Tim Golden:
Your use of the word “emancipatory” is compelling in that CRT is engaged with American history,
in particular the history of American chattel slavery.

Before elaborating on this point, it is important to note that there are various iterations of CRT,
which relate to different ethnicities who find themselves at the bottom of the “white-over-color ascendancy”
(racial hierarchy with whites at the top)
that Delgado and Stefancic reference in the lead-up to your question.

For example, there are Asian, Latinx and Indigenous forms of CRT.

And there is also an African American iteration,
which is the one that I will be discussing here.

Again, your use of the word “emancipatory” resonates with American history
and its enslavement of Black people,
and hearkens back to the formation of the American republic
and its central founding document,
the United States Constitution.

Drafted in 1787 and eventually ratified through a series of compromises that maintained slavery for the foreseeable future
— at least until 1808
— CRT, in its African American iteration, with Derrick Bell as its principal expositor,
has argued that those compromises set in motion a machinery of government that is dangerously and perpetually compromised
in its tolerance of anti-Black racism.

CRT’s critical and emancipatory aims, then, are to show how American law and politics maintain systems of racial oppression.

CRT does this in at least two ways.

⭐️First, by showing how the compromises at the American founding have set the tone for a morally lax American political ethos
which benefits African Americans,
not because of any genuine recognition of moral harm done to them,
but rather because their interests coincidentally converge with those of American whites.

This is what Bell referred to as
“interest convergence,”
and it is a sort of utilitarian moral calculus
less concerned with doing what is right
and more concerned with doing what is expedient.

For example, President Abraham Lincoln, Bell would argue, did not emancipate
— there’s that word again
— the slaves because it was morally right,
but rather because the Union had to be restored.

And President Barack Obama was not elected because America had suddenly become any less racist in its view of Black people,
but rather because so many upper-middle class whites were bleeding large sums of money from their retirement accounts in the financial crisis of 2008,

and because Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin appeared to them to be incompetent to handle the fledgling economy.

I have written of this in the introduction to my book on Derrick Bell.

⭐️A second way that CRT advances its critical and emancipatory aims is through
a trenchant critique of abstraction in American constitutional law.

CRT, through the work of Bell and others, has demonstrated how the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,
ratified for the purpose of helping newly freed slaves shed the legacy of slavery,
is now interpreted in ways that make such remediation illegal.

CRT points out how,
through an abstract understanding of “equality,”
liberal democratic theory,
with its emphasis on a symmetrical concept of “rights,”
generates absurd notions of “reverse racism,”
in which whites can now claim legal harm pursuant to a constitutional amendment that was ratified,
not to protect whites,
but rather to remediate the harm that whites have done.

CRT’s work in law is thus critical and emancipatory in its exposure of racial oppression in American constitutional law.

#Black #History #CRT #Derrick #Bell #Tim #Golden

Celebrating #Black #History Month means honoring the importance of Black knowledge production
and emphasizing the deep and enduring themes of Black life,
from structures that continue to oppress Black people
to courageous forms of political and existential resistance.

With this understanding in mind, I think it is crucial that we focus on critical race theory ( #CRT ) and its founder,
#Derrick #Bell, who in 1971 became the first Black tenured professor at Harvard Law School.

Today, there are many distorted characterizations of CRT
and attacks against its study.

Far right activist Christopher Rufo has championed this assault,
arguing that CRT is
“being weaponized against the American people.”

Clearly, many of the field’s current critics have no idea,
no clue, about the true meaning of CRT,
which consists of indispensable scholarship produced to rigorously conceptualize and fight against systemic forms of racism.

Indeed, CRT is absolutely necessary to heal this fragile democracy.

