One of the main tasks of Black consciousness is to affirm the beauty of our Blackness, to see beauty in Black skin, and thick lips and broad nostrils and kinky hair; to rid our vocabulary of ‘good hair’ and ‘high yeller’ and our medicine cabinets of bleaching creams.  To de-niggerize ourselves is the key task of Black consciousness.” –John O. Killens (1966)

—388 years after the first 20 African indentured servants who were erroneously called “Negars” were brought to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 –We are still using the N-word!

—200 years after Haitian Blacks won their freedom in 1804, becoming the first free Black independent nation in the Western hemisphere – We are still using the N-word!

—142 years after President Lincoln’s proclamation, the Civil war and the 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which finally abolished chattel slavery in the North America – We are still using the N-word!

—85 years after Marcus Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance and the “New Negro” consciousness movement – We are still using the N-word!

—50 years after the landmark Supreme Court Case, “Brown vs. Board of Education,” Emmitt Till’s lynching, and Rosa Parks’ courageous stand in the deep South – We are still using the N-word!

—40 years after Black leaders Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers were assassinated – We are still using the N-word!

—40 years after the “Black is Beautiful” and the “I’m Black and I’m Proud” movements. We are still using the N-word!

—and finally, 40 years after the other N-word (Negro) was virtually obliterated from Black language and Black life—We are still using the centuries old despicable term Nigger!

With all of the above in mind, why are many of today’s Black psychologists, sociologists, historians, ministers, politicians, community activists, etc., speaking and writing about these same crazy issues facing African-Americans across the nation, such as self-hatred, internalized inferiority, White supremacy (racism), mentacide, the Willie Lynch syndrome and the post-traumatic slavery syndrome?  Why is it that 50 plus years after the experimental research of Dr.’s Kenneth and Mamie Clark and their famous Black doll- White doll studies with Black children, their response still yields the same negative results in 2011?  That being that Black children in New York City still choose or prefer the White doll over the Black one as being smarter, prettier, and more desirable.

From the leaders of early slave revolts on to W.E.B. Dubois,Marcus Garvey, Carter G. Woodson, Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, we have been passionately informed that the most devastating impact of the White man has been psychological.  In their writings and speeches, they consistently cautioned us that “The key to the White man’s power and the major strategy used by him to remain dominant in the global power struggle of the modern world, has been in his uncanny ability to influence other people’s minds (cultures), and how they live and relate to one another.”

In his 1903 literary masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois made his case for the idea of a dual or “double consciousness” existing with the collective psyche of Africans in America.  This false consciousness that Dr. Dubois wrote about really speaks to the confusion and ambivalence that Black folks experience every day in America as they search and struggle for their own meaningful sense of historical and cultural identity.  Indeed the latter struggle and the problem of “The Color Line” are still with us more than a century later.

Let us now fast forward to 1933, the year that another Harvard trained Ph.D, Carter G. Woodson wrote his classic text, The Mis-Education of the Negro.  Dr. Woodson’s critical historical analysis of the effects of a Eurocentric/hegemonic education on the minds of Black students informed both Black and White readers that “the Negro’s mind” had been brought under the control of his oppressor, and that when you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.”

Dr. Woodson furthermore penned the following statement regarding Black student mis-education, “To handicap a student for life by teaching him that his Black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless, is the worst kind of lynching.  It kills one’s aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime.”

So how do we begin to de-Niggerize and de-program both young and old Black minds?  How do we begin the process of breaking the monopoly the oppressor continues to have on our minds?  Dr. Na’im Akbar’s powerful booklet (Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery) asks and answers precisely the aforementioned questions of how we must begin the self-healing process by recognizing that the starting point for understanding the African-American personality must commence with an in-depth study of the Holocaust of Enslavement (The Maafa).  Without question, this has to be the starting point and not the end point.

In order to liberate the Black mind, we have to change and fundamentally transform the consciousness of the Black individual.  We must inculcate new and positive information in the minds Black people in general but more importantly our Black youth.  This re-orientation or re-education is a mental restoration process that began with the writers and freedom fighters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  What is needed is an African centered or Afro-centric consciousness and not a Euro-centric or false consciousness.

We must always remember the words of our giant social scientist, E. Franklin Frazier who emphatically stated, “There is no parallel in human history where a people have been subjected to similar mutilation of body mind and soul.  Even the Christian religion was given to them in a form only to degrade them.”

The Hip Hop community and the present Hip Hop generation may continue to revere and embrace Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls as young, super bad Niggas!  But can we as wise, intelligent and critical thinking African elders view the following ancestors:  Marcus Garvey, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLoud Bethune, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Paul Robeson, Fredrick Douglas, Martin Delany, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Paul Cuffe, Denmark Vesey, and James Baldwin as Negars, Niggers or Niggas? [Check Ebony's Fifty Influential Figures in African-American History .]

I can certainly think of, and I am sure that we all could create other terms of endearment that we as an ancient and proud race of people could use to refer to one another in humble veneration and love.  The concepts of Black inferiority and the ugly, racist N-word have both been exported overseas.  People in various foreign nations, just like Whites in America, are using the N-word in both the public and private sectors.

As I heard it so profoundly stated by Dr. Maulana Karenga of Los Angeles, “We may not be responsible for our enslavement and colonial oppression, but we are most certainly responsible for our freedom and liberation.”

In closing, I would humbly but sincerely submit to all who read this article that a few of us African-centered thinkers have learned that a major key to de-Niggerizing ourselves and shattering the invisible chains of mental slavery is to know and respect one’s own history and cultural heritage.  With this being said, let our positive journey begin!  May the ancestors be pleased!

Professor Gershom Williams teaches African-American History at Mesa Community College.

All donations will go towards operating this website, thank you.