TURNING THE TIDE

1
TURNING THE TIDE

• Peter Scott Blackman
• C.E.O. The Afiya Trust
• peter.blackman_at_afiya-trust.org
• Tel [phone]

2
Please make note of the following website for
fresh and helpful information concerning
racial/cultural psychology look
upwww.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

3

• 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.

4

• 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.

5

• To understand the present it is necessary to know
  the past.
• Todays 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.

6

• 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.
• Todays appalling BME mental health and criminal
  justice statistics reflect the black mans
  struggle to make it in a white world.
• This is also my struggle.

7

• The French government recently declared May 10th
  as a national day of remembrance for victims of
  slavery. The French President, Jacques Chirac
  stated
• A countys 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.

8

• 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.

9

• 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.

10

• 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 mothers 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 fathers 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.

11

• How do modern Western European societies value
  people of colour?
• And how did those values arise?
• Where is the psychic toxin of racism rooted?
• Lets take a quick look at just one example from
  the story of sugar.

12

• The following quotes are from Seeds of Change -
  Five plants that transformed mankind by Henry
  Hobhouse (1985)

13

• 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 slaves life.
• It wasthe first time in history that one race
  had been uniquely selected for a servile role.

14

• ..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 mens minds to
  this monstrous aberration in the history of the
  western world.

15

• Financial accounts from sugar plantations in
  Barbados, the birthplace of my late father, show
  clearly that black people were counted in with
  the beasts.

16

• The following quote from A True Exact
• History of Barbadoes by Richard Ligond
• (1657) is an entry from the planters
• annual account

17
(No Transcript)
18

• 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
  164.40
• Annual clothing for 100 black slaves
  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.

19

• 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.

20

• 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 Hegels teachings.
• Perhaps no thinker since Kant has had a
  comparable influence on European philosophy, art,
  religion, and literature.

21

• 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.

22

• 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 itBut
  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.

23

• Among the Negroes moral sentiments are quite
  weak, or more strictly speaking, non-existent
• 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.

24

• 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
  slaveryWe may conclude slavery to have been the
  occasion of the increase of human feeling among
  the Negroes.

25

• Africais 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
  worldEgypt 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 worlds history.

26

• 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 life-threatening
  rituals.

27

• 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)

28

• 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 stiltdancers, 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

29

• 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.

30

• 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.

31

• 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.

32

• 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.

33

• 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.

34

• 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.

35

• 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.

36

• 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.

37

• 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
  submissionis 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.

38

• 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, its still happening.

39

• 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 socio-political 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.

40

• 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.

41

• 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 isin the
  delivery of mental health services, and in
  psychotherapeutic encounters.

42

• It is very important to take this into account.
  We are helping to set the future agenda for
  progressing mental health outcomes for Britains
  BME population.
• An apology from the Prime Minister for Britains
  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.

43

• I finish with another quote from my father. It
  is an excerpt from a longer poem he wrote during
  my childhood.

44
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

• 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 mans freedom
• I am Nat Turner whose daring and strength always
  defied
• you
• I have my yesterdays and shall open the future
  widely before
• me

45

• THANK YOU!