What is Africana Psychology?

History

The origins of White Psychology are found in Greek Philosophy (Boring, 1929).  Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—their Greek predecessors and contemporaries—are credited as the first to raise fundamental epistemological questions:  What is knowledge?  And how do we come to know it?  Significant contributors to this era were Pythagoras (who gave us the Pythagorean Theorem), Empedocles and Hippocrates (for whom the Hippocratic Oath is named), Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.

The most renown Greek philosophers were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  Socrates was best known for probing questions, and using those questions as a method of teaching.  His student, Plato, wrote many Dialogues (featuring Socrates as teacher), that posed many of the challenges of understanding the Soul.  Plato’s student, Aristotle, was a champion of logic and reason.

White Psychology arose from European philosophy, and was influenced by the Scientific Revolution and its positivist tradition of systematic observation.  Names frequently associated with this epoch are Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.

The philosophical traditions that provided the foundation of White Psychology were developed during Europe’s years of exploration and conquest of Africa, the Americas, and the rest of the world.  Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species) and Sir Francis Galton (Hereditary Genius) were of monumental influence in the late 1800s.

Most psychology historians (e.g., Boring, 1929) point to the 1879 creation of a psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, by Wilhelm Wundt, as the birth of modern psychology.  William James established a psychology lab at Harvard University in the same year.

The twentieth century saw a rapid growth and diversification of White psychology, from Freud’s psychoanalytic musings to B.F. Skinner’s studies of rats and pigeons.

A turning point in White psychology was the invention of tests and measures, such as the Stanford-Binet IQ test in 1916 by Lewis Terman.  Subsequent to that development have been thousands of tests and measures to assess human motivation, attitudes, personalities and brain functioning.

White Psychology is the branch of social science developed by European and White American scholars during the era of European exploration and imperialism.  Many of its theories and methods gave license to Europe’s plunder of the rest of the world.

American psychology was born shortly after the abolition of slavery, and during widespread racial segregation.

This history gave rise to the rationale for Black Psychology:  White Psychology was unashamed in extolling the virtues of White people; mainly drawing upon ideas of Social Darwinism and Survival of the Fittest.  But the flipside of White Supremacy, was the inferiorization of the majority of the world’s population.  Black Psychology was born to counter the racism of White Psychology.

What is Africana Psychology?

History

Black Psychology emerged alongside the origin of the species, about 1 million years ago (Fairchild, 2015).  The first homo sapiens—the thinking beings—arose in the Southern African region, and were imbued with a modern brain and the power of self reflection.  The ability to think about the self, in relation to the other, was the beginning of all human intellectual pursuits.  All human intellectual activity originated in Africa—with the origin of the species—about one million years ago.

Before recorded history, human beings made “great leaps” in personal and social functioning.  These advances were in the arenas of language development, social organization, the use of tools, architecture, and the domestication of animals.  Along with these developments were the progenitors of philosophy, theology, medicine, mysticism, culture and the arts.

Whereas White Psychology traces its origins to the ancient Greeks (about 700 to 300 B.C.), Black Psychology traces its roots to the ancient Egyptians (about 2,700 to 1,600 B.C.).

Greek philosophers, however, paid appropriate tribute to their Egyptian predecessors.  George G.M. James (1954, 1985) argued that the Greeks, in fact, plagiarized many of their ideas and writings from the Egyptians.  An indelible example is the well-known phrase, attributed to Socrates, “Man, Know Thyself.”  Yet an Egyptian proverb, written more than a thousand years earlier, read, “Know yourself…and you shalt know the Gods.”

The first known Egyptian philosopher was Imhotep (about 2650-2600 BC).  The architect of the Step Pyramid in Memphis, Imhotep was the world’s first physician—a title ascribed to Hippocrates in White epistemology.  The second most influential philosopher was Ptah-Hotep, vizier to the Pharaoh in about 2500 BC.  Among his quotes were the following psychological ideas (found on Wikipedia):

• “Listening benefits the listener.”
• “If he who listens, listens fully, then he who listens becomes he who understands.”
• “Only speak when you have something worth saying.”
• “As for those who end up continually lusting after women, none of their plans will succeed.”
• “How wonderful is a son who obeys his father!”

