Transcript TURNING THE TIDE

TURNING THE TIDE
Peter Scott Blackman
C.E.O. – The Afiya Trust
[email protected]
Tel: 020 7582 0400
Please make note of the following website for fresh and helpful
information concerning racial/cultural psychology look up:
www.roberttcarterassociates.com
For a novel insight into stereotyping please search on the internet
for:
Implicit Association Tests
Turning the Tide – the report on the 2005 national
conference of the BME Mental Health Network is
available from The Afiya Trust for £4.99

Contemporary Black and Minority Ethnic mental health and
criminal justice figures are not ‘just very worrying’, they are
atrocious.

Those concerning to the young African, Caribbean population
are particularly unacceptable.

As successive generations come of age, we are incubating and
reiterating the crisis. And black families, generation after
generation, watch as the lives of our loved ones are destroyed.

This curse is epidemic in our community. Our parents, our
children, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces, our
friends, hardly a black family is untouched.

If these same statistics concerned white people, loud alarms
would have long ago declared a national emergency.

Mental health studies in the Caribbean
showed the incidence of acute psychotic
diagnoses in Trinidad and Barbados was
lower than within the UK black African,
Caribbean population; and no higher than
within the wider, general population of the
UK.

This suggests there is an active and
selective environmental determinant within
the UK that can ‘drive black people mad’.

To understand the present it is necessary to
know the past.

Today’s unacceptable BME statistics, above
all those for the African, Caribbean
population, have their source in the legacy of
centuries of chattel slavery and imperial
colonialism. The typical socialised European
view of black people is a fiction concocted
from the traditions of slave traders and
slaveholders.
The insult of that legacy is the unremitting
psychosocial and economic oppression that,
my people suffer today, in the face of socially
assumed white privilege.

Today’s appalling BME mental health and
criminal justice statistics reflect the black
man’s struggle to make it in a white world.

This is also my struggle.

The French government recently declared May 10th
as a national day of remembrance for victims of
slavery. The French President, Jacques Chirac stated:

“A county’s grandeur means it must take responsibility
for all its history, with its pages of glory as well as its
periods of shadow.”

“Slavery fed racism. When people tried to justify the
unjustifiable, that was when the first racist theories
were elaborated. Racism is a crime of the heart and
the spirit, which is why the memory of slavery remains
a living wound for some of our fellow citizens”.

The Church of England also recently voted to
apologise to the descendants of victims of the
slave trade. They recognised they were “at
the heart” of it”, were “directly responsible for
what happened” and acknowledged “the
dehumanising and shameful” consequences.

We need our Prime Minister to apologise to the
world and to the British BME population for the role
Britain played in the chattel slave trade; and for the
damage and blight its legacy still brings to modern
day BME families.

This would be a positive step towards healing the
suppurating societal lesions that lead to the
unacceptable figures. It presents an opportunity for
the Prime Minister to do something positive. By
demonstrating genuine humility, an apology would
help to alleviate the current climate of BME anger
and resentment.

People ask, why should we apologise today for crimes other
people committed so long ago? The slave trade was abolished 200
years ago. This is the 21st century, so why keep dragging up the
past?

Well, for many of us, even in 2006, that past is inescapable. My
very name Peter Scott Blackman is a slave label. This is true of the
vast majority of African, Caribbean people with European
surnames. Slaves were property. They were given the mark of their
owners. Our original African titles were stripped from us.


Scott, my mother’s maiden name, denotes that a plantation owner
called Scott owned her African ancestors enslaved in Jamaica.
Likewise, Blackman denotes that a slave owner called Blackman
owned my father’s ancestors. Scott Blackman is the mark and
brand of chattel ownership.
Thus the legacy of oppression began. It involved the complete and
thorough degradation of the African and their descendants. That
legacy still thrives today deep within in the collective subconscious
of modern Europe.

How do modern Western European societies
value people of colour?

And how did those values arise?

Where is the psychic toxin of racism rooted?

Let’s take a quick look at just one example
from the story of sugar.

The following quotes are from “Seeds of
Change - Five plants that transformed
mankind” by Henry Hobhouse (1985)

“…the sugar story: how an unnecessary “food” became
responsible for the Africanisation of the Caribbean”

“…one ton represented the lifetime sugar production of one
slave who had been captured, manacled, chained again on
board ship, sold on the island market, and then naturalised to
the conditions of the Caribbean (“seasoned”)”.

“…on average, for (the sugar consumption of) every 250
English men, women, and children a black died every year”.

