Good afternoon. This is Dr. George Woods. I am honored today to be part of what I consider to be a groundbreaking conversation with Dr. Benjamin Bowser, which we will start in just a few moments. The conversation is named, The Past is Never Dead. It's not even past. Implications of the Legacy of American Slavery and Genocide for Therapeutic Practice and Treatment. And thank you, Dr. Bowser, for being a part of this conversation today. Thank you for having me. First of all, I want to just acknowledge, I thought that you would move the slide over one to SAMHSA and the African-American Behavioral Health Center of Excellence for funding this particular conversation. The contents of those of the authors and the contents are those of the authors that do not necessarily represent the official views. Also, this particular conversation is eligible for one AMA Category 1 credit. Please get your credits. We all need those. So make sure that you go for that. I know there are handouts that are available for Dr. Bowser's slides. And this is probably the last time I'm going to call him Dr. Bowser because he's been to me. And we'll continue to talk about it. You need to have these slides because when Ben Bowser gives a lecture, you want to think about it, massage it, and really look at it over time. So on the left-hand side, you see the way in which you can reach these from the desktop. On the right-hand side, you can click the page symbol, which will display the handouts. And you can load them up from that point of view. Please participate in question and answers. Again, you can look at the Attendee Control Panel. You can see that there are places for you to ask questions. And we'll certainly be answering those. Or if you're on the Instance Joint Webinar, there's a question mark that you can use to display questions and answer. Dr. Bowser, we can suppose there's no relevant financial disclosures at this time. And moving on. So let me tell you a little bit about Ben Bowser because I can't tell you a lot because it would take us for the rest of the day. Ben Bowser is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at California State University, East Bay. He received his PhD at Cornell University. He's a sociologist who specializes in research methods, public health, and community assessment. Dr. Bowser has served on three Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Expert Panels on Drug Abuse, HIV Risk, and has authored 40 peer-reviewed papers and chapters. His books related to his presentation are The Transatlantic Slave Trade, The New Directions in Teaching and Learning, and The Black Middle Class, Mobility and Vulnerability. That's three of Dr. Bowser's multiple books. He's past president of the Association of Black Psychologists, was a visiting professor at the University of Paris, and is one of the most brilliant thinkers and writers of this generation. It's an honor for me to both know Ben and to introduce him. Ben, take it away. Okay, George, thank you very much. Just one correction. I don't want the psychologists to be mad at me. I was president of the Association of Black Sociologists. I apologize. I apologize. I wouldn't want them angry with me. Anyway, the past is still with us. Of course, I must acknowledge that this is a quote from William Faulkner, but he sets a very nice stage for us. What I want to talk about in the way of a kind of contextual overview is to speak of slavery and Native American genocide in the United States, as you know, was justified and perpetrated as a cultural belief in white racial superiority. And when did this happen? Of course, it was during the colonial period. Now, we are no longer a colonial society, but in the late 1600s, early 1700s, was when the current, the present attitudes and beliefs about race were formulated and evolved and were embedded in this culture. And integral with the embedding of racial superiority, racial superiority, white superiority, and black inferiority was in the notion of whiteness, of being white. Those of you who travel in Europe, you know, Europeans do not identify themselves as white people. I mean, they understand that concept because that's part of their socialization from across the Atlantic. So this notion of whiteness is an American invention. And it was invented, the concept was invented by, interestingly, the Virginia colonial legislature. And they did this because they had a real problem. And the problem was that the white indentured servants that did most of the work in the colony, with whom the initial slaves, Africans, were not brought, by the way, Africans were not brought to Virginia in 1619 as slaves in the way that we understand slavery. They were initially brought in and worked as indentured servants. That was the way they understood how to control people to get labor. But over time, they realized that that particular setup would not sustain the colony. It was too dangerous. And it was very apparent from the Bacon Rebellion on that if they allowed white indentured servants or European indentured servants, to be more correct, to work side by side with Africans, as indentured servants, they would not be able to maintain the colony, there will be continuous rebellions, and the plantation owners and the wealthy planters would be displaced, if not worse. So they had to come up with a way of maintaining control over the colony, which meant separating the European indentured servants by essentially making them free people, elevating their status, and then taking the Africans and reducing their status. So one group was freed and the other group was put into chattel slavery, which had not been the case. Prior to these legislative acts. So by dividing the two, then they were able, especially with the big increase in Africans as slaves from the 1700s on, they were able to contain or control the colonies by this racial coding. That is white people were in control, or rather, European people of European descent were in control as a new white people, and then Africans were reduced