Publisher's Synopsis
Man, the questing animal has a built-in longing for completion, fulfilment and a concern with ultLnate goals and values. But historical-cultural determinants operate throughout history to prevent the easy attainment of a self-acquired philosophy of life and as deterrants to self actualization and joy. The powerful relation between race and psychotic behaviour is evident in the severe behavioural aberrations common among people living in a subculture. African American lives in a crucial psychological climate shadowed by the crippling reality of racism. His racial and cultural history is the history of "collective displacement marred by racial connotations. The quest for identity and wholeness is central to the human experience and "Race is a small but volatile word:2 The African American finds this central quest dogged by invisibility, inequality and insensitivity for racism has the evil ability to warp the human spirit and determine human choice. The rhetoric of barrenness and hate, public pain and private despair is a resultant response to the realization that he is:
.-. born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. The African American feels that he is rubbed out for he is caught between two dark realities - a horrendous past and a bleak future. Robert Penn Warren refers to the split in identity, the split that haunted Du Bois: the tension between the impulse to Negroness, the mystique noire, and the impulse to be absorbed into the white West European-American culture - and perhaps blood stream.
The task of attaining wholeness, of becoming more fully human is hindered by the oppressive, dehumanizing barriers of race and colour which have woven a perennial difference, an apartness into African American lives. Self actualization demands the maintenance and the enhancement of the self, an increased awareness of the self leading to an increased and positive regard for others. But the African American in his desperate search for an identity is peculiarly hampered. The "crisis of human relationships, and of human personality as well as social convulsion."'* has fostered anxiety, fear of persecution and the fragmentation of the self. The African American has come to define himself as Negro or coloured and so internalized and succumbed to white conceptions and definitions of his race. The psychological instability, the fear and the anxiety that he endures are the negative consequences of the internalization process. He is incapacitated to counter the colonisation of his body and his mind which have roots in his slave past.