To seek clarity here, I turn to the important philosophical work of #Tim #Golden,
visiting professor of philosophy at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

He is the editor of "Racism and Resistance: Essays on Derrick Bell’s Racial Realism",
and his most recent book is entitled, "Frederick Douglass and the Philosophy of Religion: An Interpretation of Narrative, Art, and the Political".
truthout.org/articles/why-the-…

“We Ain’t Born Typical”: A Closer Look at the “Human Nature” Pushing Us to Humanicide – The Perinatal Unconscious

“We Are a Fever…We Ain’t Born Typical”: Apocalypse and the Perinatal Unconscious

“Perinatal” = “Surrounding Birth”

“We Are a Fever”

How are we to characterize these strangest of days and the current unprecedented global condition? As I have said, they are driven by what I call an emerging perinatal unconscious. As The Kills sang it, most aptly, “We ain’t born typical.” [Footnote 1]

youtube.com/embed/w3fZP7QC4PE?…

Perinatal unconscious

Why perinatal? First, let us remind ourselves that perinatal means, literally, “surrounding birth.” As a one-time college instructor of pre- and perinatal psychology and as an editor of a professional journal concerned with perinatal psychology— as well as a psychohistorian, let me explain what might be considered elements of a perinatal unconscious. [Footnote 2]

Unconscious Matrices = “Human Nature”

The elements I will describe are near universally accepted among perinatal psychologists as unconscious forces, factors, matrices that exist in us all as a result of a human birth that is unique, by comparison to all other species, in its degree of trauma and hence of its impact or imprint on what we might call—dare I say the word—our “human nature.”

These perinatal elements have come to our understanding through the efforts of both the inner explorations of experiential pioneers into the perinatal, as [strong][strong][/strong]well as the hard empirical work of pre- and perinatal researchers. I might also point out that I, myself, have nearly forty years of experiential exploration into these perinatal elements. My experiences confirm, in my own mind, their absolute validity, as well as validating for myself the theoretical constructs put forth by others to describe and explain them. [/strong]

Pre- and Perinatal Psychology, Experiential Voyagers

Be that as it may, these perinatal elements in the unconscious have been described most thoroughly be three figures in particular: Stanislav Grof, Arthur Janov, and Lloyd deMause. It might help, also, to keep in mind that entire new fields of pre- and perinatal psychology, primal psychology, and to some extent, transpersonal psychology have grown up around the existence of these perinatal factors. These unconscious perinatal elements have, at this point, been confirmed by thousands of researchers and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of experiential voyagers into the perinatal unconscious.

“The Perinatal Unconscious“
– audiocast by SillyMickel Adzema

For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this chapter, click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here:

cdn.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.sw…
Apocalypse, or New Dawn? Chapter 2: “The Perinatal Unconscious” by SillyMickel Adzema

Elements of Birth Experience

Based upon all this, then, let us look at some of the elements, in general, that characterize this perinatal unconscious.

Perinatal Matrix ~ Societal Matrix

Stanislav Grof describes basic perinatal matrices (BPMs)—in other words, typical experiential constellations related to our births. These happen to be very much akin to DeMause’s perinatal schema, with some slight differences in emphasis, and more elaboration on the part of Grof. So let us use Grof’s schema as a basis. [Footnote 3]

All Needs Met . . . with luck – Matrix 1

Grof’s Basic Perinatal Matrix I, or BPM I, involves the experiences and feelings related to the sometimes, or at least relatively, undisturbed prenatal period. The prenatal period is that time in the womb sometimes characterized by feelings of peace, complete relaxation, and a feeling of all needs met, or “oceanic bliss.”

BPM I corresponds to deMause’s societal periods of “prosperity and progress,” which he claims are accompanied by feelings and fears of being “soft” and “feminine”—understandably here, for in BPM I, that is, prenatally, the fetus is largely identified with his or her mother and is very much “soft,” i.e., undefended.

Since the time in the womb may also be disturbed by toxic substances that the mother ingests—drugs, chemical additives, and so on—as well as by disturbing emotions that the mother experiences, which release stress hormones into the mother’s bloodstream, which then cross the placental barrier and affect the fetus, BPM I is also sometimes characterized as feelings of being surrounded by a polluted environment and being forced to ingest noxious substances, toxins, and poisons, which sickens the fetus.