Black Psychology traces its intellectual roots to Egypt.  Black Psychology recognizes that a naïve psychology was present among the first human beings.

As noted, Black Psychology is, in part, a reaction to White Psychology.  This reactionary posture is due to the fact that psychology, like all other disciplines in Western Academe, developed in the context of the strong racial dynamics of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and racial exploitation.  These dynamics justified for the social policies of the day:  Africans, Native Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders were viewed as innately inferior to White Europeans and Americans, so that their exploitation was actually viewed as beneficial to them.

Black Psychology also re-defines philosophical and methodological approaches to the study of human behavior by drawing upon ancient ideas of Human Beingness. Black Psychology seeks veridicality in research on Black people.

A Definition

“Black Psychology” is used interchangeably with “African American Psychology” and “Africana Psychology.”  The first of these terms suffers from color-coded race naming associated with so much pejorative baggage that the time has come for a new vernacular.  African American Psychology adorns many textbooks (e.g., Belgrave & Allison, 2010), and is frequently used.  But African American Psychology is a bit of a misnomer as our focus is on the experiences of African people throughout the world, not just in the U.S.

Wade Nobles (2006) made a cogent argument for calling the field, the Sakhu Sheti (the deep study of the soul), an idea that may be generations ahead of its time.

In preparing this volume, I settled on Africana Psychology to convey the Diasporan nature of Black (aka African American) Psychology.  A search of PsychInfo and other electronic databases yielded two prior usages of this term (Jamison, 2010; Myers & Speight, 2010).

Africana Psychology is concerned with understanding and improving the life circumstances of African people throughout the world.  Africana Psychology is nuanced when applied to African people in Africa, Europe, Australia, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, Asia and/or North America.  Africana Psychology focuses on the mental, physical, psychological and spiritual nature of humanity.  It is the collection of works that has been produced by Africana Psychologists (and allies).

Distinguishing Features

            A comparison of the history and definitions of White and Africana Psychology offers a number of important distinguishing features:

• White Psychology dehumanizes others; Africana Psychology re-humanizes.
• White Psychology focuses on the individual; African Psychology on the individual’s embeddedness in a social context.
• White Psychology is materialistic, and focuses on what can be seen, manipulated and measured; Africana Psychology recognizes both material and immaterial reality, and gives equal value to each.
• Africana Psychology seeks the illumination of the Human Spirit.
• White Psychology purports to be “value free” and “objective.” Africana Psychology is grounded in values that seeks the liberation of African people (and all people).  Anything “value free” is “value less” (Fairchild, 1995).  “Objectivity” is a myth.

Africana Psychology and Deconstruction

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, had a mammoth influence on the emerging social sciences.  Just 10 years later, Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, published the forerunner of scientific racism, Hereditary Genius.

It is no surprise that the founders of Western psychology embraced the ideological underpinnings of scientific racism.  The list of avowedly racist social scientists in the early years of European American psychology reads like a “Who’s Who” of “great men” in psychology:  Herbert Spencer, Edward Thorndike, Lewis Terman, William McDougall, G. Stanley Hall, J. Cattell, Carl Jung, Charles Spearman, and many others (Fairchild, 2000).  More contemporary proponents of these ideas are Arthur Jensen, J. Phillippe Rushton, William Shockley, Richard Lynn, Helmuth Nyborg, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein.

Jensen and Rushton have been two of the most vocal proponents of scientific racism (e.g., Rushton, & Jensen, 2010).  Today, Jensen is elderly and Rushton died a few year ago.  Their mantle has been taken up by Richard Lynn (see, for example, Lynn, 2013).  Lynn (2013) re-articulated one of the most outlandish of Rushton’s ideas—that “reproductive strategies” reflect a ranking on the phylogenetic scale. Animals that reproduce with few offspring and greater care (such as the great apes) are ranked higher in intellectual functioning than those that reproduce with reckless abandon (e.g., clams).  Extending this idea to the human family, Rushton posited that the races could also be rank ordered such that “Mongoloids > Caucasoids > Negroids” (see Fairchild, 1991 for a critique).

