Blacks are their own worst enemy

How many times have you heard someone make the suggestion that black people are their own worst enemy? I have personally heard it stated overtly or implied more than enough for a lifetime. How can any living entity be its own worst enemy given that biologically, all life is wired to promote survival and perpetuation? Is not this notion really suggesting that something is wrong with the biological programming of black folk relative to other folk? Isn’t such an assumption or conclusion simply a more politically correct or acceptable way of forwarding the notion of black inferiority? I think so.

Every action a person makes, instinctive and conscious, is made to promote survival and or the pleasure of survival, unless there is faulty wiring or physical or emotional pain to the degree that makes a person seek termination. When people make choices it is because the mental calculus has concluded that the act will best promote or stimulate survival. Life does not program entities to promote self destruction, at least not until reproduction, the second prime directive. The two greatest pleasures in life are eating and sex, not necessarily in that order. They are the greatest pleasures because they facilitate the prime directives. All our actions are born from biologically motivated calculation to fulfill pleasure because pleasure is biologically associated with promoting survival. Pain indicates threat to our survival and pleasure indicates promotion of our survival. Thus, people make choices in life to promote pleasure and not pain. Hence, to be our own worst enemy we must be guilty of not seeking pleasure.

People choose the pleasures that their environments have to offer and pleasure is not all physical, but also psychological. Social rank and status is a form of pleasure that serves as a conduit to physical pleasures that promote the second prime directive. The problem for black folk is that our historical and contemporary environment and experiences are different enough in degree or kind that the choices we make differ from others. We all want rank and pleasure however different environments dispense rank and pleasure differently. The dispensing of rank and pleasure in oppressed communities in America conditions behavior that in the long run is detrimental, but pleasurable in the short run. Contrarily, in the non-oppressed communities where people are conditioned that opportunity is boundless, if one follows a process, pleasure in a long term calculus predicated on the process.

In short, the black environment has been conditioned toward short term pleasures and immediate gratification while the white community has been conditioned to seek rank and pleasure based upon a long term process. One of the consequences of years of discrimination against blacks is that black people don’t have faith in the “process” to the degree that white folks do and for good reason. Thus, when faith in the process has been forsaken through the conditioning of empirical evidence, such people make different choices and seek immediate gratification and status and rank as defined by the environment that they know and live in. In actuality, these people for a short time achieve rank and pleasure in their communities…which hardly makes them their own worst enemy in the short run, but rather, successful. However, rank and success in a culture shaped from oppression can lead to failure and punishment by the dominate culture.

In conclusion, I don’t believe that black people are our own worst enemy. To make that suggestion is to make the suggestion that black people are biologically inferior.