigm shift. So let's go to science, and I think it's important that we do. So we then again, we go to someone named Carl von Linnaeus.
Now Carl von Linnaeus becomes an important character in this whole conspiracy of silence and legitimacy and removing the dissonance. Carl Vile Linnaeus developed a system based on a criterion of skin color and laid the basis for 19th century racial classification. Linnaeus properly began the science of anthropology. So here we have the father of anthropology.
Although color classification of races dated back to the ancient Egyptians, anthropologists refer to Linnaeus'Systema Natura of 1735 as the first modern study of man. While Linnaeus advanced classification with this use of a color criterion, he also fixed on his four families of man certain moral and intellectual peculiarities that continued into the 19th century anthropological vocabulary. He described homo americanus.
Who might that be? That would be Native American, American Indians. Homo americanus.
And what did he say about them? He said they were reddish, choleric, obstinate, contented, and regulated by custom. Homo Europaeus, as white, fickle, sanguine, blue-eyed, gentle, and governed by laws.
Homo Asiaticus, that'd be Asians, as sallow, gray, dignified, avaricious, and ruled by opinions. And Homo Afar, as black, Phlegmatic, cunning, lazy, lustful, careless, and governed by caprice. These insights into what Linnaeus defined as racial character, personality traits, behavior, intelligence, language, and a host of other related categories were transmitted into subsequent attempts at a science of classification and became more fixed than the races themselves.
Not a shred of science here. But it is in a book, and it's touted as science. And what's more important, you know my students, I teach graduate students in social work, and they'll say, but Dr. Leary, my God, we're looking at 1707 to 1778. We are, right? After all. But do you not hear these same attributions today?
You know those blacks, they're lazy, you know. All of the exact same, am I telling the truth? In your newspapers, in your accounts of them, do you not hear these very same things?
So does it matter that it started in 1707 and 1778 and has no scientific merit? That's multi-generational, is it not? It's being passed along, part of the swallowing into the social gullet.
Those are the beliefs, you see. So it doesn't matter whether it's true or not. And thank you, Carl Von Linnaeus. Again, he's removing the cognitive what? Don't they deserve to be treated the way we treat them?
Have we not just justified what we've done? After all, I just told you this is who they are. We're not wrong. We're just trying to keep the domestic tranquility. Makes sense.
I'm having a clicker thing. There we go. Johan Friedrich Blumenbach.
Just look at him. He's not right. We can tell already.
But he had to contribute his part as well. He says, now this man, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, he was an individual. How many of you are familiar with the term Caucasian? Oh, yes. Then you know Johann.
He designated five races or varieties of man in the second edition of his work on the... natural variety of mankind. His division into Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Ethiopian, and Malayan races, with the added Carl von Linnaeus descriptive peculiarities, became the subsequent basis of most 19th century anthropomedical studies.
While Carl von Linnaeus founded his system principally upon skin color, Blumenbach considered a combination of color, hair, skull, and facial characteristics as fundamental means for classifying The five varieties of man central to his study was the Caucasian, a term which he originated. He took the name Caucasian, listen for the science, from Mount Caucasus because its southern slope had cradled what he felt to be the most beautiful race of men, the Georgian. The Caucasus near Mount Ararat, upon which the biblical ark came to rest after the flood, seemed the appropriate source. for the original race of man. No science yet.
Now I'm going to quote him. These are his words. For in the first place, the stock displays, as we have seen, the most beautiful form of the skull, from which is a mean and primeval type. The others diverge by most easy gradations on both sides to ultimate extremes.
That is, on the one side, the Mongolian, on the other, the Ethiopian. Besides, it is white in color. Anybody here ever met a skull that wasn't?
Besides, it is white in color, which we may fairly assume to have been the primitive color of mankind. Zippity-doo-dah, no science, nothing to found this whole thing. He figured white skull, humanity began white. It's scary, but it's in a book, and it's touted as science. And we swallowed it without question.
But race is a concept of society that insists there is genetic significance behind human variations in skin color that transcends outward appearance. However, race has no, thank you, has no scientific merit outside of sociological classifications. There are no significant genetic variations within the human species to justify the division of races.
Mankind is one. We are one humanity. Isn't it a shame that we are still debating that in 2008? But the reason why we continue to debate it is we still try to reconcile the ugly stuff that we've never dealt with.
We still want to say they deserved it, so no one has to feel bad about all of those little babies dying and ignoring the ravages of Africa and killing young black males. Urban cities, all the, and disproportionate imprisonment, disproportionate disparities in health. Oh, it must be their fault.
