The definition of Black Psychology is widely debated and discussed among Black scholars and has generated two main schools of thought. One way to conceptualize the field of Black Psychology is to simply look at understanding the experiences of Black people as it pertains to their thoughts, behaviors, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, interactions and well being of individuals of African descent.[2]This could entail utilizing any theories, past, present or future, originating from anywhere to be applied to and codify the Black experience. Therefore, this would include African psychological theories as well as the traditional canon of Eurocentric psychological theories.
Another way to approach understanding the field of Black Psychology is to start from a deeply rooted African knowledge base where African heritage, philosophy, ideology, framework, and paradigm/worldview are used to inform the understanding of the Black experience.
This approach would more fully quantify Black Psychology as being an inherently Afrocentric psychology or an Africana psychology. Africana psychology refers back to the fact that the Black experience began in Africa, regardless of the present location of a Black person in the African Diaspora presently, and it therefore cannot be divorced from this fact. Furthermore, the Black experience cannot be separated from Black/Africana history, its cultural impact and its influence on Black ancestral belief systems that obviously began on the continent of Africa. It is agreed that in order to understand the Black experience, it must be done by understanding, analyzing and applying the African knowledge base onto the Black experience. Most importantly, it proposes that to assess the Black experience through a Eurocentric ideology would always lead to producing a lack of proper understanding, gross misrepresentation, biased ill informed conclusions and simply incoherent findings that promote racist Eurocentric viewpoints of the Black community and Diaspora.
In contemporary Black Psychology, it’s good to point out that a general understanding of the African knowledge base is expected but one does not have to choose which approach to follow but rather understand that they both exist. With these two schools of thought in mind, there have been many Black psychologists since its inception that have researched Black people and created nomenclature and theories to codify the Black experience. The timeframes of these researchers can be best broken down and understood in three conceptual frameworks such as Foundational Deconstructionist Framework, Reconstructionist Reform Framework, and Constructionist Radical Framework as identified and expounded on by the ABPsi.
Conceptual Frameworks
The three conceptual frameworks that will be discussed are the Deconstructionist, Reconsrtuctionist and Constructionist Frameworks.
Deconstructionist
As previously mentioned, in 2022 the APA published their apology for the racist history and effects of their research. This racist past influenced the mind frame of those Black psychologists during the foundation of the field. Therefore, Black psychologists who fall under the Foundational Deconstructionist Framework were focused on proving the inaccuracies of the research that was being published about Black people such as Intelligence Quotient Testing (IQ Testing) and the misconceptions and stereotypes that it perpetuated. Early Black psychologists worked to change how biased research was conducted and they focused on publishing their own works in the ABPsi since they were not allowed to publish their research with the APA. They also worked extensively to undermine, abolish and eradicate policy informed by biased research.
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Portrait of the married couple Dr. Kenneth Clark and Dr. Mammie Phipps Clark (Use with permission via Library of Congress; via Library of Congress)
The field begins with the “Founder of Black Psychology, Dr. Francis Sumner, the first African American to earn his PhD in psychology from Clark University in 1920. He also went on to found the psychology department at Howard University. Summers' work inspired the research of his student Dr. Kenneth Clark who would go on to publish, along with his wife Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, the famous 1940s Doll Study which was used to help win the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ending state sanctioned segregation in public schools. The Clarks discovered through their study that even a young Black children when presented with four baby dolls of various skin shades would identify the Black doll as the bad doll and the white doll as the good doll. They concluded that this meant Black children from an early age had developed poor self esteem and an internalized sense of inferiority and Black self hatred in a segregated society. This research would spur the research of future Black psychologists to develop measures of self esteem and to generate more holistic explanations of the results of the Doll Study that took into account other intersecting factors as to how Black children would identify themselves and the dolls.
The 1970s were pivotal for the field because of the founding of the ABPsi in 1968; it pushed back against the effects ofIQ testing and on the heels of the ABPsi’s founding, many Black psychologists used their research to fight back. One particular Black psychologist of significance was Dr. Joseph White who was known as “The Father of Black Psychology.” In 1970 he published “Towards a Black Psychology” in Ebony magazine, which shed light on the fact that the field of psychology had been historically limited, biased, and systematically racist. He stressed the dire need for a psychology that was rooted in a Black framework that was culturally relevant and focused on the Black experience from a strengths based position as opposed to a deficit model.
In 1972, Dr. Robert Williams conducted research and created a 100 question measure of intelligence called the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity (BITCH-100)[3]which included questions that were familiar to Black life, and subsequently, when people who were not familiar with Black life took the test, they scored very low. This gave credit to the notion that IQ tests are largely informed and influenced by the cultural knowledge of those who create the test and therefore can’t be completely unbiased in nature. It also implies that test bias occurs and can contribute to disparities of scores and must be taken into consideration when analyzing and interpreting results.
