In a Baha’i prayer, we ask God to fill up our “cup of detachment” and break us off from “the shackles of this nether world.” Shackles, chains that prevent us freely acting, can take many forms — physical or mental. Detachment, as described in the Baha’i prayer, begins with freeing ourselves internally.
Have you ever asked yourself if you are truly psychologically free? Or are your thoughts and behaviors influenced and controlled by your addiction to something or your manipulation from someone? Psychological manipulation is a damaging form of mental oppression. Imagine how severe and intense the pain must be when it is enforced systemically, and the resulting trauma is passed from generation to generation. A trauma that Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, understood in 1938 when he referred to these “for so long a period, such grievous and slow-healing wounds.”
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So, it’s no surprise that in a 2020 letter to the Baha’is of the United States, the Universal House of Justice stated that racism “deprives a portion of humanity of the opportunity to cultivate and express the full range of their capability and to live a meaningful and flourishing life, while blighting the progress of the rest of humankind.”
“As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free,” wrote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1968 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” “Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.”
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The Psychological Indoctrination Inflicted on Enslaved People
In the book “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South,” author Kenneth Stampp explained the levels of psychological indoctrination that American enslavers inflicted on enslaved Black people to “make a good slave,” based on the manuals and documents that enslavers produced to “train” the people they enslaved.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained that this step-by-step process involved implanting “in the bondsman a consciousness of personal inferiority. This sense of inferiority was deliberately extended to his past. The slaveowners were convinced that in order to control the Negroes, the slaves ‘had to feel that African ancestry tainted them, that their color was a badge of degradation.’” Additionally, “the master’s criteria of what was good and true and beautiful were to be accepted unquestioningly by the slaves.”
Dr. King summarized this process of indoctrination: “Accustom him to rigid discipline, demand from him unconditional submission, impress upon him a sense of his innate inferiority, develop in him a paralyzing fear of white men, train him to adopt the master’s code of good behavior, and instill in him a sense of complete dependence.”
In a 2022 letter to the Baha’is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Universal House of Justice explored how prejudices are still “infecting the consciousness of millions and despoiling them of their energies.”
The psychological manipulation employed during slavery laid the groundwork for racism’s enduring effects, wounding the self-esteem of its victims and restricting their psychological freedom.
MLK Outlines the Expressions of Psychological Freedom
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. identified three expressions of psychological freedom. The first component is “the capacity to deliberate or to weigh alternatives.”
He asked, “‘Shall I be a doctor or a lawyer?’ ‘Shall I be a Democrat, Republican or Socialist?’ ‘Shall I be a humanist or a theist?’ Moment by moment we go through life engaged in this strange conversation with ourselves.”
Dr. King continued, “Second, freedom expresses itself in decision. The word ‘decision,’ like the word ‘incision,’ involves the image of cutting. Incision means to cut in, decision means to cut off. When I make a decision, I cut off alternatives and make a choice. The existentialists say we must choose, that we are choosing animals, and that if we do not choose, we sink into thinghood and the mass mind.”
The third expression that Dr. King identified is responsibility. He wrote, “This is the obligation of the person to respond if he is questioned about his decisions. No one else can respond for him. He alone must respond, for his acts are determined by the totality of his being. The immorality of segregation is that it is a selfishly contrived system which cuts off one’s capacity to deliberate, decide and respond.”
The Psychological Wounds of a Lack of Physical and Psychological Freedom
The Universal House of Justice explained how “prejudice stains the human spirit, debases both its perpetrator and its victim, obscures perception and understanding, and prevents the achievement of that lofty standard of justice.”
Dr. King added:
The immorality of segregation is that it treats men as means rather than ends, and thereby reduces them to things rather than persons. But man is not a thing. He must be dealt with not as an ‘animated tool’ but as a person sacred in himself.
To do otherwise is to depersonalize the potential person and desecrate what he is. So long as the Negro or any other member of a minority group is treated as a means to an end, the image of God is abused in him and consequently and proportionately lost by those who inflict the abuse.
He reflected on how this absence of freedom during racial segregation imposed restraint on his deliberations regarding, in his words, “what I shall do, where I shall live or the kind of task I shall pursue. I am robbed of the basic quality of manness. When I cannot choose what I shall do or where I shall live, it means in fact that someone or some system has already made these decisions for me, and I am reduced to an animal. Then the only resemblance I have to a man is in my motor responses and functions. I cannot adequately assume responsibility as a person because I have been made the victim of a decision in which I played no part.”
“It is sometimes difficult to determine which are the deepest wounds, the physical or the psychological,” Dr. King wondered. He wrote:
Only a Negro understands the social leprosy that segregation inflicts upon him. Like a nagging ailment, it follows his every activity, leaving him tormented by day and haunted by night. The suppressed fears and resentments and the expressed anxieties and sensitivities make each day a life of turmoil.
Every confrontation with the restrictions against him is another emotional battle in a never-ending war. Nothing can be more diabolical than a deliberate attempt to destroy in any man his will to be a man and to withhold from him that something which constitutes his true essence.
He shared the “self-destructive” responses that can result from such oppression, including isolating oneself, trusting no one, “yielding to the feeling of inferiority; or by allowing the floodgates of defeat to open with an avalanche of despair.” He wrote, “The shattered dreams and blasted hopes of the Negro’s daily life provide the psychological and sociological explanation for the choice by some of negative paths of escape.”
Solutions to This Dilemma
So, how can individuals and communities overcome these psychological shackles that blast our hopes and throw us into “an avalanche of despair”? Personally, when I look at the past, present, and future promises of oppression and feel paralyzed with fear, hopelessness, or powerlessness, I recall the following quote from the Baha’i writings that says:
Beware, O people of Bahá, lest the strong ones of the earth rob you of your strength, or they who rule the world fill you with fear. Put your trust in God, and commit your affairs to His keeping. He, verily, will, through the power of truth, render you victorious, and He, verily, is powerful to do what He willeth, and in His grasp are the reins of omnipotent might.
Likewise, Dr. King advised:
In spite of uncertainties and vicissitudes we must develop the courage to confront the negatives of circumstance with the positives of inner determination. One positive response to our dilemma is to develop a rugged sense of somebodyness. The tragedy of slavery and segregation is that they instilled in the Negro a disastrous sense of his own worthlessness. To overcome this terrible feeling of being less than human, the Negro must assert for all to hear and see a majestic sense of his worth.
There is such a thing as a desegregated mind. We must no longer allow the outer chains of an oppressive society to shackle our minds. With courage and fearlessness we must set out daringly to stabilize our egos. This alone will give us a confirmation of our roots and a validation of our worth. This sense of somebodyness means the refusal to be ashamed of being black. Our children must be taught to stand tall with their heads proudly lifted.
As we lift our heads high and free ourselves from the ensnares of psychological and physical oppression, let’s not let the wrongdoings of the evildoers deter us from working toward our world-embracing vision as we keep believing that our collective efforts will one day lead to justice and peace on Earth.
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