How do you reconcile it? Rather than deal with it, we just continue to try to justify the behavior. Thomas Jefferson, you all know him?
Yes, he's one of my favorite people, actually. I close out my book with a soliloquy from Thomas Jefferson. I actually end my book with it.
Because Thomas Jefferson made a statement, here's a man highly regarded in the United States. I mean, there are more statues of him than probably anybody. And he made a statement towards the end of his life. He says, indeed, I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever. You see, it haunted him to his grave because Thomas Jefferson knew.
He knew what would happen. Matter of fact, he predicted exactly what we're dealing with today, what happened between people of African descent and those of European descent. predicted it.
He was a bright man. How do you reconcile behaving in such a barbaric way? Well, let's see what he said.
He said blacks smelled bad and were physically unattractive. Well, this was inconsistent with his behavior because, you know, he fathered slaves, Sally Hemings. So it didn't smell that bad, huh? Now here's a more important one.
He said we required less sleep. Now that one's more interesting to me. Why would he need to, what dissonance was he feeling that he would need to believe that blacks required less sleep? Why? What did he do?
You know he owned slaves. So what do you think, how hard do you think he worked them? What was the work day for a slave?
Sunrise to sunset. But do you have any empirical evidence, Joy? Can you prove that? Because you know, if you can't write, you know, count it and measure it, it didn't happen in European culture, is that correct?
Gotta count and measure it. How many of you have measurable objectives? Measurable outcomes, you better measure it. I don't care if you tell them.
Can you tell your boss, really, truly, at the end of the year, we're doing better now? I've been to work every single day I've watched, and I can guarantee you we're doing better. Is that gonna fly? That would be no. That means you have to count it and measure it.
And if you didn't count it and measure it, it didn't happen. So when you start looking at the notion of requiring less sleep, that's an interesting thing because I have to believe if I work you that hard. And boy, I got humbled when I found out how hard folks worked in the sugar plantations.
Ooh-wee, I got humbled by how hard folks in the Caribbean were worked. But what I decided to do... As I looked at the Library of Congress, most of my work over the nine years that it took to write the book, six years of that was research. The other part of it had to do with doing interviews of elders and reading slave narratives, and there are thousands of them.
This is just one taken from the Library of Congress. Sarah Gudger from North Carolina wrote, Never know nothing but work, never knew rest, felt like my back was going to break. This is the gospel truth. Then I looked at...
what happened in the sugar plantations. And this was amazing. One final set of grim numbers underlines the way slaves on sugar plantations like Codrington, it was a plantation in Barbados, were systematically worked to an early death. When slavery ended in the United States, slaves imported over the centuries had grown to a population of nearly 4 million. When it ended in the British West Indies, total slave imports of well over 2 million left a surviving slave population of only about 670,000.
More than twice as many slaves were shipped to the island of Jamaica alone than all 13 North American colonies combined. The Caribbean was a slaughterhouse. In fact, the reason why there was more importation of slaves to these plantations is because they died so frequently.
They were treated so badly, ate so poorly, that females never reached their menstrual cycles. They never actually started their menstrual cycles, so they couldn't reproduce, you see. And so many of them died, they had to import more. That's how treacherous it was, you lazy black folks that you are.
Isn't that ironic, though? What's so ironic is black people run from the shame of feeling like they're perceived as lazy. I mean, I live with that so much that when I would go to hotels, I would leave it cleaner, because your mother, everybody's mother taught you, leave it cleaner than you found it.
So black folks are so hypersensitive, I was cleaning up the hotel room, because I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm dirty, right? Now, other people in the audience that are of color, how much harder did your parents tell you you had to work to get to even? How much harder? You had to work twice as hard. Now, how come I knew that about you?
How come I knew that? Think about it. And yet, at the same time, white people think we're...
Lazy, you see? But we're so hypersensitive because of the shame. Right? And then our ancestors will work to death, to death. Recently, they unearthed a slave cemetery.
They unearthed, actually, a slave cemetery in New York City. It's on Wall Street, by the way, in the shadow of the bull. Unearthed a slave cemetery, and they still, to this day, they're struggling. They recently, you know, have done a lot in terms of commemoration. I went to the, it took me everything to get to it.
They had it blocked off so you couldn't get to it. But they, because they didn't want to deal with it. You know, you can't just bulldoze a cemetery.
So here in all these skyscrapers in the middle of it is this little cemetery. And there are slaves in that cemetery. More important than that was what the bones told us. Because, you know, now, you know, you got CSI.