Lynn (2013) supported Rushton’s ideas that these reproductive strategies would be reflected in penis size: “Negroids” ought to have larger penises than other races.  That this line of research reeks with fraud is revealed with a close examination of Lynn’s (2013) methodology:  The researchers relied – in many instances – on self-report data.  Such a methodology is laughable, and reveals the non-existent criteria that allegedly prestigious journals have for their content.  This study was published in Personality and Individual Differences, an ostensibly well regarded journal published by the Elsevier group.  Elsevier publishes more than 2000 other journals.  One can only wonder how many of those journals also reek with the sort of scientific fraud revealed in Lynn (2013).

From the beginning, Africana Psychology deconstructed the theories, methods and conclusions of scientific racism based on intelligence tests and other measures (see Guthrie, 1998).  Francis Cecil Sumner, for example, the first Black American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology, illustrated the flawed conceptions of intelligence, the cultural biases in its measurement, and the problems of a lack of controlled observation in making racial comparisons (that is, middle-class Whites, who lived lives of advantage, were typically compared to lower-class Blacks, who were disadvantaged by segregation and the denial of equal educational opportunities).

Contemporary Black psychologists have challenged racism in psychology as fraudulent, with one leading exponent calling the work “non-science and nonsense” (Hilliard, 1996).

Race and IQ arguments are conceptually and methodologically flawed.  The most important conceptual problem pertains to the definition of two key hypothetical ideas—race and IQ.  Race is best viewed as a socially constructed concept with little biological significance—the overlap in genetic code between races is very close to 100% (indeed more genetic variation is evident within so-called races than between races).

The concept of IQ is also conceptually specious.  Although viewed as a “fixed capacity” to learn or acquire information, the measure of intelligence (the IQ test) necessarily adapts to the changing ages of children, youth, and adults because their acquisition of information is dynamic and ongoing.

Finally, conceptual confusion is evident in the effort to separate hereditary from environmental influences, as if they operate in isolation.  In fact, genes and environment always operate in concert, so that disentangling their unique contributions to intellectual functioning is a methodological impossibility (at least among humans).

One of the founders of modern African American psychology, Robert L. Williams, did the yeoman’s work of deconstructing racist theories of intelligence and language.  Williams developed the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity, which was grounded in African American culture.  He was able to demonstrate, not surprisingly, that Blacks outperformed Whites on this test; suggesting that racial comparisons on culturally based instruments were invalid.  Williams’s work on personality assessment deconstructed the biases inherent in older measures, and inspired him to create more culturally appropriate alternatives.  Finally, Williams coined the term Ebonics (ebony plus phonics) to refer to the linguistic patterns of African Americans, and he showed that pejorative views of “Black English” were unwarranted.

Defending Black Students.  Another proactive approach was in legal challenges to the use of intelligence tests for educational placement.  In California, this challenge was concretized in Larry P. v. Wilson Riles, a class action suit alleging that African American schoolchildren were disproportionately and inappropriately placed in special education classes based on IQ test scores (Codrington & Fairchild, 2012).

From 1977 to 1980, members of The Association of Black Psychologists, led by Harold Dent and William Pierce, provided expert testimony in the ensuing civil trial that culminated in a judgment for the plaintiffs.  From then through the end of the twentieth century, the use of IQ tests for educational placement was banned in California.  Unfortunately, schools found other ways to continue the disproportionate placement of Black children into special education programs (Codrington & Fairchild, 2012).

A growing body of research within Africana Psychology demonstrates academic underachievement of Black youth is tied to many factors: teacher attitudes and the “self-fulfilling prophecy”; an alien curriculum that extols the cultures of others at the expense of Black cultures; an inappropriate pedagogical praxis (emphasizing sitting, listening and competitive testing, rather than active learning in a more cooperative dynamic framework); and structured inequalities in educational opportunities (Black students, on average, attend under-funded and over-crowded schools staffed with less experienced teachers and administrators).

Individual-level explanations for academic underachievement among Blacks should be held in abeyance until structural inequities are rectified.  In the context of racial inequities in educational opportunity, studies comparing racial groups on scholastic achievement violate the criterion of controlled observation in social science research.

