Willie Lynch Influence On African Society

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Jane Doe African & Latino Studies 12/6/13 America’s Corruption: The beginning Colonists built America on the bones and decimation of the African culture by creating a new culture based on oppression. Whipping, raping, cutting the of body parts of Africans; the colonists were no different from Christopher Columbus. They are our forefathers, who started the corruption in a nation we call “free”. Where is the justice, when black men were considered 1/5th of the population and black women were used for breeding and as a means of sexual relief? The psychological impact of oppression on the African society has been pressed into their descendents mental state as the African descendents are facing prejudice behavior generation after generation.…show more content…
A slave master named Willie Lynch created several rules about how to keep slaves from resisting and uprising.The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of a Slave states, “KEEP THE BODY, TAKE THE MIND!...In other words, break the will to resist...if you break the FEMALE mother, she willBREAK the offspring in its early years...Train the female horse whereby she will eat out your hand, and she will in turn train her infants to eat out of your hand, also. When it comes to breaking an uncivilized nigger, use the same process, but vary the degree and step up the pressure, so as to do a complete reversal of the mind(Lynch)” Willie Lynch debases the slaves by comparing them to horses by comparing the breaking of a horse to the breaking of an enslaved person. Lynch repeats the words break and mind constantly in this quote to make his main message clear: to break an enslaved person, the slave masters have to break the psyche of an enslaved person. This is significant because the strain and bend of the enslaved Africans’ minds left a form and constraint structure for future generations to follow. Therefore, some of the ways of division used on enslaved Africans are still in place today, 300 years after the Willie Lynch

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