Understanding African-American Psychology and Empowerment

This original WSRE presentation is made possible by viewers like you. Thank you. He says black people in America have a much greater inner power than they realize, but they must rediscover themselves in order to use it. We're one-on-one with an aware profile of Dr. Naeem Akbar. The Aware Show starts right now. Hello, I'm Dee Dee Sharp and welcome to this exciting edition of The Aware Show. We're glad to have you right there with us. Tonight on The Aware Show, we are honored to profile a special guest who is considered to be one of the world's most brilliant thinkers and orators of our time. Dr. Naeem Akbar is a world-renowned clinical psychologist Educator and author, Essence Magazine proclaimed him as one of the world's preeminent psychologists and a pioneer in the development of an African-centered approach to modern psychology. Well, to highlight Dr. Akbar's accomplishments, honors, and awards would literally take up our entire show. However, if you would indulge me for just a moment, where it's so honored to have Dr. Akbar as our guest, I just have to take some time to list just a few of his achievements. before we start our interview and you'll see why we're so excited to have him right here with us. Dr. Akbar has served as an associate professor at Norfolk State University, was chairman of Morehouse College's psychological psychology rather department and is retired from the Department of Psychology at Florida State University. He has served on numerous boards including the National Association of Black Psychologists and has also served as an associate editor of the Journal of Black Psychology. The mayors of Atlantic City, New Jersey, Cleveland, Ohio, Jackson, Mississippi, and Cincinnati, Ohio have all declared Naeem Akbar days in their cities in recognition of his accomplishments. He was the recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Scholar Award. He's received honorary doctorates from two universities, has been enthusiastically received all over 500 colleges, universities, and conferences and symposia through throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Tens of thousands of people around the world have read and been inspired by his books. You're probably one of them. He has also been written about in numerous national and international publications and magazines and has been interviewed on numerous TV shows, including Tony Brown's Journal, The Geraldo Show, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. And tonight, he's appearing right here on The Aware Show. Welcome, Dr. Naeem Akbar. to aware. Thank you so much for being right here with us. Delighted to be here. I was about to leave. You're wondering who is that person? Who is that person? You're so modest Dr. Akbar. You have so many accomplishments. We just scratched the surface with just a few of them. The list could go on and on and on and as I mentioned we could spend an entire hour just talking about the things that you have done crossing continents, crossing all types of community states and people touching their lives in so many different ways. Just to talk a little bit about some of the things that you have stood for and that you have been about. You are a clinical psychologist. You are a man who has really sought to understand black men and the way they think. Tell us what you've learned, because you say, they're crazy. You've got to comment before you get to that question. Black people in general. Black people in general. With kind of a focus on black men. Okay. Because that's where the problems are more severe. Gotcha. I guess that one of the things that I've learned that is fairly distinct about the work is that we still carry many of the scars from the years of oppression and captivity here in America. There's something that distinguishes our psychology from the psychology in general. The way that we understand how other people function is that we are still dealing with those struggles, with those scars, with that captivity, with that experiences of having been America's slaves. Unlike many other people, everybody else who came here as an immigrant looking for new opportunities, we spent the first four centuries here in oppression, and even though we have a president now, we've come all that way. Most of the time we've been here we've been struggling and that has led to some real psychological struggles that we are still having. And let's talk about some of those struggles because I think as we begin to understand as a people what we are struggling with then maybe we can begin to break down some of the barriers and begin to try to clear those hurdles in our lives. Yeah one of the one of the worst ones is the Disrespect for who we are. I mean, whereas people are able to operate in their own self-interest when they know and appreciate who they are. One of the things that slavery robbed us of was the ability to understand who it is that we were. We didn't know anything about our ancient history. We didn't know that we were the people who came from the Nile Valley civilization, the great builders of ancient civilizations. We didn't know that long before the captivity of slavery, we were in fact the pioneers in human civilization. And by not knowing that, we therefore have always had to look to other people as images of our possibility, as role models, and did not believe that somehow to be a black bald-head man Or to be a black, nappy-headed woman could be dignified, could be beautiful, could be intelligent, that there was genius in who we were. Not that we were better than any other human beings, but we didn't even realize that we were just as good as any other human beings on this planet. And struggling with that self-esteem, struggling with that issue of simply... Learning to love ourselves as being comparable to any other human beings on the planet is one of the biggest psychological problems that we've had to deal with. Okay. And obviously we haven't done a very good job in your opinion. Well, I think we're struggling with it. I think we're still struggling with it. Okay. I think we've made a tremendous amount of progress, but I think that it's still a part of the basic kind of vulnerability we have. We spend a lot of time even now trying to alter our appearance so we can look other than ourselves. We still do not think of ourselves as being geniuses. We think we could be good entertainers or outstanding athletes, but we don't believe that we could be thinkers. We don't believe we could be philosophers. We don't believe we could be great healers. We don't understand those aspects of our human capability. One of the wonderful things about the recent election of Barack Obama is that it began to shock people that a black man could be president. Because we didn't realize that for thousands of years before our captivity, we ran our own civilizations. And therefore, we didn't even try to do those things. And therefore, we spent a lot of time trying to be other than ourselves. That's a problem. That's a real problem because when you do that, you begin to resent people who are somehow trying to represent for you what your possibilities are. And the old crabs in the basket mentality where you tear each other down. You think you're better than I am or I'm better than you are or I'm better than you are because I've been accepted by somebody other than me. my own mother, father, and my own community. And when someone stood up and said, I want what's good for you, we resented that. Exactly. Because we didn't understand that people could have our self-interest at heart. Which is a difficult thing for us because not only do we end up in a self-destructive behavior, which we'll let you talk to in just a moment, but others help to cater to that self-destruction within us when... As you mentioned, they don't see us as being people who are trying to be better than who we are. Absolutely. We're trying to grow from that. So let's talk about some of that self-destructive behavior, because I think we'll see those crabs in a bucket and understand who they are and those people who are trying to get out of the bucket, the crabs that are trying to get out. Let's talk about that. Absolutely. Well, I think that one of the real kind of self-destructive things is in terms of how we use our resources. I've been rather than trying to Build up our own communities and our own educational settings. We want to run and be associated and assimilate with other people's accomplishments. So we want to be associated with other people who've done well. And we are ashamed of where we have come from and what we've been able to achieve. And in doing so, we engage in things of not... giving proper respect. To those who are trying to advance our own objectives in a positive kind of way, the fact that we do not give the kind of intellectual appreciation for what we represent as a community of people, that somehow we don't, even my work as a psychologist, but people still, after nearly 40 years, they say, what makes you think You can tell us about us, you know. I mean, what makes you an expert on black people? Dr. Akbar, I hate to tell you, but I was definitely going to ask you that question. Sorry about that. I anticipated it. But the reason for it is because we don't believe that somebody like us can be an expert on us. We have to find out who authorized you. What are your credentials? Exactly. And usually, what white person gave you those credentials? And that we don't believe that somehow that is something that we can see as an expertise that emanates out of our own self-concern and our own self-interest. Okay. I think in trying to understand some of this is to understand, go back to who we are as a people. And you've done extensive research on this and a true believer. in ancient Kemet and that sort of thing. Tell us what that really means and help us to embrace that because I think in doing that, going back to who we were, helps us understand who we are. Absolutely. Well, you know, I believe, and this is not unique to black people by any means. All human beings place themselves in the context of where they have come from And therefore... You can't finish a course in American history unless you place it in the context of European history. And if you pick up a chemistry book or a biology book or a math book or an English book or even a philosophy book, it begins in Greece. It begins to talk about the greatness that preceded European people. People talk about their greatness that preceded their current way. because that lays a context for who they are. One of the things that happened with us with slavery is that we think of our foundation as having begun in slavery. And we lost the connection with the great civilizations of ancient Africa that Africans built. And I mean, even now, there are lots of distortions. We, not we. But even the scholars will argue that ancient African civilization was built by invaders. Now there's a pyramid in Africa, there are obelisks in Africa, there's sphinx in Kemet, if you will. I mean, that somehow these people who came in and found these things built by Africans, they've been adopted and claimed by other people as belonging to them. Because it authenticates, it gives a context for their genius and their possibility. And it keeps them giving African Americans credit for having had the intelligence and the know-how to even do it. To be able to do that, exactly. So the only way you can become a doctor is to become somebody like Hippocrates. Not understanding that Imhotep, who was a black, bald-headed man who taught the ancient Greek physicians. about medicine hundreds of years before there was any kind of practice of medicine. The same man who designed the step pyramid of Saqqara, Imhotep, was also a brilliant physician. The Hippocratic Oath was based upon a papyrus that was written thousands of years before Hippocrates began to lay out his oath of healing that was written by a black... Man, these were black Africans. And