I shook my head in disgust, but I was too scared to tell them to shut up. I heard them say things like 'n.r' and 'roll it in her p.y” repeatedly. Young black males were on the train throwing around their penises in their pants and their words. I finished reading this book on the way home from work on a busy B train. Burrell’s thoughtful and important analysis of hip hop music and its dangerous and damning portrayal of light skinned black women as trophies is delivered in a manner that is quite urgent, welcomed and articulated with precision. Definitely essential reading for anyone who is black and living in America, this book carefully weaves in the history of the black American community, and how deep rooted insecurities reach back into the period of slavery. This book provided an interesting analysis of the 'brainwashing' that plagues the psyche of many black Americans. Provocative and powerful, Brainwashed dares to expose the wounds so that we, at last, can heal.

We must undo negative brainwashing and claim a new state of race-based self-esteem and self-actualization. Racism is not the issue how we respond to racism is the issue. In this powerful examination of “the greatest propaganda campaign of all time”-the masterful marketing of black inferiority Burrell poses 10 provocative questions that will make black people look in the mirror and ask why, nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, so many blacks still think like slaves.īrainwashed is not a reprimand it is a call to deprogram ourselves of self-defeating attitudes and actions.

Yet, as Brainwashed: Erasing the Myth of Black Inferiority testifies, too much of black America is still wandering in the wilderness. They are survivors of the Middle Passage and centuries of humiliation and deprivation, who have excelled against the odds, constantly making a way out of “no way!” At this point in history, the idea of black inferiority should have had a “Going-Out-of-Business Sale.” After all, Barack Obama has reached the Promised Land. “Black people are not dark-skinned white people,” says advertising visionary Tom Burrell.

Brainwashed by Tom Burrell