Academy Awards ~ The Psychological Implications of the Oscars
“Black people tend not to understand propaganda, and the reason that they tend not understand propaganda is because the propaganda channels, the mediums, the conduits, the radio, newspapers, the television we tend to treat as forms of entertainment. We don’t see them as military strategies.” ~ Dr. Umar Johnson
The aforementioned quote by Dr. Umar Johnson is a very concise explanation of why blacks are so susceptible to specific sociological and psychological machinations being used against us to further perpetuate a victim mentality and a collective inferiority complex. Propaganda has historically been proven to be one of the most effective military strategies available to any group who has access to the propaganda channels and mediums, accompanied by the knowledge and expertise of how to use them.
The very fact that blacks are upset because black actors were shut out of the Oscars once again reveals that we don’t understand the dynamic at play. First of all, it is important to understand that propaganda, in and of itself, is a highly complex psychological apparatus that can be used to accomplish a number of psycho-acrobatic phenomenon. As pointed out in his book “Brainwashed,” Tom Burrell goes to great lengths to unveil how propaganda has been used to perpetuate a collective inferiority complex among African Americans. Edward Berneys, in his earlier work, “Propaganda,” showed how propaganda can be used to convince any group of virtually anything — through constant exposure.
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When I lecture or share with groups, one thing that I find to be common is that we, as a race of people, don’t want to invest the time to research and study data and phenomenon we are unfamiliar with. If it calls for reading more than a paragraph, we don’t have the patience and commitment to devote ourselves to understand those things that have an immense impact on our forward progression as a race. The failure to invest in understanding the strategic mechanisms being used by our enemies leaves us to respond to the hostile engagement by those who oppose us through emotion, instead of a calculated strategy.
Moving forward, I am going to introduce you to the power of propaganda through a series of definitions — correlating the definition to the manner in which the Academy Awards, or other psychosocial mechanisms and modalities, are used to reinforce negative cognitions among blacks that serve to influence and underwrite a negative impression of self. As I stated earlier, the very fact that blacks are still pushing for whites to accept us into their semi-exclusive fraternities reveals that we are completely oblivious to the intentions of these social mediums of dysfunction.
The Importance of Lucid Terminology
One of the greatest inhibitors to blacks gaining a lucid perspicacity of many of the pernicious machinations being used against us is the communication gap. With each system of destruction, there is a different technical vernacular that is used to describe how the system works, and if a person does not have a background in this particular discipline, attempting to understand it can become so frustrating that they simply turn away. What has to be understood is the fact that the last thing we can afford to do is walk away from the knowledge that has the capacity to free us. It was Tom Burrell that wrote we must be willing to take propaganda, the very weapon that has been used against us, and turn it around and use it in our favor. For that to happen, we must first understand it for what it is.
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The following definitions are meant to help simplify the process of developing an understanding of how certain social mechanisms are used to create and perpetuate a false reality for blocks of people. Propaganda is a part of the field of psychology known as social influence. While propaganda is almost always directed at a group, qualifying it as a social mechanism, the psychological elements associated with it are so prominent, it is better to understand it from a psychological perspective — primarily due to the fact that even in its ability to shift the perception of the masses, it is accomplished by impacting the cognitive interpretations of each individual.
When reading these definitions, it is important to understand that these definitions are representative of my understanding and interpretation of the literature, as well as the empirical and pragmatic data that is available on this particular topic. People define concepts differently, based on multitudinous variables, such as personal experience, professional experience, background and more. You can easily evoke a passionate debate among scholars and scientist by simply invoking a certain definition. Regardless, these definitions will be rendered at a level that they will at least provide a reasonable understanding of how the Oscars are used to perpetuate a negative image of the African American — to others, and to African Americans themselves.
Social Influence
From a sociological and psychological perspective, influence is the investigation of the causes of human change in behavior, attitude or beliefs. One of the behaviors that is studied with an exorbitant amount of emphasis is compliance. When a mechanism is able produce a change in behavior to fit a certain socially implied or explicit expectation, the adjusted behavior is known as compliance. In fact, it was Dr. Umar Johnson who said, “White supremacy is absolutely nothing without black compliance.” So we understand that one of the goals associated with creating social mechanisms is to ensure compliance with the projected social norms and standards set out within and by the mechanism. When a change in attitude is accomplished, it is referred to as “persuasion.” Finally, inducing change in beliefs is referred to as either education or propaganda — depending heavily on the intent and the perspective of the person that is investigating it.
Social influence is an action that is practiced or employed by a specific agent upon a particular target, through a process known as advocacy. If you wanted to convince your child to become more responsible in how they approach cleaning their room, you might employ certain reward and punitive measures to create a change in behavior or beliefs. In this case, you would be the “agent” and the tactics you use would be your advocacy mechanisms, and your child would be the target.
Basically, the Academy awards should be viewed as an advocacy mechanism that is being used to primarily effect a belief system. The belief that is being influenced the most through this system is the belief by blacks that they must be validated and accepted by whites in order for their exceptional talents and gifts to actually have value.
