We are all American by virtue of our location of birth, but our parents and language and food and lifestyle may differ. We want the right to life as full human beings, which means we will not be separated from our past and present. We can acknowledge only a fractional part of the time in which Black Americas have actually been shown any kind of equality of rights and opportunity. Many Black Americans are discovering a sense of appreciation for their heritage and they are attempting to identify with their American citizenship. There are many African Americans who are living fully in American society, and who are middle-class and upper-middle class and wealthy. There is an increasing tendency in the Black community to display cultural pluralism, which means to be as American as possible, but to identify and retain pride in the heritage of being African American. Many Blacks see their own identity is far more important than either accepting or rejecting somebody’s stereotyped identity. So, they are taking pride in their heritage, finding some satisfaction in greater acceptance of things labelled soul. Black is Beautiful means to honor your features and accept who you are as a person so that you can see how beautiful you are, and it does not mean that any other culture or race is less attractive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11

Black is beautiful also means of many: I am a human being, real and alive, and only recently aware of myself as a person with unlimited potential. I like who and what I am. I can be real now. I am a human being and my identity is something I can develop and feel good about. Self-acceptance and self-appreciation are definitely part of what self-actualization as a process is all about. Knowing your part inhumanity is a vital concept in self-actualization. This may mean coming to a fuller, deeper, more holistic appreciation of all that you are: body, color, heritage, intellect, and certainly emotions. This is also a current definition of together. Much like other Americans, Black want full acceptance of their status as human beings who happen to have a special ancestry and heritage. The drastic change or destruction of stereotypes upsets or upends our comfortable ways of handling our environment. We are challenged to react in ways in which we have little or no experience. However, it is an important transition stage for any person undergoing the emergence of one’s fullest identity. It is our hope that enough Americans can learn to accept and like and experience their own self-identities that they can also enjoy and appreciate this in people who may differ in pigmentation and heritage. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11

Anxiety and courage have a psychosomatic character. They are biological as well as psychological. From the biological point of view one would say that fear and anxiety are the guardians, indicating the threat of nonbeing to a living being and producing movements of protection and resistance to this threat. Fear and anxiety must be considered as expressions of what one could call self-affirmation on its guard. Without the anticipating fear and the compelling anxiety no finite being would be able to exist. Courage, in this view, is the readiness to take upon oneself negatives, anticipated by fear, for the sake of a fuller positivity. Biological self-affirmation implies the acceptance of want, toil, insecurity, pain, possible destruction. Without this self-affirmation life could not be preserved or increased. The more vital strength a being has the more it is able to affirm itself in spite of the dangers announced by fear and anxiety. However, it would contradict their biological function if courage disregarded their warnings and prompted actions a directly self-destructive character. There is a right mean between cowardice and temerity.# RandolphHarris 3 of 11

Biological self-affirmation needs a balance between courage and fear. Such a balance is present in all living beings which are able to preserve and increase their being. If the warnings of fear no longer have an effect or if the dynamics of courage have lost their power, life vanishes. The drive for security, perfection, and certitude to which we have referred is biologically necessary. However, it becomes biologically destructive if the risk of insecurity, imperfection, and uncertainty is avoided. Conversely, a risk which has a realistic foundation in our self and our World is biologically demanded,while it is self-destructive without such a foundation. Life, in consequence, includes both fear and courage as elements of a life process in a changing but essentially established balance. As long as life has such a balance it is able to resist nonbeing. Unbalanced fear and unbalanced courage to destroy the life whose preservation and increase are the function of the balance of fear and courage. Humans are thrown into this World without their knowledge, consent, or will. Or they simply do not remember these things after soul amnesia. In respect, humans are not different from the animals, from the plants, or from inorganic matter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11

However, mortals are endowed with reason and imagination,and cannot be content with the passive role of a creature, with the role of dice cast out of cup. Mortals are driven by the urge to transcend the role ofthe creature, the accidentalness and passivity of their existence. Mortals can create life. This is the miraculous quality which they indeed share with all living beings, but with difference the one alone is aware of being created and of being a creator. Mortals can create life, or rather, women can create life, by giving birth to a child, and by caring for the child until it is sufficiently grown to take care of his or her own needs. Man—man and woman—can create by planting seeds, by producing material objects, by creating art, by creating ideas, by loving one another. In the act of creation mortals transcend themselves as a creature, raises oneself beyond the passivity and accidentalness of their existence into the realm of purposefulness and freedom. In human’s need for transcendence is possessed one of the foundations for love, as well as for art, religion and material production. “And they were also distinguished for their zeal towards God, and also towards mortals; for they were perfectly honest and upright in all things; and they were firm in the faith of Christ,” reports Alma 27.27.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 11