No-Exit Despair – Matrix 2

In Grof’s schema, BPM I is followed by BPM II—that is, Basic Perinatal Matrix II—which are experiences and feelings related to the time of “no exit” in the womb and claustrophobic-like feelings occurring to nearly all humans in the late stages of pregnancy and especially with the onset of labor, when the cervix is not yet dilated. Since there does not seem to be any “light at the end of the tunnel”—metaphorically speaking—it is characterized by feelings of depression, guilt, despair, and blame, and a characterization of oneself as being in the position of “the victim.”

It is very much like DeMause’s period of collective feelings of entrapment, strangulation, suffocation, and poisonous placenta, which he has found to precede the actual outbreak of war or other violence. [Footnote 3]

Birth Wars – Matrix 3

This of course is followed by BPM III (Basic Perinatal Matrix III), which involves feelings and experiences of all-encompassing struggle and is related to the time of one’s actual birth. Characterized also by intense feelings of aggression and sexual excess—in the position, now, of “the aggressor”—it is related directly, in DeMause’s schema, to a time of actual war.

Hallelujah! . . (I think. . . . ) – Matrix 4

Basic Perinatal Matrix IV (BPM IV) follows this; it corresponds to the time of emergence from the womb during the birth process and is characterized by feelings of victory, release, exultation.

But also sometimes, after that initial relief of depression—when the struggle does not bring the expected rewards, as when, during modern obstetrical births, the neonate is harshly treated and then taken away from the mother, disallowing the bonding which should occur, naturally, immediately after birth.

In my own experience, the exultation and relief of release was replaced suddenly by feelings of being assaulted by the attendants at my birth (which of course they thought of as “attending” to me) as they went about roughly removing mucous from my mouth; prematurely cutting my umbilical cord to leave me struggling for breath; scrubbing, weighing, measuring, and otherwise probing me; and wrapping me like a tamale and taking me away from all I had previously known…i.e., my mother. This felt like ritual abuse to me, and I have often likened it, after the intense period of compression and crushing before birth, to a situation of “going from the frying pan into the fire.”

At any rate, this experience of actual emergence or birth coincides, societally, with DeMause’s period of the ending of a war.

Heaven and Hell

In summary, we have euphoric, oceanic, blissful feelings, sometimes feelings of being poisoned or being in a toxic or polluted environment; followed by crushing, no-exit, depression, claustrophobia, compression, strangulation, suffocation, and being force-fed by a poisonous placenta; followed by struggle, violence, war scenarios, birth/death fantasies, sexual excess; and finally release, triumph, feeling of renewal or rebirth and a new golden age, but also possibly of being abandoned, tortured, ritually sacrificed, probed medically, and assaulted by sensations. These are some of the elements that characterize the experience of the perinatal unconscious.

For Dreaming Out Loud!

In the next chapter we will take a look at how these elements have erupted into our collective dreams in recent history. By this I mean, we will see how our artists and creative people have projected them into the media, movies, and TV–in which we all participate–and how our fascination with them, because these artists are reflecting things that exist deep inside of ourselves as well, has caused them to grow, creating the dominant underlying mythos of our time.

Continue with ET, Phone Mom – Of Aliens, Toothy Vaginas, Satanic Cults, and Explosions: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Being Born

Return to Facing Foursquare the Darkness – Not for Cowardly or Uncaring Humans: Strange Days, Pt 3

youtube.com/embed/w3fZP7QC4PE?…

Footnotes

1. Chapter titled with appreciation and admiration to The Kills for their recording, U R A Fever. The lyrics go, “I am a fever, you are a fever, we ain’t born typical….” and so on. The music video produced is similarly brilliant. Together, it is a production bordering on genius. The video contains levels of meaning that are only obvious on subsequent viewings. I reproduce it for the second time in this series, above in this part, for the convenience of the reader.

