Suicide is the pre-eminent expression of Black-on-Black violence.
It is the other side of Black-on-Black homicide. Both homicide and suicide are different forms of the collective self-destruction of a race by death. Both actualize a death-wish instigated externally, and executed internally.
Both are assassinations by proxy: victim murdering victim.
Both involve the killing of someone considered expendable, someone lodged between the assailant and some form of settlement or satisfaction.
As in murder, in suicide there is the killer and the victim, the executioner and the executed, the judge and the condemned.
Suicide, like homicide, is dyadic. It is therefore a social act. It is the deadly vectorial outcome of a cataclysmic convergence of socially interactive forces.
As in murder, in suicide killing is always done in public, in the presence of another, whether that other is physically or mentally present and accounted for.
There is always the final judgment without appeal.
Someone’s hopes have been unrealized, someone’s vanity injured, someone’s been mistreated and demands that the ultimate price be paid. Someone must be sacrificed to the need of another, whether that other be inside or outside the skin of the victim.
Both the homicide and the suicide are victims of ideas, sacrifices made to some ideology, some system of values.
Both are attempts to palliate some unbearable hurt or pain, some sickness of the soul.
The Black Family, the Black Male and Suicide
Infected with the germ of self-alienation, self-abnegation, self-misrepresentation, and economic deprivation, the resultant intra-familial conflict often is actualized as various forms of suicide by its young.
African-Americans are the most patriotic of all American ethnic groups-they sacrifice their lives every day for their country. The frequent breaking up of the African American home by many-proned attacks on it by the racist system in which it is embedded, frequently leaves it children without warm, caring, protective and wise parental system with which to identify and with which they can overcome an encroaching sense of emotional and social isolation: a system which can be their ally in their embattled struggle against a hostile world.
For the male child the loss of his father’s love and protection, or his failure to find a worthy substitute as the result of White supremacy’s unrelenting and murderous assault on Black manhood, are most often the apparent stimuli which instigate his committing suicide.
The chronic and over determined negation of African-American males, if not countered by strong Black male egos, may subject them to fits of depression and dejection.
The rite of passage through racist white American dominated society is extremely stressful for Black youth. This is more so the case for the Black male since he receives the brunt of the White supremacist attacks against Black America.
Stripped of appropriate male support, guidance, protection, education, and other important coping skills by a white racist system which fears his Afrocentric competence, he is left vulnerable to the thousands of little nicks and burns, physical and psychological insults, which cumulatively push him toward self-annihilation.
Not allowed the privileges and status of full and unfettered manhood by white racist male domination, a significant number of African American males are immaturized or are often led to express their “manhood” in self-destructive ways: in ways harmful to other Black males and the Black community in general. Immaturized by white racist oppression, void of overarching and long-term Afrocentric goals which provide them with maximum and healthy control over their impulses (including impulses to kill themselves) they may commit suicide.
Without Afrocentric self-definition, possessed by an introjected alien identity, and racked by neurotic and psychotic conflict, the Black male readily becomes subject to white racist psychopolitical, psychopathological promptings and persecutions. Consequently, he may come to think that the only effective solution to his problems lie in physical or mental self-abnegation. To be an African-American male in white America is to live with anger and hostility, to feel the need to attack, to violently retaliate to even the score. These murderous feeling without appropriate catharsis, sublimation, channeling, or targets….yet in need of outward expression…are often turned inward resulting in self-annihilation.
And the enemy is himself.
Suicide Morality of Black Males
One dies a blossoming in the Spring, the other after the first frosts of Autumn.
Apparently, the young African American suicide is one who has grown old while very young, He has packed all the guilt, failure, shame, fatalism, pain, hopelessness, and cynicism of a lifetime within a life-span of three decades.
Somehow the cavalier optimism of youth and the willful self-confidence of young manhood are dissipated at or before the point of actualization and assumption of their powers to transform the world.
Somehow Black youth and young adults are born into and come early to exist in a different and ominous reality: one that was created for them; one under the control of others. That created “reality” negates, diminishes and saps their will to live, make their lives pointless, an absurdity filled with hitter ironies, a happenstance, a quick stand wherein every effort at self-rescue seems to pull them more rapidly under, and where every branch thrown to a sinking man breaks as he struggles to reach safe ground.
Both are welded together by violence. Both represent violent attempts to triumph over hopelessness and despair.
Both represent abject reactionary surrender to what is perceived as an immutable, oppressive ordering of the universe. While the BlacK-on-Black homicidial criminal seeks to triumph through the externalization of murderous aggression, the Black-on-Black suicide victim seeks to triumph through his internalization of murderous aggression.
Both seek to violently cheat destiny as they have been made to see it. Their plan blinds them to other alternatives, obscures obvious, through perilous, pathways through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Free to choose only the wrong things they both choose to murder the wrong persons for the wrong reasons.
Suicide as Displaced Aggression
Suicide is a form of displayed aggression. To internalize the white racist spirit is to internalize the White supremacist’s death-wish directed at the African male. When a young Black male commits suicide it is usually a sign that the implanted white racist incubus has executed the order of its archetypal racist masters.It is the introjected white racist superego in black face which mercilessly chastises him for having sinned, and “fallen short of the glory of God” (European man). It is this implanted Euro-centric conscience which threatens him with eternal damnation for having committed the original sin of being born African in America, which derides him for his alleged helplessness and unworthiness: The same Eurocentric conscience tells him he will never be any good, never succeed on his own terms or otherwise, that he deserves punishment, that he is deservedly the object of hatred and revilement, that he has been cursed by God and sentenced to unending servitude, and that his death would be a favor to the world; tells him that he is unlovable, unprotected, incapable of happiness, unemployable and that his only enemies are himself and the blackness of his skin.
Have internalized the accusative self-serving conscience of his oppressors, the African American suicide victim exaggerates his self-accusation, the hopelessness of his future, his incapability for redemptive transformation.
He considers his situation incorrigible.
His internalized alien spirit screams its recriminations and he masochistically submits to severe feelings of guilt and self-devaluation. It is this spirit which splits his psyche into executor and executed; into the person and depersonalized, judge and condemned. Thus, when he kills he does not kill himself; he kills the “nigger” within.
The Black victim may think that suicide represents a sort of grim triumph, a having of the last word, the last laugh on his tormentors; that his suicide represents the ultimate protest, the penultimate defiance of the will of his enemies.
Suicide may be his way of refusing to live a life of quiet desperation, of masochistic screaming, and squealing supplication, while fulfilling the sadistic needs of others. Maybe, like his ancestors who voluntarily gave up the ghost during the Middle Passage by jumping overboard to feed the sharks, he sees living the life of a slave as not living life at all. And yet, he must know, or he quickly must be told, that such a triumph, such a hollow victory is pyrrhic, more costly to the “victor” than the vanquished; that it is illusion of overcomance.
How much more heroic to die fighting one’s true enemies than to die fighting false ones; to live five minutes as a man than die forever a coward! For the fight is not against the shadows cast on the walls of one’s mind but with the caster of shadows, the Wicked Witch of The West. “For God gave us not a spirit of cowardice, but that of power and of love and of soundness of mind.” The power of European man over others is the power of deceit, illusion, life and hatred over honestly, reality, truth and love.
Such power cannot last.
