The
Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)
In
1951, two psychiatrists, Abraham Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, published what at
the time was thought to be a state-of-the-art psychological investigation of the
identity and personality of the Negro. They
concluded that middle-class and poor blacks alike suffered from a
Negro-self-hatred” syndrome that likely had its origins in the aftermath of
the slavery experience. They called
this legacy of slavery the “mark of oppression.”
With the unfolding of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the
1950s and 1960s, scholars renewed interest in the study of slavery, and by the
late 1970s, the “mark of oppression” thesis had fallen out of favor.
It is now understood that over the course of nearly 400 years of bondage,
the captive Africans were able to exploit various gaps and contradictions in the
way the slavery system operated, resulting in a level of humanity and cultural
strengths never intended by slave owners. Blacks
exited from slavery with healthy personality profiles and keen cultural
competencies that allowed them to navigate continued experiences with oppression
from 1865 to the late 1950s. Over
the last 30 years, this legacy of strength has met its match in black nihilism, stemming from the massive and protracted unemployment of black workers.
That black and white observers alike have seen in this nihilism a
“legacy of slavery” constitutes a form of intellectual denial, regarding the
psychological consequences of economic redundancy in the 1990s.
In today’s world, the employment links to the larger society have been
severed completely for tens of thousands of blacks, and the resulting nadir may
prove to be as grim a challenge as that faced by blacks, after slavery or during
the Depression of the 1930s.