HOW TO RECOVER FROM THE ADDICTION TO WHITE SUPREMACY BY MARVIN X
"Marvin X is Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland."
--Ishmael Reed, Lecturer Emeritus, UC Berkeley
"Marvin X is the African Socrates teaching in the hood."
--Dr. Cornel West, Harvard University
"Marvin X has always been in the forefront of Pan African writing. Indeed, he is one of the founders and innovators of the revolutionary school of African writing."
--Ancestor Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Arts Movement Co-founder
Black Bird Press has just reprinted Marvin X's classic How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy: A Pan African 12-Step Model for a Mental Health Peer Group, foreword by Dr. Nathan Hare. The police lynching of George Floyd has rocked the consciousness of human beings around the world, but the problem has existed for centuries, from the slave catchers to the police of today. And North American Africans suffer internal violence as well. It is this latter issue that concerns this manual for a mental health peer group, based on the AA 12-Step model, revised for addiction to white supremacy Type II, as described by Dr. Nathan Hare. The officer(s) who lynched George Floyd under the color of law, suffer Addiction to White Supremacy Type I, while George suffered Type II. Whites who suffer Type I must work out their problems, and North American Africans, and African throughout the Diaspora, must find the way to recover from Type II, for we are in many ways "the other white people." Blond wigs and weaves, bleaching cream and attraction to European values of materialism, reveal we are black men and women dipped in chocolate, as Marvin X was told by a young man. Marvin X revises the AA 12-Step model for our purposes, adding the 13th Step: discovery. After all, after recovery shall we attend meetings forever as if we have traded one drug for another. After recovery, we must discover our mission is the liberation of our people throughout the Pan-African world.
In Wretched. of the Earth, Dr. Fran Fanon told us, and Dr. Nathan Hare (Black Anglo Saxons) concurs that the only way the oppressed people can maintain their mental equilibrium is through radical action for true and lasting freedom from all forms of oppression, although white supremacy is the most cunning and vile drug in the world, addicting entire nations and continents.
In his Foreword, Dr. Nathan Hare says, "Who knows, but it may be that Dr. M's (as he calls Marvin X) movement of recovery from addiction to and from white supremacy is offering us a final and effective change to begin to "sit down together" to get together and get our heads together...."
Dr. Mark Christian compares Marvin X to Walter Rodney, Steve Biko, Frances Cress Welsing, Bobby Wright, Nathan Hare and Dr. E. Franklin Frazier. "What I am most impressed with is Dr. M's Pan-Africanist perspective.
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy is not a book to read but a manual to work. As they say in recovery meetings, "It works if you work it!
Detoxification from White Supremacy
Twelve Steps (13)
Step 1: We are not powerless over self-hatred, racism white supremacy thinking but our lives have become unmanageable
Step 2: We have come to believe that a power within ourselves can restore us to sanity
Step 3: We have made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God
Step 4:We shall make a searching and fearless moral inventory
Step 5: Admitted to God within and without the exact nature of our wrongs
Step 6: We are entirely ready to have God remove defects of character
Step 7: We humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings
Step 8: Make a list of all Africans and others we have harmed
Step 9: Make direct amends to such people
Step 10: Continue to take personal inventory
Step 11: Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God
Step 12: Carry the message to the Pan African world and other humans in the global community
Step 13: Discover Pan African consciousness and join the cultural revolution
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