Defending Black Families.  Due to the near complete absence of African American scholars in the social sciences until the 1950s (with the exception of a handful of pioneers, mentioned previously), research on African American life and culture was performed almost entirely by “outsiders” to the African American community.  As with studies on race and IQ and scholastic achievement, research on the family life of African Americans has been fraught with conceptual, methodological and ideological flaws.  Consequently, a long line of research has pathologized African American families by pointing to their presumed matriarchal structure, father absence, under- or over-stimulation of children, and its either permissive or rigidly authoritarian child-rearing styles.

This line of research culminated in the highly influential policy paper on the Black family authored by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1965).  Popularly known as “The Moynihan Report,” this treatise concluded that the African American family was best viewed as a disorganized “tangle of pathology,” with little hope of remediation.

In reaction, African American psychologists focused on the strengths of Black families (Hill, 1972; McAdoo, 1997).  Throughout the history of family disruption during the centuries of slavery and de jure discrimination, the majority of Black families could be described as “nuclear” (two-parent) and egalitarian.  The problems that Black families face are more related to contextual variables – social class, neighborhood quality – than racial ones.

Far from being disorganized, African American families exist in a complex “kin network” that spans space and time.  These extended kin networks, operating in conjunction with Black churches, propelled upward mobility and provided a buffer against myriad stresses confronting African American people in the eras of slavery, segregation and discrimination.  Harriette McAdoo called these effects a “kin-insurance” policy (McAdoo, 1981).

Defending the Black Personality.  The pseudo-scientific attacks on Black people focused on intelligence, achievement and family functioning.  Additional attacks targeted the integrity of Black people on other, more personal grounds.  These attacks questioned the personality functioning of Black people (low self-esteem, external locus of control, low impulse control, inability to delay gratification), their psychological functioning (Blacks are over-diagnosed with schizophrenia), or their culture (Blacks have an alleged culture of poverty, a counterculture, no culture, etc.).  In each instance, Black psychologists reacted with critiques and re-analyses that demonstrated the invalidity of the pathology perspectives.

Constructive Approaches in Africana Psychology:  The Founding of The ABPsi

A responsibility of Africana Psychology is to debunk White Psychology; and much of its attention has been devoted to this cause, as described above.  Were it not for the anti-Black biases of White Psychology, Africana Psychology may have never been born.

Robert Guthrie’s Even the Rat Was White provided a history of White social sciences’ fascination with race differences (and its anti-Black biases).  This text also reviewed the early history of African American Psychology, beginning with the awarding of the Ph.D. to Francis Cecil Sumner in 1920 (Guthrie, 2004).

“Modern” Black Psychology was reborn in 1968 with the founding of The Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi, www.abpsi.org).

At the 1968 Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (APA) in San Francisco, a group of about 80 Black psychologists, led by Joseph White (Professor Emeritus, University of California, Irvine), gathered to discuss their frustrations within the nearly all-White APA.  This was just 3 years after the publication of the Moynihan Report and 2 years after the publication of the Coleman Report (the Reports disparaged Blacks, and exculpated American history).

1968 was the peak of the Black is Beautiful and Black Power movements that arose from the Civil Rights struggles of the late 1950s and early 1960s.  1968 was the year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; and it was just 3 years after the assassination of Malcolm X.

ABPsi developed into an autonomous organizational entity at this crucial juncture in American history.

Guided by the principle of self-determination, the founders of The ABPsi addressed the professional needs of its members, and began to develop new models of human behavior to benefit the broader Black community.

The founders of The ABPsi articulated eight goals:

1. To enhance the psychological well-being of Black people in America and throughout the world;
2. To promote constructive understanding of Black people through positive approaches to research;
3. To develop an approach to psychology that is consistent with the experiences of Black people;
4. To define mental health in consonance with newly established psychological concepts and standards regarding Black people;
5. To create internal support systems for Black psychologists and students of psychology;
6. To develop policies for local, state and national decision making which affect the mental health of the Black community;
7. To promote values and lifestyles that support individual and collective survival; and
8. To support established Black organizations and aid in the development of new independent Black institutions to enhance our psychological, educational, cultural and economic situations.

Racial Identity Research

The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements were both a consequence and cause of a dramatic transformation in the psyche of Black people.  Once considered “colored,” and “Negroes,” the African American population embraced more positive images and symbols (e.g., the “Natural” hair styles, African clothing) and phrases (e.g., “Brother/Sister”, Black is Beautiful!) that reflected a positive affirmation of self and group.  This period ushered in the era of naming children in African-centered traditions, and the re-adoption of pride in African heritage.