into slavery. So this was a critical period in our colonial history. And this is part of what has not died with the end of slavery. So in racism, racism did not end with the abolition of slavery. And I would also point out that the Native American history, it goes hand in hand with this, that in the initial colonies, it wasn't the intent of the colonists to eliminate Native people. But in time, they began to realize that that was necessary. The only way they could get Native lands were essentially to eliminate the people who claimed them and who defended that those properties as their own. So we have running here, a parallel and what is generally seen as two separate histories are in fact very closely related into the development of modern racism. So the past has not passed because with the abolition of slavery, the end of the Civil War, and the no longer having the necessity to eliminate Native peoples, you would think that well, that history has passed, that awful history has passed. Well, in fact, it has continued in the form of cultural racism, the embeddedness in our cultural thinking of white superiority and the inferiority of people of color. One of the big issues that's come out of this, along with racism is multi-generational trauma. And I'll come back to that in a moment. If any of you are interested in reading further this history and how it connects to our current, you'll find it in a journal article which I published with colleagues in genocide studies and prevention. So let's look at what are the outcomes of this living past, current outcomes. First of all, I'm going to divide these outcomes into two kinds. One, outcomes for the descendants of Africans, of enslaved Africans and Native people. And in particular, we're going to look at outcomes that are not part of the focus of current counseling treatment in education. That is, it's not a part of any formal education in this country and certainly not a part of any treatment by psychologists, clinicians or social workers. I mean, we can go down the list of helping professions that do not see these issues as important for their work. And I have to tell you that the basis of this work is not my simply cogitating and coming up with something. It's the basis of several international forums where psychiatrists and historians from seven countries in the Western Hemisphere, we came together and asked this question as part of a UNESCO study group on slavery. What were the implications of this history in the West for the present? And we were shocked to find that many of the issues that we discuss generally in the United States were also issues that we found in Brazil, in Cuba, in Mexico, in Peru, in Venezuela and in the Caribbean, despite the fact that we have differences in languages and differences in history, that these are common outcomes for people of African descent in the West who experience slavery. So I'm going to go over, I think, six, and these are the first three. First is colorism. One of the central issues in people of color, Native Americans and African Americans alike, is colorism. And by the way, this is also an issue among Southern Indian immigrants into the US. Colorism, that comes out of a different history. That is, the lighter you are, the higher the status. The darker you are, the lower the status. This is a direct consequence and outcome of slavery in this country. Secondly, child beating. We don't have African Americans and Native parents don't just discipline their children, they beat them. This is historically coming out of slavery. Harsh treatment, and I'll get into that in a moment. Self and racial group hatred. This is a huge issue in the communities of color as a consequence of Americanization. Colorism, let's look a little more deeply, go a little more deeply into this. You'll see here three images. From the top left of your screen to the bottom right, top left, is a woman who is of color, but she's very fair-skinned. In the middle is a woman who is primarily black, I'm sorry, brown in color. And then on the other end, you have a woman who is phenotypically African, very dark. And in the context of American racism and the history of slavery, these women are viewed very differently in terms of social status. And in fact, if you think about it, you think about what you see on television in terms of the images of the more recent images of black women who come across as newscasters and weather announcers and so forth in most of the country. It is rare that you see a woman who is of dark skin. So in our history, you're all right if you're very fair-skinned and stick around if you're brown and get back if you're black. There's a long history of this colorism as a basis of social conflict, but it's also a problem of individual psychology and self-esteem around these issues of color. One of the, you say, well, Dr. Bowser, really, is that true? Well, one of the empirical ways of seeing this is the multimillion-dollar skin bleaching and lightening industry in the United States and increasingly in Africa, where products are developed and sold to women of color as lightening, skin lightening products. Of course, this is basically really snake oil. There's no way to bleach one's skin, but nevertheless, millions are being made off of this to lighten dark skin. Hair straightening. African phenotypes are people who are native of Saharan environments, have generally kinky hair like this man on the right, but in the context of racial inferiority for people of color, there's a necessity, especially seen among black women, of hair straightening, European-style hair, stylings, and so forth. The same is among men of color. In fact, many men, the way they deal with this, many men of African ancestry, is that they just simply cut their hair off completely. They have bald hair, or they're bald-headed, or simply just eliminate the hair, period, as a style. Child beating. This is one that many psychiatrists are really not aware of, that in the histories of their clients, they were often beaten