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Slavery Fragments the African World View |
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A world view is like a blueprint used for building a house. The architect draws plans to show what the house will look like and where everything goes. Similarly, a world view is a mental picture of a pattern or model of what the world looks like to an individual, a group, or a societyâ€"the components consisting of what is considered significant.
Those components are the result of answering the Seven Questions of Inquiryâ€"who, which, what, when, where, why, and how. After prioritizing, arranging, and synthesizing these answers, one is then able to make sense of the world. That understanding provides the tools for coping with the complexities and changes one faces daily by giving explanations about good/bad, true/false, and other aspects concerned with matters of serious business. From these basic elementsâ€"similar to the way the letters of the alphabet are used to form wordsâ€"one can determine which types of things to put together in order to select one's values for prioritizing into a philosophy of life.
Those values are like the kind and quality of materials chosen by the house builder after studying the architect's plans. The equipment then needed by the builder to get the job done is like the Power Approach one calls on to get through life (e.g. aggression, nonaggression, passivity, or passive-aggressive). Since the key to one's success in the marketplace is the ability to successfully predict the future, it is from one's world view that one extrapolates for future predictions. Extrapolation is a form of deductive reasoning whereby you infer from what is known to an unknown "something" having a viable chance of coming into existence. As a result of "standing" on one's world view to gain a vision of the future, one can acquire ideas about a proper purpose in life, about proper stepping stones along the way, and about how to get there.
The power contained inside one's world view activates desire, will-power, and motivation to reach one's destination. Its meaning stimulates actions and reactions of a Second Nature typeâ€"those learned by socialization-- and thus are deeply engrained. For Ancient Africans, this "second nature" was probably fully developed prior to 10,000 BC. Back then analysis and synthesis of the mathematical information obtained from studying the stars was used to formulate the world view of Wholism (i.e. all God's creations on spiritual, mental, and material planes of existence are linked by invisible bonds). They agreed on God as the standard (around which their philosophy of life was built); mathematics as their earthly standard; and Ma'at (love in action) as their principles for human interaction. These three foundational stones of their world view were all they needed to handle any tough problem they had never seen or heard of before.
The impact of Europeans enslaving Africans and bringing them to the Americas shattered their world view into a chaotic state. Each slave tried as best he/she could to bring some order to the chaos. Whatever was the final result constituted a slave's new world view. Because of gaps, mis-arrangements of salvaged parts, and "scars" from the trauma of slavery, there were ongoing misdirections of values, thoughts, emotions, expressions, and behaviors. The extent of the degree of problems in their New World View represented the degree of their Mental Weakness. Weakness suggests a giving way to an improper impulse as a result of an encaged or enslaved mind. This has nothing to do with one's level of intelligence although a disturbed world view can disturbed the effectiveness of one's intelligence. By a problematic world view preventing the slave from being able to see clearly what was going on in his/her world and simultaneously internalizing self-defeating thoughts and emotions meant their minds were Encaged. From being enraptured by European values and methods and failing to realize there were far, far better ways to view reality as, for example, African Tradition meant their minds were Enslaved.
website: jablifeskills.com
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.
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