“Every ton represented a life. Every teaspoonful represented
six days of a slave’s life”.

“It was…the first time in history that one race had been
uniquely selected for a servile role”.

“..The novel feature of this particular slave trade was
not only that the slaves were Negroes and the traders
were white, but that a whole new mythology grew up
to justify the industry. The Negroes were the children
of Ham, and therefore were unworthy of consideration
as human beings; free white men could not be
expected to work in the sugar plantations; the Negro
was discouraged from becoming a Christian, and
forbidden to read and write, so that he could continue
to be regarded as hardly human. These theories
became accepted within two generations of the first
ship load of slaves arriving in Lisbon in 1443, and
were perhaps necessary to blunt men’s minds to this
monstrous aberration in the history of the western
world.”

Financial accounts from sugar
plantations in Barbados, the
birthplace of my late father, show
clearly that black people were
counted in with the beasts.
The following quote from “A True & Exact
History of Barbadoes” by Richard Ligond
(1657) – is an entry from the planter’s
annual account:
“As also for the moderate decays of our Negres, Horses, and Cattle,
notwithstanding all our Recruits by breeding all those kinds - £500”
There were also huge differentials in annual allowances made for
clothing:


Annual clothing for 30 white servants
Annual clothing for 100 black slaves
£164.40
£ 35.00
That is:


For each white servant £5.48
For each black slave £0.35
Thus black African humanity was valued at around 1/16th the value
of white
European humanity, i.e. each white servant was worth 16 black
people.
The degradation of African peoples was
codified by academia.
The quotes that follow are sampled from a
lecture delivered by Georg Wilhem Freidrich
Hegel (1770 -1831). They demonstrate the
approach of learned 19th century Europeans
to Africa.

Hegel was perhaps the greatest of the German philosophers.

Hegel thought the role of philosophical science was to link the
development of the rational powers of the human mind to lived
experience.

He taught that reality is absolute mind, reason or spirit, made
manifest in history and human affairs.


One of my favourite sentences, “the whole is far greater than the
sum of its parts” had its roots in Hegel’s teachings.
Perhaps no thinker since Kant has had a comparable influence on
European philosophy, art, religion, and literature.

During 1822-83, at the age of 52, just 9 years
before the end of his life, Hegel held the
Chair of Philosophy at the University of
Berlin. When introducing a course on “The
Philosophy of History”, this is what he taught
his students about the people of Africa.

“The Negro exhibits the natural man in his
completely wild and untamed state. We must lay
aside all thought of reverence and morality – all that
we call feeling – if we would rightly comprehend
him, there is nothing harmonious with humanity to
be found in this type of character.”

“…Cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary
and proper. Among us instinct deters from it…But
with the Negro this is not the case, and the
devouring of human flesh is altogether consonant
with the general principles of the human race; to the
sensual Negro, human flesh is but an object of
sense – mere flesh.”

“Among the Negroes moral sentiments are
quite weak, or more strictly speaking, nonexistent…”

“Through the pervading influence of slavery
all those bonds of moral regard which we
cherish toward each other disappear, and it
does not occur to the Negro mind to expect
from others what they are enabled to claim.”

“…It is manifest that want of self control
distinguishes the character of the Negroes.
This condition is capable of no development
or culture, and as we see them at this day,
such have they always been .The only
essential connection that has existed and
continued between the Negroes and the
Europeans is that of slavery…We may
conclude slavery to have been the occasion
of the increase of human feeling among the
Negroes.”

“Africa…is no historical part of the world, it
has no movement or development to exhibit.
Historical movements in it – that is the
northern part – belong to the Asiatic or
European world…Egypt does not belong to
the African Spirit. What we properly
understand by Africa, is the unhistorical,
undeveloped spirit still involved in the
conditions of mere nature, and which had to
be presented here only as on the threshold of
the world’s history.”


In like manner in universities throughout
Europe, the indigenous, African disciplines of
communal and spiritual management,
philosophic conviction, worship and law
making were mocked by academia and
misrepresented as so much ‘superstitious
clap-trap’.
European distortion globally promoted a
generalised view of traditional black African
cultural life as an object of contempt. It was
depicted as a manifestation to be associated
with fear, fecklessness and bizarre lifethreatening rituals.

For example, common English usage of the
term ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ is associated with
gibberish and meaningless nonsense.

Mumbo-jumbo /.... n. (pl. -jumbos) 1
meaningless or ignorant ritual. 2 language or
action intended to mystify or confuse. 3 an
object of senseless veneration. [Mumbo
Jumbo, a supposed African idol] - (The
Concise Oxford Dictionary 9th Edition, 1995)

Yet, the truth is that Mumbo-Jumbo is a Mandingo phrase from West
Africa. It refers to a spiritual leader who protects his people from
evil.

