The Jesus Bag,

Of the three books I have read by Grier and/or Cobbs, (Black Rage, My American Life) this is by far their best and undoubtedly the most important. Why? Because it is a psychologically thriller, raw and a profoundly honest appraisal of what it takes to survive in a racist culture in general, but in America's culture of racism in particular. Only obliquely is "The Jesus Bag" about Jesus, or about religion, per se. Those who have read "Black Rage," may have forgotten that the authors, Grier and Cobbs, were not only Black revolutionary thinkers, but more importantly, were (and arguably still are) also seasoned (and honest) Black Psychiatrists. As they did in Black Rage, (but in my opinion, as Price failed to do in his retrospective, My American Life (see my review of it)), these men demonstrate again that they are professional Psychiatrists and patriots first, and revolutionary thinkers second. In laying out what it has taken historically to survive the psychological pressures required to sustain oneself in a racist culture, Grier and Cobbs again pull back the 500-year old pus-filled festering sore of American racism and lays it bare. Not only do they lay bare the wounds that make up the very subtext of American society, but also demonstrate through clinical cases, how the intended victims, blacks, are affected; and also by insinuation and Freudian extrapolation, how the unintended victims, the white perpetrators themselves, have suffered even more. In the process of trying to fashion a world safe for white pigmentation and white male sexuality, whites have lost their souls and any claims to moral leadership or moral superiority they may have had, in the process. Here we get a glimpse of the raw subtext of American society as seen through the eyes of blacks fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough depending on one's point of view) to end up on the psychiatrist's couch instead of in the morgue. In these timeless testimonies, we see cosmic patterns of pain that make up the everyday substrate of a typical black person's life, and the kinds of compromises Black humanity has had to make everyday in order to survive the madness and savagery of American society. It shows how black character, from childhood on, is carefully shaped by the tyrannical and inhibitory pressures of racism; how the lessons of black life transmitted from generation to generation is mostly an obscenity posing as normality, but at base is in fact little more than conditioning and training for a future of humiliation. The essence of the shared American experience for both races is hatred and violence -- sublimated and expressed indirectly. Hatred directed in at least nine directions at once: from whites to blacks and back; from whites to other whites and back, and then back onto themselves individually; and from blacks to other blacks and back, and then back unto themselves individually. Only Psychiatrists with the heroic and patriotic courage to "see and tell what