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Ethics

Ethics is a system of moral conduct, that is, a set of principles by which we live. These principles are accepted rules about how people should carry themselves. Over time, different cultures, depending on what they consider to be the nature of the human person, produce different sets of moral philosophies—ethics—for guidance. For example, during those eras when men and women were considered sinners primarily, penitential living and the search for forgiveness and salvation were their major preoccupations.

In the twentieth century, however, after the Freudian revolution, the prevailing notion within educated circles was that neurotic men and women were characterized by their struggle to keep their sexual desires under control through repression. As a result, many sought economic prosperity and to practice sexuality free from guilt.

Many young people are confused about what they should or should not be doing and how they should act toward each other. They are searching. “Is it okay to call people certain names referring to race?” “I like to keep it real. Why should I talk all proper?” “Should I follow my family’s expectations or do what I want with my life?” “Why should I care whether my parents don’t like my style of clothes?” “What’s so wrong about using drugs if everybody does it?”

Hip-hop offers direction to some. Mega-church televangelists offer guidance to others. Icons like Bill Cosby and Russell Simmons also like to give advice. Who is right?

Globalization and Ethical Confusion

Much of the uncertainty and confusion we see today is related to globalization. In globalization, the business practices of very large and powerful multinational corporations increasingly break down local processes of communication, trade, and ownership, and they direct the flow of money to themselves instead of those who help produce their wealth. The world at large is their marketplace.

Globalization makes you feel like what’s going on around on the other side of the world is just as important as what’s going on in your own neighborhood. Increasingly, in response to the confusion that comes from the feeling that everything everywhere is important, we are told we must accept a “diversity” of viewpoints about what is wrong or right, with questions like “Can’t we all just get along?”

Sometimes we can, and sometimes we won’t. Bombings, wars, and mass shootings are signals that we don’t. When an individual or a group decides to “take it to the streets,” it’s a sign that some people no longer feel like arguing whether or not their point of view is the most valid or important. Where and when do we take a stand?

People stand on principles all the time. Many are willing to die for their principles. They feel it’s important to live out their ethics, to live out what they believe in. It’s important, therefore, to be aware and selective about the principles by which we are willing to live or die.

Ethics for African American Teens

The particular set of ethical principles that we practice reflects those values that we have decided to follow, in order to preserve our way of life. Cultures take their time in laying out their values clearly. People outside a given culture can’t always relate to what goes on inside it.

When we sometimes say to people who have not grown up in a particular culture, “You wouldn’t understand,” we really mean it. We don’t expect them to understand. For example, when Alice Walker campaigned against female genital mutilation in some African cultures, a lot of African women told her that she should go back to her own country and talk to people in her own American community about their own sexuality, and that she didn’t understand that of African women. Those cultures had their own values regarding sexuality, and they wanted to be given their proper respect. Practices that we might consider cruel or barbaric or archaic at the beginning of the third millennium might well be central to their ways of life. Cultures take care of a people’s sense of identity, and they preserve a community’s viability or prospects of continuity. Break the rules—break the culture.

African American cultural communities are no different. Black cultural traditions stress our essence as embodied, intelligent spiritual beings who express ourselves in the spiritual, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral spheres of human experience. Ethics for black teens should promote the healthy development of the black person as a member of the family, the community, and the world.

The rules of behavior that governed black people traditionally when local area processes such as enslavement and unemployment tested our humanity preserved our culture and made our survival possible. These rules have come under assault increasingly from macro-processes like urbanization and globalization. During our transitions from plantations to tenant farms to housing projects to suburbs, we have also moved from one room school-houses to segregated city schools to integrated academies. We’ve moved from country prayer arbors to large churches and mosques to being “too fly” for God.

It’s easy to get lost in the confusion. Look at all the young black boys who are thrown out of school because of belligerence when they are “dissed” by teachers, young black teen girls in love who become disillusioned and pregnant after succumbing to the seduction of older men, young black gangbangers who thought that by killing, they would gain respect and grab the mantle of adulthood, and young black ex-prisoners who search sadly for a world where they really can be winners.

What sort of life will any black youth have without a personal and conscious examination of the principles that have allowed us to survive, and that have produced some of the richest, most creative gifts to our nation and world? What else besides the gift of a book on ethics for black teens could be more appropriate for training them to take a meaningful role in society and the world?

Training Black Spirit

The principles presented this book come from working with incarcerated young people, college students, hospital patients, families of single black mothers, and families that fostered or adopted African American children. Many were at high-risk for becoming severely impaired adults. Things had happened to them that were very likely to affect their development in a very negative way.