severely and traumatized in these beatings as a function of normal, everyday childbearing. The history of this is that in slavery, children were not disobedient to the master. Children had to be disciplined at the early age to be able to know what to say to the masters and what not to say. In other words, children couldn't make mistakes with the wrong people by being children, by being verbal, saying, oh, my mommy says this, or my father thinks that. Because if your mommy or your daddy is a slave, and the child gives the master conversations that the parents don't want the master to know about, then children must know at the earliest age, as soon as they start talking, that this is off-limits, and that they must know that there are circumstances under which they cannot talk to or say certain things to the master. In which case, this could not be part of a long-term childrearing, had to be done immediately, and which ends trauma was used as a way of making certain that you don't say anything. So typically, the children didn't say anything. They were mute. And of course, this translates over to teachers and to people in general authority back then and today. To point out, the evidence of this is that Black parents still beat their children more often and more severely than parents of any other ethnic group. And we've actually had studies of these in your field of child psychology, psychiatry. And this is a major issue, both as a clinical issue, as well as a social issue. And another way that you can know the importance of this and the severity is that Black comedians, one of the tropes that they use to entertain their audience is to talk about how their parents beat them as children. And the audiences will erupt around this in acknowledgement of, yes, that's the fact. And the question is, was it necessary in order to produce a well-functioning adult? And this is a question that's never been answered well, especially after slavery. So the third outcome of this past is what I referred to earlier as unresolved multi-generational trauma. In research on trauma, we have good research on initial trauma. And then there's research on people who have been traumatized twice, but what we do not have is research on people who have been traumatized more than two times within their own generation, and then across generations, trauma across generations. In the case of the Holocaust, the European Holocaust of European Jews, we had a period of essentially 20 years that produced trauma, severe trauma, for so many people who were the products of concentration camps and so on, but when it comes to genocide among Native Americans and slavery, we're talking about trauma that went on for well over 200 years, and that trauma was an intentional outcome of slave control. That is, slave owners and trainers knew exactly what they were doing. They knew they were traumatizing their slaves, and they did that intentionally as a function of control, and so consequently, multi-generational trauma became part of African-American culture and of Native American culture, and of course, it is expressed across generations for people who have no idea where it came from or why it still exists in their families, but it's still there. Finally, Black on Black, Native on Native violence. We have violence among people of color, in particular among African-Americans and Native Americans in this country that cannot be explained by poverty, that cannot be explained by lack of education, unemployment, all of the ways that we as sociologists study the inequality, racial inequality in this country. None of this, the independent variables, can successfully explain the level of violence. In fact, police violence is absolutely minor, it's miniscule compared to Black on Black violence, where you read in the papers and you see on the news the weekends with the numbers of shootings among youth, and we generally refer to as gang violence or drug violence, but even in the context of gangs, even in the context of drugs, the levels of violence are not explained by poverty, by drugs, by dealing, and so forth. This is a historic outcome that has been with us, that was violence in slavery among slaves, and it continues on into the present, and it's endemic as part of the culture, and of course, it's part of individual behavior, and it won't be addressed until it's recognized as such. Perhaps in questions and answers, we'll come back to that. Now, interestingly, we ordinarily think of racism as having only effect on people of color, on the victims of racism, but in fact, the racism that came out of the colonial history has had also this compromise the health and well-being of European Americans, and notice I didn't say white Americans, it's European Americans, because in terms of culture and history, we're talking about people of European ancestry and background, independent of their socialization as white people in the United States, and again, these outcomes are no place on the radar for counseling, treatment, and education, but they need to be if we're going to have a resolution of this history of racism in the United States. Two of these outcomes, by the way, which are not simply, since I'm speaking to an American audience, interestingly, my colleagues in Brazil, Cuba, and other countries in the Western Hemisphere are using the exact same points, but within the historic and linguistic context of their country, but we're dealing with the same issues. One of the biggest is this notion of distorted authenticity, and whiteness as it's currently defined and understood in the United States is part of this distortion. Are people of European descent European descent, or are they white descent? Of course, I ask my students in my classes based on travels throughout Europe, where is white land? What is the European origins of white people? And there's no people in Europe who call themselves white people historically or culturally. Again, this simply speaks to the fact that this is a strictly an American concept, but within