Compliance
Achieving compliance is normally a quick fix to a problem, and therefore, serving as a short-term solution to certain issues or forms of crisis. Compliance is about behavior, not belief, so, it does not require that the target agrees with the advocacy — they simply have to perform the behavior. When looking at this from the perspective of an African American, compliance is dangerous because behavior is a habitual mechanism. If you continue to do something consistently for a short as 21 days, it will become habit — being perpetuated extinctively. This explains the mindless behavior and responses of the masses in certain situations. What is ironic, is this behavior can actually be accomplished without initially impacting the belief system of the target. Simple compliance does all of the work until it becomes misguided behavior.
Allow me to demonstrate how subtly powerful compliance is in this situation. Although blacks may not hold the belief that whites are better actors, they submit themselves to the acknowledgement that the Academy Awards — a white semi-exclusive entity — is the ultimate acknowledgement of accomplishment in the film industry. The longer that this compliant behavior is practiced, the more it actually becomes a “persuasive” advocacy mechanism that begins to impact the belief that being rejected by this entity is tantamount to not being good enough.
Persuasion
The advocacy function of “persuasion” is much more pernicious than that of compliance, because it seeks to influence the “heart and mind” or the “soul” through impacting the belief system and paradigms of the target. In this particular instance, the force of persuasion looks to induce a change in attitude toward a certain idea. Persuasion is more difficult to induce — taking longer than compliance — however, its effects last significantly longer. When the agent is able to effectively use advocacy mechanisms to persuade a change in attitudes of beliefs, the conditioning has to literally be reversed, not just challenged. The ideology within the advocacy mechanism is actually internalized by the target.
While there are multitudinous persuasion tactics, one of the most effective is what is known as the Socratic Effect. The Socratic Effect states that by simply directing thoughts to attitudes and beliefs with logical correlative implications, the attitudes and beliefs that are being targeted by the thoughts being projected will become more consistent with those thoughts.
Propaganda
Because the mediums and mechanisms are so plentiful and often complex, it is impossible to simplify it in its totality, but it must be understood as one of the most effective advocacy mechanisms to achieve the ultimate form of social influence — brainwashing. Education should be understood as the propagation of a set of ideas or beliefs. As I have stated is my latest book, The Mis-education of Black Youth in America, education is far more than the attainment of academic skills — it is the information that provides the foundation on which a person will adopt paradigms that influence the way they view life.
Earlier, I mentioned that perspective will determine whether the information that is being disseminated is considered to be education or propaganda. The best way to distinguish between the two is that education is generally viewed as beliefs and information that we agree with and embrace, even if we don’t understand it. Propaganda is the dissemination of information that is diametrically opposed to or antithetical to the inherent beliefs of the target in a specific area of thought.
Beliefs should be understood as things that are known or believed to be true, as opposed to “attitudes,” which are evaluations of thoughts and ideas we are presented with. Our belief systems are immensely important precursors to our attitudes and behavior; however, they are also created and established after the fact, as a mechanism to defend certain attitudes and behaviors we have adopted.
When we agree with information that is being disseminated, we call it education, and we refer to disseminated information that we disagree with as propaganda — especially when a discrepant belief system is being disseminated through a large-scale mechanism, such as mass media. Specifically, what is central to both, education and propaganda, is the role of the fact, the statistic, element of knowledge of belief that the target believes to be true.
Brainwashing and Thought Control
The first time that the term “brainwashing” was used was in 1951 to provide a description of the conversion process that was being used against prisoners of war in Chinese prison camps during the Korean war. The news correspondent that used the term, known simply as Hunter, was actually using the translated version of the Chinese concept of (hse nao), meaning to “wash brain.” Actually, there were earlier references to the same concept as early as 1929, when Tse-Tung used the term so-Hsiang to-Cheng, or “thought struggle” as a reference to what is now, more commonly referred to as mind-control.
Mind-control or though control is a representation of the dark side of social influence — combining compliance, propaganda and persuasion into an exceptionally insidious form of coercive manipulation that is capable of robbing a person or group of their personal identity, circumventing the volitional freedom of the individual to interpolate a belief system that the person would not have chosen on their own. The fact that it is practiced at a high level consistently by governments, corporations, religious organizations and more, is a testament to its effectiveness.
Thought control advocacies function best when an individual is separated from their normal frames of reference and other social influences.
Social Psychology
Because we are dealing with social influence — the influence of groups, it is important to understand it from a psychological perspective. It is important not to confuse social psychology with sociology, the study of groups. Social psychology focuses on studying the attitudes and behaviors of individuals as it relates to social environments. In other words, it investigates how impacting the individual thought process or cognitions of a person impacts their social environment. The focus of social psychology is the study of the individual within the group. It allows for us to evaluate and study the numerous forces that change humans — their attitudes, their beliefs, and their behaviors.
Where there have been numerous attempts to develop taxonomies to help better understand the numerous tactics that are being used in the area of social influence, it is still an area that is highly divided among different schools of thought. So, how mechanisms are defined and viewed will be determined by who you consult. What I have presented here is a simplified explanation that will allow you to, at least, gain a minimal perspicacity of how certain mechanisms are consistently used to impact the cultural paradigms of blacks.
The Academy Awards is just one of many mechanisms that whites use to stroke their own egos while perpetuating the propaganda message of black inferiority and the dependence of blacks on white affirmation.
It is imperative that blacks embrace those celebratory mechanisms that we already have in place, such as the Image awards, to validate ourselves. ~ Dr. Rick Wallace, Ph.D.