even the way it's talked about, the fact that Egypt, even today, is called the Middle East, as opposed to Egypt is in on the continent of Africa. And the beginning of Egypt came from the basis of Mount Kilimanjaro, which is the center of Africa, and the now flows upward. to the part that is known as Cairo and Alexandria. So the beginning of Africa... It's down in the part of Africa near the Sudan, in the part of Africa where people look just like me. But by not knowing that, by not understanding that, and again, and I like to emphasize because people say, oh, you're just kind of distorting this so you can make yourself better than anyone. It's not about that. It's about understanding that we represent a continuity of greatness. And once you do that... Then our young girls and boys can understand they can achieve today as we used to, we once achieved before. How do we get people to see that? How do we get them to that point where they see themselves as greatness and then their lives reflect that? Well, you know, one of the critical things is that we can't leave it to chance. In every culture, in every civilization, people require that as a part of their basic education. They begin to have coloring books of ancient Greeks for European children early on. They begin to talk about the great monuments that came out of that civilization. We must take control of the early education. of our young black children early on so that they begin to take that for granted. But you see, as long as we are looking to someone else as the standard of excellence, as long as we're looking to other people's accomplishments, we look at Paris, we want to be able to polyvulsum francais, we want to look at England, we want to look at other civilizations, rather than looking at these things came from us. So the problem is that it's extremely difficult to correct a problem if you don't understand the source of the problem. Now, Naeem Akbar didn't invent this. Carter G. Whitson, back in the 1930s, talked about the miseducation of the Negro. He talked about the fact that our education did not give us the kind of sense of who we were to permit us to do what was necessary for us to take control of our lives the way that other people take control of their lives. And he says if you control a man's thinking, you can control his actions. You don't have to tell him to go to the back door. He'll go to the back door. And you begin to operate as a given of your inferiority if you don't understand the source of that. And so even now, and one of the paradoxes... of my work is that somehow many of the ideas that I have tried to do in my work would not have been listened to if I had not come with a PhD from the University of Michigan. There are many black educators, there are many black people who have done this work in terms of trying to reconnect us with our origins long before I came along. People begin to kind of listen to me only because I've been authorized and authenticated by someone other than ourselves. So it's a multi-generational process. So everything from rites of passage programs, educational programs, we have to do books, we have to write, we have to do research, We have to do movies. We have to do Avatar. I bet all the media. kinds of things. We have to somehow recreate our mythology. We have to recreate our fairy tales. We have to recreate our images. We have to recreate our symbols so that we can represent us at our best. How can we do that when you can name on one hand the big celebrities, black celebrities, be it black female or black male? How can we do that when we don't have a stake in Hollywood, which controls the movies in a lot of this? How can we do that when we don't own enough publishing companies to publish the books and the studies and that sort of thing? How can we do that individually to make the contribution to get us to where you're saying we need to be as a people? Well, there's so many of those things that are there that because it's a vicious circle in many ways, because Those things are there that we've not taken advantage of. That because of the fact that we don't understand their value. So for example, the one black television station we had, rather than being one that celebrated us in terms of our brilliance, the only thing that it celebrated us was our capacity to sing, dance, and play the harmonica. So we see ourselves. as outstanding entertainers or outstanding basketball players, outstanding football players, as something that somehow can entertain. But we don't celebrate ourselves in terms of being the thinkers we're supposed to be. So somehow, and as I said, it's going to have to take generations of people who begin to struggle with this. And I continuously emphasize that... This didn't start yesterday. Dr. Du Bois talked about this. One of your idols or somebody that you are inspired by? Yeah, one of my role models. One of my role models. As I said, Carter G. Woodson. I mean, people have talked about this for many, many generations and have encouraged us to try to rebuild our concept of who we are because that information has to begin to be passed along so that we can come up with someone. who will own a television station, who will own a movie studio, who will own a publishing company, and will give it the marketing backing that will somehow be able to celebrate us at our best. Okay, in just a moment we're going to talk a little bit about how a man can be a better man and father, and we'll also talk about relationships between the man and the woman and how you see that faring these days. But for right now, I kind of want to zoom in and focus a little bit more on Naeem Akbar. Okay. That was not your given name. No. So let's start with who you are. Okay, sure. I started out as Luther Weems, Jr. That's a long way from Naeem Akbar. I was the only son of a mother and a father. Well, I'm not far from Pensacola, as a matter of fact. I was born right there in Tallahassee. My father's from Alabama, my mother's a third-generation Tallahassian, but the thing of it is, is that I grew up in a segregated black community in Tallahassee, Florida. I went to FAMU, Florida A&M University's laboratory school, and spent the first 12 years of my life in that kind of setting. I was raised in the CME church in the black community. just like so many other people for so many generations up until the time when I went off to graduate school. But the exciting thing for me, the good thing, is that my higher education began at the time of the so-called civil rights movement and black power movement. And with that, there was an upsurge of consciousness all around me. Not only in the university setting, but everywhere. There were poets, and there were movies, and there was all the kinds of things that we were just talking about we don't have enough of now. There were a lot of those things going on around us. There were speeches. That was a Malcolm X. And therefore, there were novels about the autobiography of Malcolm X that led me to the studies of where he got his information from. that came from the Nation of Islam. And I became, after a while, I said, okay, well there's some limitations in what I understand about myself. And I began to find out that the same way he went from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X to Elhadj Walik Shabazz, that I went from being Luther Weems to Luther X to Naeem Akbar. And all of this was done in this process of trying to rediscover who it was that I was supposed to be before the distortions of the oppression that we had experienced with that. And that's the way that I grew, and that was kind of a transition. But I can't, it wasn't a moment of revelation for me. It was a part of what was taking place. during the 60s and the 70s in this country. And there were so many people who were raising these same kinds of issues. It began with the simple problem, the simple confrontations with the status quo. From the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King who says, wait a minute, we shouldn't have to sit in the back of the bus. We shouldn't have to go to some, we shouldn't have to pass up this lunch calendar. We're as good as anyone else. And that began to light a flame under the thinking of a whole generation of people who began to write poetry, began to do research, began to do history. and began to somehow bring into being people like the Nation of Islam, and bring to the forefront people like Marcus Garvey and all these other people who did this. And so my exposure to those things opened the door for me being able to do a kind of mental correction, if you will, to the miseducation that I had gone through. by my being kind of assimilated into being somebody other than myself, because certainly prior to that exposure, I believed, based on my socialization, that the only way I could be worthwhile was to be acceptable to someone other than myself. In other words, if white people said you were right, I thought I could be better off. by being educated like a white person, by looking like a white person. In fact, I thought I was always too black to be handsome. I always thought that nobody black could be intelligent and creative. But again, the creativity that came out of that particular era began to convert that kind of thinking. And so that served as a prototype and an example from... My learning in that experience of my own transformation, that this is the way that we can begin to transform the thinking of all of our people. And that served as the kind of model for Know Thyself, one of the books that I have, which is one of the formula that I kind of use, which comes from the knowledge of self, which is what Elijah Muhammad began to tell us. teach Malcolm when he was in jail selling dope and engaged in self-destructive behaviors that somehow if you know who you are, if you know the greatness from which you've come, then that then can begin to give you the keys to begin to rebuild what you can be. So is that what people will read if they were to pick up this book? If they get that book, exactly. It goes back to understanding. Self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the key. And then it turns out, even though when I first heard it, I said, boy, that's pretty profound. And then when I began to study it, I found out that the ancient temples of Kemet had written across the portals, man, know thyself. It was not originated from Plato. It was originated from the African... scholars thousands of years ago that said the foundation of human knowledge and competence was in knowing who you were. And so you found that out after you wrote this? After I wrote that. You began to realize that, hey, I'm on to something. Exactly. Well, actually, I found that out. That's talked about in the book. Right. But I'm saying that when I discovered it from the simple formula of self-knowledge that I learned from Elijah Muhammad through the Nation of Islam. And then that then led me to the bigger picture to see that it was not simply just something that these black Muslims were talking about, but in fact, this was a universal principle that self-knowledge was the source of human power. Gotcha. The Aware Show, talking with Dr. Naeem Akbar, who's known... to many people as one of the greatest thinkers of our time, a clinical psychologist, and just has an array of accomplishments and awards and things. And we have the pleasure of having him on our show today to talk to us a little bit about consciousness of oneself, I think, to some degree is a bigger picture here for The Aware Show and having you on. We're talking about just one of your books, but you have written many. And so I want to take a time here, a moment, to kind of talk about some of those things because... You've probably already mentioned a lot of the content and some of the things that you've already said here on the show. This one, Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, certainly some of the things that we've talked about so far. But maybe you want to zoom in and focus on what