Willie Lynch - Myth or Not

Text of the Willie Lynch Letter

The Willie Lynch letter has been circulating on the internet for some time now. According to it's contents it offers white slave holders instructions on how to break the spirit and desire for freedom in African slaves so they will be easier to handle. Africans in America reading this letter were encouraged by the understanding it gave them into what damage has been done to them in this country. This letter is the American experience of Sankofa--overstanding the present by underrstanding the past.

Naturally opposition to this letter arose. Websites sprung up dedicated to prooving that the Willie Lynch letter is a hoax and that Willie Lynch never existed. Whether these disclaimers are true or not the result is to quench that spark of hope in the hearts of Africans in America before it became a burning inferno that obliterates the claims of white supremacy. Willie Lynch offered proof that the present low state of Africans in America was planned and systematically enforced and not due to some supposed inherant inferiority. Does debunking the Willie Lynch letter put Africans in America back where they were with no point of reference or explanation for their circumstances? A dark man shall see dark days and that's that?

Actually it makes no difference at all. The import of the Willie Lynch letter does not rest in their authenticity or the historicity of Willie Lynch. He is just as powerful as a myth as he is as a fact. What we have in Willie Lynch is a powerful crystalization of a vast and nebulous social ideology. According to Joseph Campbell, author of Hero With a Thousand Faces, a common character in mythology is the wise old man who gives the hero the magic words to complete his perilous mission or shows him the magic sword that will slay the dragon. If you think of the white supremists as the embodied hero of racist ideology, the freedom-hungry spirit of the Black slave as the threatening dragon, then Willie Lynch naturally becomes the wise old man whose letter instructs the hero to victory.

The Willie Lynch letter provides us with one of the most brilliant analysis of the systematic undermining ofAfrican progress not only in America but throughout the world. Fact is, there is not one instruction for subjugating slaves made in that letter which whites have not carried out to the fullest.