it, it contains a distortion of self around this notion of race, which itself is a myth, and which is nonsense. Then gun culture, we're talking now about these mass shootings and the unwillingness of the Congress to do anything about it. And the fact that Americans have accumulated almost 300 million guns in this country. There seems to be this fear of violence. And fascinating thing is the vast majority of people who fear this violence have absolutely no real basis for it whatsoever in terms of any physical violence against themselves. I had a neighbor who had 23 guns in his house, and it was the safest part of Oakland, California. So what do you need 23 guns in? And I used to laugh with him about, well, you know, with 23 guns in the house, there's a greater probability that you'll kill yourself than anyone else. But he'd laugh and just kept going. And interestingly to know, this man was from the South. His father had 23 guns, his grandfather had 50 guns, and they were armed to the teeth for generations. And when I had asked him, well, why do you need these guns? He really didn't have a good answer. So what is this fear of violence and the need for guns, this gun culture in the United States, as such that Congress will not act? And we have some people who have this as almost a religious fervor. Let's get a little more into this. The current Trump has, Trump has opened the floodgates of stuff that years ago, I used to have to convince people that racism existed. But since Trump came on the scene and enabled so many people to now be free to discuss and to say exactly what they mean, and they believe, we see all kinds of extraordinary examples of white distortion of authenticity. And this, this is a beautiful commercial. Um, I mean, it's almost as if these people have some kind of, of, we can't call it the clinical problem, because it's not in the DSM-5. But they certainly have some kind of cultural and conceptual cognitive problem when it comes to issues of race, where you can somehow or another think that, well, you know, the new state laws strictly prohibit any curriculum about color, Dr. King's skin, which, as you know, is being proposed across the country. So we only want to discuss his characters, if somehow or another, you can separate the two, and why is it necessary to separate the two and believe so strongly in it? This is distortion of authenticity. And of course, the gun culture. For those of you who are not familiar with the, with the history of America of slavery, the gun culture came directly out of slavery in this country. White landowners and poor whites having to be armed to the teeth to prevent entry to address any kind of slave uprisings, slave insolence, it was necessary, they had to be well armed, because the few slave revolts that happened, was very clear that if they weren't well armed, they would, the slaves of rebellion would wipe them out. So coming out of the south of this country, which is the origins of American culture is primarily in the south. Coming out of that history, you have this intense necessity among white Americans to be well armed. And it came out of direct, came directly out of the necessity to be well armed in order to avoid slave rebellions and put them down if they ever occurred. Two final outcomes for European Americans. The justification for black inferiority and white superiority. And I have under here structurally and individually. Well, we know about the individuals who insist that this is the case, and we'll find every single example of possibility that they can find to justify black inferiority and white superiority. But where this becomes particularly problematic is in the running of institutions, structurally, the running of schools, of police forces, and so forth. You cannot find police officers who enforce the law differentially against black people and for white people who do not believe that they're justified by white and by white superiority and black inferiority. You just don't find it. I mean, so we find this in policing, we find it in education, the presumption that black kids and Indian kids are inferior, that not good students can't be good students, and that their failure is justified. Finally, the displacement of fear and anxiety on blacks and other cultures and people of color. This, my colleagues have been writing for years about how this has affected US foreign policy. And the notion that people of color, and of course, most people in the world are of color, so they are now suspect, within the context of American racism, that we've engaged in wars with countries that were absolutely unnecessary. Vietnam is a great example. Why were we in Vietnam? We feared communism, but no, we didn't fear simply communism. We feared and did not understand people who were of color in Southern Asia, and presume that the way in which we saw the world, somehow or another, the racial way in which we saw the world necessitated the intervention into their history and culture. So more recently, this business of voter fraud in the United States comes directly out of the presumption that fraud, that voting in Philadelphia, and Minneapolis, and other large cities were fraudulent. You remember that? And this was absolutely no truth to this. The voter fraud in Atlanta was the basis of the whole Trump calling the Secretary of State of Georgia, looking for 11,000 more votes, wasn't looking for 11,000 more Black votes. So we're finding that there's huge fear, irrational fear in this country, around issues that are the direct outcomes of fear and anxiety of Blacks, and of the presumption that if people of color become a majority of the population in the United States, somehow or another, the white race will be eliminated, weakened, and made less than what it is. And of course, it's complete nonsense. Even if people of color did become a majority, there's absolutely no evidence in no way that European Americans in some way will not continue to control the country, and be the dominant ethnic group. So how does