Why I Do What I Do

I am a healer. The ideas I talk about in this book come mainly from working with incarcerated young people, with college students, with hospital patients, with families of single Black mothers, and with families that fostered or had adopted African American children. Many of those who came to see me were adolescents whose parents were drug- and alcohol-addicted, or children who had witnessed extremely violent acts in their homes, or children who had suffered intense and prolonged sexual abuse as infants or toddlers. In all these settings, I constantly found myself “breaking it down” so that the concepts were easy to understand. I enjoyed this aspect of my practice at first. It made me feel smart, something psychologists aren’t supposed to admit! People were vibing strongly to my ideas about how we should decide what to do under various conditions, and telling me they liked this approach.

As a psychologist and a healer, I learned to use powerful methods for influencing behavior. I was very aware of the need to be respectful of the rights of my clients to determine their own objectives, particularly in therapy. Telling people what they should do by telling them how to think about a problem, no matter how “directive” or “nondirective” my therapy with a particular client was, seemed a risky business to me. For years, I was uneasy with the notion that I was teaching ethics under the guise of therapy.

As I began working with more and more seriously emotionally and physically ill people, I discovered that their own ethical frameworks, oftentimes unclear or implicit, were often part of the problem! Making their present mode of ethical decision-making and its behavioral expressions explicit and reflexively discussing alternatives made me feel safer, and it helped those who came to see me! In fact, many—given the missing bit of ethical background information needed for generating the “correct” solution to their problems—seemed to get better almost instantly. People were coming to me for advice on how to think about their problems rather than simply asking me to help them get rid of them. However, I still felt a nagging pull.

I didn’t feel like I was anybody’s role model, and I sure wasn’t going to start living my life according to anyone else’s expectations if I could help it. What gave me the right to tell others what I thought they should do? I knew that many of the answers came to me easily, having been trained to recognize various types of questions as a philosophy student in college. What were the rules for telling others what I thought they should do?

Is the right thing to do the same for everybody? No. That’s the reason we need ethics for black teens.

Psychologists used to operate as though we developed impartial clinical insight as a result of our training and that our scientifically based treatment kept our own values out of therapy. Twenty-five years ago, this was easier to believe, if we were middle-class, American, white males who worked only with others like ourselves. However, in response to societal changes about forty years ago, psychology training programs began accepting more ethnic minorities and more women.

Now, psychologists don’t feel as smug about challenges to their own unexamined ethnic and gender biases. Being aware of ethical issues when working across lines of ethnicity as well as gender and sexuality has become more of a standard of expected practice as psychologists have become more honest about the nature of the therapy. Some psychologists have related their uneasiness with ethical questions in therapy to an ethos of near-narcissism, with self-fulfillment and expressive individualism as goals rather than family and community responsibility.

As more and more academic and practicing psychologists accepted the fact that white American middle-class standards and modes of interaction were not necessarily right standards and modes of interaction with clients who were ethnically different from themselves, we began the slow and often painful process of expanding psychologists’ awareness and knowledge base.

Black, Asian, Latino, and Native American perspectives were developed for the purpose of training American practitioners and researchers to work with people who were not white, not male, not native-born, and not English-speaking. Feminist, gay, lesbian, and bisexual perspectives soon followed suit. Restructuring the curriculum and practice of psychologists is a tedious, and sometimes painful process. I am still involved in this work of changing the profession.

Traditional Wisdom

Training Black Spirit is written in the aphoristic style of traditional wisdom literature. That means it uses lots of short maxims, proverbs, and adages, or short sayings about life that many people consider to be true, to state or comment on personal standards of conduct. You may not understand some things clearly at first, and you may need to ask an adult you trust to help you with it. Give things time to sink in. Training Black Spirit challenges you to figure out what’s important, determine where your values lie, and become more united in head—how you see things—and heart—what moves you—and hand—how you respond to the demands of your situation. It’s your personal trainer in the area of ethics, or directions on proper living. Although I use the word “God” several times in this book, you may substitute other names denoted for the Author of the universe, depending on your religious beliefs.

The principles in Training Black Spirit are based on traditional African values. They should be interpreted as directives or instructions by which to live as well as means of self-defense against destructive influences.

The principles are represented by Adinkra symbols. A self-defense interpretation for each of the principles is written after an Adinkra symbol. On the facing page, there is a meditative reading to help you gain insight into the principle. The Adinkra symbol helps you learn to focus quickly on the principle when necessary. Eventually, an ability to reflect on the principle will become habitual with the viewing of the symbol. The concepts behind Training Black Spirit draw on brain science, transpersonal psychology, mainstream psychiatry, and ancient traditions.

This brief synopsis, as well as the book, is abstract, just as a simple line drawing of a person is abstract, meaning it points out just the skeletal elements of the ideas. You have to interact with the text, think things out, and figure out what it means for you.

You can interact with the text by getting together with friends and talking about a particular question, or about one of the ideas you found challenging, or hard to go along with. Sometimes you may discover ways to think about a particular topic that you had not considered before.

“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.