To create presupposes activity and care. It presupposes love for that which one creates. How then do mortals solve the problem of transcending oneself, if one is not capable of creating, if one cannot love? There is another answer to this need for transcendence: if I cannot create life, I can destroy it. To destroy life makes me also transcend it. Large sections of mortal’s civilization serve the purpose of giving one safety against the attack of fate and death. One realizes that life demands again and again the courage to surrender some or even all security for the sake of self-affirmation. Nevertheless, mortals try to reduce the power of fate and the threat of death as much as possible. Pathological anxiety about fate and death impels toward a security which is comparable to the security of a prison. One who lives in this prison is unable to leave the security given to one by one’s self-imposed limitations. However, these limitations are not based on a full awareness of reality. Therefore the security of the neurotic is unrealistic. The individual fears what is not to be feared and one feels to be safe what is not safe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11

Indeed, that mortals can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that mortals can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, mortals set themselves above life; they transcend oneself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for mortals, inasmuch as one is driven to transcend oneself is to create or destroy, to love or to hate. The anxiety which humans are not able to take upon themselves produces images of having no basis in reality, but it recedes in the face of things which should be feared. That is, one avoids particular dangers, although they are hardly real, and suppresses the awareness of having to die although this is an ever-present reality. Misplaced fear is a consequence of the pathological form of the anxiety of fate and death. The same structure can be observed in the pathological forms of the anxiety of guilt drives the person towards attempts to avoid this anxiety (usually called the uneasy conscience) by avoiding guilt. Moral self-discipline and habits will produce moral perfection although one remains aware that one cannot remove the imperfection which is implied in human’s existential situation, one’s estrangement from one’s true being. Neurotic anxiety does the same thing but in a limited, fixed, and unrealistic way. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11

To say that mortals are capable of developing their primary potentiality for love and reason does not imply naïve belief in mortal’s goodness. Destructiveness is secondary potentiality, rooted in the very existence of mortals, and having the same intensity and power as any passion can have. However—and this is the essential point of my argument—it is only the alternative to creativeness. Creation and destruction, love and hate, are not two instincts which exist independently. They are both answers to the same need for transcendence, and the will to destroy must rise when the will to create cannot be satisfied. However, the satisfaction of the need to create leads to happiness; destructiveness to suffering, most of all, for the destroyer him or herself. The anxiety of becoming guilty, the horror of feeling condemned, are so strong that they make responsible decision and any kind of moral action almost impossible. However, since decision and actions cannot be avoided they are reduced to a minimum which, however, is considered absolutely perfect; and the sphere were they take place is defended against any provocation to transcend it. Here also the separation from reality has the consequence that the consciousness of guilt is misplaced. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11

The moralistic self-defense of the neurotic makes one see guilt where there is no guilt or where one is guilty only in a very indirect way. Yet the awareness of real guilt and the self-condemnation which is identical with mortal’s existential self-estrangement are repressed, because the courage which could take them into itself is lacking. The pathological forms of the anxiety of the emptiness and meaninglessness show similar characteristics.Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude in systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. In spite of the element of doubt which is implied in mortal’s finite spirituality, and in spite of the threat of meaninglessness implied in a mortal’s estrangement,anxiety is reduced by these ways of producing and preserving certitude.Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended and is defended with the utmost tenacity. Mortal’s power of asking is prevented from becoming actual in this sphere, and if there is a danger of its becoming actualized by questions asked from the outside one reacts with fanatical rejection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11

However, the castle of undoubted certitude is not built on the rock of reality. The inability of the neurotic to have a full encounter with reality makes one’s doubts as well as one certitude unrealistic. One puts both in the wrong place. One doubts what is practically about doubt and one is certain where doubt is adequate. Above all, one does not admit the question of meaning in its universal and radical sense. The question is in the individual, as it is in every person as mortal under the conditions of existential estrangement. However, one cannot admit it because one is without the courage to take the anxiety of emptiness or doubt and meaninglessness upon oneself. Existential anxiety has an ontological character and cannot be removed but must be taken into the courage to be. Pathological anxiety is the consequence of the failure to take the anxiety upon itself. Pathological anxiety leads to self-affirmation on a limited, fixed, and unrealistic basis and to a compulsory defense of this basis. Pathological anxiety, in relation to the anxiety of fate and death, produces an unrealistic security; in relation to the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, an unrealistic perfection; in relation to the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness, an unrealistic certitude. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11

Pathological anxiety, once established, is an object of medical healing. Existential anxiety is an object of priestly help. Neither the medical nor the priestly function is bound to its vocational representatives: the minister may be a healer and the psychotherapist a priest, and each human being may be both in relation to the neighbor. However, the function should not be confused and the representatives should not try to replace each other. The goal of both of them is helping mortal to reach full-self affirmation, to attain the courage to be. We want to realize and appreciate the position we occupy before God and the great blessings and privileges that are within our reach. We have just commenced, as it were, it the great work. We do not always comprehend these things, and hence we labor under difficulties pertaining to this matter, because we do not see, we do not comprehend the position and relationship that subsists between us and our God. God is our Father; we are his children. God has brought us into his covenant, and it is our privilege to go on from wisdom to wisdom, from intelligence to intelligence, from understanding of one principle to that of another, to go forward and progress in the development of truth until we can completely comprehend God. “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” reports Matthew 6.9-10. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11