“You’ve been misled,
you’ve been had, you’ve been took” – Malcolm X. This
is the opening quote to, what I believe, is a very powerful and inspiring book.
Though this book was not on the reading list, I discovered it by means of
another book called ‘Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery’ by Na’im
Akbar, who Tom Burrell states he was inspired by. Both books touch on the
unseen reasons as to why African-Americans remain disadvantaged. This book
carefully looks into the history of the African-American community, and shows
where our poverty, disunity, lack of opportunity, deep insecurity, lack of
education, and self-hatred originated from, and how it is propagated today.
As the quote suggests, we have been deceived and taken advantage of, possibly
by our own ignorance.
Burrell
opens up the book by letting us know that we as a people are greater than what
we think we are, after which he questions why we still remain in a
disadvantaged state, and why we as a people do not seem to be making a positive
progress in American society.
“We are strong, survivors of the middle
passage, the whip and the chains. We have survived centuries of terror,
humiliation, vilification, and depravation. We are smart. Even when our
literacy was illegal, we learned quickly, invented discovered, built, taught,
and excelled against all odds. We are creative. Making our way out of ‘no way!’
and constantly birthing and rebirthing American art and culture. So then why, after all this time, when
calculating the achievement of the ‘American Dream’, are we still ranked at the
bottom of almost every ‘good’ list and the top of every ‘bad’ list? Why despite
our apparent strength, intelligence, and resourcefulness, do we continue to lag
behind and languish in so many aspects of American life?” (Brainwashed
Introduction page IX)
The
answer of course becomes a broad and detailed discussion, linking back to our
people’s mentality or consciousness. Burrell goes on to describe the answer to “cancer, that can’t be healed because it
can’t be discussed honestly and openly.” From this point in the book, Burrell begins to
tell the story of how he gained personal insight into this problem, starting
from childhood on up.
Tom
Burrell was born and raised in the south side of Chicago. He experienced
poverty, just as many African-Americans do, and received government assistance.
But despite this, he began to question the overall intent of government
programs such as food stamps and public housing assistance because it
represented an “unquestioned dependency” and
to what he further described as “learned
helplessness”, to which is he believed to be “reinforcements to a deep-seated, race-based inferiority”.
Burrell launched a lucrative advertising
agency (named Burrell Advertising), in which he promoted products and services
not aimed at the African- American community. He began to give positive and
realistic depictions of African-Americans in the media, a move which he
described as “positive propaganda”. Becoming
chief executive officer (CEO) of Burrell Communications, he made it his goal to
“connect the dots from slavery and Jim
Crow segregation to social and commercial propaganda” to fully understand the way blacks are viewed in America.
Burrell
gave three points, taken from his extensive company’s research, which shed
light on African-American psychosocial issues. According to Burrell, these
issues stemmed from “circumstances
arising from our experience as chattel slaves in America” (Brainwashed page
XI). His example points were:
·
Black preference
for high end status brands was driven by the need to compensate for feeling of
low self-esteem.
·
Our penchant for
lopsided spending/saving ratio grew out of our need of immediate gratification,
based on a chilling pessimism about an uncertain future.
·
We ‘over
indexed’, spending disproportionate amounts in every product category related
to cleanliness (from feminine douches and scented laundry detergents, to car
deodorizers and household disinfectants), primarily to compensate for being historically
stereotyped as being dirty.
“But in the propaganda against the
Negro since emancipation in this land, we face one of the most stupendous
efforts the world has ever saw to discredit human beings, and effort involving
universities, history, science, social life, and religion”
- W.E.B. Du Bois. As this quote suggests, what we have going against us is
heavily entrenched into the fabric of our society. As previously mentioned, Burrell linked the
majority of the issues to their ‘genesis’
in American slavery. He goes on to paint
a broader picture, in which not only purchasing power is affected, but also relationships
(social interactions) and personal lives. In 2004 Tom Burrell sold his
advertising business, but did not abandoned what he called “real-life African-American cultural anthropology”. He wanted to
find a way to utilize what he knew, about our people’s “brainwashing”…
How
did this “brainwashing” come about?