William Cross (1971), then teaching at Cornell University (currently retired in Nevada), developed a theory of Psychological Nigrescence that described the “conversion” of African Americans’ identity “from Negro to Black.”  The first stage, “Pre-Encounter,” described the person’s immersion in an alien culture with a self-deprecating attitude.  The “Encounter” stage resulted from a catalyzing event that “wakes the person up” to the reality of race and their subordinate position in the racial hierarchy.  For many African Americans, the “Encounter” was Civil Rights Movement and the assassination of its leaders in close succession.

The third stage in identity transformation is “Immersion,” wherein the person engages in deep study of African and African American heritage.  The person in this stage may adopt an African name, wear African or African American garb, and exhibit an antipathy to the White majority.  The final stage in Cross’s model is “Emersion,” during which the person becomes more accepting of all races and cultures.

This idea of identity transformation may occur developmentally.  The innocent child is in the Pre-Encounter Stage; the rebellious young adult in Immersion; and the older, more sanguine adult in Emersion.  This model may be applied to individuals or collectivities (for example, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, could be described as “Pre-Encounter”[1]; the Nation of Islam as “Immersion”).

Racial identity is important in psychotherapeutic interventions and psychotherapy.  Therapeutic approaches must be adapted for individuals at different levels of racial identity; and self-acceptance must be a goal of therapy.

Models of Health and Mental Health

Africana Psychology emphasizes the historical origins of contemporary reality.  African people have suffered more than 400 years of domination, exploitation, genocide, slavery and psychological inferiorization.  It is a story that is unprecedented in human history.  This history accounts for the pathos—and triumphs—of African people.

African value structures buffered against historical assaults.  These values include an emphasis on the community, cooperative interdependence and sharing, respect for others, and a strong religious orientation.

African personality and conceptions of physical and mental health have been re-defined from an African-centered worldview.  An individual’s functioning is defined through her or his connections within a larger collective.  This approach emphasizes Spiritness (as opposed to spirituality) as the most important aspect of human functioning.  Human existence consists of seen and unseen elements that produce health or illness.

The Africana Psychological perspective views humans as Divine Beings. Many of the problems we face come from ignorance of, or being divorced from, our sense of divinity.  Gods don’t kill other Gods.

Linda James Myers (1993) introduced the conjunction of spirit and matter in an African-centered cosmology, and was particularly concerned with the reintegration of spiritual elements into human functioning.

Much of Africana Psychology is a “back to Africa” movement in in that it embraces generations of accumulated knowledge in philosophy, traditional medicine, pharmacology and communal healing resources.  The goal of mental health treatment is the reintegration of the person into spiritual-material wholeness, in the context of an extended family and community (Myers, 1993).

The mental health challenges that confront Africana Psychology include understanding and coping with the racial stresses that result from the daily slights and indignities (micro-aggressions) that produce feelings of marginality.  The health challenges are the “excess deaths” from the panoply of preventable diseases that plague African people throughout the world.

The ultimate purpose of Africana Psychology is to improve and save lives.

Assessment

Africana Psychology has a long history of countering racist attacks on the integrity of Black people, principally in the area of tests and measures.  These assessments were developed in a cultural context that was alien, and at times hostile, to Black people.

Black Psychologists responded by developing a number of more culturally congruent assessment tools that focused on racial identity, social support, spirituality, cultural mistrust, acculturation, African worldview, parenting attitudes and behaviors, etc. (Fairchild, 2000; Jones, 1996).

Applications

Africana Psychology has many applications encompassing the health-related foci and assessment strategies described above.  Additional concerns include gender and sexuality; the intersections of identities that derive from the group memberships; and the continuing oppression of African people around the world.

• Harold Dent and colleagues developed models of “dynamic” assessment – to assess children’s learning styles – as juxtaposed to the static measures embodied in IQ tests or the SAT.
• Na’im Akbar (1991) and Gail Wyatt (1997) advanced our understanding of gender dynamics in the African American community.
• Fred Phillips (1990) developed “Ntu” (Bantu for Spirit Energy) Psychotherapy. This approach linked mind and body, object and spirit, and client and healer.  The task of therapy is to reconnect a person’s mental life to his or her physical, emotional, and spiritual beings.

