Foreword
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
By Dr. Nathan Hare
Call him Dr. M, as I do, though I’ve known him by other names in other
places and, like Diogenes, who went around holding up a lantern to the
faces of the people he would meet in the streets of ancient Athens
looking for an honest man, I have come to the realization that we as a
people have been waiting and looking for somebody like Dr. M to come
along for more than half a century, ever since America was stunned by
The Mark of Oppression (the Jim Crow era book by two white liberal
psychiatrists whose findings had brought them to the heartfelt
conclusion that the race of people called “Negroes” was “crushed.”
In only four years after their epitaph was written, Negroes (now called
“blacks,” “Blacks,” “Afro-Americans,” “African-Americans,” or as Dr. M
sometimes calls them “American Africans”) had exploded in Montgomery
with passive resistance. In four more years the “sit-in movement” broke
out among the youth, followed like a one-two punch by the so-called
“freedom riders” (roving bands of individuals who boarded and defied the
segregation of interstate vehicles and included a future student of
mine on spring break from Howard University by the name of Stokely
Carmichael). Then came “Black Power,” in the context of which I first
heard of a man who had metamorphosed from the slave-name Marvin Jackmon
into a prominent “North American African poet” who went by the name of
Marvin X (the X connoting “the unknown”).
dr. nathan hare and marvin x
While, despite the fact that I have known him through the intervening
years, I cannot unravel every single quality of the brother, I can
testify that Dr. M is a brand new Marvin, a Dr. Marvin, a social doctor,
if you will, with a gift and a mission for a new black movement. I know
this to be true because, aside from my Ph.D. and years of experience in
the practice of clinical psychology, I specialized in the study of
social movements for a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago.
But more than that, I have watched a dedicated Dr. M, up close and
clinically, going about his fearless work in the mean streets of San
Francisco.
Over a period of many months, on many a dark and dreary sometimes rainy
Wednesday night, I served as a consultant in clinical psychology to Dr.
M’s “Black Reconstruction Group” (the pilot to his twelve-step model now
unveiled in this important book on “How to Recover from Addiction to
White Supremacy.” In the Recovery Theatre’s pilot groups, I sat with
diverse and ad hoc coteries of men and women gathered impromptu in the
austere basement of a Catholic church, St. Boniface, located in the
heart of The Tenderloin, the highest crime district in San Francisco,
just down a few blocks from the famous Glide Memorial Methodist Church.
Many a night I marveled at the ease with which Dr. M and his talented
co-facilitator, Suzette Celeste brought out trickles of lost and
unleashed hope and inspiration in the minds of destitute and degraded
street people as well as in the confused and empty psyches of invited
members of the black bourgeoisie who, still trying to be unbroken, had
come where not many “bourgies” would dare to tread.
On many an appointed night I stood by silently looking on while Dr. M
and his collaborators sauntered out into the shadowy mysteries of
dilapidated streets to solicit and harness hapless homeless men and a
woman or two and bring them in to meet as equals with the anxious
representatives of the black bourgeoisie who had dared to cross
momentarily back over their tentative territorial and social
boundaries. This of course is not recommended for the feeble or the
fainthearted; because, until the revolution comes, or the proletariat
triumphs, there will be difficulties and perils in chance encounters of
the social classes. So I must hasten to explain that a security
conscious Dr. M was operating within a safety net of collaborators
competent in the martial arts; like Geoffrey Grier, who has been an
international martial arts competitor and is a son of a black
psychiatrist, Dr. William Grier, coauthor with Dr. Price Cobb of the
late 1960s blockbuster, Black Rage.
At the moment when the oppressed have had enough, their rage will
explode -- Fanon had warned us in The Wretched of the Earth -- and it
is at that moment, at the very point of mental and spiritual coagulation
and defeat, when they will come together and rise. Frantz Fanon went
on to tell of a category of reconstruction groups called “’djemaas’
(village assemblies) of northern Africa or in the meetings of western
Africa, tradition demands that the quarrels which occur in a village
should be settled in public. It is communal self-criticism, of course,
and with a note of humor, because everybody is relaxed, and because in
the last resort we all want the same things. But the more the
intellectual imbibes the atmosphere of the people, the more completely
he abandons the habits of calculation, of unwonted silence, of mental
reservations, and shakes the spirit of concealment. And it is true that
already at that level we can say that it spreads its own light and its
own reason.”