Lyrics – U.R.A. Fever – The Kills

Walk you to the counter
What do you got to offer
Pick you out a solder
Look at you forever

Walk you to the water
Your eyes like a casino
We ain’t born typical

Find a piece of silver
Pretty as a diagram
And go down to the Rio

Put it in my left hand
Put it in a fruit machine
Everyone’s a winner
Laughing like a seagull

You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical

You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical

Living in a suitcase
Meet a clown, fall in love
went down to have you over

Going ’round a break up
Take you to a jukebox
That’s the situation
Pick you out a number
And that’s our arrangement

Dancing on the legs of a new-born pony
Left right left right
Keep it up son

Go ahead and have her
Go ahead and leave her
You only ever had her
When you were a fever

I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical

I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical

We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical

We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical

We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical

We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical

2. In the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Newsletter I was applauded for being the first person in the United States to teach the subject of pre- and perinatal psychology at the university level and—as it was said, remarkably—for doing it while still a student. I did this at Sonoma State University, in Rohnert Park, California, in the years 1994 and 1995, beginning while I was still a graduate student.

Subsequently, I became the editor of the professional journal, Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, formerly published by the International Primal Association. Much of the contents of its issues were later posted to my website, Primal Spirit, where they can still be viewed.

I have had my writings published in The Journal of Psychohistory, including some that later became part of this book. In fact, I presented the material of this book originally at an Institute for Psychohistory Association convention; and its earliest publications were in The Journal of Psychohistory under the title, “”The Scenery of Healing: Commentary On DeMause’s ‘Restaging Prenatal and Birth Trauma’s in War and Social Violence’””23/4, 395-405.

These are among my many credentials in this field, where I have studied and trained from 1972 till this day. [return to text]

3. Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. [return to text]

4. Lloyd deMause, “Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 344-391. (Reprinted, with permission, on the Primal Spirit website as “Restaging Prenatal and Birth Traumas in War and Social Violence“) [return to text]

Continue with ET, Phone Mom – Of Aliens, Toothy Vaginas, Satanic Cults, and Explosions: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Being Born

Return to Facing Foursquare the Darkness – Not for Cowardly or Uncaring Humans: Strange Days, Pt 3

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: facebook.com/sillymickel

#abandon #age #aggression #aggressor #attending #basic #birth #bliss #bonding #born #breath #cervix #claustrophobia #compression #cord #crush #DeMause #depression #despair #dilate #dream #element #emerge #emerging #emotion #end #entrapment #excess #experience #experiential #exultationCutting #feelings #feminine #fetus #fever #golden #Grof #guilt #hallelujah #heaven #hell #Kills #labor #light #Lloyd #matrices #matrix #measure #mother #mythos #nature #need #noExit #obstetric #oceanic #perinatal #pioneer #placenta #pre_ #pregnancy #premature #primal #psychohistorian #psychohistory #psychology #rebirth #relief #researcher #reward #ritual #ritualAbuse #sacrifice #schema #scrub #sexual #soft #Stanislav #strangulation #struggle #suffocation #surrounding #Torture #toxic #transpersonal #trauma #triumph #tunnel #typical #umbilical #unconscious #undefended #undisturbed #victim #violence #voyager #war #weigh #womb

Apocalypse - NO!

2012-01-29 21:32:58

Facing Foursquare the Darkness – Not for Cowardly or Uncaring Humans: Strange Days, Pt 3

Facing Square Our Apocalypse—For the Heroic and Most Caring Only: Strange Days, Part Three

There will always be those that will have their heads in the sand and will be cast about like flotsam upon the waters by the events swirling around them–impotent in the face of them and dependent upon other’s actions for the result. If you are one, know we’re trying to save you, too.