counseling, treatment, and education, what are the implications of these legacies of slavery in the present? How can we address them? Is there any way that we can lessen their impact? And these, by the way, are suggestions from the authors of our UNESCO study group that looked at these issues. These are some of the suggestions that we've made. First of all, for people of color, colorism and self and racial hatred should be part of individual and group psychotherapy. I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not a psychologist, but my psychiatrist, psychologist colleagues, who have looked carefully at these and participated with us in these study groups, have all come to a consensus that this is absolutely essential, that it's almost impossible to do effective psychotherapy for people of color and not address colorism and racial and self-hatred. And to presume that these, first of all, do not exist, and there are some cases where people have processed this. And this is not something that is part of their individual lives, but for many it is, and it is unquestioned. They're not even aware of it. Secondly, multi-generational trauma. A number of psychologists and psychiatrists spoke of clients who were transformed by understanding the trauma, the secrets in their family that impacted the socialization of new members across the generations. And in many cases, these were rapes and of murder, and certainly we know of this as an issue among Native Americans. And the high suicide rate is a function of unaddressed multi-generational trauma in the lives of Native American families. We have the same issue in people of African ancestry who came out of slavery in this country. And finally, I've already talked about the Black on Black and Indian on Indian violence, and that both should be issues of community mental health. It should be viewed as that because they are not simply individual issues, they are community-wide issues. For European Americans, guess what? Racism and white supremacy should be questioned by people in the helping professions. How do you do a treatment and how do you improve the functioning, the psychological functioning of European American or white clients and not address racism? In effect, we've done that because we've paid no attention to white racism as a function, as a belief, and as a behavior on the part of European Americans that degrades their psychological functioning and also makes it difficult for people of color to live with them. Exploring and addressing multicultural, multi-generational trauma in white families, we have a suspicion, and we don't have empirical evidence of this, but we have a suspicion that multi-generational trauma is much more prevalent in white and European family, American families than we realize. It is almost impossible to have become an immigrant and not in some way or another have been traumatized by the experience and not only experiencing and having to come to the United States. People, when you ask European Americans, why did your ancestors, your grandfather, great-grandfather, and so come to the United States, they'll say, well, for economic advantage and to improve our lives and so forth. Well, in fact, if you go deeply into the history of the Irish immigration to the United States or Italian immigration to the United States, you'll realize that it wasn't that they came for economic advantages. Yes, of course, they came for that, and that's how they rationalized it, but the fact of the matter is they were forced out. In many cases, if they didn't leave, they would have been eliminated. There was rape. There was violence against them. Members were killed in their families. They were forced out. It was a traumatic experience for them to have to uproot themselves and to move, and then the traumas continue in having to transport themselves halfway across the world and then experience what they experienced when they got to the United States. They weren't white. They didn't arrive white. They arrived as Italians. They arrived as Irish, and in the process of becoming Americans, then they had to learn to become white, and in this were all kinds of experiences that were traumatic, which very few therapists have even started looking at, but this is a huge issue in our population, and we suspect it may have something to do with the continuing life of racism in this country and the necessity for it and of the incredible American habit of wanting to know nothing about more than three generations back, and I don't mean when talking about genealogy, not wanting to know genealogy, but wanting to know the living experiences of the people who immigrated to this country who were one's forefathers were. Finally, this whole business of white gun necessity and violence as a community mental health issue, it is a community mental health issue, and it should not simply be an issue of politics in Congress. This is a major cultural issue in this country. It needs to be addressed, and the helping professions should be part of that. All right. Here we are. I'm I'm shot for 1245, and I'm three minutes early, so I turn it over to Dr. Woods. Dr. Bowser, I want to thank you for your amazing and enlightening, and I think for me, a hopeful presentation, because reality is always where you should start. I want to share with you, my wife and I had a conversation last night about our parents, particularly about our mother. And the conversation was about how sure were we that our mothers loved us, given the fact that they beat us. Now, both of us are very clear that our mothers loved us. That was not part of the conversation, but the fact that as young black children, we were exposed to that violence at home that now in our seventh decade, we still think about. Brought me back to the point that you were making about how do you see those long-term implications of self-hatred and of questioning? Well, part of what I haven't done here because I didn't have time or the circumstances that black culture and identity is so intricately linked