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A Paradigm Shift For Black Americans |
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The two airplanes that flew into the World Trade
Center buildings on
9/11/2001 reduced those buildings to rubble. This illustrates my concept of
what happened to the minds of Africans at the moment the fishnet was thrown
over each so as to doom them all to a fate of slavery "forever." Immediately,
every slave's mind no doubt by-passed all selfhood mental states (e.g.
self-esteem and mental sanity) to arrive at a basic survival mentality bottom.
A major loss was their sound African mental health, worldview, paradigm, and
archetype messages of African Tradition that had been passed down through the
millennia. A fundamental point is that nothing the slaves found in the Americas
enabled them or their struggling descendants to rebuild workable paradigms into
any success related reproducible mindset. Instead, with only shattered pieces
of philosophical rubble (i.e. those pertaining to archetype and paradigm
foundational values) available for building materials, afflicted Blacks could
merely haphazardly reconstruct mindsets--mindsets inadequate for thriving in USA society.
Two resultant prominent mindsets of those Black Americans struggling then and
those struggling now are the "Herd" and the "Security."
A "Herd" thinking pattern feature is one of a rambling right
brain nature without any ordering and coherence provided by the left brain.
Outsiders must "feel" them to get a clue as to what they are saying. A
"Security" thinking pattern feature is best illustrated by the negative portion
of the Thinker's Scale. This scale has a positive ruler and a negative ruler
separated by zero. The positive ruler represents benefits-- ranging from +1 to
+100 one desires in life. The negative scale--ranging from -1 to -100--concerns
what one does not want in life. "Security" Blacks are oriented to doing what it
takes to ensure that their basic needs are cared for. This necessarily means
conforming to their "We" group and not getting outside that box. Hence, their
talents are rarely, if ever, discovered, developed or placed in the right niche
for thriving in riches.
Effective paradigm rebuilding for such struggling Blacks
will not occur spontaneously because of their tendency to simply "herd" closer
together when circumstances get worse and worse. Many old slave expressions
kept alive in Black culture rap need updating or replacement. For example,
"time will make it all right"-is not correct because time does nothing to cure
self-defeating belief systems. Rather than with multiple small "Berlin Wall"
type blows distributed over a period of time, the best way to topple defective
belief system paradigms is with a quick-shattering stroke. In other words, a
Paradigm Shift begins when a set of belief assumptions is challenged and
completely dismantled (or shattered). From the resultant rubble, the
destructive and the useless are discarded; the paradigm props worn down from
overload or apathy or gnawed away by bad habits; and the improper use of "okay"
habits undergo the "5Rs": Rearranged, Recombined, Refined, Repaired, or
Replaced. To fashion new paradigms likely to work well inside racist America,
African Tradition might suggest applying the African Phoenix ("Death and
Rebirth") approach. Then follow with the African Sankofa approach ("returning
to Ancient African Values and incorporating them into one's philosophical
paradigm for purposes of getting through the maze of life). Both approaches are
successful when one's new perceptions, values, choices, decisions, and
solutions cause one to get what one wants and stop getting what one does not want.
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.
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