However, psychiatric authority for a self-help peer group focus on
individual feelings (or addiction) in relation to white supremacy became
available anew in the late 1960s, when Jeffrey Grier’s father, Dr.
William H. Grier, and his collaborator, Dr. Price M. Cobbs, published
Black Rage. Dr. Grier has also consulted with Dr. M and his Recovery
Theatre around the time of the pilot trial run of the first “Black
Reconstruction Groups.” According to Grier and Cobbs, in the
“Introduction to the Paperback Edition” of Black Rage, “The most
important aspect of therapy with blacks, we are convinced, is that
racist mistreatment must be echoed and underlined as a fact, an
unfortunate fact, but a most important fact – a part of reality.
Dissatisfaction with such mistreatment is to be expected, and one’s
resentment should be of appropriate dimensions” among black warriors who
would exact retribution. “Psychiatry for such warriors,” Grier and
Cobbs went on to explain, should aim to “keep them fit for the duty at
hand and healthy enough to enjoy the victories” that are likely to
emerge.
Fitness for duty is a pleasant but likely side effect of Dr. M’s “Black
Reconstruction Groups” working to free the minds of persons addicted to
white supremacy. This no doubt is no doubt why they do not limit
themselves in their group sessions to expressions of resentment of
racist mistreatment and dissatisfaction but also calmly allow its hidden
effects, which often remain unconscious in the way in which the
relentless karate chops of white supremacy have killed our dreams on a
daily basis and shattered our ability to love, to feel loved, to love
ourselves and therefore one another. I listened with much satisfaction
as Dr. M and his assemblies delved into the depths of fractured feelings
and emotions of the brokenhearted in order to help them come to terms
with betrayal, jealousy and rage, in their moving endeavors to learn to
love again.
And so it is that you will find many a reference to love in How to
Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy. This includes, for
instance, “Women Who Love” and the motivations of the men who love
them.
Dr. M’s own fitness for duty is complex, unique and variegated.
According to James W. Sweeney, "Marvin walked through the muck and mire
of hell and came out clean as white fish and black as coal." Marvin can
boast of “a Ph.D. in Negrology,” as he puts it,” the study of nigguhs”
issued by the University of Hardknocks’s College of Hell), based on
twelve years of research , independent study , and practicum in San
Francisco's Tenderloin and other unlettered social laboratories
throughout the United States.
There may still be hope, if it pleases you, for Dr. M to join the white
man’s system of miseducation and mental health care, when we consider
that psychologists, including one of my mentors, the late Dr. Carlton
Goodlett, at first were “grandfathered” in when the licensure of
psychologists was started in the state of California. Later came the
oral exam (conversational, not dental), followed in time by an essay
exam, before the boom in “standardized “ multiple choice tests for which
workshops were offered to prepare you for a fee, causing excellent
practitioners, especially black ones, to be blocked from licensure until
they found out and forked over whopping workshop fees .
There is also a burgeoning market opening up in “clinical sociology” and
“sociological practice” still cutting out its slice of the marketplace
and finding its way in matters of licensure and credentialing in the
field of sociology. But here it may be important to say that the
self-help peer group does not require a sociological or a mental health
professional, any more than the primordial AA groups from which the
mental health profession has profited and learned. Dr. M is a social
“doctor” (which etymologically means “teacher”) grappling with a social
problem, white supremacy and its punishing residue in the minds of
oppressed black individuals and white oppressors who have chosen to
reject and come to places where their fathers lied. Oppressors pure and
simple, who accept white supremacy, must be dealt with in a later
context, as you will not very well be able to keep them in a Black
Reconstruction or White Supremacy Destruction Group (or White Supremacy
Deconstruction, if you will).
Much in the manner of Hegel in his essay on “Master and Slave,” Marvin
senses that the oppressor distorts his own mind as well as the mind of
the oppressed. Hence Type I and Type II White Supremacy Addiction. White
sociologists and the late black psychologist, Bobby Wright, converged
in their findings of pathological personality traits (“the authoritarian
personality” and “the racial psychopathic personality,” as Bobby put
it).