someone would see in picking up this book and what they would read. Yeah. Let me also mention about all of those books is that I wanted to make them readable. I did not want, as a psychologist, I didn't want to talk to other psychologists in some deep theoretical terms about new theories of human behavior. I believed that if I were going to be a psychologist that spoke to the needs of our community, those books had to be readable with a language. and in a size and a volume that wouldn't be intimidating, you see. So every one of the books I've written, except maybe the last one that is a kind of a summary of my writings, is we're all done to be less than 100 pages in a language that if you have an eighth-grade education, you could read the book and begin to understand who you are. Now, as a result of that, interestingly enough, going back to one of the early points we've made, It's not considered scholarly enough to somehow be used in a lot of university settings. I got you. But you go to any prison in this country where there are people who need it the most, they have read Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery. They've read Know Thyself because that's where they get captured into that situation. they pick up these little books and suddenly it makes sense to them. This is something that begins to speak to who they are. Now, the Breaking the Chains book, that's the fundamental. If I were going to say, what is the foundation of the major source of our craziness, quote unquote, it would be based upon this idea. That we still carry on our minds captive chains that came off the plantation. We still don't like ourselves. We don't like our communities. We don't see our own capabilities. We don't work for ourselves. We tear each other down. We like to divide and conquer. Our groups somehow spend all of our time trying not to be ourselves. We want to look good, but we don't want to do good. We put all of our money on our backs. Rather than use our resources to develop our own communities, we somehow busily try. And that came off the plantation because Mazza would give us a new outfit and we thought we were something, you know. So somehow we thought that being able to look like those people who had resources was a measure of worth and power. That comes off the plantation. The fact that we still do not work. to advance ourselves and our communities the way that other people advance their own communities. The fact that even, it's such, the fact that we still put much more worth and attention, as I mentioned earlier, in our capacity to entertain people than we do to inform people. We have much more respect for black entertainers and black athletes. Then we have for black thinkers. And I'm just always just so flattered when you say that Naeem Akbar is one of the great thinkers of our time. You're probably one of the few people who says that. Essence magazine said that. Essence, because Susan Taylor, there were bright and brilliant people there who were able to, you know, understand that that was our real kind of objective. But so many other people never considered. Thinking as being something worthwhile. However, every other civilization gives so much greater worth to those people who lay out ideas, do discoveries, do technological development, who do education, and who do things to advance the culture. You know, that's who their heroes are. I say that you are a great thinker in that after reading some of your information and your background and looking at some of the excerpts and things like that that I've looked at and studying you before you were a guest here on the show, you provoked me into thought. Good. That is what made me think that he is a great thinker. Your ideologies, your methodology, your studies, your way of understanding and putting things, as you mentioned, so that even an eighth grader could understand. I have a master's degree, so beyond that. But... My point is, is it made me think from you. So that's how I can say that from my application. And that's a good thing. I mean, and that's what I've struggled to do. I spent my whole career trying to do that. But I had to fight against the odds of those people who said that, look, you can't sing. You can't dance. Play some basketball. Be an entertainer. Be an entertainer. Do the thinking. You know. We don't need. We don't need that, you see. We all think. We all got thoughts. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so there's much more prestige given. to those people who've been able to perpetuate those negative images. That came off the plantation. Exactly, because, you know, if someone like you is thinking and you're passing that knowledge on to someone else and they're thinking, then that might not be as embraced, not only by the crabs in the bucket, but by someone who doesn't even want the crab in the bucket. Absolutely. You know what I mean? Well, certainly somebody who wants you on the plantation doesn't want you to think. Okay. If you begin to respect who you are, And this is the important thing we need to keep in mind, that our captivity as slaves and oppressed people in this culture was only the physical chains were taken off early on. It was the chains that were put on our minds. The fact that we don't respect black leadership. I mean, like, simple things like Harriet Tubman had to somehow... struggle to make some of the slaves understand they needed to run away from slavery. That somehow they were not born to be slaves. Frederick Douglass was snitched on three times before he ran away by other slaves because they believed that somehow he was in defiance of good old Maza by trying to get away from the plantation. It was only when he decided, look, I'm going to run away by myself, that he was able to get away and became the abolitionist that he became. Martin Luther King, many times, his greatest enemies came from our own community. You know, why are you causing all this trouble? You know, there was a there was a big minister up in Chicago who refused to have the street in front of his black church named. after Martin Luther King. And this was a black Baptist minister because he did not even, this was back in the time of Martin Luther King, a great Nobel Peace Prize winner. We call those kind of people haters. Yeah, haters. Okay. But see, that is the practical example of the chains of psychological slavery. If you don't love yourself, nobody else loves you. And nobody has to do anything to us now. And you won't love anyone else. You can't love anybody else. If you don't love yourself, you can't love anybody else. How would you know how to even do it? It's in the Bible. Love thy neighbor as thy what? Thyself. As thyself. That's right. I mean, that's the foundation for loving someone else. We could talk to you on and on and on, but our time is limited. And I did want to get to some more of these publications that you have, but not touting them for anyone to buy or anything, but to tell people more about who you are and what you represent and what you're trying to do. help people understand about themselves to get where they're trying to go. Another book you have, Akbar, Papers in African Psychology. That kind of summarizes the work that I've done in the field of psychology. The one that I don't have here is The Visions of Black Men, which really kind of deals with the specific issues that black men have in understanding what it means to be a man. And I talk about in that book this idea. That we think that manhood is like pants on the ground, you know, how many rings you got on the finger, your fingers, being able to be a pimp and a hustler, you know, and that somehow, or a woman means how many men you can make look at you rather than respect you. And so what I talk about in that book is that manhood and womanhood is different from Maleness and femaleness. And I talk about the fact that in traditional African societies, the way that people were taught to become men, women, fathers and mothers, is that they were taught that by rites of passage, and they went through a process to understand that a male is what you start off as, A boy? is what you become, and a man is what you must learn. A female is what you start off as. You become a girl, and you are taught how to be a woman. What's the difference? Those are people who somehow begin to develop an appreciation for what their higher skills and responsibilities are as being able to take... their gender and use their gender in constructive and responsible kinds of ways. So the visions for black men was sort of done in a very simple kind of way to say look your manhood is not who you can beat up. How many balls you can shoot into a hoop, or how fast you can run on a football field. Or how many women you can chase after. Or how many women you can chase after. Or on the other part that's so bad these days, how many different babies you can have from different men. You know, I got to take my baby and push my baby to the mall. You know, that your new outfit somehow is going to make you a woman. I mean, all of those superficial, materialistic ideals. that are fed to us through the media have to do with the fact that we're still trying to be males and females rather than men and women. And we can't leave that up for granted. We can't leave that up to the media. Dr. Akbar, we say that we know that slavery broke down some things. We know through the generations some things have happened. How do we get where we are then? We don't have, I think, we're missing sometimes. the generation gap and it's not getting any any better it's not filling in any better that we don't have the grandmothers anymore to help the young ladies get to where they need to be we don't have someone to to reach up and help pull them up by the bootstraps anymore what what's going on i mean is that is that it i mean what are you finding we're almost going backwards in many ways and it's frightening it's very very frightening that somehow not only do we have the things that came from africa we only have the things that we established to survive here in America. Because we are busily kind of living in that era of reality television. So Flavor Flav has become like an image of a black male accomplishment, you know, with gold teeth and, you know, some type of looking like a pimp, looking like a hustler. I mean, these are the destructive images. So we've got to somehow reinstate. But do you know how many shows and how much airplay that Flavor Flav has gotten in recent years? And how much money he makes. And how much money he's making now. And how much money he makes. I mean, he was like gone for a minute, and now he's back. He's back. And they're using it. Exactly. He's the face of it right now. Absolutely. But look how he started out with Public Enemy. They were speaking to the mind. They were speaking to, again, there's that era I was talking about where how the whole hip-hop movement. began by speaking to the intelligence, speaking to the mind, and using the media of hip-hop as a means of transforming the consciousness. But it got commercialized, and it turned into shake that thing. And hop the hip, not the hip-hop. There you go. It's backwards. Absolutely. It is backwards. And in process, we are going backwards. And I think that's particularly disturbing. Because there is this illusion that with a man in the White House who now is a black man, that therefore those are no longer necessary issues for our community. Not realizing that we created a Barack Obama as a community based upon the kind of struggles of trying to regain our dignity as human beings. But there's a level of complacency that we've fallen into. And sadly enough, a lot of people were just, a lot of black people were just glad to have a black person in the White House. I don't think they really understood. Just by the face. Just by the face, just by the color, just saying that, instead of understanding that it's not just about having a black man in the White House. It's about having a man who will go there and serve