Hell, I can go in there and tell you what's going on now. You know, so. With the CSI thing, now they've discovered a little bit about the bones.
And to me, the most phenomenal thing about the bones is what they told us about those people and how they lived. The majority of the people in there were children, infants and children, high mortality, infant mortality rate. They even know what they died of.
Died of malnutrition and starvation, because they could tell by the rotting of the teeth and the jawline. So even though they most likely grew food, they weren't allowed to eat it. And then they found something even more peculiar that speaks to this idea of why he believed we required less sleep.
They would show a large frame man and they would find an injury where the muscle actually detached itself from the bone as a result of exertion and not injury. Stay with me. It detaches itself from the bone as a result of exertion. That means you work so hard the muscle detached itself from the bone.
You don't see those kind of injuries in contemporary society because no one's going to work that hard. Unless, of course, you have a gun trained on you from sunrise to sunset. So we do have empirical evidence of how hard folks work. Then he went on to say that we were dumb, cowardly, and incapable of feeling grief.
Why would Thomas Jefferson need to believe that? Why would he need to believe we didn't feel grief? What was he doing, do you think, that produced cognitive dissonance?
You were killing people? Not only were you killing people, beating them, you were selling them, yes? Selling mothers away from their children and husbands away from wives. And surely they don't feel it, because if they felt it, that would make them human like me. So I simply say, and you see it's not so much, it's not even so much that he said it, but he was an important person.
If Joe, nobody said it, but he said it. So what do you think the rest of the folks, uneducated laborers, believed? Well, they don't feel grief, you know.
After all, Thomas Jefferson says they don't. So he becomes a critical person in making those statements. But you see, it was all to relieve and to settle the conscience that he died with.
But these become very important as you see how these things move forward. Then there was J. Marion Sims. I won't spend a lot of time with him. He's another figure.
You can Google him. There's a statue, actually, of him in Central Park. And J. Marion Sims was an individual credited.
He was a father of modern gynecology. How many women in here know what a vaginal speculum is? And for those men in the room that we lost...
Vaginal speculum is a device designed to open up the vagina. It was considered one of the most important advancements in medicine that was made. He was credited as being the wealthiest man to have, wealthiest physician to have ever lived. And what's interesting about him, you know, look at the medals pinned on him. I was just very curious about how it was.
They regarded this man because no one ever really looked at how did he come up with that vaginal speculum. The way he did it was he actually worked on unanesthetized, did experiments on unanesthetized slave women. He created a makeshift hospital in his backyard in the mid-1800s.
He built the first vaginal speculum from a pewter spoon. And he reasoned that slave women were able to bear great pain, meaning we don't need any... anesthesia, because their race made them more durable and thus they were well suited for painful medical experimentation.
We didn't even, you know, because we didn't feel like other women could feel. This man would cut into women, cut into them, and just said, well, since they're black, they don't really feel it. Unbelievable. And more importantly is what he did to infants. Because not only did he experiment on women, he also experimented on infants.
He said that black infants suffered from something he called trimus nascentium, which is now commonly referred to as neonatal tetanus. Neonatal tetanus originates in horse manure, which was a likely cause of the disease in slave infants. He contributed, he attributed it to the indecency and intellectual flaws of slave infants together with skull malformations at birth.
That is a shoemaker's awl and that's the 1800s shoemaker's awl. He would stick that into the heads of brand new infants in an effort to realign their skulls based on the indecency and intellectual flaws of their parents to treat the malady. Of course, it was 100% death rate. But that's what he would stick in the head of a baby at birth.
And so these are things that are so horrific that you can't possibly wrap your head around it. And this man is, I mean, just Google him. And you think to myself, I think to myself, if I were up here in front of you right now, and this is going to become very important as you move, I move into the other slides. If I stomped a puppy to death out here, up here, just...
a little puppy and stomped it right here to death in front of you, most of you would need therapy. And I would be arrested probably faster than killing a black man for killing a puppy. How could you do that? Do you realize how much dissonance you have to remove in order to stick that into the brain of a child?
More importantly, the child can no longer be human. Are you understanding what I'm saying? The reason why he could do it is they weren't human. They didn't even feel pain. That's what this man believed.
Now, you may look at that and go, those are horrific things from the past. There is a book out right now, not table reading. It's called Medical Apartheid.
