The Black Threat Theodicy

The Black Threat Theodicy

And The New Face Of Black Theology

Shahidi Islam

Copyright © Shahidi Islam.

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ISBN: 978-1-64921-213-9 (E-book Edition)

Some characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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The Black Threat Theodicy

Introduction

1. Escaping Our Traumatic Experience

2. The African Origins of the Hebrew People

3. Unlocking the Truth about the Book of Revelation

4. The Unceremonious Erasure of the Goddess Principle

5. Appreciating the Beauties of Suffering

6. The Prophetic Call in a Prophetless Age

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

The Penguin Complete English Dictionary defines theodicy as: a defence of the doctrine of God’s goodness and omnipotence against arguments derived from the existence of evil.

Basically, a theodicy is the study of God’s righteousness and his omnipotence in spite of physical suffering, and a black theodicy is a study of God’s benevolence and his mightiness in spite of black suffering.

It is through this understanding that I have developed the black threat theodicy. Hence, the reason for black suffering is the black threat. So what is the black threat? The black threat is what has held us back as a people and caused us great pain.

Till we learn the threat we will ourselves be the victims of the threat and it will consume us and our children. This is the danger of our ignorance to the black threat. By knowing what the threat is we thereby free ourselves from the threat and it becomes our oppressors’ threat.

In the following chapters I shall be breaking down the black threat piece by piece.

Escaping Our Traumatic Experience

The first T in the black threat is for trauma and as a people we black people have experienced a heavy trauma that needs to be accounted for.

Now I am not a psychologist nor do I claim to be a psychologist or a doctor even though I have read a large number of books on the subject.

At the same time, it could easily be said that the sociality of a situation creates the moral and psychological aspects of it. That what occurs in the mental and ethical facilities of a person are the result of the socio-cultural mechanisms in place in a society.

Freud’s id, ego and superego come into play here with the fact of the socio-cultural represented in the superego and the far more amoral biological drives being represented in the id.

These three vicissitudes of the self plainly show the extent of the nature v nurture argument in Freud’s theories.

On the one hand, biology effects the subconscious and, on the other, socialisation effects the subconscious; both in turn effect the consciousness of the individual.

If socialisation came just from the family this would be no problem but socialisation also comes from schools, textbooks, society, the media, the state and religion.

A child and an adult are affected by these realities subconsciously and consciously. But this is not only so but groupings are also collectively affected by these realities subconsciously and consciously.

Here is the complicated part: schools, textbooks, society, the media, the race, the nationality, the government, the culture, the religion and the class have a collective conscious and subconscious that is influenced and affected by the other groupings.

Here the significance of the institution gets internalised through interaction with other institutions.

When the interaction is negative then negative belief systems get internalised either towards that institution if that institution is of equal or lesser significance, or towards its own institution if they are in fact the ones of lesser significance.

This debacle cannot be eradicated while the id and the superego are in conflict. The submitting of the id to the superego coincides with the submitting of the biological to the sociological.

Such a structure can never last as it is the essence of the unnatural. Such is the modernisation of society, an unreal, unnatural, unhealthy caricature.

The subjugation in the subconscious of one institution to another coincides with the subjugation in the individual of the id to the superego.

Mental disorder must be substituted by social disorder for empowerment to be achieved. This means looking at the situation in all its vicissitudes: First is racial self-consciousness, a mechanism of the existing order of things.

The white social order leads to the black mental disorder as the black person’s social inferiority gets internalised and they subjugate their black instinctual mechanisms to white cultural institutions.

The institutional racism black people suffer from is not as external as they have assumed it to be. In fact, it is a result of philosophical complexes that have been instilled into the black person through socialisation and transformed into eternal constructs segregating and subjugating their psychological development.

The black, to avoid mental disorder at this phase either denies their blackness as primitive, instinctual, bestial and thus resists against their black nature (the hallucination of being white) or they accept their blackness and their humanity but admit to black cultural, social and economic backwardness (the delusion of white privilege).

As can be noted by the terminology both are just as psychologically inept as the mental disorders of those who go the other route (delusions of persecution, delusions of personal grandeur or hallucinations of internalised complexes).

For we black people as a race to overcome these mental disorders induced on us from the sociological framework of the current system we must group together and uplift black personality.

As concerning our psychological development as black people it is imperative that we progress through the phases of racial empowerment. This begins with racial self-consciousness.

At this phase the black person is aware that their race has set them apart for difficulty in the current world system.

The understanding that white social structures, when internalised, produce black mental strictures creates for these black people a cocoon to hide in from responsibility for their progression.

Basically, everything gets blamed on the white man with no hope or intention of ever getting themselves or their people out of this predicament.

White social structures, whether consciously or unconsciously, still get internalised but now more tacitly.

Racism is seen everywhere in their minds as mentally they are very aware that their black body stands them out, this is because in spite of knowing they are different and disadvantaged in a white world and social order, they have no knowledge of self or love of self.

The next phase is cultural consciousness, which comes when racial awareness turns into racial pride, as cultural distinctions are glorified.

At this point the vicissitudes of the black self – based on Freud’s id, ego and superego – are no longer divided between the black primitive id and the white cultured superego, but are reversed to the white savage id and the black civilised superego.

When one has reached a place of cultural consciousness they are able to see the beauty of their blackness, their black soul and their black culture.

All things black are now exalted and all things white are emasculated.

The black psychological mechanisms now transfer the evil, savage and inferior position from the black to the white, and fights internally to overthrow the white devil and the white devil doctrine that had them and/or their race oppressed (The delusion of black supremacy).

This is a continuation of a delusion of personal grandeur into the delusion of racial grandeur. Knowledge of self and love of self at this phase has not been controlled so that the black person has black pride without black power.

Following this phase is the phase of national consciousness, when the race spontaneously forms nationalist groups with the purpose of nation building and in opposition to the white social order.

This phase is one of the socio-political fight. Any mental disorders experienced in the other two phases are at this point rectified. Hallucinations and delusions begin to melt away as one struggles for national dignity and empowerment.

However, the social pressures of governmental repression more than compensate for the psychological empowerment gained. State repression takes the form of murder, theft, destruction and torture; and the torture can be of both body and mind.

These state sponsored psychological disorders can have the appearance of mental breakdown in the individual but are not.

The individual and their close associates may not be able to tell the difference but the truth is they are finally in a place of mental wholeness, and the traumata they are feeling is the price of war and can be resolved through persistent counselling.

Nationalism, however, is not in the individual but in the political group; in this the