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“The black/African mind is one that appears not to be burdened by a massive unconscious area. Modern psychology, spurred by the thinking of Sigmund Freud, generally compartmentalizes human awareness into three areas: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The unconscious contains censored thought hidden from awareness. These exiled thoughts are imprisoned by repressive defenses: denial, repression, rationalization, intellectualization, and others. The black/African appears not to be so affected because of the propensity to use song, dance, oratory, painting, sculpture etc., to expel urging impulses that ordinarily become the content of the unconscious in the Western-oriented mind. The diminution of these defenses seems to give free rein to the rhythm impulse, which acts as an inner source of excitation. Inner excitation seeks expression, we believe, by compelling the mind to creatively manage the simultaneous emission of urging impulses.”
“Repressive defenses prevent stimulating emissions from fully entering awareness. The mind is relieved of teasing excitation but at the cost of being less creative. A repressed mind has fewer vital stimuli to manage, and is therefore artistically restricted. Recent brain research suggests that the unconscious capacity of the mind resides in the right side of the brain.”
“We can argue, then, that the readiness of the black mind to comprehend and express reality in aesthetic forms, giving credence to its artistic nature, is the result of fluid contact with the area of consciousness that is responsible for our experience of imaginative-imagistic sensations and impulse signals, the right side of the brain. Easy contact with this side of the brain is denied Westerners, who, forever seeking to be in control (of themselves and others), reduce their awareness of sensuous impulses by introducing into the mind repressive defenses. The split brain theory (left and right sides) or hemispheric specialization offers a convincing explanation regarding expressive differences between blacks and whites.”
“What some scholars are saying, including those at the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge and at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of California at San Francisco, is that consciousness is a factor of the role that each side of the brain plays in determining human awareness. Their contentions further suggest that role specialization, and therefore human consciousness, is susceptible to differentiation in humans as a factor of cultural predilections.”
“Robert Ornstein, in his book The Psychology of Consciousness, insists that Easterners and Westerners operate on different modes of consciousness. Stated with less technicality, blacks, particularly the unacculturated, and whites operate on different systems of thought. They see and come to understand the world somewhat differently, and therefore their expressive behavior and value systems present sharp contrasts. Lilyan Kesteloot is more descriptive:
‘Just as whites are indelibly marked in their way of thinking, feeling, or expressing themselves by Western European civilization, whose key values are Reason (for the mind), Technique (for work), Christianity (for religion), Nature (for art), and Individualism (in the social life), black people are formed by their culture, of which we already know the principal traits: Solidarity, born of the cohesion of the primitive clan; Rhythm and Symbolism in artistic and religious manifestations; Participation in the cosmic forces, ‘special reasoning processes,’ which, although neither prelogical nor alogical, do not necessarily follow the Western mind or its syllogisms.’
‘… Whatever their social status and the overlay of Western influence, as long as they have remained in a sufficiently large group, they retain more or less intact the traits of specifically Negro African psychology, which gives their culture an easily recognizable flavor: in music, the special rhythm of jazz, for example, in poetry, a style which transforms any foreign language it uses according to its own particular cadence and sensibility.’
“The contrast seems to reflect differences in the uses of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.”
Alfred B. Pasteur, PH.D, and Ivory L. Toldson, ED.D.
“Roots of Soul: The Psychology of Black Expressiveness”
Page 16
