Summary Of Na Im Akbar

In Na’im Akbar’s book “Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slaves”; I was intrigued by many factors. The primary factor stems from the fact that I recently preach a sermon on the psychological state of African American people.
Work
Akbar in this book shares a valued observation when dealing with the aspect of the psychological bondage of work (forced labor). He states in his writings that work for the slaves did not add any pleasure to their lives. Slaves often worked from sun up, to sun down six days a week, sometimes seven days depending on need basis. Akbar goes further to discuss that work for slaves was an activity that was hated. Work was hated by slaves according to Akbar because slave masters used work as a form of punishment. This
Now because work is often viewed by those of African descent as something done unwilling and out of necessity only, many African Americans find it difficult to identify work with pride. As a result Akbar believes that many African Americans began to develop bad habits to avoid working. Now we find our streets flooded with street hustlers and pimps that look successful without having to any identifiable work. Akbar believes this work phobia, he calls it. It also a reason we have so many African Americans that form dependency on welfare. Akbar closes this section of his book encouraging readers to be aware that the attitude of many African Americans about work is a result of our slavery
Akbar argues that from the most immediate way to bring death to a body is to remove the head. With this idea Akbar says that a system was put in place during the times of slavery to remove and slave that was identified as an emerging leader. The slave masters according to Akbar would immediately remove any slave that exemplified any leadership capability. The common removal would be through the slave master isolating, killing, or ridiculing the leader or the head. In place of the slave that would exemplify real leadership skills, the master would have the slave removed and would hand pick and train another slave to stand only for the master’s welfare. The master would teach slaves to view acts of slaves standing up against the system as “uppity” or “arrogant” and label them as troublemakers. The actions of these so called trouble makers as a part of the system would bring trouble upon the entire community of slaves. These created in the mind of slaves that those rebelling against the master’s system did not care about the community but that they were acting selfishly.
Akbar states that those slaves that rebelled against the master’s system because of the extra burden placed on the community slaves were often isolated by the community and were usually the victims of being “snitch” on. This created the idea that reporting to the master on behalf of the