But wouldn’t real ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ follow the bowdlerized slave version of the Bible? It seems to me that what Africans, at home and in the Diaspora, have done and are still doing is exactly what Jesus counseled in the Sermon on the Mount: NOT what I call ‘doormattery’ but rather moral jujitsu, where you use your opponent’s weight to throw THEM. Dig into some hermeneutics and you’ll find Jesus’s first and most troublesome example essentially comes to: if anyone is trying to ‘keep you in your place’, make as if to say ‘I didn’t catch that. Want to try again?’ but do so from a position that, if s/he DOES try again, they cannot help but acknowledge you as an equal — exactly the opposite of what they wanted to do! The two other examples run along the same lines. When you’ve a chance, take a look at Walter Wink’s book, ‘Engaging the Powers’. That’s what illumined those passages for me.