This relates to the ancient, sophisticated African spiritual community
of stilt–dancers, who practise their art in Africa and the Caribbean to
this day.

In the Caribbean this practice survives largely as a carnival
masquerade called ‘Mocko Jumbi’. ‘

Jumbi’ means ‘spirit’ in the Caribbean and ‘Mocko’ refers to a doctor
who cures illness and who also `sees' in the spiritual sense.

In action, the colourful, fourteen feet tall Mocko Jumbi stilt dancers
seem to defy gravity. Whirling and twirling precariously, they bend
over backwards and stumble as if about to fall; all to the pulsing,
hypnotic rhythms of the Mocko Jumbi drummers.

It is a very spiritual art that represents the balance between this
world and the next

Please bear in mind the profound impact Hegel and others had on
modern European thinking.

Echoes of the academic codification of crass ignorance and frank
racist domination still resonate today in contemporary mainstream
thinking.

The BME populations bear the oppressive burden of coercion and
suffering that results from this.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the disproportionate over
representation and treatment of the African, Caribbean population in
our mental health and criminal justice systems.

And the proposed contentious Mental Health Bill will serve to further
reinforce the relentless racist intimidation.

As young black adults reach puberty and
grow away from the relative shelter and
nurturing protection of school and family, they
are increasingly exposed to more and more
explicit racism and prejudicial treatment.

In my view, and relating to my own personal
experience, this is a significant contributory
factor to the high rate of, ‘apparently sudden
unpredicted onset of crises’ among BME
young adults.

As they explore their independence in
society, most BME young people become
aware that racism in the wider populace can
frustrate their most fundamental life
aspirations.

Experiences of racism, at this point in their
lives, become inescapable, concrete and
upfront personal.

This almost invariably leads to sensations of
dysphoric confusion.

For young BME British who were
socialised to self-identify as ‘English’, it is
shocking to be faced suddenly with the
fact that you ‘do not really belong’

That you are disinherited of those
privileges that are the naturally assumed
inheritance of ‘the white British social
family’

That you are denied things the dominant
population takes for granted.

You discover that doors open to your white friends
are ‘politely’ shut in your face.

That you must now work twice hard and be twice as
good as them to (if then) receive the same level of
recognition.

You learn on all fronts to anticipate discrimination
and rejection.

Thus young BME British people have to come to
terms with the fact that UK society has a duplicitous
morality that really is divided along black
(punishment) and white (reward) lines.

It is well known within black British society that our
young people, when internalising this reality, often
go through a process of critical and very distressing
self-confrontation. This can lead to the discovery of
a strong and resilient new ‘Black Self’. It can also
lead to serious, often life threatening mental health
and/or criminal justice crises.

Few black families in Britain are free of
complications generated through this negative
experience.

It is a stage in black British life that has, to date,
been largely ignored by the establishment; and one
that must be taken seriously into account by both
mental health and educational services.

The diversity of British BME social cultures and their variable levels
of access to supportive social capital will cause such ‘coming of age’
crises to present in different forms and levels of severity.

Thus mental service providers need to take account of diverse
‘imported and indigenous’ cultural, religious, linguistic and social
mores, as well as issues of social class, single parent families and
other social pressures.

Service providers need to reflect on the importance of such factors
and how they might affect individual experiences (in both service
user and provider), and thus the perception, presentation and
interpretations of such distress. A system is needed that can interact
with the community.

The ‘Delivering Race Equality’ programme is a first significant step
in that direction.

It must also be noted that social factors, being
dynamic, constantly evolve over time.

Unfortunately British racism, although it too evolves
with time, is a constant factor distressing the well
being of BME populations.

It is important for white people to recognise that you
too have been observed from a BME viewpoint.

More than fifty years ago my late father penned the
following words. Unfortunately for us they still ring
true today.

This is a quote from The True Negro written in 1953
by Peter MacFarren Blackman (1908 -1993)

“That offensive person, the vain, swashbuckling
arrogant white man, the scourge of our epoch; who
struts across the world setting his skin in the face of
the nations and claiming their awed submission…is
a product of bourgeois industrial technique. His
extravagant claims and equally extravagant cruelties
have kept pace with this. Today he brandishes the
atom; crying ‘bow down or burn’, his aim the
peoples’ obliteration or obeisance. Experience
teaches he gets neither.”

