The Indoctrination Of The Black Spirit.

Around four hundred years ago, something terrible happened I thought to myself. It’s Christmas Time, and I’m not celebrating, instead I’m drawing adult series and penning new storylines for my craft. The night is dark and dim lit, and I think back to the first time I really thought about it; blackness and the societal association of it with religion.

I was just a kid, maybe around eight or so when I was forced to go to church. I’d have to wear a long sleeve button up, dress pants and ‘church shoes’. Having a disability, and a wider toe area made these slim fitting shoes very uncomfortable for me; but my pain was second to the word of god.

We went, it was packed, smelled musty and was very loud to my ears. Everyone referred to each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, and I want to point out how confusing it all was. As a kid, I thought it was silly, a omnipotent guy, needed an old shrively man as his messenger; it never lined up with me.

Being older, I’ve educated myself on a variety of different subjects, history, psychology, social studies and the arts. It’s not without a great deal of research that I assert this claim; blacks as a whole were indoctrinated by western Christianity. This indoctrination is significant and plays into African American culture to such an extent that 80% of us identify as Christian; the largest self-identifying number in the United States.

But why? I thought about that a lot when I was young, then as I poured my second cup of tea against the silence of a dim quiet Christmas; it really hit me. Back then, it was common—if not universally accepted—that blacks had no souls, and were thus beyond salvation. So why the act? As I skimmed through the Bible—ironically enough—I found it; ultimately god was described as white. The names expressed throughout the book are white names.

My cup filled, I let the aroma of hibiscus sit, I’d entertain the discourse taking place in my head a little longer. Giving blacks the grace of god wasn’t about salvation, nor about being in god’s image—at least not the way some might think—it was about control , and in that power. If the lord was white, and the man before you was created in the image of this lord, what is he to a broken slave? god. God also condoned slavery, you could have one or more but you were to be kind to them and discipline them without making them suffer.

Right. That was an ugly thought, it spoke to why I didn’t much miss the whole affair I had with my family’s faith. In honesty, as the stillness of the room set, I thought it more like an arranged marriage; where you had no control, no freedom.

Blacks were items, put on earth to serve the will of god’s children—that’s how they saw it—and those beliefs were enforced and engrained in the minds of blacks. In modern day a lot of theist move away from the anthropomorphic idea of god, which allows some people to disassociate the image with the pain slavery caused.

I skimmed through a news story about John Legend and someone else I cannot remember, and how they created a ‘safer’ rendition of a very inappropriate Christmas song. That’s nice I thought... then there was a sort of correlation.

I took my first sip. The wood like flavor, with a touch of honey, glided atop my tongue. I turned my head to the side, attempting to avoid the pain of a impacted tooth as it didn’t seem to prefer the taste as I did.

In modern society, if we take a real hard look, it’s effects still linger. The shackles on the body are gone, but ask yourself; what reasonable people are steadfastly loyal to the same faith as their oppressors? Everything about slavery is condemned, except the religion that has been beaten, scorched, branded, sliced, whipped, and raped into our ancestors.

This is what indoctrination looks like, we entertain their values, we enforce their punishments on our children, we ostracize members of our community who don’t accept their values. We hold the word of their god, higher than our lives, higher than the lives and sanctity of our fellow human beings. We’ve given the god of slave masters more power over ourselves than we feel we ourselves possess.