Another notable Black psychologist at the time was Dr. Robert Guthrie, who published Even The Rat Was White in 1976, which shed light on many related topics such as how biased psychological research was used to promote misrepresentations of the Black community, the lack of opportunity for Black psychologists to conduct and publish their research, and the history of psychology along with its intersection with racism. In 1975, Dr. Asa Hilliard III was involved with the court decision Larry P. vs. Wilson Riles where he contributed to the courts outcome and decision that there was racial bias in IQ testing leading the California Board of Education to stop IQ testing. The focus of these researchers was to change the misconceived narratives of Blacks from being an inferior people to Blacks being a strong, smart and resilient people and by doing so confronting racism in the field of psychology.
Reconstructionist
Black psychologists that fit under the Reconstructionist Reform Framework produced work to codify the Black experience by understanding the Black self and rejecting traditionally Eurocentric psychology theories for understanding personality. More specifically, they were focused on Black self development, Black personality development, racial identity formation and creating a more culturally sensitive model of psychology due to psychologists in the broader field being ill informed about how to provide therapy and services for BIPOC communities. It was strikingly evident that so much was missing from Eurocentric frameworks of psychology, including anything about racial identity development. Being that the Black experience of racial identity development, especially in racially charged environments like the United States of America, is vastly different than the process of white racial identity development, it was imperative for the following Black psychologists to create theories to understand these stages of development.
These Black psychologists include Dr. William E. Cross Jr. who, in 1971 as a graduate psychology student at Princeton University, constructed his theory of Nigrescence which was a theory of racial identity development focusing on the process of how individuals of African descent come to understand and navigate their racial identity in the United States. The theory of Nigrescence defines 5 stages of a mental and emotional journey that Black individuals progress through while accepting their racial identity. The 5 stages are known as Pre-encounter, Encounter, Immersion-Emersion, Internalization and Internalization-Commitment with a focus on self-awareness in a racially stratified society, understanding oneself as well as becoming an advocate for social justice and racial equity.
In 1976, “Extended Self: Rethinking the So-Called Negro Self-Concept,” was published by Dr. Wade Nobels, who analyzed previous Negro Self-Concept theory from Eurocentric psychologists. Prior to this, there was only a published Eurocentric understanding of the Negro-Self Concept and therefore Dr. Nobles was the first to provide an alternative explanation rooted in Reconstructionist Afrocentric Ideology. “He argued that if Black psychologists are to fully liberate themselves and their communities from the chains of oppression and White domination, they must first rid themselves of “colonialistic” and “scientific” approaches to the Black self-concept.” [4] This was seminal because it pushed against the monolithic “Black Self Hatred” narrative that had come out of earlier studies which were culturally biased and therefore concluded with a deficit lens that Blacks had a deep sense of innate self hatred and a lack of internal locus of control.[5]
In 1984, Dr. Linda James Meyers created a psychological theory called Optimal Conceptual Theory (OCT)which has an Afrocentric Worldview and approach to psychology that emphasizes the interconnectedness of all living things, the importance of culture and spirituality in mental health and the necessity for balance of mind, body and spirit. OCT has been used to understand and address a variety of mental health issues, including racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. The theory also includes a focus on self-determination as we as humans have the right to determine our own destiny and the need for social justice.
In 1985, Dr. Janet E. Helms introduced the Theory of Cultural Mistrustwhich codified the dynamics of racial and ethnic minority individuals' perceptions of and interactions with dominant culture systems, particularly in contexts where historical oppression and discrimination have occurred. The marginalized populations can develop a collective sense of skepticism rooted in their experiences and interactions with systems of oppression stemming from historical racism, discrimination and inequalities.
Constructionist
Through the Constructionist Radical Framework, Black psychologists focused on creating theories specifically from the Afrocentric worldview and paradigm. This means that these concepts were free from Eurocentric influence and were generated from the African knowledge base previously described. Therefore, these ideas tended to be more radical, focused on eliminating social injustices such as racial inequality, economic and political injustices, countered oppression, and focused on liberation from these societal systems. These Black psychologists rejected the deficit model of the Black community but rather focused on the resiliency model present within the Africana philosophy. This strengths based approach is foundational and core to the concepts generated in this framework. These ideas included theories based on African philosophy such as Ubuntu, African spiritual practices and African cultural frameworks such as the Akan Personality Model.
There have been many Black psychologists over the years that have contributed to the field, however they cannot all be listed here. These psychologists and frameworks listed were foundational and expressed a deep focus on rejecting Eurocentric identity concepts, fighting against oppression through their research findings, conducting research that would uplift and move the Black community forward, and strongly recognizing the need for a paradigm shift away from the inherent Eurocentric oppression present in the field of psychology.
Endnotes
[2] Belgrave, Faye. African American Psychology: From Africa to America. (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA: Sage, 2018.)
[3] Matarazzo, J. D., A. N. Wiens “ Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Scores of Black and White Police Applicants,” Journal of Applied Psychology 62 no. 1 (1997): 57-63.
[4] Cokley, Kevin, & Ramya Garba, “Speaking truth to power: How Black/African psychology changed the discipline of psychology,” Journal of Black Psychology, 44, no. 8 (2018): 695–721.