out what his platform is and that it might look like yours. You know, that sort of thing. Absolutely. I think we've just got kind of sidetracked with that. How do you see his being there? What do you see the accomplishment, I guess, in getting, I guess some would say, a black man from the plantation to the White House? Well, I really believe, if anything, it serves as a reminder. In other words, we can't rest on our laurels and assume that we've arrived now. We are now in a post-racial society, that all the problems have been solved. We've got to understand that he didn't end up there by accident. A lot of people died, a lot of people struggled, a lot of people continued to deal with day-to-day issues of understanding that we've got to break these psychological chains of slavery. We've got to understand who we are. We've got to understand what we can do, what we have done. To be able to have the audacity to hope and to dream and to build, all those kinds of things don't happen magically. It's not a cosmetic thing. It doesn't matter what face is there, but you've got to be able to love yourself, respect yourself, know yourself, and build yourself, and nobody can do it for you. No one can give you a welfare check. into acceptability. You have got to earn that by taking on the responsibility to somehow change yourself and change the world that you're living in. And I believe that that's the key issue, that it doesn't happen magically. The fact that he was accepted by the large number of the white population, that wasn't his real accomplishment. The real accomplishment was that we should see in that as an introduction and an incentive for us to accept ourselves. And we have to understand that we can't expect him to do magical things, because he's in fact the president of all the United States of America. And it simply serves as a symbol of our possibilities if we do the work. of trying to transform ourselves and love ourselves. One of the wonderful things, I think, probably the most impressive thing about him, for me as a role model, is Michelle Obama. Absolutely. You see. And I say that because he didn't feel he had to leave who he was to be able to achieve his greatness. So unlike some other people who will go unnamed, who've created all kinds of self-destructive... images of themselves by leaving their own community and getting, rather than getting someone who looked like them, who raised little girls, little boys who look like them, and let them serve as models of their possibility. Not to mention the educational, I mean, they seem so evenly yoked as a couple. Absolutely, absolutely. Educationally, spiritually, even for the same ambitions to some degree, not that Michelle wants to be president, but that she doesn't mind taking the role of being How do they say, behind every good man is a really good woman. You know, she's happy to be that person behind him. Exactly. And I believe, though, we didn't look to as the world turns. We didn't look to other people's models of excellence. We looked to ourselves and saw respect within our own communities. Now that's an important kind of lesson. That's a very, very important lesson. In speaking about their relationship and getting to African-American men and women in the relationship, and really in general, because a lot of what you're talking about, we're talking about African-Americans and that sort of thing, but this is really what you're saying is applicable to all people. But in just looking at them and what we see from their relationship, how do you see men and women relationships today? We've got to get it off the television and bring it back into human interactions. I bet the whole idea that you can now, who's going to be the bachelor and the bachelorette of the year, that somehow it becomes a matter of materialism. Who can have the greatest, some type of reality television show? Or you can do it on some kind of social networking. The idea is that it has to go back to building on the basis of people knowing who they are and knowing each other in the process. If I can switch back just a minute to this whole idea of this visions for black men, visions for black women. We have to understand the difference between being a male, a boy, and a man. In the same way we need to understand the difference between being a female, a girl, and a woman. Girls and boys play games. They entertain themselves. But men and women... plan to build worlds, build families, and build communities. And I believe that that is our key issue. In other words, we have abdicated the responsibility. You mentioned earlier in our conversation this whole idea of the loss of those grandmothers who told their granddaughters about how they needed to have the respect. That's because grandmothers are younger than the daughters now. Exactly. And I'm saying, but. But I'm saying we've got to reclaim that kind of responsibilities in our communities where we have some control over that, whether it's in our schools, in our churches, in our neighborhoods, wherever we are. We've got to somehow elevate those who represent the best that we can be rather than somehow representing the floozies and the hoes and the pimps as being our claim of what manhood is all about. Now we're on PBS, Dr. Akbar. Now I can appreciate what you're saying. Sorry about that. We're about to walk things down here. We definitely understand what you're saying in context and want people to understand that Dr. Akbar's views are his own and not reflective of WSRE or mine or anybody else's, but certainly respectfully hearing what you have to say because you do come to us with a great deal of credentials to say the things that I think that you're saying to people who Should be listening and what they can use, use it and what they can't, let it go back out the other ear. You know, that's just how it is when we bring in people such as yourself. We talked about some of your... People that you look up to and that sort of thing. Who does Dr. Naeem Akbar look to other than, we know W.E.B. Du Bois and that sort of thing, but who are some of the thinkers that you think about? Yeah, one of the chapters in the book, Visions for Black Men, is I kind of like identify like five heroes in that book who represent certain kind of qualities. that represent the best of what we can be. And I believe that they are kind of my heroes. And I think that if anyone walked into my office, they would see on the wall in my office the picture of Martin Luther King Jr., who I think represented someone who was just not a preacher, but took the word to transform the society. He didn't just take his education as a means to hoop. and a hooping holler, but he used it to somehow to do what Jesus did. He used Jesus' example to transform the world he was living in. Elijah Muhammad, who I think, despite the fact he's been hated on in all kinds of negative ways, he transformed Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali. He transformed Malcolm Little into Malcolm X. and that somehow... The information and the concepts that he had were brilliant ideas in terms of self-respect, self-development, self-love, how you love yourself and love your women, your community, look in your black face and find dignity in that. All of those things. That's another one of my heroes. Paul Robeson, who understood. A tremendously gifted man. Four-letter athlete, you know. An outstanding actor, brilliant singer. He was able to use his art and his athletic ability, not as a means of somehow getting the biggest house in town, a seven-bedroom house, but being able to somehow represent, use this to transform our community. Got you. With our last few minutes here on the show, because we had two hours to talk with you, How... How, at the end of the day, when someone sees this show or hears any of your lectures or reads any of your books, at the end of the day, how does a person know that they are loving themselves? I believe that they know they're loving themselves by what they do. I spend every day of my life trying to help those people who are most like me get better. to be better, to be more better in whatever way I can. And I don't mean just my children. I've raised three young, two young black men, a young black woman, and I have grandchildren now. I work with them directly, but I mean all my students, all the people I've worked with. And if your work is engaging and trying to lift up those people most like you, then you know you love yourself. But that's almost like a self-actualization, I think, at that point. Because you've self-actualized to a point where that's what your work is now, or has been, I guess, for the last decade. I've been doing that for the last 30 years. It's giving back to people. I have to go back and recapture that because that is true. You have been doing that. You've done that. Crossing continents doing it and trying to talk with people. So you self-actualized a long time ago. But no, it's been a gradual process. I've grown into doing that. But that's how you know. You ask, how do you know if you love yourself? And so to get to that self-actualization has been some of the applications of some of the things that we've been talking about here today. It's been those kinds of things. So every day I do something to help lift us up. I confront issues when they affect our people in a negative way. I want to say to our young black boys. Pull up your pants, brother. Look like a man. You are a king. You know, come on, sister. Don't be looking like that. Look like the woman and the queen that you're supposed to be. And don't hate on the ones who believe they're kings and queens. Absolutely. Appreciate. And understand I have nothing, I have absolutely nothing against our brilliant athletic skills and our brilliant artistic skills. But ultimately, use those skills not to... tear all communities down and don't think for a minute that because you've made it we've all made it. The reality is is that each one must help one if you're not pulling someone up behind you then you are the failure. that that lowest person on the chain is all about. I have one minute left, Dr. Akbar. Okay. At the end of this show, at the end of reading a book, at the end of any of your lectures, what is it that you hope someone will take away? Knowing who you are and loving who you are automatically gives you the imperative for what you do with your life. That self-knowledge is the key, self-love and self-respect. is the incentive and the energy that drives and fuels what your activities need to be all about. I believe that every person, even though we are focusing on the issues of black people, I think that's true for white people, Native Americans, Hispanics, everybody must love themselves and try to lift themselves up. But you don't have to lift yourself up. at the, in disservice to someone else. You don't have to stand on someone else to be able to exalt yourself. If you somehow understand the dignity in you, if I can love the God in me, I can see the God in you and understand that I have the responsibility to help to facilitate that wherever I see it. And if you had to tell someone to go somewhere to get this information or this knowledge, how to begin to love themselves and how to begin to think and get to where even you are and above, what would that source be? What could they tap into? Other than my books. Shame on you. That's one good story. But that's their wealth of knowledge, their wealth of knowledge in these. Yeah, but there are references in those kinds of things. The information is there, but one must engage in. trying to tie those things into understanding how these things tie into you. I certainly have appreciated you being here on our show. An exciting talk. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Dr. Naeem Akbar, clinical psychologist, and as you see, a great thinker here on The Aware Show. For all of us here, thank you so much for joining us. I'm Dede Shard saying until the next time, stay informed and stay aware. Good night. Thank you.