Burrell takes us far back into history, when slavery had its fresh start in the
first American colonies of the 17th century. During that time,
people had to grapple with the moral dilemma of slavery. According to Burrell, “They desperately needed a way to justify
the gaping divide between their God-fearing, freedom loving rhetoric and the
nation’s increasing addiction to cheap slave labor” (page XIII). So what was the solution? In order for
slavery to successfully survive, both master and slave were indoctrinated,
generation after generation, that “blacks
would always and forever be mentally, physically, spiritually, and culturally
inferior.”
While
moving forward in time, we as a people had to continually prove our equality,
even to ourselves. Burrell states that in an effort to do this, we “unconsciously the master’s dream, adopted
his values, moved into his neighborhoods, and danced to his tune” (page
XIII). Burrell continues to say that
while we were in survival/assimilation mode, and progress to what we thought
was true advancement, we never considered the priced we paid by leaving behind
our own communities and people.
Burrell
goes on to say that “our insistence to
think we have from negative propaganda is wishful thinking.” He says that during of the black power
movements of the 60’s and 70’s (I’m black and I’m proud), we paid “lip service” to the ideals of true
change, but that was not backed up by the “psychological
machinery” needed to make permanent change. Simply put, we cannot truly
change the social conditions of our people unless we can change our mindset.
Now
this is where Burrell changes his focus in the book to the present, which he
begins by describing the newly elected, President Barack Obama, as one who “may have reached his Promised Land, but
most black Americans are still wandering in the wilderness” (page XIV).
What did he mean by that? Burrell begins to slowly reference to an “illusion”, or what is known as a false
or misleading impression of reality. Burrell couples Barack Obama’s presidency
with the “illusion of racial progress”, implying
that President Obama himself is an illusion which propagates that we are now in
a “post-racial era”, or that racism
towards us has subsided.
How
I understood this particular passage, was that racism changed, into what was
now, subtle, behind the line attacks, rather than outright and obvious. To me,
that is the most dangerous form because we as a people cannot see who or what our
enemy is; in Burrell’s case it was raced-based lack of self-esteem. He states “Over time, I’ve learned that the root of
the problem wasn’t what was being done to me- it was what I’d been brainwashed
to feel about myself.”
Reading
this book, I agree that our brainwashing still continues; in what many call ‘the slave mentality’. Burrell
outlines what exactly this mentality entails, as it is very close to home… To
continue he asks several fundamental questions, such as:
·
Why can’t we
build strong families?
·
Why do we
perpetuate black sexual stereotypes?
·
Why can’t we
stick and stay together?
·
Why do we keep
killing each other?
·
Why can’t we
stop shopping?
·
Why are black
and beautiful still contradictions?
·
Etc…
According
to Burrell’s outline, I believe the majority of us still do think like slaves;
for some very simple facts such as our youth answering or calling each other
‘nigga’ or ‘ho’, our women having a distorted view of beauty, why we place
entertainment careers above scholarly education, among many other things. If we take a good look at what our media gives
us, we see the stereotypes played out in plain sight, although we no longer see
them as stereotypes but as facts… We see black women breeding babies without
fathers, as if it is a normal thing to do. We see black men jailed in confined,
for either violence or possession of contraband, as if it is a normal thing. We
see the face of poverty and government assistance as black (even though poor
whites get it too), and treat it as normal thing. We read about the high
dropout rates of black students in school and we see it as a normal! What we
are thinking is normal, is not really normal. To me, it is in fact an illusion.
This
is what Burrell called a “paradox of
progress”, and it is the most important message of the book. Burrell goes
on in detail of how our brainwashing is still conducted today through many
examples. Because Burrell seems to lay out our problems and the roots of the
problems before us, he gives the reader a chance to critically evaluate
society. Overall, through this evaluation, we could begin to rectify our
problems.