But if Hegel was correct in his notion that the oppressor cannot free
the slave, that the slave must force the oppressor’s hand, then it is
Type II White Supremacy Addiction which if not more resistant to cure,
must occupy our primary focus. Type II White Supremacy may be seen as a
kind of “niggeritis” or “Negrofication” growing out of an
over-identification with the master, who is white. As in any disorder
severity of symptoms may vary from mild to moderate or severe.
As Frantz Fanon put it when he spoke for the brother with jungle fever
in Black Skin, White Mask: “I wish to be regarded as white. If I can be
loved by the white woman who is loved by the white man, then I am white
like the white man; I am a full human being.” In the twisted mental
convolution of a brother in black skin behind a white mask, Fanon
observed a “Negro dependency complex” independently chronicled in my own
Black Anglo Saxons (black individuals with white minds in black
bodies). They struggle to look, think, talk and walk white by day, then
go to sleep at night and dream that they will wake up white. They refuse
to realize that no matter what they may ever do they will never get out
of the black race alive.
On the other hand, you are going to be seeing “nouveau blacks” and
lesser Afrocentrics -- who faithfully and unquestionably follow
twelve-month years and endeavor even to blackenize the twelve disciples
of Jesus Christ -- jumping up to question Dr. M’s re-africanization of
the “Twelve Steps” model for “using the Eurocentric twelve steps,” but
they forget that the very effort to be practical and collective is the
original African way. In any event, we must build on whites as whites
have built on us, taking the best of the West and leaving the rest
alone. But Dr. M has expressly and creatively added a thirteenth step;
for his goal is not just recovery but discovery, his goal is not just to
change the individual but to change the individual to get ready to
change the world.
Meanwhile there is one thing on which we can all agree: in any serious
attempt to solve the bitter mental ravages of white supremacy, we must
face the unadulterated fact that we are limited when we look to the
institutionalized “profession” and their professional “providers.” This
of course is not to say that the institutionalized professionals cannot
be helpful. Dr. M is quick to point out that a self-help peer group
cannot cure all the diverse neuroses and psychoses that afflict us.
Indeed he goes so far as to suggest that some of us “may need to be
committed.”
The late Queen Mother Moore (who loved to boast that she had “gone as
far as the fourth grade, and stayed in school too long to learn
anything”) delighted in going around deconstructing our “slave
mentalities” and saying somebody needs to “do some surgery on these
Negro minds” – in which Queen Mother had diagnosed a chronic condition
she called “oppression psychoneurosis.” Queen Mother Moore was basically
joking, that is, laughing to keep from crying, but it is no joke that
mental health professionals, operating under the medical model, think
nothing of seeing a person suffering from a psychosocial problem and not
only treating the victim instead of the problem but – much in the
manner of any addict or drug pusher– use or apply chemicals and
sometimes chemical abuse to deal with the inability of the “patient” to
feel good in a bad place and thrive, to try to “have heart” in a
heartless world. Many people are unaware to this very day that the
practice once was rampant for psychiatrists to treat a person with
chronic mental maladies by subjecting them to lobotomies cutting off a
portion of their brains. Shock treatment was another method – you’re
shocked by life, let’s shock your brain, Senator Eagleton (who later ran
for the vice-presidency in the 1970s on the ticket with George
McGovern).
It should never have been any surprise that the mental health profession
would be of only partial help in reconstructing the psychic
consequences of centuries of prolonged brainwashing and subjugation
(this is not to mention “Sicko” and what we know of the crippling new
effects of “managed care” on the medical profession). Many mental health
experts, the overwhelming majority of them white, have long suggested
that the “medical model” may be inappropriate in the treatment of the
psychological, not to mention, sociological components of mental
illness.
But you don’t have to be a mental health professional or a sociologist
to know that we can no longer restrict our search for healing to
professional shrinks, raring back in executive chairs and carpeted
suites stocked with “psychometric instruments” standardized on the white
middle class, far removed from the realities of the concrete social
milieu of afflicted and homeless black “subjects” living lives of
hardship and subjugation, with no assurance of available treatment.