This is written by Harriet Washington, came out last year. This book chronicles the experimentation on black people up to contemporary day. See, we want to look at the Tuskegee experiments. We want to look at Sims and go, oh, that's just still going on. Implicated, Harvard, John Hopkins, because we weren't what?
Human. So that dehumanization is something that we really got to appreciate, went on for a long time. Can you go back? Back one more.
No white could ever rape a slave woman. The regulations of law as to the white race on the subject of sexual intercourse do not and cannot, for obvious reasons, apply to slaves. Their intercourse is promiscuous.
We've now justified raping black women because they can't be raped. We aren't raping them. They're promiscuous by nature, so we can't do it. Forward. One more.
The fact that white men could profit from raping their female slaves does not mean that their motive was economic. The rape of slave women by their masters was primarily a weapon of terror that reinforced whites'domination over their human property. Rape was an act of physical violence designed to stifle black women's will to resist and to remind them of their servile status. These become important instruments that you look at. And I want to give you some statistics as it relates to American history.
By the mid-1800s, there was over 600,000... mixed-race children born. 600,000.
How many of you know what miscegenation is? Miscegenation is the illegal marriage between people of different races. Actually, it's very profound here.
It was illegal to marry someone of another race. So, when you consider the fact that one of the greatest issues and one of the number one reasons why black men were lynched, beaten, and... Imprisoned had to do with the fear that they were going to rape whom? White women.
Now the numbers, I mean we're talking about pure numbers, numbers alone. It was who being raped. Okay.
It was black women being raped. But they can be raped. Let's advance forward. Before we get into the Casual Killing Act. The Casual Killing Act was written Because of the number of people who were killed while being corrected.
Okay. And if any slave resists his master, owner, or other person by his or her order, correcting such slave and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be counted felony, but the master, owner, and every other person, so giving correction shall be acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such accident had never happened. So that means that if you happen to be correcting someone and you beat them to death, you know how hard it is to beat someone to death.
I mean, I thought about that. I said, it happens so frequently that they created a law so that you wouldn't feel any what? No guilt, because you were simply correcting them. It wasn't your fault.
So I went back to look at who was beating folks to death. I wanted to know. And it was white women. White women were beating black children to death.
That's who was being beaten to death. But it wasn't her fault. She was just correcting them.
You see, what we do is we rob ourselves of our own humanity when we refuse to look at this stuff. We rob ourselves of our humanity. And that's what people didn't know happened. Going forward, one more. Then you had the mental health folks.
This is how we got in. We got in to try to fix it. In the early years of the 19th century, a physician... named Samuel A. Cartwright argued that two particular forms of mental illness caused by nerve disorders were prevalent among slaves. One was drapedomania, which was diagnosable by a single symptom, the uncontrollable urge to escape from slavery.
So now what we've done is we've now pathologized your desire to be free. There must be something wrong with him. Keep trying to free themselves. And again, it would be funny if it weren't in journals.
You see, all of this is to remove the cognitive dissonance. Now we have, look at all the people joining in. You got Linnaeus, you got anthropology, you got physicians, all of them saying they deserve it. It's not us. We don't need to adjust anything.
And if they just tried harder, how about you people just pull yourselves up from your bootstraps? What's the matter with you? The playing field has been leveled.
Well, we're going to see if, in fact, it's been leveled. Or is that conjecture? Move forward. I want you to look at this photo very closely, and I want you to see who's in it.
More important than the man hanging, because you've got to understand, the lynchings that occurred in America happened after slavery, not during. Thousands of lynchings happened after slavery. Because this is a reaction to white fear of what we would do once freed. But we didn't create a vigilante group to take out white people. But they did create a vigilante group to take us out now that we're free.
See, that happened after slavery. They were called the what? The Ku Klux Klan.
They don't wear hoods anymore. They wear suits. But they're alive and well all over the world, even here. So look at who's in the picture. I want you to look at this little girl in particular.
You can't see her closely, but she's actually grimacing, like smirking. Now, remember, let's go back to the puppy concept here. She would be loathed and torn up probably if this was a puppy, which means he's less than that because she's not disturbed. This little girl is not disturbed by this, but she should be, shouldn't she? People always ask me, they go, Joy, what was the impact on white people?
There it is, right there. Can't feel any empathy for him. None, zero zip. There's a little one back here, even smaller.
Because whatever she's been taught or told, socialized to believe, makes him no longer human. That's the greatest danger to white people is that they can't feel it. And there's a reason why white people can't feel what we're talking about. My God, what would you then feel?
It's tough. So I've got to believe, oh, it's all over now. It's not my fault.
