How Are White People Brainwashed by White People? Explained From Nathan Hare’s Brainwashing a Black Men’s Mind

“Once we had only the land. The white man came and brought us the Bible. Now we have the Bible, and they have the land” (Hare, 178). In Nathan Hare’s Brainwashing a Black Men’s Mind, Hare believes the Black society is being brainwashed into thinking that Whites are the supremacy. Nancy Larrick’s, The All-White World of Children’s Book’s (1956), states “... white child learns from his books that he is the Kingfish [top dog].” (63) Which leads to, how are the Whites brainwashing a Black man’s mind? Hare gave the following example, controlling and manipulating the minds and bodies of the subjects [blacks] will be the best by removing the blacks normal settings.

Hare writes that the color white symbolizes purity and black stands for evil and derogatory referent and that “... theirs brains,..., at last has been washed white as snow.”. At a young age, children are taught how to read children’s books. ‘“Why are they always white children?” asked by a five-year old Black girl” (Larrick, 63), as many books seen are only white. Nancy Larrick wrote an article about children’s book and argued how children’s books portrays only whites in books, while there are many non white children and white children across the United States that are reading these books about white children. Larrick also points out that across the country 6,340,000 million non white children are learning to read and understand the American way of life in books which either omit them entirely or scarcely mention them in it (63), and of the 5.206 children's book, only 394 included one or more blacks, which was an average of 6.7 per cent (64). Children’s books will not contain a black hero/heroine because in the books, being depicted as a slave or a servant, or better yet to ...

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...brainwashed by the ruling of Whites. During the days of slavery, a University History Professor of Chicago, Stanley Elkins, described a slavery plantation was common to the practices of a Nazi Concentration Camp (179). In Carter G. Woodsons, The Miseducation of the Negro, it was merely the biggest and most efficient of a brainwashing system that the world has ever known. Now blacks long struggle to become more and more like a white, hence the quote “washed white as snow”.

Works Cited

Hare, Nathan. “The Brainwashing of Black Men’s Minds.” Black Fire 1968. Eds. Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2007.178-86.
Hughes-Hassell, Sandra. “Multicultural Young Adult Literature as a Form of Counter-Storytelling.” The Library Quarterly 83.3 (2013): 212-28.
Larrick, Nancy . “The All-White World of Children’s Books.” Saturday Review 11 September 1965.