Even when they are “insured they are limited to the care and treatment
some insurance clerk is willing to “authorize.” In matters of mental
health, this typically will include a few sessions of “fifty minute
hours” of “talk therapy” before leaving with a prescription or chemical
palliative to dull agony and the pain but not the punishment of life on
the skids in a sick society.
The hour is up and time is running out, black people, but white
supremacy is not. We are living now in the final and highest stage of
racism and white supremacy. We’ve let our struggle slip back while
sitting in classrooms and conferences crooning about “afrocentricity”
and ancient African glories that have gone forever.
We have come now to a crossroads. We have lost control of our children’s
minds, our future. We have lost their respect, and appear to be on a
collision course to a war of words between the black generations, in
which hip-hop youth disparage and mock our language, our music and our
humanity with a creativity and a rime and a rhythm we can’t fathom, let
alone equal in our pitifully fruitless endeavors to eliminate the
“n-word” and box with the black-on-black random violence of
dissocialized youth who have concluded that adults and their leaders
cannot or will not fight the power. Who knows but it may be that Dr.
M’s movement of recovery from addiction to and from white supremacy is
offering us a final and effective chance to begin to “sit down
together,” to get together and get our heads together.
Review of How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
Peer mental health group cures 'addiction'
by Reginald James
Laney Tower
Laney College Newspaper,
Oakland CA
May 22, 2008
Author, playwright, and poet Dr. Marvin X is a modern theologian and
philosopher sent to earth to help others find themselves. He's not a
prophet, but is certainly beyond worthy of his Oakland bestowed title of
"Plato" (Ishmael Reed).
His most recent book is, "How to recover from the addiction to white
supremacy: A Pan African 12-Step Model for a mental health peer group."
Using a poetic and personal prose, Dr. M, as he is known, leads readers
of all ethnicities and national origins on a journey to recover from
what he terms the earth's most deadly disease: white supremacy.
"White supremacy can be any form of domination, whether stemming from
religious mythology and ritual, or cultural mythology and ritual, such
as tribal and caste relations," writes Dr. M. "White supremacy is
finally a class phenomena, the rich against the poor,thus the process of
recovery must include a redistribution of global wealth, for there is
no doubt that the rich became rich by exploiting the poor, not by any
natural inheritance or superior intelligence."
Dr. M, a founder of the Black Arts movement, uses his life experience
with drug addiction to create a recovery model for others. Similar to
the "12-step model" used by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the book reads
like a personal narrative of not just one man's struggle to overcome a
grafted sense of self-inferiority and a disillusioned projection of
superiority in others, but a prayer of confidence that when others
connect with their spirits, they will be able to overcome "stinking
thinking," negative attitudes and self-destructive behavior.
After defining white supremacy in the introduction, the next chapter
details how to detox and "rid the body and mind of the toxicity of
decades under the influence of racist ideology of institutions that have
rendered us into a state of drunkenness and denial."
After detoxification, patients are now ready to step into a new era. The
first step to recovery is to "admit we are not powerless over
self-hatred, racism and white supremacy thinking."
Dr. M's message of mental purification comes through strong in his
accounts, and his vast historical knowledge of the experience of North
American Africans" (so-called African Americans) encourages students to
study. His vast literary references do not discriminate as he makes
reference to Shakespeare and "classic" Greek tragedies as well.
"The Other White People," as he refers to them, "are an enigma to
themselves, a conundrum of major proportions, transcending Shakespeare's
Othello in tragic dimension, for their tragic flaw is lack of self
knowledge."
"Such is the gracious gift of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
It has produced a Pan African people in love with all things European:
women, clothing, religion, education (what people in their right minds
would send their children to the enemy to become educated, especially
without a revolutionary agenda), political philosophy, social habits,
dietary preferences, sexual mores, etc" writes Dr. M.
While he seeks to create a dialogue with all, the sexism ingrained in
this society leaps out at you. He attempts to make amends by apologizing
for his past instances of sexism and emotional, verbal, and physical
abuse of women.
