It’s no secret that the oppression of black people is alive and well, on both a national and global scale. Metro caught up with clinical psychologist Jerome E. Fox, Ph.D. to discuss his new book: Addicted to White: The Oppressed in League with the Oppressor.
You’ve described your book as being “a bit unusual, as it presents critical analysis decorated with poetic ‘accents’ and grounded by Biblical citations, all in a workbook style.” Why did you write this workbook?
“Because of the overall wretched conditions of black people globally. In every society on earth where whites and more richly pigmented people inhabit the same terrain, the lowest socioeconomic class is replete (disproportionately) with black and brown citizens. The normal bell-shape curve cannot be applied!”
How will your book rectify that?
“I offer a behavioral prescription for solving what I consider to be the major problem facing us. In short, black people are addicted to an oppressive white value system which has frustrated our natural quests for life, liberty, and the pursuit of blessedness. A grave obstacle to our well-being lies in our ideological entanglement with a white supremacist social order predicated on narcissism, greed and unjustifiable violence which are at the root of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. identified respectively as the ‘triple evils of racism, poverty, and militarism engulfing black life.’ Dr. King, along with others, also believed that a ‘radical revolution of values’ is needed to advance the cause of oppressed people worldwide.”
What are you asking people to do?
“In Addicted to White: The Oppressed in League with the Oppressor, I detail a groundbreaking three-step group recovery procedure to counter white values and restore enlightenment, justice, goodness and prosperity to black people everywhere.
White-value dependency develops in the context of the historical shaming of Africans and African culture. For a solution, black people must gather together, grounded in the self-help philosophy that nothing so much ensures immunity from active addiction as intensive work with fellow recovering addicts. Recovery work must tackle the borrowed white values and assumptions with which we view the world. This recovery work must be done first, before we can expect to achieve a permanent solution to our oppression. If Africans cannot remove the enemy from within, the enemy without has no reason to reverse himself; and all attempts to persuade him to do so may as well be abandoned.
As we attempt to organize in order to battle injustice, we soon discover that more black minds are ‘incarcerated’ than black bodies. And until the mental shackles of white-value dependency are addressed, any and all efforts to erase the physical marks of oppression (including chronic poverty, deadly police encounters, the black bourgeoisie’s isolation from the black proletariat, you name it) will have only a limited impact (if any at all) on the lives of most black people.”
Is there anything else you want the public to know?
“Firstly, I am grateful for those who have read this article with an open mind. Secondly, I wish to stress that, although written for black people, progressive-thinking whites may also benefit from the values detoxification procedure I present in my workbook. I hope readers of Addicted to White: The Oppressed in League with the Oppressor (available now via Amazon) will implement my recovery strategy and, thereby, gain the clarity of purpose and unified prosocial action that follows getting clean and maintaining abstinence from the ideology of white supremacy in all of its intrapsychic, interpersonal and institutional disguises. Finally, let me emphasize that Addicted to White: The Oppressed in League with the Oppressor is the SOLUTION for uncoupling the shame-based alliance between the oppressed and the oppressor. Solution! Solution! Solution! That’s what this workbook is about.”
