Roaden Polynice
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Off the coast of Tiburon in California, is a residential community titled the Dresslian Institute. In current times, the Dresslian Institute is a nonprofit organization that holds different workshops during the year, ranging from yoga, ecology, psychology and spirituality. The retreat center mainly serves as a sunny locale for bored couples and rich technology startup mavens to unplug from everyday life. However, in the past, the Dresslian Institute, and the founders of the Dresslian Institute, harbored much grander ideals. Ideals that would lead them to attempt to turn people into free individuals, free from corporate and political coercion. In their attempts to free people from their capitalistic bonds, they would then try to use the very same techniques, to enact social changed in the tumultuous 1960s.
The 60s saw a new wave of radical thinking which was borne out of the counter-culture movement in the United States. Among the various ideas of the counter-culture movement, there was a disdain for government and the capitalist society that they felt had plagued the citizens of the United States for decades. The counter culture believed this to be detrimental, as faceless large corporations preyed on the subconscious minds of the masses to compel them to buy more goods than they needed. The other way the counter-culture movement believed this rampant capitalism to be harmful, was that it warped freedom, and made them prisoners to the capitalist society. They argued that they were not free in a country that trumpeted freedom for all, when the masses were being manipulated by a small cadre of highly-skilled and intellectual groups.
The Dresslian Institute opened in 1961. The founders touted the idea that you could somehow, through the use of psychoanalyst techniques developed by Otto Braun, change the the self of a person. In other words, you could rid people of the control that big business and the government exerted over their free will, and a new self would be born. Out of this new and freer self, would the roots of governmental and social transformation grow.
Besides the Dresslian Institute attempting to transform beings, the institute believed they could attempt to transform the larger society, and resolve other societal ills, beginning with racism.
The leaders of the institute decided to hold encounter groups between black radicals and white people. The aim of the groups was to bring the two races together, and encourage them to spill their feelings about each other. The moderators believed that this would lead the people in the groups to be freed from the control of society, and their ill-feelings, and they would eventually see themselves as individuals.
The encounter groups were a disaster. The blacks bonded together, and excoriated the whites. They saw the groups as an attempt to undermine their power, the power they drew from the collectiveness of their groups as black radicals.
Fast forward to the present. With the days of black radicalism behind us, the black race in America is at a precarious point. Indeed the black race has taken great strides. There are many black people who sit atop Fortune 500 companies, who own their own businesses, black females are plentiful in colleges, and there is a bevy of young, intelligent black professionals littered throughout the United States.
Then there is the other side. The sky-high incarceration rates of black males, the problem with WorldStarHipHop, President Obama, Michelle Obama, Tommy Sotomayor, Kanye West, single black mothers, drug use, a raucous inner-city youth who shun compassion for ruthlessness, and love for murder, the pernicious habit of public self-flagellation, hip-hop in general, a desire for worthless material objects, the ills of Michael Jordan, slavishness to sports and fleeting wealth, get rich quick schemes, and Love and Hip-Hop.
It is plain to see that while black people have made strides to become a more powerful denomination in the United States, we have strayed far from the black radical groups in the 1960s who bonded together for strength and determination. We have instead traded in fierce communities and unbreakable love, for sneakers, weaves, homophobia, crime, grinning politicians, and frothy rap music disguised as politically radical commentary.
It is at this point the black community must make a change or perish. Thus I submit that the black community embrace individualism and separateness within the community.
This does not mean that black people turn to white people or look to appease white people. It simply means that we adopt the thinking of the Dresslian Institute. Through this slicing up of the black community, black people on their own will forge a new identity, a new self. One that will, over time, not be lumped together into one group or movement. This practice of grouping people as one and ignoring their individual traits and qualities inevitably leads to generalities, and a weakening of them as a person. To be grouped with the WSHH, Polo loving, Jordan wearing crowd means to impose an identity on one that one may not want at all.
Down the road this could lead to a black individual that is free to criticize any public figure who is black. For a very long time, in futile bids to foster a "community," black people would look down on those who attempted to denounce other black people who had rocketed themselves to positions of power, or who had made strides to bear some semblance of success. The mentality is that as long as one of us makes it, we should ignore his transgressions and support him/her regardless.
This is a harmful way of thinking. One that lionizes unqualified people, commends others for their missteps and creates an inaccurate portrayal of them as a person and a pushes a detrimental propaganda that wildly distorts. We should be free to criticize anyone without the community breathing down our necks. A new freedom, an embracing of the crabs in a barrel mentality.
Radical as this may sound, it will, down the line make sense. In a world where individualism is running rampant and becoming ever stronger through the internet and gross consumerism that was never eradicated despite the efforts of the Dresslian Institute, this shift in mentality will see black America ahead of the curve. It may be a far cry from what the black radicals believed to be their anchor, but the argument follows that they would be hard pressed to disagree judging the way blacks have evolved since then.
Shawn C. Booker is a PhD/Journalism student currently enrolled at Emory University with an interest in race relations and history. He is currently researching for a book that explores the effects of the internet and jordans on black people
If anything they are the epitome of advancement in the African American Community.