The most powerful aspect of the book is the encouragement to the reader
to gain a working knowledge of self. When speaking to the need for
patients to take a "moral inventory," Dr. M puts a mirror up to all
people.
Breaking down dynamics of interracial relationships with the analytical
perception of a sociologist or psychologist, including historical
context of relationships between black women and white men and the taboo
of white woman with a black man, Dr. M simplifies the frustration faced
by women who date outside of their "race" and the reaction of those who
feel their "natural partners" have been stolen.
"In this war with the white woman over the black man's sperm, the black
woman, in desperation and denial, tries to mimic the white woman as much
as possible, donning blond hair and continuing the tradition of
bleaching cream throughout Pan Africa."
Equally healing is the emphasis on seeking forgiveness. When under the
influence of substances or mind altering racist ideology, people often
hurt people that are closest to them. Dr. M apologizes for his own
shortcomings while under the influence of not just white supremacy, but
while using crack cocaine. The prolific writer fell victim to the
"ghost" for 12 years, and apologizes to his family and especially his
daughters.
He also apologizes on behalf of the "Black Bourgeoisie," "Pan African
Professors" he attacked because they were "not as radical and
revolutionary as I believed they should, after all, white supremacy
institutions are not about to allow a radical Pan African ideology and
philosophy to flourish within its institutional framework," writes Dr.
M.
Dr. M is able to weave not only events in his life which were
symptomatic of white supremacy, but the thought process and actions of
others.
While some may be quick to write Dr. M off as a Pan-African
revolutionary (which he is), or a "reverse racist" (which he is not),
his book benefits people of all ethnicities to come to grips with their
preconceived notions about one another.
He successfully differentiates between white supremacy and "white
people" for only a few handsomely reap the benefits of white supremacy,
while others simply enjoy white privilege. He also emphasizes that white
supremacy has not, and will not, flourish without disciples and
co-conspirators.
"The white supremacy rulers have used poor whites and working class
whites to delude whites into thinking the blacks are the cause of their
misery and economic exploitation, just as capitalism is presently using
immigrant labor to suggest they are the cause of middle and lower class
white economic woes, while in fact it is the white supremacy global
bandits who are outsourcing for cheap labor." Dr. M equates the
assertion with the current immigration debate.
Ultimately, after completing the 12-step model, patients are encouraged
to join the "cultural revolution." Harkening to the era of he 1960s, Dr.
M suggests "linguistic transcendence" in which North American Africans
reclaim a regal self-concept.
In the great tradition of indigenous healers, Dr. M pours love into
patients inspiring hope for a cure for what others have deemed the only
reality.
Like all scientists, Dr. M is experimenting, hoping that patients will
actively involve themselves in their recovery. The "peer group mental
health model" accompanies the book and allows the reader to form their
own circle to undergo transformation with friends, family, or those
people you haven't met yet. Starting a much needed dialogue, Dr. M
brings forward "5000 watts" of shock therapy to awake people to their
senses.
Dr. M obtained his PhD in Negrology from the University of Hell, USA.
Formerly known as Marvin Jackmon, he was born in Fowler, CA and grew up
in Fresno and Oakland. He attended Merritt College and San Francisco
State University where he received a BA and MA in English. He has taught
English, African American Literature, Drama, journalism, and more at
Fresno State, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, San Francisco State University,
University of Nevada, Reno, Mills, and Laney College. He was an
professor at Fresno State University when then Governor Ronald Reagan
found out Dr. M refused to serve in Vietnam--he was barred from
teaching.
His other books include Love and War, poems, 1995, In the Crazy House
Called America, essays, 2002, and his most recent Beyond Religion,
toward Spirituality, 2007His books are available from Black Bird Press,
1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley, CA, 94702. $19.95 each. His Academy of da
Corner is at 14th and Broadway, Northeast corner. He is presently
organizing the Blackwell Institute of Art, Math and Science. How to
Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy was used as a textbook at
Berkeley City College and Oakland's Merritt College.
marvin x and fillmore slim will perform together at the black repertory theatre, berkeley, september 30, 8pm.
PROCEEDS BENEFIT THE MOVEMENT NEWSPAPER AND THE BLACK REPERTORY GROUP THEATRE, INC.
