What are the dimensions of ideologies founded on negative theories? Ideas that subjugate and denigrate. What depths would one go to create an inferiorized “other” to justify its unjustified superiority? As Terry Eagleton proposes, "Ideas are internally shaped by their social origins, their true value, or lack thereof, is not reducible to them."
What lengths would one go
to maintain the status quo,
given the understanding
that if the truth were to be revealed,
vast swaths of the body politic
could begin to heal
from the trauma imparted
from the dimensions of ideologies
founded on negative theories.
-Eddie B.
The core issue confronting American descendants of the institution of slavery is not a unilateral or compartmentalized challenge. It is a multidimensional undue hardship they did not choose but have to endure.
“Let us briefly explore the oft-heard phrase, “Black is beautiful.” In light of the sick and twisted history of racism in the United States and the world, how should we evaluate this statement? How does the word “is” function in this statement? From a philosophical perspective, the verb “to be” can have four different descriptive functions, namely, the functions of identity, predication, membership, and existence. Examining these four functions can expand our understanding of the relation between aesthetics and economics.”
In determining how to move beyond the conditioned inferiorization that has held the mind hostage, there must be an examination of different philosophies that increase the awareness of selfhood and the mind’s ability to hold several truths at once.The exploration of different concepts offers the opportunity to uproot the weeds of ideologies that we were indoctrinated into during the process of indigenization on the American plantation. It is to unlock the mind to the awareness of a self concept that is outside of the limiting constraints that have been imposed upon it.
The isms.
Founded on fears, lies,
and the propensity for sadistic abuse.
Fascism, Racism, Nazism
Ism after ism, creating schism after schism.
Eddie B.
As Dubois notes in the Souls of Black Folks (1903), “So here we stand among thought of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of Black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men for life.”
I ask again, What are the dimensions of ideologies founded on negative theories? Ideas that subjugate and denigrate. What depths would one go to create an inferiorized “other” to justify its unjustified superiority?
How does a being compartmentalize itself in an effort to articulate experience within the confines of negative ideology; founded on the dimensions of inconsistent theories? The morphology of ideologies founded on negative theories has not been cleansed of the harm it perpetuates. These distorted theories and the destruction they have wrought require explication and reconstitution, or wholesale repudiation.
The founders, by their own admission, did not anticipate a union that was perfect. They expressly wrote to the union that was “more perfect”. In the direction of the worthy and progressive ideal… that “more perfect union”.
At the time when this union was in its infancy, Black Americans were slaves and the American terrain was replete with plantations that they were forced to work on. Slavery was the demon that possessed the people and cursed the land that the chattel slave was forced to till and work until death.
“The long experience of slavery in America left its mark on the posterity of both slave and master and influenced relations between them more than a century after the end of the old regime. Slavery was only one of several ways by which the white man has sought to define the Negros status, his place.” (Woodward, 1973)
As we move further to the idealized norm of the positive self concept for American descendants of the institution of slavery, we examine the toll of chattel slavery’s immorally depraved normalcy and the order of knowledge and thought that created, glorified, and rewarded the collective deviance of an entire society. This same deviance, a fundamental part of the pathology of America, is still being fought against today by those who are descendants of the institution.
It is the lies that brought us here. And if truth is a form of medicine, the Black soul has a full supply — and longs to use it, not just to heal itself, but to heal the very soul of the nation to which it is bound.
Woodward, C. V. (1973). The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3rd Rev Ed.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903a). The souls of Black folk: Essays and Sketches.
McClendon, J. H., & Ferguson, S. (2019). African American Philosophers and Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350057968
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