to whiteness that they're like two rocks. You can't move one without the other. You can't transform one without the other because the continuing violence of black parents and Native American parents is predicated on continuing exposure to cultural, to media images, and to education that explain the presence and essence of people of color as being inferior. And so then, along with that comes how do you survive as an inferior person? You make certain that your children are overly socialized around authority, i.e. beatings rather than spankings or using violence. And so, you can't move one without the other. Right. When you talk about, and I'm going to jump around here because I've got five pages of notes, but when you talk about distorted authenticity, can you give us a little bit more about that? Yeah. You know, when your reality doesn't fit what you think you are, then you have to go a little, you have to be cognitively creative. You got to come up with ways to explain this distance between one's reality and what you think. So, if you are, if you're a European American and you're not the, and the smartest kid in the class is an Indian kid or a black kid, well, if you're superior, how do you explain that? Okay. So, then you got to come up with something. Oh, well, you know, he's there because of affirmative action. He's there because of something about that black child's experience has to explain why you are not at the top of the class. And you're down where you expect him to be or her to be. So, you got this business of distortion going on continuously because if there's a distance between your cultural belief and your realities as such, then you got to fill in the gap. And that's what distortion, racial distortion is all about. And by the way, black people do the same thing. There's a distortion going on on that side as well, where if you are, if you believe you're supposed to be better or you think you can be better and you aren't, well, how do you explain that? So, you got distortions happening all across the board. Right. A friend of, there's a friend of mine that's a child psychiatrist who describes that relationship with black men and their mothers. And the idea that their mothers are so afraid of them just dying, not, you know, not afraid of it, but it's just so afraid that they will lose them, that they overprotect them. And that overprotection ends up creating an expectation that can never really be satisfied because no one else is going to treat them that way. In fact, you may in fact encounter just the opposite. So, there's this over, which is part of trauma, there's this overreaction, this hyper-reactivity on both sides. Yeah. And what's so amazing about it is that in all of these distortions, there are elements of absolute truth and reality. There are realities. It is dangerous to be a black man of color in an environment where the police are predominantly white and approach it with a racist attitude of white supremacy. You're in a dangerous situation. So, that's real. But then how you interpret that, you're drawing on your history. You're drawing on your history. If that history has dysfunctional solutions, then guess what? You pull up the stuff that is dysfunctional if you don't know it's that. So, I'm certain part of your colleagues' treatment of the mothers and those families was to explain to them, hey, look, you can train your children, but you don't have to beat them. You don't have to use a 17th century necessity in the 21st century. And the only reason you're doing that is because it's come across from your parents or your grandparents and so forth, and you've never questioned why you're doing that in the way that you're doing. Right. Or you never felt like you had control. Or you never had control. Exactly. That's what you do. That's what you do. You know, in 1492, there were approximately 12 to 15 million Native American people in what we now know as the United States. Where did they go? Where did they go? The most well, I guess the accepted explanation, most accepted explanation is that they died from smallpox, yellow fever. They died from diseases brought to North America by European settlers. That is in question as to whether there's the accuracy of that particular beast. Of course, the historians are looking at this, debate this issue. But the alternative is that they were, in fact, eliminated. They were genocidally killed. And it's hard to accept that. But the fact of the matter is that the increasing evidence, and there are now people studying the histories of various Native American tribes and nation states in North America and Central America and South America. And they're finding evidence that there were policies and there were practices that essentially rewarded the elimination of Native people, physical elimination of them. Oh, they're inferior. They're savages. They didn't take care of all this land they had. So they were eliminated. As simple as that. That's what's happened to them. And that elimination went right up until the late 1800s. Physical elimination went up to the 1800s. And then, of course, you know, after into the 1900s, it was cultural elimination. You eliminate their presence, you eliminate them as a cultural entity. You send them to schools to try to teach them to become, by the way, they weren't certain whether the outcome would be white people or something else. But that's what they did. Yeah. I question that medical explanation for the numbers that we have today. And it really speaks to something we don't see to the same degree in Europe, and that is, although we see it perhaps, we think of Japan and what they've done with the Korean in terms of comfort women and World War II, etc. But this denial, you know, this denial, this unwillingness to, how would you put it, this irrational fear. What makes that so strong in the American culture? Well, what makes it so strong in the American culture is because it is an essential part of one's social and personal identity. It is who you are. And if you accept