Collective Unconscious

My website is about love and though I write about romantic love, my site is dedicated not only to romance but to self-love, familial love, love for others, and love for your community. Without love there is no possibility of peace and that love has to come from within.

In every society there is a concept of God and the Devil as well as mother and father. There are marriage and family, rich and poor, the manner in which we worship or believe in God.  And yes, there is a concept of love.  No matter where we go on this Earth, for the most part, there is a variation of these human concepts. For those Africans whose ancestors were brought to the United States as slaves, we have been fighting this collective unconscious that we are less than everyone else, that they are limits to our lives, that we are not as intelligent, that we do not deserve to inherit the earth, broken families, poverty, etc. It is evident in everything that we see in our daily life. We have become so numb to the atrocities that happen in our communities on a daily basis, it calls to mind a scene from a movie.  There was a dramatic scene in the Oscar-nominated (which is another issue in terms of what the committee feels comfortable as movies worthy of nominations of which Black Panther should be at the very least receive nom for Best Film), Twelve Years a Slave in which the main character is left dangling from a noose all day in such a way that he was near death all day. That scene was difficult to watch not just because he was tortured in such a way but the slaves in the background appeared to be unaffected by what was happening to him because it was nothing out of the ordinary for an incident like that to happen. What struck me the most about this movie was how it could be applicable to life today. Watch any racially charged event (e.g., Rodney King anyone?) that occurred more than 20 years ago and you realize that nothing has really changed. Yes, we elected an African American President but has race relations on a daily basis really changed when the very next President is a man who has never been in politics in any form or fashion and has been so racially divisive. Has the way young African American children view themselves changed? Will they choose a doll that looks like them now or will they continue to feel that somehow their lives are not as important as others in this country perhaps in the world? The lyrics of Happy by Pharrell touch me when he says “A room without a roof” meaning there is no limit to our happiness. Our collective unconscious has become a room with a roof; we do not even know that we have limits.  We are a beautiful and intelligent people that have been conditioned to believe that we are ugly and dumb. Most of us do not have an identity and it is innate to want an identity to belong, so we have young people desperate to find a way to make themselves unique. We have young men who have not had positive male role models choose to engage in criminal acts in order to survive (and sometimes just to have bragging rights) and have little respect for the women in their lives. We have young women who believe it’s cool to live ‘ratched’ and ready to fight one another, openly be the ‘side chick’ and encourage their men, whether it’s son or partner, to provide for them by any means necessary.

A rose growing from the concrete are our heroes such as Harriet Tubman who risked her life to free people some of whom she admitted did not even know they were slaves because they were so conditioned to believe that this was the life they were destined to have. We have let the collective unconscious rule our lives in so many ways…it is time to change that unconscious…and become conscious of who we are one by one that we are inherently intelligent and creative (e.g. Pyramids in Egypt) and beautiful, dynamic, loving, powerful, and so many other descriptive words of positivity.  Using the words of Spike Lee, who discussed the still current light vs dark skinned battle in School Daze, it’s time for us to “Wake Up!”