Having been educated, trained, and experienced in the medical and medical/legal arenas, I have formed the habit of thinking and writing in a step-by-step way. By repeatedly using the categories of this process -- source, origin, beginning, middle, end, and results -- under all sorts of circumstances and finding it works, medical thinking has become "second nature" for me.
However, I have rudely learned the public is far more interested in an entertaining and not a truth searching approach. Still, my rational approach is beneficial for those members of the public who are struggling to satisfactorily handle matters of serious business and who want to get familiar with an offensive and defensive style that works in the marketplace of society at large.
The point is that what works well in one setting may not work well in another setting. The same applies to different time periods. Thus, in assessing your bad habits, know their source, origin, and the setting and time period in which they occurred.
Bad habits are thoughts or behaviors that slow or stop you from going in the right direction and may even send you in the wrong direction. Being a traditional people, a major source of Black American habits comes from (modified) cultural transmissions. Typically, descendants embrace cultural transmissions without much, if any, thought. Therefore, if your life is a mess, there is a bad habit somewhere in the way you think and/or behave.
Since there is no indicator in my years of research that bad habits were prominent in pre-colonial Africans, my proposal is that most bad habits of Black Americans can be traced to culturally transmitted patterns arising during slavery. Thus, let us examine the day-to-day resistance patterns of our slave ancestors to determine if they have possibly contributed to bad habits in some of today's Black Americans.
Common sense says free Africans in Africa could not be enslaved by Europeans and then be treated so inhumanely without building up layer upon layer of rage, fear, frustration and a sense of injustice. Naturally, against their captors they reacted by avengefulness (righting the wrong of evil deeds) in the best way they could, without inviting even harsher punishments.
Apart from running away, attempted escapes, arson (of barns, stables, and outbuildings), and revolts, most slaves were a close-knit group in their subtle resistance pertaining to whatever made the slave master rich or comfortable.
For example, slaves sabotaged the master's plantation property -- things like breaking, wasting, and misusing much of everything they handled; like destroying tools and farm equipment, pulling down fences, vandalizing wagons, damaging boats; and like ruining the clothing of the master's family.
In the process of hoeing, they destroyed crops by improperly cutting corn, cane, cotton, and tobacco. More so out of necessity but also out of revenge and avengement they "took" things from the slaveowner like chicken, sheep, hogs, cattle, money, watches, produce, liquor, tobacco, and flour. "Taking" meant the slaves viewed what they "toted" as merely a transfer of the master's property -- and not stealing.
Slave resistance also included ploughing shallow for seed planting (for the convenience of the birds), picking trashy cotton, leaving gates open, shirking their duties, disrupting the routine, being careless in work assignments, sulking, and engaging in "personal or communal foot-dragging" (i.e. procrastination or work slow-downs). Whites therefore labeled the slaves as "troublesome property."
Although slave resistance habits served a useful purpose for the slaves, those habits carried out of slavery and continued into today's setting become self-defeating bad habits -- especially for those who find themselves unable to rise out of poverty. Today's best focus for struggling Black Americans is to discover and discard (slave survival) bad habits as well as develop those habits that are for one's benefit rather than being against a faceless enemy.
website: jablifeskills.com
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.
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