Willie Lynch Letter
By: Mike • Essay • 1,859 Words • January 10, 2010 • 1,391 Views
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Willie
Lynch
The Sad Truth
294 years ago Willie Lynch of the infamous “Willie Lynch Letter: The Making Of A Slave” read his manual to those who were present that day in the Virginia Colony. In his letter Lynch spoke about how if his procedure is used correctly then “It will control the slaves for at least 300 hundred years”.
As of right now the year is 2006 and the effects are still felt and it is not even 300 years, reading Willie Lynch’s letter you hear some African American/Black people say that they get mad but to me a lot of it’s the truth and its sad to say that we as Black people do it to each other.
So far the life I have lived I can honestly say that Black people are the most self-hated people in the world. You can look at every race and see that there is some type of cohesion between them. White people are a great example, they may hate each other but if something goes wrong to were they may lose some power, they will come together to stop the force or those people from prospering. Asian and Hispanics those two races are probably the most independent cultures that will look out for each other. But Black people we sell each other out in a heart beat as long a we (the individual) are taken care of.
Back to Willie Lynch, every versus tandem he has put together is that of a problem in the Black society: Old Male vs. Young Male, Male vs. Female and the age old battle of Light Skinned vs. Dark Skinned. The Old Male vs. Young Male is not so much of a problem because there will always be some type of generation clash, but the other two are somewhat of a problem. In the case of Male vs. Female due to Willie Lynch I will say that it is bitter sweet.
In the part “The Breaking Process Of The African Woman” Lynch describes of ways to destroy the male image of the Black man so the Black Woman herself will become independent and she will raise her offspring in reversed roles. That means the Mother will make the son mentally weak, dependent, but physically strong so that he will not have the same fate as the male image that was once there, next she will raise he daughter to be psychologically independent. This as Lynch would say is having the “Woman out front and the Man behind and scared.” This is so true. In some type of sick twisted way I guess Lynch was telling the future because no more than any generation there are many independent Black women. This is not bad at all but from Lynch’s prospective the man is supposed to provide and the woman depend on him, which is not so much now. Today’s societies there are more Black women than black men that higher education, so this not being a bad thing but the question is asked were is the Black man in this equation? Far behind. So some Black women like to make the excuse that the reason they date outside of there race because there is not a lot of educated black man. Also the dependency of the Black Man is still there because a lot of men cannot leave the nest of whom? There mother, thank you Willie Lynch.
There is also the age old battle of Light Skinned vs. Dark Skinned today this is still an issue. You have good hair, you have bad hair, are quotes thrown out amongst Black people. Some Black people look at these terms now and say that is just what the case of a person hair. In Willie Lynch’s manual he talks of concocting backwards people, in this case the backwards people are “light skinned people”. To sum it up Lynch goes on to tell all the slave owners that they should mix pure white blood with the Black women so then you would have variety of slaves to choose from and then you may breed them.
To me the Willie Lynch letter is almost a wake up call reading it for the first time because a lot of Black people are still slaves. The thing to me that is so crazy is that it has already been 294 years and we as Black people have not changed our ways. You have some Black people that do want to change then you have those that do not and are set in their ways, to me that is a nigger. A nigger does not want to let anyone else get in front of them especially if that person is their own race or creed, a nigger will sell their self out at either their own expense or some one else’s.
Though the letter is very impacting there are people who believe that Willie Lynch was a fictional character such as historian Pro. Manu Ampim who says "There is a large body of written materials from the slavery era, yet there is not one reference to a William Lynch speech given in 1712. This is very curious because both free and enslaved African Americans wrote