Hello, I'm Dee Dee Sharp and welcome to this exciting edition of The Aware Show. We're glad to have you right there with us. Tonight on The Aware Show, we are honored to profile a special guest who is considered to be one of the world's most brilliant thinkers and orators of our time.

Dr. Naeem Akbar is a world-renowned clinical psychologist Educator and author, Essence Magazine proclaimed him as one of the world's preeminent psychologists and a pioneer in the development of an African-centered approach to modern psychology. Well, to highlight Dr. Akbar's accomplishments, honors, and awards would literally take up our entire show. However, if you would indulge me for just a moment, where it's so honored to have Dr. Akbar as our guest, I just have to take some time to list just a few of his achievements. before we start our interview and you'll see why we're so excited to have him right here with us.

Dr. Akbar has served as an associate professor at Norfolk State University, was chairman of Morehouse College's psychological psychology rather department and is retired from the Department of Psychology at Florida State University. He has served on numerous boards including the National Association of Black Psychologists and has also served as an associate editor of the Journal of Black Psychology. The mayors of Atlantic City, New Jersey, Cleveland, Ohio, Jackson, Mississippi, and Cincinnati, Ohio have all declared Naeem Akbar days in their cities in recognition of his accomplishments. He was the recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Scholar Award.

He's received honorary doctorates from two universities, has been enthusiastically received all over 500 colleges, universities, and conferences and symposia through throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Tens of thousands of people around the world have read and been inspired by his books. You're probably one of them.

He has also been written about in numerous national and international publications and magazines and has been interviewed on numerous TV shows, including Tony Brown's Journal, The Geraldo Show, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. And tonight, he's appearing right here on The Aware Show. Welcome, Dr. Naeem Akbar.

to aware. Thank you so much for being right here with us. Delighted to be here.

I was about to leave. You're wondering who is that person? Who is that person? You're so modest Dr. Akbar. You have so many accomplishments.

We just scratched the surface with just a few of them. The list could go on and on and on and as I mentioned we could spend an entire hour just talking about the things that you have done crossing continents, crossing all types of community states and people touching their lives in so many different ways. Just to talk a little bit about some of the things that you have stood for and that you have been about.

You are a clinical psychologist. You are a man who has really sought to understand black men and the way they think. Tell us what you've learned, because you say, they're crazy. You've got to comment before you get to that question.

Black people in general. Black people in general. With kind of a focus on black men.

Okay. Because that's where the problems are more severe. Gotcha.

I guess that one of the things that I've learned that is fairly distinct about the work is that we still carry many of the scars from the years of oppression and captivity here in America. There's something that distinguishes our psychology from the psychology in general. The way that we understand how other people function is that we are still dealing with those struggles, with those scars, with that captivity, with that experiences of having been America's slaves. Unlike many other people, everybody else who came here as an immigrant looking for new opportunities, we spent the first four centuries here in oppression, and even though we have a president now, we've come all that way.

Most of the time we've been here we've been struggling and that has led to some real psychological struggles that we are still having. And let's talk about some of those struggles because I think as we begin to understand as a people what we are struggling with then maybe we can begin to break down some of the barriers and begin to try to clear those hurdles in our lives. Yeah one of the one of the worst ones is the Disrespect for who we are.

I mean, whereas people are able to operate in their own self-interest when they know and appreciate who they are. One of the things that slavery robbed us of was the ability to understand who it is that we were. We didn't know anything about our ancient history.

We didn't know that we were the people who came from the Nile Valley civilization, the great builders of ancient civilizations. We didn't know that long before the captivity of slavery, we were in fact the pioneers in human civilization. And by not knowing that, we therefore have always had to look to other people as images of our possibility, as role models, and did not believe that somehow to be a black bald-head man Or to be a black, nappy-headed woman could be dignified, could be beautiful, could be intelligent, that there was genius in who we were.

Not that we were better than any other human beings, but we didn't even realize that we were just as good as any other human beings on this planet. And struggling with that self-esteem, struggling with that issue of simply... Learning to love ourselves as being comparable to any other human beings on the planet is one of the biggest psychological problems that we've had to deal with.

Okay. And obviously we haven't done a very good job in your opinion. Well, I think we're struggling with it. I think we're still struggling with it. Okay.

I think we've made a tremendous amount of progress, but I think that it's still a part of the basic kind of vulnerability we have. We spend a lot of time even now trying to alter our appearance so we can look other than ourselves. We still do not think of ourselves as being geniuses.

We think we could be good entertainers or outstanding athletes, but we don't believe that we could be thinkers. We don't believe we could be philosophers. We don't believe we could be great healers. We don't understand those aspects of our human capability.

One of the wonderful things about the recent election of Barack Obama is that it began to shock people that a black man could be president. Because we didn't realize that for thousands of years before our captivity, we ran our own civilizations. And therefore, we didn't even try to do those things. And therefore, we spent a lot of time trying to be other than ourselves.

That's a problem. That's a real problem because when you do that, you begin to resent people who are somehow trying to represent for you what your possibilities are. And the old crabs in the basket mentality where you tear each other down.

You think you're better than I am or I'm better than you are or I'm better than you are because I've been accepted by somebody other than me. my own mother, father, and my own community. And when someone stood up and said, I want what's good for you, we resented that. Exactly.

Because we didn't understand that people could have our self-interest at heart. Which is a difficult thing for us because not only do we end up in a self-destructive behavior, which we'll let you talk to in just a moment, but others help to cater to that self-destruction within us when... As you mentioned, they don't see us as being people who are trying to be better than who we are. Absolutely. We're trying to grow from that.

So let's talk about some of that self-destructive behavior, because I think we'll see those crabs in a bucket and understand who they are and those people who are trying to get out of the bucket, the crabs that are trying to get out. Let's talk about that. Absolutely. Well, I think that one of the real kind of self-destructive things is in terms of how we use our resources.

I've been rather than trying to Build up our own communities and our own educational settings. We want to run and be associated and assimilate with other people's accomplishments. So we want to be associated with other people who've done well. And we are ashamed of where we have come from and what we've been able to achieve. And in doing so, we engage in things of not...

giving proper respect. To those who are trying to advance our own objectives in a positive kind of way, the fact that we do not give the kind of intellectual appreciation for what we represent as a community of people, that somehow we don't, even my work as a psychologist, but people still, after nearly 40 years, they say, what makes you think You can tell us about us, you know. I mean, what makes you an expert on black people?

Dr. Akbar, I hate to tell you, but I was definitely going to ask you that question. Sorry about that. I anticipated it. But the reason for it is because we don't believe that somebody like us can be an expert on us. We have to find out who authorized you.

What are your credentials? Exactly. And usually, what white person gave you those credentials?

And that we don't believe that somehow that is something that we can see as an expertise that emanates out of our own self-concern and our own self-interest. Okay. I think in trying to understand some of this is to understand, go back to who we are as a people.

And you've done extensive research on this and a true believer. in ancient Kemet and that sort of thing. Tell us what that really means and help us to embrace that because I think in doing that, going back to who we were, helps us understand who we are.

Absolutely. Well, you know, I believe, and this is not unique to black people by any means. All human beings place themselves in the context of where they have come from And therefore... You can't finish a course in American history unless you place it in the context of European history.

And if you pick up a chemistry book or a biology book or a math book or an English book or even a philosophy book, it begins in Greece. It begins to talk about the greatness that preceded European people. People talk about their greatness that preceded their current way. because that lays a context for who they are. One of the things that happened with us with slavery is that we think of our foundation as having begun in slavery.

And we lost the connection with the great civilizations of ancient Africa that Africans built. And I mean, even now, there are lots of distortions. We, not we. But even the scholars will argue that ancient African civilization was built by invaders. Now there's a pyramid in Africa, there are obelisks in Africa, there's sphinx in Kemet, if you will.

I mean, that somehow these people who came in and found these things built by Africans, they've been adopted and claimed by other people as belonging to them. Because it authenticates, it gives a context for their genius and their possibility. And it keeps them giving African Americans credit for having had the intelligence and the know-how to even do it. To be able to do that, exactly.

So the only way you can become a doctor is to become somebody like Hippocrates. Not understanding that Imhotep, who was a black, bald-headed man who taught the ancient Greek physicians. about medicine hundreds of years before there was any kind of practice of medicine. The same man who designed the step pyramid of Saqqara, Imhotep, was also a brilliant physician.

The Hippocratic Oath was based upon a papyrus that was written thousands of years before Hippocrates began to lay out his oath of healing that was written by a black... Man, these were black Africans. And even the way it's talked about, the fact that Egypt, even today, is called the Middle East, as opposed to Egypt is in on the continent of Africa.

And the beginning of Egypt came from the basis of Mount Kilimanjaro, which is the center of Africa, and the now flows upward. to the part that is known as Cairo and Alexandria. So the beginning of Africa...