I don't benefit. It's not a big deal. Let's move on. It's not all of those things.
But we don't say that to Jewish people. I dare you. you have to understand when you unearth this one, that's what we did to our children.
Let's move forward. This is a similar photo to the one that is used in Denzel's movie. Now, again, most important, this is a man that's being burned.
Also, I won't read the depiction, but there are newspaper accounts of this. It's written in a book called 100 Years of Lynching by Ginsberg. No pictures, just newspapers that say not only did they burn him, they decapitated him, cut him into pieces, and used parts of his body as things to put on mantles.
So people would say, get me a tongue, would you, or a liver, a little crisp, so I could put it on the mantle. Now, again, I want you to look at the folks. I want you to look at who's here. We're not talking about the toothless, big gut, hooded wonder, are we?
We're looking at plain old, common, dressed up folks. They're squeezing, please, I want my picture taken. Are you following me? This is somebody's cousin, uncle, somebody. And the ability to do that, dehumanize this man and rob them of their humanity, all at the same time.
All at the same time. That is the most dangerous, treacherous thing that could happen. What did Hitler do?
He dehumanized human beings, put babies in ovens. Anything that robs us of our humanity is a danger to everyone. And that is what's going on with people of African descent all over the world, because not only did it get done here, but who do we tell the entire world we told these people don't deserve any value? Everyone wants to be American, not y'all. But when we go, I mean, I literally go to countries all over the world.
America sets the standard. And thank God for what happened later. Let's move forward. a lot of people start saying, well, y'all got free, right?
Y'all are free. Everything's fine. See, whenever you talk about post-traumatic slave syndrome, people get locked there. So there's a myth that after slavery ended, the playing field was leveled.
Was it? Remember all the lynchings occurred after slavery. That wasn't during, after slavery.
So you had black sharecropping. Now, We didn't get a lot of black history in our school. I have four degrees, and three of them advanced degrees. Never did I get black history.
I got about two pages of black history, and what page was the picture? And it was a picture of the little folks with the cabin. You probably saw the same picture.
It's a little cabin, the little guy on the porch with the banjo, little children running, frolicking about, eating watermelon, right? Everybody happy. We certainly need little Mary and little Johnny to believe that they were happy. The slaves were happy people.
And they had a nice place to live. Because we couldn't have them feeling cognitive what? Not little Mary.
She can't start questioning what Grandpa did. So I want you to see this because those are leftover slave quarters. He's a sharecropper.
So now let's go back and take a look at sharecropping. Now these are folks that were slaves, no longer slaves, decided I'm going back to be a sharecropper on the same plantation that I was enslaved. Why would you do that?
Let's move forward. Here's why. Because when you did try to leave and you go north, because you're free. I want you to go north now. I live in Oregon, right?
That's where I live. Here we go. No free Negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this Constitution shall come reside or be within this state or hold any real estate or make any contracts or maintain any suit therein.
And the legislative assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such Negroes and mulattos and for their effectual exclusion from the state. And for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them. This was repealed November 3rd, 1926. My father was alive. Section 6 said, if any free Negro mulatto shall fail to quit the country as required by this act, if guilty upon trial shall receive upon his or her back not less than 20, no more than 39. We'll beat you. That if any free Negro mulatto shall fail to quit the country within the term of six months after receiving such stripes, he or she shall again receive the same punishment over every six months until he or she shall quit the company.
We're going to beat you until you leave. But you're free. The playing field is leveled. Pull yourself up from your bootstraps.
Are you following me? So he went back to the plantation. Let's go back. He went back to the plantation to be a sharecropper because that's the only place he could live. But he can't read or write because it was illegal to educate a slave.
So I'm illiterate. I go back and I say to the slave owner, who, past slave owner, okay, now I'm coming back to work for a fair wage because I'm free. And the slave owner says, sure, you can come back. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to advance you seed, tool, and a mule.
In other words, you know, I am going to give you that grant that you want. And we're going to let you work with that. And at the end of the year, we'll settle up. Well, the grant's never enough, is it? And so at the end of the year, he's found owing.
And what must he do to pay off that debt? He's got to work it off, yes? And his children have to work it off, yes? That's called debt servitude or another form of slavery. But you all are free.
What are you whining about? Let's move forward. Move forward.
So, well, can we lease them? Now everybody wants to know big issue. You have overrepresentation here. Guess how I know. Overrepresentation in the criminal justice system, as its ideology, it was big business then.