whiteness as part, as who you are, as an integral part of who you are, then you're predisposed to defend what happened before. And the tragedy of that is that is precisely what the colonial, the legislature I showed you, that is precisely what they intended it for it to do. Because the vast majority of Americans have no history in colonial America. They didn't own property in the South. They weren't slave owners. They were immigrants. They were brought to this country. And what's interesting is that despite what happened to them in Europe, which should dispose them to be more inclined to identify with African American and Native American history, instead of identifying with the histories that are closest to their own, they end up identifying with the English plantation settler class culture of this country. And I'm fascinated by the fact that of the number of people of Irish ancestry who are now the main proponents of Make America Great. Mitch McConnell, and you keep finding these Irish names, if you go back into their histories, their grandparents should be rolling in their graves around who they're identifying with and what they're doing. But that's what happens when whiteness becomes part of becoming an American. In order to be American, you've got to be white. And of course, this is the difficulty with white Americans understanding a new America. How in the world can people of color be Americans if they're not white? And how could they? I mean, it doesn't make sense. Due to me, what I've done to them. Yes, exactly. Well, I mean, that's the fear when you don't know the history. Right. That's the fear that is given to you to continue trying to go back into the past. Right. Right. And so then you come up with, oh, well, if they are in our position, they would do the same thing. And, you know, that's just simply, simply not true. People, African Americans have more conflicts among themselves as such that if they didn't have racism, they'd have some other issues with each other and would probably not bother white people at all. So that's, you know, that brings up the paperback test. Would you mind talking a bit about the. Yeah. Paperback test in the HBCUs, the African, the black, historically black colleges and universities in the United States. One of the things they did to to aid them and to mimic white culture was to start fraternities. And fraternities, of course, were expressions of their own values. And if you consider colorism as one of the things that's important to you, then you're not going to have a fraternity that is that it is going to be a prestigious fraternity and you're not going to have one that has a lot of people who are who can't pass what is called the brown bag test. And that test was if you take a brown bag and I don't have one here. Oh, my my bookcases in the back are brown. If you take that as an example, you can ask yourselves, well, if I want new members of my fraternity or sorority, I can bring them in here. And if they're darker than the bookcase and I don't want them in the fraternity, they can't be members and out. And that was called the brown bag test, they would have a brown bag and anybody who was darker than the bag was automatically excluded from membership to the sorority or fraternity. And that was a actual example of colorism in action around rejecting certain members of the community and then elevating others in the community because of their color. You know, we we are at the one o'clock point, but I I want to ask you one more question. I actually want to ask you 15, but I'll keep it to one. That's probably you. You've written on a. Modern culture and its implications for self-hatred, particularly around certain forms of music. Can you can you comment on that? Yeah. One of the I guess my my longest serving book is entitled Impacts of Racism on White Americans. And the third edition is now the impacts of racism on white Americans in the age of Trump. And the main thesis of this book and of the authors who contributed to this project now over 30 years going. Is that the solution to racism in this country rests among primarily among European Americans who call themselves white? That. You know, black people and native people, we can stand on our heads, we can all get PhDs, we can all get MDs, and we're still going to have a problem with color of racism in this country until the general public among white Americans embraces and realizes that they're paying a heavy price for this racism and white people are paying a heavy price. And that's the my answer to your question, and that we need to make it wider known what the price is, what the price is. It is huge. The price and the cost. Price and the cost. Exactly. Housing and education and psychological functioning in worldview and foreign relations. It is it is distorting and poisoning and has been doing this for generations. And, you know, we may be coming to a head around these issues that are largely driven around issues of race and unwillingness to deal with racism and the racism of white Americans. Well, Professor Dr. Ben Bowser, thank you so much for. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Can you go to the next? I think we have one more slide. Yes, yes, yes, yes. OK, I've got to. It's OK. Sure. To claim the credit. Follow these instructions in the Learning Center at psych.org. Or please attend the attend the virtual event. I know people will be coming in online for the next few months. Submit evaluation, claim your credit. Click the button. You know, that's one of the things that we've seen in this series is that we have tremendous policy and people come on over the course of months. And so we really look forward to having you again and I could talk to you for hours. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure and much success. Thank you very much. Thank you.

American slavery

genocide

therapeutic practice

colorism

multi-generational trauma

black-on-black violence

native-on-native violence

racism

white supremacy

mental health