Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

was only a dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial a few decades ago has become a reality for all.

Yet for many heroes of color, the collective memory of that discrimination—and the habits secreted into our culture around commemorating it—have produced a rabid, slavering Cerberus whose heads are Self-Defeat, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and Pervasive Expectation of Exclusion.

If you’re an ethnic crimefighter who believes everyone is against you, you may find yourself caught in a manifestation-cycle of overt or passive-aggressive behaviors that drive away your colleagues and potential friends. Constantly supercharged by your own antisocial aggression, you are so aswim in your conviction that “discrimination” exists that you remain convinced that everyone else is wallowing in that “awareness” with you.

The belief that everyone shares your worldview, while imputing your own aggression to others’ motives and self-servingly transferring back to yourself the victimhood you impose on them, is a toxic mind-set known as “Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis.” This delusory perspective, rather than supervillains, is the leading cause of injury among heroes of color, because the distraction and poor judgment the neurosis engenders lead to irrational choices, needless danger, and fruitless fighting.

Of course, people who believe they are victims of exclusion frequently become excessive excluders themselves. This is the “Rudolph Syndrome.” The atmosphere I observed inside the Dark Star was clearly one of hostile competition, one-upmanship, alpha-doggery, and vicious pecking-orderism. Outsiders, even “outside insiders” such as the Brotherfly, must be attacked bloodily (in body or in spirit) to satisfy the need for a scapegoat. Without such a sacrifice, the self-defeating community would dissolve into civil war; to “riff” upon an African American proverb, the crabs in the bucket would be forced collectively to jump into a boiling pot.

Examine your behavior patterns closely. Are you constantly crying victim? Do you perceive the world as composed of antagonistic institutions whose “propagandized minions” are wittingly or unwittingly “oppressing” you? Do you ever find yourself using expressions such as “the system,” “the Man,” “our people,” or “further evidence of the vast conspiracy against us/me”? If so, you may be suffering from RNPN. And if you are punishing others with the very exclusion you claim afflicts you, you are probably enforcing the ruthlessness of the Rudolph Syndrome.

To deal with your RNPN, begin by recognizing that you are an individual, not a social abstraction. Your destiny belongs to you, not to history, and whatever successes or failures you experience are of your own making. Take responsibility for your own happiness, rather than claiming telepathy you don’t have (unless you are telepathic) or ascribing to others ugly thoughts you can’t verify, and aiming endless, nonspecific blame for your mediocrity at the Trilateral Commission, “the media,” SKULL, the RAND Corporation, the long-disbanded Treemasons, the MAN, the Black Helicopter Legion, or the perennial favorite of paranoiacs, “Them.”

Finally, if you’re the victim of a Rudolphian attack, remember that it’s neurotic to desire the company of those who loathe you. And remember also the lesson of Rudolph, the legendary luminescent crimson-proboscised reindeer: if you continue developing your own abilities and doing what fulfills you without anxiety over other people’s judgment, eventually even those who despise you shall be constrained to honor you. It’s a paradox, but only by abolishing your craving for your critics’ respect will you ever achieve it.

When a QRIB Is Only a Crib: Victim-Identity as Self-Infantilization

Eager to expel me from his former hang-out spot, Kareem “offered” to escort me to a gypsy cab or the subway. I was just as eager to probe his perspectives and self-delusions while he was still in his native environment, so I persuaded Kareem to take me on a walking tour of Langston-Douglas, including the headquarters of the League of Angry Blackmen, the QRIB.

A couple of blocks away from the Dark Star loomed a renovated building that had once been a bank but had taken on an entirely different purpose under an entirely different appearance. This near-legendary edifice was sometimes called “the underground shrine,” despite the fact that the slightly trapezoidal fortress stood aboveground and five stories tall: the Quarters for Revolutionary Intelligence, Blackified. The QRIB.

Its architecture vaguely suggesting the Grand Temple of Luxor, the QRIB boasted wraparound murals crawling with hierograffiti and giant native black African figures dressed like Ramses gripping sundry white characters by the hair while smiting them (including caricatures of select U.S. presidents and members of the F*O*O*J itself). The display was nothing if not a vast, three-dimensional incarnation of the Racialized Narcissistic Projection Neurosis which undoubtedly helped cost the L*A*B its HUD security contract to protect Langston-Douglas.

Kareem paused to look up at the images, and even with his eyes masked by his black “G-man” sunglasses, his face was darkened by the unmistakable soot of melancholy. I proceeded gently, asking him what André meant by saying that Kareem was hardly more welcome than he was at the Dark Star.

He cut me off, pretending he hadn’t heard my question, listing instead a myriad of L*A*B miscellanea such as how an artist named Emory Douglas helped design the QRIB’s murals; how the QRIB was built on the border with Cripton (the most dangerous part of Langston-Douglas) as a warning to the gangs that infest it; how independent crimefighters had been shattered by the death of Maximus Security in 1984 and finally formed the L*A*B in 1987 to continue his work; how those same L*A*Bsters only later realized that each of them had gained his powers from being exposed to the contents of mysterious hieroglyphic-inscribed containers called canopic jars, which, said Kareem, they “found in obscure corners of places like libraries and the Special Collections Rooms of the Schombro Museum.”

Eventually Kareem and his comrades came to believe that the jars were the divine gifts of Hawk King.

“He interceded in the affairs of Stun-Glas to raise up among us a generation of heroes,” said Kareem, his sentence creaking beneath its own obese grandeur, “so that his people—our people—could save themselves. Now maybe we didn’t have the deputized supra-legal exceptionalism of the F*O*O*J, but we