For African Americans and most people of African descent the themes in The Matrix movies can have particular meaning. A major theme in the movies is the need to free one’s mind to see the reality of the world in order to overcome oppression. One can easily apply this theme to the needs of people of African descent, because of centuries of racism, racial violence and oppression, the need to free one’s mind as a means to overcome oppression is required. This theme has been echoed by black scholars and activist for centuries from Carter G. Woodson and Malcolm X to Kwame Nkrumah to Stephen Biko and Nelson Mandela. Here several themes from the popular Matrix movies will be explored and applied to the needs and experiences of the peoples of the African Diaspora.

Wake Up

In the movie, The Matrix the Laurence Fishburne character Morpheus express the need for humanity to wake up. Albeit in a different way, there has been a sense by many for the need for the black world to wake up. It is arguable that the black world and as a consequence the world at large suffers from a sort of mental imprisonment. In this matrix like scenario, the limitations conscious and subconscious have been placed on the black mind, through hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, violence, lynching, segregation, creating a perverse unreal world. A world where black children are taught the wonders of European civilizations and nothing of their own accomplishments. They are given an education that perpetuate a society based on race that is not real. The great historian, Carter G. Woodson echoed this point in The Mis-Education of the Negro,

“HISTORY shows, then, that as a result of these unusual forces in the education of the Negro he easily learns to follow the line of least resistance rather than battle against odds for what real history has shown to be the right course. A mind that remains in the present atmosphere never undergoes sufficient development to experience what is commonly known as thinking. No Negro thus submerged in the ghetto, then, will have a clear conception of the present status of the race or sufficient foresight to plan for the future; and he drifts so far toward compromise that he loses moral courage. The education of the Negro, then, becomes a perfect device for control from without. Those who purposely promote it have every reason to rejoice, and Negroes themselves exultingly champion the cause of the oppressor.”

The ‘wake up’ theme has also appeared in Spike Lee’s movie School Daze addressed albeit in a different way— that African Americans have been sleep walking in America, mentally enslaved to do what is told including discriminate against each other based on complexion. Frantz Fannon discussed this issue in his writings The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin White Masks applying this theory to the African colonial and neo-colonial mind. He explored how essentially the mind of the oppressor can be placed into the mind of the oppressed. Creating a perverse reality where the oppressed consciously or subconsciously does the bidding of the oppressor. You think this idea is insane? Think about Mobutu and other African dictators who bled their own countries wealth for self and for foreign investors exactly the way in which colonial economic relationships worked.

The One

In the The Matrix movies Morpheus considers the Keanu Reeves’ character Neo to be ‘the one’. The one who will lead to the defeat of the machines. This theme too has been echoed throughout the black experience. There have been many leaders and hero’s considered to be the “one” to lead the people out of ignorance of the reality of this world like the Keanu Reeves’ character Neo. The list reads off like a black history month book report: Martin Luther King, Jr. (killed), Malcolm X (killed) Marcus Garvey (deported) Huey Newton (killed) Medgar Evers (killed) even as far back as Nat Turner (killed) Patrice Lumumba (killed) Kwame Nkrumah (overthrown) Mandela (imprisoned later freed). All of those who have been considered to be the One were eliminated one way or the other by “The Matrix.”

You know something what you know you can’t explain but you feel it. You felt it your entire life; that there is something wrong with the world, you don’t know what it is but its there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad.
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