It's big business now. You're gonna get free labor one way or another. New slavery is imprisonment.
Well, let's see, why was this? It was so successful, by the mid-1898, nearly three-quarters of Alabama's total state revenue came directly from this institution. Well, of course, I wanted to do research on what they did, because they're free. But now we're arresting them at alarming rates. And for what?
12 years for vagrancy, loitering, startling a white woman, looking menacingly at a white woman. That's what they got 10, 12, 15 years for. And many of them, 25%, died under convict lease, more than during slavery.
Because there were no protections, because now we have another label to justify our behavior towards them. And what's their new label? Well, after all, they're convicts. They're criminals.
Don't they deserve it? Do you see what I'm saying? So when did it end, is the question. Move forward.
You all heard about Katrina, yes? Yeah. See, I was there. My family's from Louisiana. I went to the Ninth Ward.
Sometimes you can't pay attention to what the news says. It's important to actually go eyeball what's going on, which was very interesting, because it was one of the most horrific events I'd ever seen and probably will ever see in my life. Where black folks were just simply treated differently. Did you notice that?
Here's the good news about Katrina. Everybody noticed it. So all the rest of the world, where we learn, send us your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, your democracy, your equality. They said, what happened with that Katrina thing? All that stuff y'all talked about.
Well, let me read this. This is from Associated Press, taken straight from the newspaper. In the front, actually, the top part here is actually a woman, but they think it's a man. Anyway, it says, a young man walks through chest-deep floodwater after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, August 30, 2005. Same body of water down here, excuse me.
Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store. Now, same event, same water. White people, black people.
We've told you what you see now. That removes your what? Dissonance, because these people can't be perceived as looting.
They're white people. White people don't loot. Now the truth of the matter is I don't care what any of them are doing.
It doesn't matter, but I'm going to steal the social conscience by letting you know, don't forget, this is a looter. Matter of fact, what you last heard was that they were looters and rapists. Did you not?
So don't they deserve it? That wasn't back in, oh, I don't know, slavery though, was it? Now we're going to kind of move into operationalizing that to look at what is it, how do we begin to connect that behavior, that history to what we're dealing with and what you're dealing with right now and what we're seeing.
And very often people say, well, is everything post-traumatic slave syndrome? Obviously that would trivialize all the work. You know, we cannot lay squarely on the shoulders of post-traumatic all the problems that we see, nor can we. uh place all the problems squarely on the shoulders of white people or any of the above so hopefully we won't um digress into anything that is that foolish in terms of a discussion because you know that's another thing that happens in terms of trying to deal with the pushback around this uh then we move into extremes and it tends to dilute the realities that are going on so um hopefully we're way beyond all that well now she's saying everything is post-traumatic no i'm not And most of my work, my background is really in the field, doing work in the community and grassroots.
That's where my training was in terms of my clinical work. And just the fact that I've always been, this work started on the ground. It didn't start here. Matter of fact, the attention, I got the attention of places like Oxford and Harvard and the Ivy League and major institutions, even the FBI.
You know, but. Those were things that happened after I started doing the work on the grassroots level. And so for me, my commitment is to healing. So this is not an exercise in some kind of broad intellectual esoteric. It's really about how do we then take this information and help a person extricate themselves from behavior that they've learned and or been socialized to believe.
black and white and everyone in the middle that has been affected by this. What do we do? So this is kind of looking at the contemporary kind of reflection of the trauma, which is right supremacy and terrorism.
That continues. We see that on a daily basis in the United States as well as here. This book is called Breaking Rank by Norm Stamper. Norm Stamper is a 34-year police veteran.
He was the chief of police for the cities of San Diego and Seattle. This is a white man, wrote this book called Breaking Rank, and he really did. So all I can tell you is he broke rank. I've been trying to meet Norm.
Norm travels quite a bit, and he gets a considerable amount of death threats because of what he's done. But he talked about, and this is contemporary. Remember, that's what we're looking at. How does it reflect itself today?
I've heard some police officers refer to prostitute slayings or to the slayings of blacks as misdemeanor murders, employing an unofficial code for them, NHI, which means no human involved. These are on telephone calls, these are on calls that you hear on police officers speaking, hey, what do you have? Well, we have an NHI, we have no human involved, it's a black person killed. Do you see what I'm saying?
Again, the dehumanization reflecting itself. in just their casual involvement with one another. San Diego cops confessed to a myriad other acts of discrimination, including additionally dehumanizing the references to blacks on a radio call, just an 1113 nigger. 1113 is a code for an injured animal.