Perhaps you feel this is offensive
commentary – that it is too harsh a
judgement.

You may say that too was all in the past –
21st century British society has since moved
on.

You may think that such views are not
appropriate – that they do not reflect modern
Europe. I disagree. More than 50 years have
passed, and as we speak today, it’s still
happening.

The pejorative ideas about BME peoples were codified and made
universal.

Even today they resonate deep within the European collective
subconscious as a powerful subsonic, subterranean rumble.

They play a significant, active role in the socialisation and
personality development of all modern Europeans.

As such they contribute to the racial identity profiles of every
white and BME person growing up in Europe.

Our current racial-cultural psychological and racial-cultural sociopolitical difficulties are embedded in peoples' socialisation and
personality development.

These problems are profound and very pervasive. They affect
each one of us and infiltrate every aspect of our society.

Thus mental health professionals have a unique opportunity and
power to truly catalyse genuine social change.

However this can only happen if, and only if, they learn how to
understand and cope with the racial influences in their own lives and
in the lives of their service users.

Even relatively minor changes can have amplified and positive
outcomes.


In this context, wherever we refer to ‘cultural issues’ or ‘cultural
competence’ we need to expand the term to refer to ‘racial and
cultural issues’, or ‘racial/cultural competency’.
When we refer to culture only, it negates the profundity of our
predicament.

I quote from Robert T. Carter (The Influence of Race and
Racial Identity in Psychotherapy - 1995):
“One might argue that, in part, race has become less salient
because mental health clinicians, scholars, and researchers
are more comfortable examining presumed cultural and ethnic
issues. Many writers seem to suggest that race is included
within analyses and explanations of culture and ethnicity. I
contend that race is not understood when culture and
ethnicity are assumed to encompass racial issues. When race
is subsumed in ethnic and cultural phenomena, our
history….our current socio-political climate, and the
operations of our institutions are ignored. Emphasis on
ethnicity and culture, particularly when it is grounded in broad
definitions of culture, obscures how central race is…in the
delivery of mental health services, and in psychotherapeutic
encounters.”

It is very important to take this into account. We are helping to
set the future agenda for progressing mental health outcomes for
Britain’s BME population.

An apology from the Prime Minister for Britain’s role in the slave
trade would have significant influence.

The time is right.

On a universal scale, such a demonstration of good will would
undoubtedly contribute towards an improved mental health status
for Black and Minority Ethnic Britons.

To achieve this, the Prime Minister could take advantage of the
bicentenary in 2007 of the Slave Trade Act (1807) that marked
the abolition of the slave trade.

It would mark a significant step towards the turning of the tide. It
would also go a long way towards reclaiming the Union Jack flag
from the extremely racist British National Party.
I
finish with another quote from
my father. It is an excerpt from
a longer poem he wrote during
my childhood.
Excerpt from: My Song is for All Men - Peter MacFarren Blackman -1952
“To all my wide continent I welcomed these they came to
Africa
Seized all they could lay hands upon
Took the best lands for their tilling to build them white
houses
I pass them each day cool deep-shaded in green
Their dwelling places wanton in lovelinesses
Spread for their senses by sky river and sea
I am unlearned in the philosophies of government
I may not govern myself children must learn of their elders
Till they are elders themselves
I know nothing of science never created a great civilisation
Poetry song music sculpture are alike foreign to my
conceiving
I have never built a monument higher than a mudhut
Nor woven a covering for my body other than the passing
leaves of the grass
I am the subman
My footprints are nowhere in history
This is your statement, remember, this your assessment
I merely repeat you
Remember this too, I do not ask you to pity me
Remember this always you cannot condescend to me
There are many things I remember and would have
you remember as well
I smelted iron in Nubia when your generations still ploughed
with hardwood
I cast in bronze at Benin when London was marshland
I built Timbuctoo and made it a refuge for learning
When in the choirs of Oxford unlettered monks shivered
unwashed
My faith in the living mounts like a flame in my story
I am Khama the Great
I helped Bolivar enfranchise the Americas
I am Omar and his thousands who brought Spain the light
of the Prophet
I stood with my spear among the ranks of the Prempehs
And drove you far from Kumasi for more than a century
I kept you out of my coasts and not the mosquitoes
I have won many bitter battles against you and shall win them
again
I am Toussaint who taught France there was no limit to
liberty
I am Harriet Tubman flouting your torture to assert my
faith in man’s freedom
I am Nat Turner whose daring and strength always defied
you
I have my yesterdays and shall open the future widely before
me”
THANK YOU!