I have not yet read the book, but I have ordered it. I heard about this book first on Twitter, believe it or not, and the subject matter interests me very much. I was just have a conversation the other day with someone about how Black slaves and free Blacks – many of whom fought hard for freedom, fought hard for the right to read and fought hard to educate themselves – would be appalled at how their descendants are behaving and presenting themselves to the world as a whole. Here is an excerpt from a chapter:
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Excerpt: ‘Brainwashed’
by Tom Burrell
Chapter 2
Relationship Wrecks
Why Can’t We Form Strong Families?
The shattering blows on the Negro family have made it fragile, deprived and often psychopathic.
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On Father’s Day, June 15, 2008, Barack Obama, then only a candidate for the U.S. presidential nomination, stood before a black congregation at a Chicago South Side church and delivered an important message to the black community:
Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important … But if we are honest with ourselves we’ll also admit that too many fathers are missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.
While Obama was congratulated for boldly taking absentee black fathers to task and condemned for taking 
an opportunistic shot at black men for political gain, all sides missed the most important points. Black men are not just absent from their children’s lives; too many black men and women are absent from each other’s lives.
In other words, it’s not just a fathering problem; it’s a “family-ing” problem, another casualty of our addiction to the Black Inferiority brand. The major challenge, therefore, is to discuss and seriously dissect
the black family problem.
Songs to the Beat (down) of Black Life
We sing, dance, and make love to catchy beats that endorse, reinforce, and promulgate our most self-destructive habits.
The messages are not only telegraphed through our music. The muddy milieu of black relationships seemingly splash across the front pages of tabloids, on Internet pages, on the nightly news and TV dramas, and in everyday advertising. The media gleefully amplified the exploits of a wildly successful R&B singer beaten bloody by her equally popular boyfriend. Of course, the juicy story of the black televangelist strangled and stomped by her preacher husband on a hotel parking lot also received plenty of media play.
Flip the channel or turn the page and there are the “baby mamas” and “baby daddies” so ubiquitous in common American culture that they become plot points or titles for mainstream comedies and movies.
And there, on the news, backed by respected research, are the products of all this ingrained promiscuity and violence — young children seemingly running amok in urban cities that breed violence, some left to raise their own siblings in the absence of negligent or missing parents.
The syndicated television program Maury, hosted by Maury Povich, is known for its “Who’s Your Daddy?” segments. Much of the content is based on issuing paternity tests to teens and young adults in hopes of determining fatherhood. In just one week during the summer of 2009, I watched these scenarios:
Three young African American women — girls really — accused a young man of fathering their three children — all born within a month of one another. The young man had another 7-month-old child with his current girlfriend. In another segment, a young girl slept with two men at the same time, and was unsure who fathered her child. Then, there was the story about a mother who paid her daughter’s boyfriend for sex.
Many of Maury’s guests are black, and the sheer number of these cases is damning. Shows like these, along with court television shows that promote the same dysfunction, are very popular. I couldn’t help but imagine the vast numbers of people indoctrinated by these images of black family chaos. And it’s not like we can put 100 percent of the blame for this public buffoonery on the producers of these shows. These situations aren’t fabricated; they’re just carefully picked realities of black life. Sadly, it’s art (and I use the word loosely) that imitates life. We watch these programs like a gory train wreck because they involve so many people who look like us.
Blacks not only dance to the beat of family destruction, we patronize films by black producers and directors that bombard our brains and reinforce all the bad we’ve been fed about ourselves — first by the white ruling class, and now abetted by our brainwashed brethren. Whether it’s sagas like Rihanna and Chris Brown, or negative, self-demeaning movies, or characters like those depicted in HBO’s gritty urban drama The Wire — black relationships and families are seen as hopelessly at odds, dysfunctional, violent, and unsubstantial.
Yet we accept and share these perceptions without question or qualm. Passionate conversations about “no good black men” among groups of black women are not irregularities. What is a rare occurrence, however, is our willingness to go to the historic root of negative black male behavior or discuss how fatherless homes help shape the sentiments shared by so many black women.
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Interesting stuff. I can’t wait to read it!
1love
n’mama
