It's important to realize that any criticism of Black male/female relationships is at the same time and in equal measure a criticism of White society's worldview which has shaped us to fit and function “properly” in it. Social conditions create both social consciousness and social conduct and failure to recognize this can lead one to see racial defects where social ones are more real and relevant...It is this final contention that serves as a key point of departure for any serious analysis of Black male/female relationships. For to say we are products of our social conditions is to say the same thing about our relationships. Analysis of the major defects in Black male/female relationships clearly reveals their social rather than genetic or purely personal basis. Thus, to understand the negatives of our relationships we must understand the negative characteristics of society that have shaped them.
Delores P. Aldridge says "An ideological institution is a codified and long-existing set of social arrangements that forms a basic element of a given society. It follows that such institutions share the distortions inherent in the rationale for their existence" (Focusing, p.20).
What is being done to Africans by commercialism, drugs, religion, and Western psychology, education, urbanization and industrialization by which individuals become detached from their traditional environment. Its not just Chicago, its being done to Afrikans in London, Cape Town, Sydney, Montreal, and Buenos Aires. By embracing the logic that what is normal for one people is normal for all people, because they have come to accept the validity of other people’s words over their own traditions, many Afrikans rush toward a European worldview. They cannot see that following a European cultural worldview opens them up to an alien and self-alienating way.
Delores P. Aldridge speaks of sexism as working with racism, capitalism, and Judeo-Christianity as the “ideological institutions” serving to systematically undermine any possibility of stable, positive relationships between Afrikan men and women. Na’im Akbar shares her opinion saying that sexism, materialism, and Christianity, as a force insuring a perception of the inferiority and danger of women, and “an assumption of inevitable conflict between the sexes” are inextricably tied in the assault on peace and purpose for couples. Maulana Karenga’s four “connections” consist of the more catchy “cash,” “flesh,” “force” and “dependency” “connections” that undermine male/female relationships. Sexism makes sexual exploitation civilized. It makes it normal and, therefore, natural.
This is why you have so many brothers and sisters talking about it's natural for a woman to be submissive to a MAN. Or that stupid phrase going around that an alpha female will naturally submit to a dominant male. That alpha whole concept created by white people that they have even deconstructed is still deep in the minds of our people. Why, because it makes us feel good in our zombie-like state. The zombie is moved by the impulses of others, its sees what other sees, and thinks/speaks what others think/speak. Thus the African becomes black, they become Hebrew, they become Christian, they become native American, they become Latino. They love everybody and they make fun of every conscious movement and people trying to figure it out. So it should be no surprise about Kevin Samuels or the way we act on the net.
“A cultural paradigms analysis proposes that every individual operates according to some group’s conception of reality, whether they are aware of it or not, and it is a conception which they share with other members of their reference group; the group with which they are identified (in terms of values, beliefs, customs, etc.). The group that we identify with is usually our own indigenous cultural group under normal-natural circumstances. In abnormal-unnatural circumstance, i.e., those in which we identify with a group that is not our indigenous cultural group (such as an alien group, or an acquired alien group identity), then the conception of reality out of which we operate is not naturally our own. This is so even though we may have adjusted to it so intimately that we do not experience it as alien to us.”
Kobi K. K. Kambon
“African/Black Psychology in the American Context: An African-Centered Approach”
Page 119
“… worldview systems provide for the organization, structure, and content of culture. As the ideological-philosophical basis of culture, worldview systems articulate the basic assumptions, values and beliefs undergirding culture and are expressed through its various structural or institutional manifestations. Worldview systems also define the power base of the culture because through it the indigenous group defines their own collective reality, and it is thereby their natural base of empowerment. Finally, worldview systems are resilient and enduring across generations of the cultural group. The worldview system is passed on from one generation to the next and thus defines the consistency and stability of the culture.”
Kobi K. K. Kambon
“African/Black Psychology in the American Context: An African-Centered Approach”
Page 126
“Given the racial pluralism and so-called multicultural nature of American society, it is inevitable that conflict between these oppositional worldview systems would occur. The African and European worldviews have undergone vigorous analysis by African scholars, both on the Continent and in America, in particular over the past three decades…. These analyses have organized the worldview differences between these groups…., these analyses have concluded that the fundamental assumption or ethos defining the European worldview may be categorized as an ‘Humanity versus Nature’ orientation. This basic thrust of the European worldview defines an antagonistic and conflictual theme in human-nature relations. The emphasis is placed on human intervention into nature to achieve mastery and gain control over nature through the power-based (or power-motivated) mechanisms of aggression, domination, oppression, suppression, repression, and the unnatural alteration or reordering of all objects in nature….”
“A major theme emanating from this basic assumption of human-nature relations is that of ‘Survival of the Fittest’…. The principle underlying this theme is that those humans (i.e., individuals, races) who achieve the greatest degree of mastery, control, suppression and manipulation over nature represent the fittest among the human community. Fittest, then, represents the lofty position of human achievement attained through competition (i.e., aggression) and is indexed by the amount of psychological and physical distance that one is able to establish between himself (self-consciousness) and nature-phenomenal experience/objects…. This usually occurs in terms of the degree to which one has gained effective manipulative power and/or dominance over nature through the objectification of nature. Therefore, one’s degree of mastery or control over nature establishes the ‘fittest’ level of the individual, race-culture, etc.”
“Hence, the European worldview is defined by the basic values of materialism, control, aggression and linear-ordinal ranking, conflict and opposition-dichotomy….”
Kobi K. K. Kambon
“African/Black Psychology in the American Context: An African-Centered Approach” Page 130
“The African worldview, by contrast, defines human-nature relations as interdependent and inseparable. The fundamental assumption or ethos in African cosmology is that of ‘Human-Nature Unity,’ Oneness or Harmony with Nature, including complementarity, balance and reciprocity in all of existence…. Humanity, or the Self, and Nature, then, are conceptualized as one and the same phenomenon. Thus, positive, affirmative and complementary themes define the character of human-nature relations within the framework of the African worldview. The ‘Maatian’ Principle… defines much of this process beginning at the level of the person and extending to the society and the whole of the universe. The primary emphasis is on the survival of the corporate whole of nature, which includes all living things, rather than simply advancing some special interest group or some segment apart from the corporate whole. Hence, the basic values, beliefs and psychobehavioral modalities characterizing the African worldview relate to the principles of inclusiveness and synthesis, cooperation and collective responsibility, groupness, sameness and commonality, and at the core of it all, of course, is ‘Spirituality.’”
Kobi K. K. Kambon
“African/Black Psychology in the American Context: An African-Centered Approach”
Page 132