It's down in the part of Africa near the Sudan, in the part of Africa where people look just like me. But by not knowing that, by not understanding that, and again, and I like to emphasize because people say, oh, you're just kind of distorting this so you can make yourself better than anyone. It's not about that. It's about understanding that we represent a continuity of greatness.

And once you do that... Then our young girls and boys can understand they can achieve today as we used to, we once achieved before. How do we get people to see that? How do we get them to that point where they see themselves as greatness and then their lives reflect that? Well, you know, one of the critical things is that we can't leave it to chance.

In every culture, in every civilization, people require that as a part of their basic education. They begin to have coloring books of ancient Greeks for European children early on. They begin to talk about the great monuments that came out of that civilization. We must take control of the early education.

of our young black children early on so that they begin to take that for granted. But you see, as long as we are looking to someone else as the standard of excellence, as long as we're looking to other people's accomplishments, we look at Paris, we want to be able to polyvulsum francais, we want to look at England, we want to look at other civilizations, rather than looking at these things came from us. So the problem is that it's extremely difficult to correct a problem if you don't understand the source of the problem. Now, Naeem Akbar didn't invent this. Carter G. Whitson, back in the 1930s, talked about the miseducation of the Negro.

He talked about the fact that our education did not give us the kind of sense of who we were to permit us to do what was necessary for us to take control of our lives the way that other people take control of their lives. And he says if you control a man's thinking, you can control his actions. You don't have to tell him to go to the back door.

He'll go to the back door. And you begin to operate as a given of your inferiority if you don't understand the source of that. And so even now, and one of the paradoxes... of my work is that somehow many of the ideas that I have tried to do in my work would not have been listened to if I had not come with a PhD from the University of Michigan.

There are many black educators, there are many black people who have done this work in terms of trying to reconnect us with our origins long before I came along. People begin to kind of listen to me only because I've been authorized and authenticated by someone other than ourselves. So it's a multi-generational process. So everything from rites of passage programs, educational programs, we have to do books, we have to write, we have to do research, We have to do movies. We have to do Avatar.

I bet all the media. kinds of things. We have to somehow recreate our mythology.

We have to recreate our fairy tales. We have to recreate our images. We have to recreate our symbols so that we can represent us at our best. How can we do that when you can name on one hand the big celebrities, black celebrities, be it black female or black male? How can we do that when we don't have a stake in Hollywood, which controls the movies in a lot of this?

How can we do that when we don't own enough publishing companies to publish the books and the studies and that sort of thing? How can we do that individually to make the contribution to get us to where you're saying we need to be as a people? Well, there's so many of those things that are there that because it's a vicious circle in many ways, because Those things are there that we've not taken advantage of.

That because of the fact that we don't understand their value. So for example, the one black television station we had, rather than being one that celebrated us in terms of our brilliance, the only thing that it celebrated us was our capacity to sing, dance, and play the harmonica. So we see ourselves. as outstanding entertainers or outstanding basketball players, outstanding football players, as something that somehow can entertain. But we don't celebrate ourselves in terms of being the thinkers we're supposed to be.

So somehow, and as I said, it's going to have to take generations of people who begin to struggle with this. And I continuously emphasize that... This didn't start yesterday.

Dr. Du Bois talked about this. One of your idols or somebody that you are inspired by? Yeah, one of my role models.

One of my role models. As I said, Carter G. Woodson. I mean, people have talked about this for many, many generations and have encouraged us to try to rebuild our concept of who we are because that information has to begin to be passed along so that we can come up with someone. who will own a television station, who will own a movie studio, who will own a publishing company, and will give it the marketing backing that will somehow be able to celebrate us at our best. Okay, in just a moment we're going to talk a little bit about how a man can be a better man and father, and we'll also talk about relationships between the man and the woman and how you see that faring these days.

But for right now, I kind of want to zoom in and focus a little bit more on Naeem Akbar. Okay. That was not your given name. No.

So let's start with who you are. Okay, sure. I started out as Luther Weems, Jr. That's a long way from Naeem Akbar.

I was the only son of a mother and a father. Well, I'm not far from Pensacola, as a matter of fact. I was born right there in Tallahassee. My father's from Alabama, my mother's a third-generation Tallahassian, but the thing of it is, is that I grew up in a segregated black community in Tallahassee, Florida.

I went to FAMU, Florida A&M University's laboratory school, and spent the first 12 years of my life in that kind of setting. I was raised in the CME church in the black community. just like so many other people for so many generations up until the time when I went off to graduate school.

But the exciting thing for me, the good thing, is that my higher education began at the time of the so-called civil rights movement and black power movement. And with that, there was an upsurge of consciousness all around me. Not only in the university setting, but everywhere. There were poets, and there were movies, and there was all the kinds of things that we were just talking about we don't have enough of now.

There were a lot of those things going on around us. There were speeches. That was a Malcolm X. And therefore, there were novels about the autobiography of Malcolm X that led me to the studies of where he got his information from.

that came from the Nation of Islam. And I became, after a while, I said, okay, well there's some limitations in what I understand about myself. And I began to find out that the same way he went from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X to Elhadj Walik Shabazz, that I went from being Luther Weems to Luther X to Naeem Akbar. And all of this was done in this process of trying to rediscover who it was that I was supposed to be before the distortions of the oppression that we had experienced with that. And that's the way that I grew, and that was kind of a transition.

But I can't, it wasn't a moment of revelation for me. It was a part of what was taking place. during the 60s and the 70s in this country.

And there were so many people who were raising these same kinds of issues. It began with the simple problem, the simple confrontations with the status quo. From the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King who says, wait a minute, we shouldn't have to sit in the back of the bus. We shouldn't have to go to some, we shouldn't have to pass up this lunch calendar.

We're as good as anyone else. And that began to light a flame under the thinking of a whole generation of people who began to write poetry, began to do research, began to do history. and began to somehow bring into being people like the Nation of Islam, and bring to the forefront people like Marcus Garvey and all these other people who did this.

And so my exposure to those things opened the door for me being able to do a kind of mental correction, if you will, to the miseducation that I had gone through. by my being kind of assimilated into being somebody other than myself, because certainly prior to that exposure, I believed, based on my socialization, that the only way I could be worthwhile was to be acceptable to someone other than myself. In other words, if white people said you were right, I thought I could be better off.

by being educated like a white person, by looking like a white person. In fact, I thought I was always too black to be handsome. I always thought that nobody black could be intelligent and creative.

But again, the creativity that came out of that particular era began to convert that kind of thinking. And so that served as a prototype and an example from... My learning in that experience of my own transformation, that this is the way that we can begin to transform the thinking of all of our people.

And that served as the kind of model for Know Thyself, one of the books that I have, which is one of the formula that I kind of use, which comes from the knowledge of self, which is what Elijah Muhammad began to tell us. teach Malcolm when he was in jail selling dope and engaged in self-destructive behaviors that somehow if you know who you are, if you know the greatness from which you've come, then that then can begin to give you the keys to begin to rebuild what you can be. So is that what people will read if they were to pick up this book? If they get that book, exactly.

It goes back to understanding. Self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the key.

And then it turns out, even though when I first heard it, I said, boy, that's pretty profound. And then when I began to study it, I found out that the ancient temples of Kemet had written across the portals, man, know thyself. It was not originated from Plato. It was originated from the African...

scholars thousands of years ago that said the foundation of human knowledge and competence was in knowing who you were. And so you found that out after you wrote this? After I wrote that. You began to realize that, hey, I'm on to something. Exactly.

Well, actually, I found that out. That's talked about in the book. Right. But I'm saying that when I discovered it from the simple formula of self-knowledge that I learned from Elijah Muhammad through the Nation of Islam.

And then that then led me to the bigger picture to see that it was not simply just something that these black Muslims were talking about, but in fact, this was a universal principle that self-knowledge was the source of human power. Gotcha. The Aware Show, talking with Dr. Naeem Akbar, who's known... to many people as one of the greatest thinkers of our time, a clinical psychologist, and just has an array of accomplishments and awards and things.

And we have the pleasure of having him on our show today to talk to us a little bit about consciousness of oneself, I think, to some degree is a bigger picture here for The Aware Show and having you on. We're talking about just one of your books, but you have written many. And so I want to take a time here, a moment, to kind of talk about some of those things because... You've probably already mentioned a lot of the content and some of the things that you've already said here on the show.

This one, Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, certainly some of the things that we've talked about so far. But maybe you want to zoom in and focus on what someone would see in picking up this book and what they would read. Yeah.

Let me also mention about all of those books is that I wanted to make them readable. I did not want, as a psychologist, I didn't want to talk to other psychologists in some deep theoretical terms about new theories of human behavior. I believed that if I were going to be a psychologist that spoke to the needs of our community, those books had to be readable with a language. and in a size and a volume that wouldn't be intimidating, you see. So every one of the books I've written, except maybe the last one that is a kind of a summary of my writings, is we're all done to be less than 100 pages in a language that if you have an eighth-grade education, you could read the book and begin to understand who you are.