How many people think they understand what racism is? Show of hands. Come on.
You know, you think you know. I'm not suggesting I know. I just have a couple of definitions that...
that kind of came to me as I thought about it. How many people think there are white racists? That there are white racists out there?
How many think there are black racists out there? Now, this is an interesting thing, because this becomes important as we begin to define concepts. I do that, I usually define concepts all the way.
But one of the things that I do is I try to help people get a picture of what I mean by... by racism. So tell me how it is.
I'm going to first category is white racism, then we'll deal with black racism. So white racism. Tell me the ways in which white racism adversely impacts the lives of black people.
Just what are the ways that white racism can adversely impact the lives of black people as a group? What are some of those ways? I'm sorry, power, but how is that defined specifically? Education, okay.
I'm sorry. Economically employment. What else? Housing.
What else? Policing. Why are we here today?
Healthcare. Okay. Now... We could actually kind of grow that list. Now we're going to move over to black racism.
Tell me the ways in which black racism adversely impacts the lives of white people as an entire group. Thank you. The reason why you become silent, there's one that always comes up, and that's fear. White people are afraid of black people. They are afraid.
afraid of us. And it's a very interesting thing because black people know it. We know white people are afraid, but you have to start getting into the psychology.
What are you afraid of? Why are you afraid? But it's an interesting dynamic.
Now, also you see the difference in what racism is, do you not? Racism implies you have not just prejudice, but the power to do something with that prejudice. Now, I don't like you, not only that, but I'm going to control whether you can get, you know, I may say I hate you.
I hate white people. I hate them. I hate them.
It's not going to change you getting that, you know, loan when you go to the bank. You could go, you could hate, I could hate you all the way to the bank. Not going to change. Do you see the difference?
That whereas white racism says, not only do I not like you, but I'm going to change the impact of where you can live. I'm going to determine with that racism where your powers are. You following me?
And I'm talking about as a group, not an individual, because people said, I remember when my uncle didn't. I'm not talking about your uncle. I'm talking about the whole group.
I'm not talking about an incident. That's a difference. But white people are afraid.
So let's get into how this fear impacts criminal justice. Because if white people in this room are afraid of black people, guess who else is afraid of black people? Only they have guns. So now let's look at what he said.
Simply put, white cops are afraid of black men. We don't talk about it. We pretend it doesn't exist. We claim colorblindness.
We say white officers treat black men the same way they treat white men, but that's a lie. And here's a big one. In fact, the bigger, the darker the black man, the greater the fear. Any big black men in here? You got a big old bullseye on you, even if you got the suit on.
And it's the truth, because we statistics bear it out. The African community knows this. Hell, most whites know it. Yet, even though it's a central, if not the defining ingredient in the makeup of police racism, white cops won't admit it to themselves or to others. He goes on to talk about actually learning it in the academy.
Norm Stamper, he told on everybody. He had folks indicted. He now lives in a cabin on a mountain somewhere in the San Juan Island.
That's where he lives. Nobody knows where he lives. Because he knows they're coming after him, and they have. This is a statement from the book also.
Race and class discrimination are all too real in every phase of the criminal justice system, from arrests to sentencing impoverished black defendants, and this is going to sound familiar to you, are far more likely to wind up on death row than richer middle class whites, and of the 3,700 inmates now awaiting execution nationwide, 43% are African American. Black defendants are not accorded the same due process rights as whites. Their cases are not given the same scrutiny and consideration afforded to white defendants. Not now, not ever, not in this country.
This is what the man said. It was dismal. But he doesn't believe it's possible in the current system.
So what we have to realize, we need to be realistic about that. So what I have to do is teach my sons how to navigate this, do I not? Doesn't matter what I think in, oh, baby, you know, we are the world. no this is real you do have a bullseye on you when you when you're in an elevator with the only white woman there and you're the big black man she's clutching her purse and she's worried that's a reality and if you startle her too much it used to mean you get lynched matter of fact i think she could scream right now and you'd get taken down now this is interesting because this has to do with women you You know, my father used to say, if a white man has a cold, a black man has pneumonia.
And if a black man has pneumonia, a black woman has cancer. It just kind of figures out that way. In 1986, on-duty California Highway Patrol officer Craig Payer strangled a San Diego State University student named Kara Knott and threw her body off a 70-foot bridge, motive she'd resisted his sexual advances.
Now let's go back and understand that... And this is an interesting thing. I worked with adolescent and adult male and female prostitutes for five years.