Assuming you are not one of them–a good bet, if you’ve managed to get to this paragraph–there is much to say about the current apocalyptic trends. [continued after video]

---

Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema

For the author’s reading of a version of this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:

youtube.com/embed/Gyxj8sXdGnA?…
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?–Michael Adzema

---

Facing Foursquare

But even those of us aware of this crisis hardly think of it. Of course it is our normal psychic defenses that operate to keep this huge awareness out of our [strong]daily minds; we must do this in order to be able to function.But perhaps, for some of us, our defenses work too well–so much so that we unthinkingly participate in and contribute to our own demise. This is classic neurotic self-sabotaging, self-destruction on a macro scale. [/strong]

However, psychologists, historians, psychohistorians, and scholars and the educated public claim not to be like that. It is their job, or their claim, to be looking squarely into the face of these forces of denial and potential apocalypse and to be seeking to understand the human condition and human psychology in light of them. It is their duty then to inform the rest of us about what they see so that we might have a chance of reversing our self-destructive tendencies. [Footnote 1]

If you’re not alarmed, you’re not paying attention.

Whether the educated public and the multitude of scholars actually are [strong]fulfilling their mission in these times is debatable. Regardless, my thesis is that when we do this, when we look foursquare into the face of the global crisis and its accompanying denial, we find that these unprecedented global factors contribute to a unique and unprecedented human condition and psychology. I have seen a bumper sticker around, in California where I live, that proclaims, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention!” It could as easily say, however, “If you’re not alarmed,” fearful, anxious, depressed . . . you name it, “You’re not paying attention!” [Footnote 2] [/strong]

To Face These Maddest of Days and Minds

So then let us pay attention. This book is about facing foursquare into the [strong]fantastic circumstances and situation in which we find ourselves, watching, like a photograph emerging in solution, as the face of these times slowly comes into view, and then waking up to the meaning of the message, perhaps the warning, it brings us, so that we might live most fully and take up our roles consciously amid these unprecedented unfoldings. What is required of us now, then, having turned to receive the message, is to look deep into the features of our age. Let us begin.[/strong]

Continue with[strong]“We Ain’t Born Typical”: A Closer Look at the “Human Nature” Pushing Us to Humanicide – The Perinatal Unconscious
[/strong]

return to “people attending to political action but ignoring the environmental catastrophes rising up around us“

---

Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema

For the author’s reading of a version of this part, click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:

youtube.com/embed/Gyxj8sXdGnA?…
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?–Michael Adzema

---

Footnotes

1. An example of what we should be doing. These are the kind of public figures and pundits we need.

If the bees disappeared, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man. – Albert Einstein

Vanishing bees is “just a sign” of what is going on, as they point out. The canary has died, and we cannot just leave the coal mine.

So we owe gratitude to Ellen Page and Bill Maher for setting an example for the kind of discourse we could and should be having in the media.

youtube.com/embed/7qDHAjFVsXU?…

2. Helen Caldicott compares our complacency in the face of these dire happenings to the parents who respond emotionless when she has to tell them their child has leukemia. She says, “Get mad. Get emotional.” She urges us to [strong]take back our governments from these mad perpetrators of the darkest doom imaginable. And, in the least, occupy! She proclaims,[/strong]

It’s time you took your country back…. Use your bodies like they did in Wisconsin. Do a Tahrir Square here. Take back New York. Take back the Congress. Invade the Congress! Those people belong to you. They are your representatives, and you are their leaders. But you’ve got to have some guts! And stop being so goddamn polite all the time! And don’t need approval. Step up to the plate….

We’ve got to be emotional…. It’s time we used our emotions and become incensed! Otherwise we’re not going to make it.

youtube.com/embed/nCN-c4yd2LM?…

Continue with “We Ain’t Born Typical”: A Closer Look at the “Human Nature” Pushing Us to Humanicide – The Perinatal Unconscious

[strong]return to “people attending to political action but ignoring the environmental catastrophes rising up around us“[/strong]

Invite you to join me on Twitter:

friend me on Facebook:

#activism #apathy #apocalypse #brave #care #compassion #complacency #coward #destructiveTendencies #doom #face #hero #humanPsychology #payAttention #strangeDays #uncaring #wakeUp #wwwYoutube

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