By Taki S. Raton

Nationally certified school psychologist, kinsmen to abolitionist Frederick Douglas and a presenter in the renowned and widely acclaimed DVD “Hidden Colors,” Dr. Umar R. Abdullah-Johnson was jointly interviewed Thursday January 26, 2012 by this writer and First Work multimedia producer Warren Muhammad of the Final Call Newspaper. As part of a national tour, Dr. Johnson was on a three-day lecture schedule in Chicago speaking to educators and community audiences on the “Psycho-Academic War Against Black Boys.” The following comments were recorded on the third day of this engagement, Thursday, January 26, following his presentation to Chicago Public School social workers at the South Loop Hotel. Questions were selected from a wide range of published articles by Dr. Johnson. Appreciation is extended to Chicago’s Black Star Project for arranging this interview.

Raton: How have Black parents and adults become so desensitized to the pain of our children, particularly our boys?

Dr. Johnson: One of the biggest reasons or ways that desensitization has taken place is by way of the massive indoctrination of Black parents with the belief that the system has the best interest of their children at heart. Many black parents especially mothers find it difficult to understand that there is a psycho-academic war against Black children in general and Black boys in particular. I think that the menticide of the Black parent is actually making them an active participant in the mis-education and extermination of their children because they are finding it difficult to believe that society would be determined to marginalize and harm an entire generation of children. And unfortunately, until they come to the realization that that is exactly what is happening to their sons and daughters, it is going to be difficult to reverse the carnage because children generally cannot protect and fend for themselves. They need their communities and their families to do that for them. So without the community and the family as a protective safeguard for the youth, I think that it will become eminently conclusive that one day there will be no more Black youth.

(“Mentacide” as labeled by Dr. Bobby Wright in 1985 is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group’s mind and their unique way of life knowing, life thinking, and life being.)

Raton: How does the five-stage cycle of “Institutional Repression” ultimately place Black males on the path of incarceration?

Dr. Johnson: I have discovered in my work, in my research and particularly in my own experience as a psychologist and as an educator that the five stages that ever so increasingly large numbers of our Black boys are now moving through during their short life span takes them from birth to a premature extermination by the age of 25. The first stage in the psycho-academic holocaust against Black boys is mis-education. Mis-education has three goals. The first is to teach the Black male child to hate himself. That’s most important. The second is to teach the Black boy to love White culture. The third is to “special educate” the Black males and the fourth is to effeminize and homosexualize the Black male child. Now the effeminization and homosexualization is an over-arching goal of public education. It is the job of the White middle-class teacher to break the Black male’s spirit; to psychologically emasculate him so that he simply acquiesces into the oppression that the society has in store for him. And I always say that it is going to be difficult to rescue the effeminization of Black boys as long as their education is in the hands of White women. Now, if a White female teacher is not successful in breaking his spirit, we then go to stage two which is the psycho-tropic medicalization of Black boys. That is the deliberate usage of psychological chemicals to induce a submission to the American social order. And so the use of Risperdal, Adderall and the list goes on. These chemicals are used to do to the brain what you could not do to the spirit. So if the White middle-class female is unsuccessful in breaking the spirit of the Black boy, she then turns to the psycho-tropic drug cartel to induce the submission psychologically. So first, you try to effeminize the Black male child. If that is not successful, you go to psycho-tropic medication. If the Black boy still is a “man child” and had not been broken through mis-education and schooling, you now go to juvenile incarceration. So juvenile incarceration is the full fledged physical containment of the Black male spirit and the Black male threat. You see, the whole purpose of mis-education is to make the Black boy psychosocially drop out of his own life. Mis-education is designed to engender in the Black male’s mind a desire to not want to achieve. Mis-education stamps out all interest in learning. Children by nature want to learn. Black boys want to learn like everyone else. But what they don’t want is the differential treatment that belittles them, that psychologically castrates them and makes them feel like they are less than human. To put it another way, the schools are doing exactly what slavery use to do, which is to dehumanize the Black man. And so when we look around our community and we see Black boys acting like animals, it is because they were treated in like fashion in the public school setting. A good example of how this works can be found in the “Standford Prison Experiment” conducted by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo at Standford University from August 14-20, 1971. It was funded by a grant from the US Office of Naval Research and was of interest to both the US Navy and Marine Corps in order to determine the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners. What this study revealed was that people will act the way they are treated. You become the surroundings that you are subjected to. Black children act out because they are being subjected to a hostile animalistic environment in today’s public educational system. And after they come out of juvenile incarceration, that’s when the reality sets in the Black male’s mind that “I’ve been lied to my whole life. My mother and my father told me; my pastor told me that if I go to school and do my work most of the time, study for my test and past them most of the time, listen to what the teacher has to say most of the time, I will graduate, get a diploma, go to college, graduate, find a good job, get married and live happily ever after.” They found out that that was all a hoax, a big lie. And now they are out on the street and not allowed to go back to school. They have psychological frustration and alienation. They become irritable and they feel disrespected. Our Black boys are not acting like this on purpose and it is really not a part of some kind of hyper-masculine personality. They are depressed. They are sad as hell, and they are in much pain. They are dealing silently with trauma. But they are too afraid to admit it because many of them have egos that have been torn to pieces by White women, by their own families, by their community, and by the media. So to admit that I am in pain, to admit that I need help to them means to admit that I am less than a man. And that they are not willing to do. Keep in mind that the minute slavery ended, they immediately began to build state-wide prison systems because they knew that they were going to engineer the education and economic order to eventually over time lead the Black man to jail which means, in a sense, straight back to slavery. We still have slave ships. They now call it prisons. They just don’t sit on water, they now sit on land. FULL STORY