Now, as a result of that, interestingly enough, going back to one of the early points we've made, It's not considered scholarly enough to somehow be used in a lot of university settings. I got you. But you go to any prison in this country where there are people who need it the most, they have read Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery. They've read Know Thyself because that's where they get captured into that situation. they pick up these little books and suddenly it makes sense to them.

This is something that begins to speak to who they are. Now, the Breaking the Chains book, that's the fundamental. If I were going to say, what is the foundation of the major source of our craziness, quote unquote, it would be based upon this idea. That we still carry on our minds captive chains that came off the plantation.

We still don't like ourselves. We don't like our communities. We don't see our own capabilities.

We don't work for ourselves. We tear each other down. We like to divide and conquer. Our groups somehow spend all of our time trying not to be ourselves. We want to look good, but we don't want to do good.

We put all of our money on our backs. Rather than use our resources to develop our own communities, we somehow busily try. And that came off the plantation because Mazza would give us a new outfit and we thought we were something, you know. So somehow we thought that being able to look like those people who had resources was a measure of worth and power. That comes off the plantation.

The fact that we still do not work. to advance ourselves and our communities the way that other people advance their own communities. The fact that even, it's such, the fact that we still put much more worth and attention, as I mentioned earlier, in our capacity to entertain people than we do to inform people.

We have much more respect for black entertainers and black athletes. Then we have for black thinkers. And I'm just always just so flattered when you say that Naeem Akbar is one of the great thinkers of our time. You're probably one of the few people who says that.

Essence magazine said that. Essence, because Susan Taylor, there were bright and brilliant people there who were able to, you know, understand that that was our real kind of objective. But so many other people never considered.

Thinking as being something worthwhile. However, every other civilization gives so much greater worth to those people who lay out ideas, do discoveries, do technological development, who do education, and who do things to advance the culture. You know, that's who their heroes are.

I say that you are a great thinker in that after reading some of your information and your background and looking at some of the excerpts and things like that that I've looked at and studying you before you were a guest here on the show, you provoked me into thought. Good. That is what made me think that he is a great thinker.

Your ideologies, your methodology, your studies, your way of understanding and putting things, as you mentioned, so that even an eighth grader could understand. I have a master's degree, so beyond that. But... My point is, is it made me think from you.

So that's how I can say that from my application. And that's a good thing. I mean, and that's what I've struggled to do. I spent my whole career trying to do that. But I had to fight against the odds of those people who said that, look, you can't sing.

You can't dance. Play some basketball. Be an entertainer.

Be an entertainer. Do the thinking. You know. We don't need. We don't need that, you see.

We all think. We all got thoughts. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so there's much more prestige given.

to those people who've been able to perpetuate those negative images. That came off the plantation. Exactly, because, you know, if someone like you is thinking and you're passing that knowledge on to someone else and they're thinking, then that might not be as embraced, not only by the crabs in the bucket, but by someone who doesn't even want the crab in the bucket.

Absolutely. You know what I mean? Well, certainly somebody who wants you on the plantation doesn't want you to think. Okay.

If you begin to respect who you are, And this is the important thing we need to keep in mind, that our captivity as slaves and oppressed people in this culture was only the physical chains were taken off early on. It was the chains that were put on our minds. The fact that we don't respect black leadership. I mean, like, simple things like Harriet Tubman had to somehow... struggle to make some of the slaves understand they needed to run away from slavery.

That somehow they were not born to be slaves. Frederick Douglass was snitched on three times before he ran away by other slaves because they believed that somehow he was in defiance of good old Maza by trying to get away from the plantation. It was only when he decided, look, I'm going to run away by myself, that he was able to get away and became the abolitionist that he became.

Martin Luther King, many times, his greatest enemies came from our own community. You know, why are you causing all this trouble? You know, there was a there was a big minister up in Chicago who refused to have the street in front of his black church named. after Martin Luther King.

And this was a black Baptist minister because he did not even, this was back in the time of Martin Luther King, a great Nobel Peace Prize winner. We call those kind of people haters. Yeah, haters. Okay.

But see, that is the practical example of the chains of psychological slavery. If you don't love yourself, nobody else loves you. And nobody has to do anything to us now.

And you won't love anyone else. You can't love anybody else. If you don't love yourself, you can't love anybody else. How would you know how to even do it? It's in the Bible.

Love thy neighbor as thy what? Thyself. As thyself.

That's right. I mean, that's the foundation for loving someone else. We could talk to you on and on and on, but our time is limited.

And I did want to get to some more of these publications that you have, but not touting them for anyone to buy or anything, but to tell people more about who you are and what you represent and what you're trying to do. help people understand about themselves to get where they're trying to go. Another book you have, Akbar, Papers in African Psychology.

That kind of summarizes the work that I've done in the field of psychology. The one that I don't have here is The Visions of Black Men, which really kind of deals with the specific issues that black men have in understanding what it means to be a man. And I talk about in that book this idea.

That we think that manhood is like pants on the ground, you know, how many rings you got on the finger, your fingers, being able to be a pimp and a hustler, you know, and that somehow, or a woman means how many men you can make look at you rather than respect you. And so what I talk about in that book is that manhood and womanhood is different from Maleness and femaleness. And I talk about the fact that in traditional African societies, the way that people were taught to become men, women, fathers and mothers, is that they were taught that by rites of passage, and they went through a process to understand that a male is what you start off as, A boy? is what you become, and a man is what you must learn. A female is what you start off as.

You become a girl, and you are taught how to be a woman. What's the difference? Those are people who somehow begin to develop an appreciation for what their higher skills and responsibilities are as being able to take...

their gender and use their gender in constructive and responsible kinds of ways. So the visions for black men was sort of done in a very simple kind of way to say look your manhood is not who you can beat up. How many balls you can shoot into a hoop, or how fast you can run on a football field.

Or how many women you can chase after. Or how many women you can chase after. Or on the other part that's so bad these days, how many different babies you can have from different men.

You know, I got to take my baby and push my baby to the mall. You know, that your new outfit somehow is going to make you a woman. I mean, all of those superficial, materialistic ideals. that are fed to us through the media have to do with the fact that we're still trying to be males and females rather than men and women. And we can't leave that up for granted.

We can't leave that up to the media. Dr. Akbar, we say that we know that slavery broke down some things. We know through the generations some things have happened. How do we get where we are then?

We don't have, I think, we're missing sometimes. the generation gap and it's not getting any any better it's not filling in any better that we don't have the grandmothers anymore to help the young ladies get to where they need to be we don't have someone to to reach up and help pull them up by the bootstraps anymore what what's going on i mean is that is that it i mean what are you finding we're almost going backwards in many ways and it's frightening it's very very frightening that somehow not only do we have the things that came from africa we only have the things that we established to survive here in America. Because we are busily kind of living in that era of reality television. So Flavor Flav has become like an image of a black male accomplishment, you know, with gold teeth and, you know, some type of looking like a pimp, looking like a hustler. I mean, these are the destructive images.

So we've got to somehow reinstate. But do you know how many shows and how much airplay that Flavor Flav has gotten in recent years? And how much money he makes. And how much money he's making now. And how much money he makes.

I mean, he was like gone for a minute, and now he's back. He's back. And they're using it.

Exactly. He's the face of it right now. Absolutely. But look how he started out with Public Enemy.

They were speaking to the mind. They were speaking to, again, there's that era I was talking about where how the whole hip-hop movement. began by speaking to the intelligence, speaking to the mind, and using the media of hip-hop as a means of transforming the consciousness. But it got commercialized, and it turned into shake that thing. And hop the hip, not the hip-hop.

There you go. It's backwards. Absolutely. It is backwards. And in process, we are going backwards.

And I think that's particularly disturbing. Because there is this illusion that with a man in the White House who now is a black man, that therefore those are no longer necessary issues for our community. Not realizing that we created a Barack Obama as a community based upon the kind of struggles of trying to regain our dignity as human beings.

But there's a level of complacency that we've fallen into. And sadly enough, a lot of people were just, a lot of black people were just glad to have a black person in the White House. I don't think they really understood. Just by the face.

Just by the face, just by the color, just saying that, instead of understanding that it's not just about having a black man in the White House. It's about having a man who will go there and serve out what his platform is and that it might look like yours. You know, that sort of thing. Absolutely.

I think we've just got kind of sidetracked with that. How do you see his being there? What do you see the accomplishment, I guess, in getting, I guess some would say, a black man from the plantation to the White House?