I don't want you to get that confused. I'm not an ex-ho. I've actually had people say, gosh, she's come along, you know, she used to be. She's done so well.
So somehow when I say that, people think I've never been in the life. Okay, I work with adolescent, adult, male and female prostitutes as a case manager counselor. Okay, and during that time that I worked with folks, it was very interesting to see the perspectives and the behaviors and the attitudes that people had about prostitutes.
I mean, When folks want to be, if you want to start off as a serial killer, just go kill the prostitutes. Nobody cares. They don't even invest, CSI don't investigate the prostitute slayings, right?
But when we begin to see what's been happening with particularly women of color, you know, just historically, women of color have been fodder for white men. Now, what started in the backwoods or in the cabin with the slaves? It never went away, you know, and I want to speak to this because this is a tough one to swallow too.
But imagine, they did a study back in the, actually in the 80s, and they asked men, cross the board, cross races, if you could get away with sexually assaulting a woman, raping a woman, in other words, and there's no possible way that you'll get, you know, penalized for it. Do you ever get, how many of you would consider doing it? This is just regular Joe go to work with the kids, 70%, 7-0. Said if I could do it, I would do it.
Imagine being able to do that for a couple hundred years with impunity. Imagine, you don't have to worry about, you know, you talk about pedophilia and all that. Imagine being able to buy that.
And then you could beat it to death too and get another one. I know it's tough to wrap your head around, but what happens to an appetite created like that where you could rape a black woman anytime you wanted to and it wasn't considered rape because she was promiscuous hundreds of years we're not talking about a few years hundreds of years protected by the law no moral you could go to church it was all good where do you think that went after slavery ended It didn't go away because guess who's the number one? You got folks who are pimping the women and then you got the ones that are buying them.
And who's buying them? Same middle-aged white males between 35 and 60 married with children. Five years I worked with them.
These are the Johns. Still are the Johns. And still are getting hold of some of that black body.
Are you following me? This is really important to know. It just mutated into something else. So now we have to figure out a way within the legal perspective to deal with these women who are out of control.
My cautious guess is that 5% of America's cops are on the prowl for women. Women, you need to get concerned. 5% of any police department, in other words, they're folks who become police officers because they're predatory.
That's why. Think about it. We know where pedophiles go, don't we?
You go where there are children. Thank you. So we got to understand police officers, plenty of them are twisted. And I've worked for the last 20 years with police officers, trust me.
I'm always concerned about someone that deliberately wants a gun, aside from the short man. In a department the size of Seattle's, that's 63 police officers. In San Diego, 145. In New York City, two.
thousand. The average patrol cop makes anywhere from 10 to 20 unsupervised contacts a shift. If he's on the make, chances are a predatory cop will find you or your wife, your partner, your daughter, your sister, your mother, your friend.
That's in general. And you see you get a freebie when you have a person of color because they have no rights. It is not hard to understand why people of color, the poor and younger Americans did not and do not look upon the police as quote theirs. Compare and contrast.
Are the police, as an institution, known for their protection of the innocent against deception, or do they deceive the innocent? Do the police protect the weak against oppression or intimidation, or do they oppress and intimidate the very people they've sworn to protect? Again, we're not talking about anybody that just fell off a truck. We're talking about a 34-year police veteran who went back, by the way, to get his PhD. Now, this was a study I did.
The research I did. Now let me explain kind of the basis of this research. 200 African-American male youth, 100 of whom are incarcerated.
100 of whom are not, but are from the same neighborhood. That was the group that I was working with. So one of the things that I wanted to do, over here on the right side, what you see is my dependent variable, what I'm trying to predict.
And what I'm trying to predict is the use of violence. So what I discovered was the most significant predictor of African American adolescent violence, when I did the... Multiple, in other words, I put all the variables together to see out what was most significant. The baseline variables of witnessing and victimization, we already know they're going to fall out because they're baseline. We already know that, was respect.
The most important predictor, respect. Think about that. How do you get respect as African American male, period, but a male youth 16 in your society?
How does he get respect? Got to get it, though. Because he's not going to roll up in a corner and ball and die somewhere. He needs to get respect.
And as black people, I say this all the time out in here, that we can ill afford to swallow whole what is called cultural. We can ill afford to swallow that because there's poison in the cookies. And the only way to get the poison out of the cookies is not someone from the outside looking in, but those who are living in this to be able to look at themselves and assess it with a level of dignity. a level of safety that perpetuates a sense of well-being and healing. Thank you so much.