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(Editor´s Note: This is part three of an article urging men to let God renew their minds through faith in Jesus Christ.)
Black Worldviews And Coping Strategies
While black Americans think about our historical experience in varying ways creating many different worldviews, the vast majority today believes we are totally innocent victims of history´s worst injustice ever! To think otherwise is to be a lackey of the "white man" and sell out to the race. However, to think even as the majority over the years since slavery has led not only to many different, but deficient worldviews and at their best, unhealthy coping strategies. How did this come to be?
As with the aftermath of any calamity that impacts humanity, white southerners had to pick themselves up at the bitter end of the Civil War. They rallied together to rebuild their devastated cities and tattered way of life which now meant exploiting and oppressing their former slaves. In this they showed how they interpreted history, a worldview and future vision.
Numbering some four million souls, our newly freed slave ancestors were mostly uneducated and dirt poor. It is understandable that the federal government and many well meaning northern whites came into the South pushing education as the salvation of our people. That first generation out of slavery wanted education too along with economic help and political enfranchisement. To their credit, many black churches aided mightily in these efforts.
But with all of these efforts should have also come from the churches a biblical interpretation of the slave experience as well as a unifying worldview and vision for the black future. The churches had the mandate since it was the Christianity they represented that had held the majority of slaves from many different African tribes together; their submission and hope famously resting upon the God of Moses and Jesus from the Bible and forever recorded in their work songs and spirituals.
Instead, in the demoralizing face of white political intrigue and violent terrorism, the more immediate concerns of survival and coping through escapist religious ecstasy occupied the many black Christians and their churches (amazingly as it still does to this very day, over 140 years later). As a result, by the end of that 19th century, the hope crushing reality of legally sanctioned oppression and discrimination in the form of Jim Crow segregation, easily made victimization the majority interpretation of the black experience.
With the matter of interpretation settled, all that remained was the selection of an appropriate worldview. A growing number of leaders from within and without the churches of the closing 19th century competed for which of their worldviews, coping strategies and future visions would prevail.
While eventually one approach did emerge dominant culminating in the Civil Rights Movement in the middle of the last century, the people themselves also considered and lived out many victimization driven worldviews and coping strategies, some with a future vision; others clearly not.
In my research and experience down through the years, I have identified at least eleven major black worldviews and corresponding coping strategies that I present in our Releasing The Strong Man Seminar. I will introduce each briefly in the rest of this article to demonstrate why we need God to renew our minds as promised in the Christianity of the Bible. The thinking, attitudes and behaviors described in a few of the black worldviews and coping strategies overlap. Too, some folk have more than one worldview and means of coping.
In the defeatist worldview, the thinker is overwhelmed with and gives himself over completely to the belief blacks will always be victims of white tyranny. He is a white conspiracy theorist and copes by retreating accordingly into a world of paranoia and self-destructive behavior such as alcohol and drug abuse. Instability and even mental illness is not uncommon among those with the defeatist worldview.
As I have already noted, victimization feeds most black thinking about our experience and related worldviews. Those holding to victimization as their worldview are in a state of waiting as a coping strategy. They wait for white America to own up to the harm done to and to make it right with blacks. A number of these hardcore victims refuse to get an education, work consistently or otherwise "play the white man´s game." Their cry is, "we are innocent; we were done wrong as a people and we are owed!" From such thinking comes the unabashed call for reparations for example.
In the seminar I quote black author Shelby Steele who contends those with the victimization worldview "have a hidden investment in victimization and poverty." 1 The investment is the sense of innocence we have been able to parlay into entitlements. But the question is, are we (or any human beings for that matter) truly innocent before the Judge of record who really counts, God Almighty? He says no (Romans 3:9-20, 23)! This being so, black innocence is a lie and victimization as a worldview and its coping strategy is a sham!
1 Shelby Steele, The Content Of Our Character, (New York: St. Martin´s Press, 1990), p. 15.
To Be Continued Next Issue
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