Well, I really believe, if anything, it serves as a reminder. In other words, we can't rest on our laurels and assume that we've arrived now. We are now in a post-racial society, that all the problems have been solved. We've got to understand that he didn't end up there by accident.

A lot of people died, a lot of people struggled, a lot of people continued to deal with day-to-day issues of understanding that we've got to break these psychological chains of slavery. We've got to understand who we are. We've got to understand what we can do, what we have done.

To be able to have the audacity to hope and to dream and to build, all those kinds of things don't happen magically. It's not a cosmetic thing. It doesn't matter what face is there, but you've got to be able to love yourself, respect yourself, know yourself, and build yourself, and nobody can do it for you.

No one can give you a welfare check. into acceptability. You have got to earn that by taking on the responsibility to somehow change yourself and change the world that you're living in. And I believe that that's the key issue, that it doesn't happen magically.

The fact that he was accepted by the large number of the white population, that wasn't his real accomplishment. The real accomplishment was that we should see in that as an introduction and an incentive for us to accept ourselves. And we have to understand that we can't expect him to do magical things, because he's in fact the president of all the United States of America.

And it simply serves as a symbol of our possibilities if we do the work. of trying to transform ourselves and love ourselves. One of the wonderful things, I think, probably the most impressive thing about him, for me as a role model, is Michelle Obama.

Absolutely. You see. And I say that because he didn't feel he had to leave who he was to be able to achieve his greatness. So unlike some other people who will go unnamed, who've created all kinds of self-destructive... images of themselves by leaving their own community and getting, rather than getting someone who looked like them, who raised little girls, little boys who look like them, and let them serve as models of their possibility.

Not to mention the educational, I mean, they seem so evenly yoked as a couple. Absolutely, absolutely. Educationally, spiritually, even for the same ambitions to some degree, not that Michelle wants to be president, but that she doesn't mind taking the role of being How do they say, behind every good man is a really good woman. You know, she's happy to be that person behind him. Exactly.

And I believe, though, we didn't look to as the world turns. We didn't look to other people's models of excellence. We looked to ourselves and saw respect within our own communities.

Now that's an important kind of lesson. That's a very, very important lesson. In speaking about their relationship and getting to African-American men and women in the relationship, and really in general, because a lot of what you're talking about, we're talking about African-Americans and that sort of thing, but this is really what you're saying is applicable to all people. But in just looking at them and what we see from their relationship, how do you see men and women relationships today?

We've got to get it off the television and bring it back into human interactions. I bet the whole idea that you can now, who's going to be the bachelor and the bachelorette of the year, that somehow it becomes a matter of materialism. Who can have the greatest, some type of reality television show?

Or you can do it on some kind of social networking. The idea is that it has to go back to building on the basis of people knowing who they are and knowing each other in the process. If I can switch back just a minute to this whole idea of this visions for black men, visions for black women.

We have to understand the difference between being a male, a boy, and a man. In the same way we need to understand the difference between being a female, a girl, and a woman. Girls and boys play games.

They entertain themselves. But men and women... plan to build worlds, build families, and build communities.

And I believe that that is our key issue. In other words, we have abdicated the responsibility. You mentioned earlier in our conversation this whole idea of the loss of those grandmothers who told their granddaughters about how they needed to have the respect.

That's because grandmothers are younger than the daughters now. Exactly. And I'm saying, but. But I'm saying we've got to reclaim that kind of responsibilities in our communities where we have some control over that, whether it's in our schools, in our churches, in our neighborhoods, wherever we are.

We've got to somehow elevate those who represent the best that we can be rather than somehow representing the floozies and the hoes and the pimps as being our claim of what manhood is all about. Now we're on PBS, Dr. Akbar. Now I can appreciate what you're saying.

Sorry about that. We're about to walk things down here. We definitely understand what you're saying in context and want people to understand that Dr. Akbar's views are his own and not reflective of WSRE or mine or anybody else's, but certainly respectfully hearing what you have to say because you do come to us with a great deal of credentials to say the things that I think that you're saying to people who Should be listening and what they can use, use it and what they can't, let it go back out the other ear.

You know, that's just how it is when we bring in people such as yourself. We talked about some of your... People that you look up to and that sort of thing.

Who does Dr. Naeem Akbar look to other than, we know W.E.B. Du Bois and that sort of thing, but who are some of the thinkers that you think about? Yeah, one of the chapters in the book, Visions for Black Men, is I kind of like identify like five heroes in that book who represent certain kind of qualities. that represent the best of what we can be.

And I believe that they are kind of my heroes. And I think that if anyone walked into my office, they would see on the wall in my office the picture of Martin Luther King Jr., who I think represented someone who was just not a preacher, but took the word to transform the society. He didn't just take his education as a means to hoop.

and a hooping holler, but he used it to somehow to do what Jesus did. He used Jesus' example to transform the world he was living in. Elijah Muhammad, who I think, despite the fact he's been hated on in all kinds of negative ways, he transformed Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali.

He transformed Malcolm Little into Malcolm X. and that somehow... The information and the concepts that he had were brilliant ideas in terms of self-respect, self-development, self-love, how you love yourself and love your women, your community, look in your black face and find dignity in that. All of those things. That's another one of my heroes.

Paul Robeson, who understood. A tremendously gifted man. Four-letter athlete, you know. An outstanding actor, brilliant singer. He was able to use his art and his athletic ability, not as a means of somehow getting the biggest house in town, a seven-bedroom house, but being able to somehow represent, use this to transform our community.

Got you. With our last few minutes here on the show, because we had two hours to talk with you, How... How, at the end of the day, when someone sees this show or hears any of your lectures or reads any of your books, at the end of the day, how does a person know that they are loving themselves? I believe that they know they're loving themselves by what they do. I spend every day of my life trying to help those people who are most like me get better.

to be better, to be more better in whatever way I can. And I don't mean just my children. I've raised three young, two young black men, a young black woman, and I have grandchildren now.

I work with them directly, but I mean all my students, all the people I've worked with. And if your work is engaging and trying to lift up those people most like you, then you know you love yourself. But that's almost like a self-actualization, I think, at that point.

Because you've self-actualized to a point where that's what your work is now, or has been, I guess, for the last decade. I've been doing that for the last 30 years. It's giving back to people.

I have to go back and recapture that because that is true. You have been doing that. You've done that. Crossing continents doing it and trying to talk with people. So you self-actualized a long time ago.

But no, it's been a gradual process. I've grown into doing that. But that's how you know. You ask, how do you know if you love yourself?

And so to get to that self-actualization has been some of the applications of some of the things that we've been talking about here today. It's been those kinds of things. So every day I do something to help lift us up. I confront issues when they affect our people in a negative way.

I want to say to our young black boys. Pull up your pants, brother. Look like a man. You are a king.

You know, come on, sister. Don't be looking like that. Look like the woman and the queen that you're supposed to be. And don't hate on the ones who believe they're kings and queens. Absolutely.

Appreciate. And understand I have nothing, I have absolutely nothing against our brilliant athletic skills and our brilliant artistic skills. But ultimately, use those skills not to... tear all communities down and don't think for a minute that because you've made it we've all made it.

The reality is is that each one must help one if you're not pulling someone up behind you then you are the failure. that that lowest person on the chain is all about. I have one minute left, Dr. Akbar. Okay. At the end of this show, at the end of reading a book, at the end of any of your lectures, what is it that you hope someone will take away?

Knowing who you are and loving who you are automatically gives you the imperative for what you do with your life. That self-knowledge is the key, self-love and self-respect. is the incentive and the energy that drives and fuels what your activities need to be all about.

I believe that every person, even though we are focusing on the issues of black people, I think that's true for white people, Native Americans, Hispanics, everybody must love themselves and try to lift themselves up. But you don't have to lift yourself up. at the, in disservice to someone else.

You don't have to stand on someone else to be able to exalt yourself. If you somehow understand the dignity in you, if I can love the God in me, I can see the God in you and understand that I have the responsibility to help to facilitate that wherever I see it. And if you had to tell someone to go somewhere to get this information or this knowledge, how to begin to love themselves and how to begin to think and get to where even you are and above, what would that source be? What could they tap into?

Other than my books. Shame on you. That's one good story.

But that's their wealth of knowledge, their wealth of knowledge in these. Yeah, but there are references in those kinds of things. The information is there, but one must engage in. trying to tie those things into understanding how these things tie into you. I certainly have appreciated you being here on our show.

An exciting talk. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Dr. Naeem Akbar, clinical psychologist, and as you see, a great thinker here on The Aware Show.

For all of us here, thank you so much for joining us. I'm Dede Shard saying until the next time, stay informed and stay aware. Good night. Thank you.

Transcript for:Understanding African-American Psychology and Empowerment

Transcript for:
Understanding African-American Psychology and Empowerment