The Nguzo Saba

Africana Psychology has been heavily influenced by the Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles), developed by Maulana Karenga (1999-2004).  These seven principles may be seen as aspirational guides for living.  Each principle forms the basis for one of the seven days of Kwanzaa, also created by Karenga.

1. Umoja (Unity). African people must unite within the family and broader community.  Racial unity is also considered essential.
2. Kujichagulia (Self-Determination). African people must define themselves, and to do for themselves.
3. Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility). African people must work together to build community and care for one another.
4. Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics). African people must develop of businesses and enterprises; recycling Black dollars.
5. Nia (Purpose). African people must restore African people to their former greatness.  Being goal driven.
6. Kuumba (Creativity). African people must leave the community “more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it” (Karenga, 2000).
7. Imani (Faith). African people must live in a way that pays tribute to the sacrifices of the ancestors; and to believe in the “righteousness and victory of our struggle” (Karenga, 2000).

Conclusion

Principally through the work of The Association of Black Psychologists, Africana Psychology is becoming more globally self-conscious in reaching out to African psychologists in Europe, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the African continent.

Many parallels exist in the histories and contemporary life circumstances of African people throughout the world.  The mission of Africana Psychology is to illuminate and liberate the African Spirit.  But we cannot liberate the African, without liberating the rest of humanity.

References

Akbar, N. (1991).  Visions for Black men.  Tallahassee, FL:  Mind Productions.

Codrington, J., & Fairchild, H.H. (2012).  Special education and the mis-education of African American children:  A Call to action.  Washington, DC:  The Association of Black Psychologists (http://www.abpsi.org/pdf/specialedpositionpaper021312.pdf).

Cross, W. (1971).  The Negro-to-Black conversion experience: Toward a psychology of Black liberation.  Black World, 20, 13-37.

Fairchild, H.H. (1991).  Scientific racism: The cloak of objectivity.  Journal of Social Issues, 47, 101-115.

Fairchild, H.H. (2000).  African American psychology.  Pp. 92-99 in A.E. Kazdin (Ed.), Encyclopedia of psychology.  Washington, DC:  The American Psychological Association and Oxford University Press.

Fairchild, H.H.  (2015).  A brief 1,000,000 year history of psychology.  Claremont, CA:  Pitzer College.  (A powerpoint presentation published on the internet.)

Hilliard, A.G.  (1996).  Cultural Diversity & Mental Health, 2, 1-20.

James, G.G.M. (1954, 1985).  Stolen Legacy (Reprint Edition).  San Francisco, CA: Julian Richardson Associates, Publishers.

Jamison, D.F. (2010).  The roles and functions of Africana Psychology.  Journal of Pan African Studies, 3(8), 1-4.

Karenga, M.  Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles).  http://www.us-organization.org/ nguzosaba/ NguzoSaba.html

Lynn, R. (2013).  Rushton’s r-K life history theory of race differences in penis length and circumference examined in 113 populations.  Personality and Individual Differences, 55, 261-266.

McAdoo, H.P. (1997).  Black Families (3^rd Edition).  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Moynihan, D.P.  (1965).  The Negro family: The case for national action.  Washington, DC:  Government Printing Office.

Myers, L.J. (1993).  Understanding an Afrocentric world view: Introduction to an optimal psychology (2^nd Ed.), Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.

Myers, L.J., & Speight, S.L. (2010).  Reframing mental health and psychological well-being among persons of African descent: Africana/Black psychology meeting the challenges of fractured social and cultural realities.  Journal of Pan African Studies, 3(8), 66-82.

Nobles, W.W.  (2006).  Seeking the Sakhu: Foundational writings for an African psychology.  Chicago:  Third World Press.

Nyborg, H.  (2015).  Sex differences across different racial ability levels: Theories of origin and societal consequences.  Intelligence, 52, 44-62.

Phillips, F.B. (1990).  NTU psychotherapy: An Afrocentric approach.  Journal of Black Psychology, 17(1), 55-74.

Wyatt, G. (1997).  Stolen women: Reclaiming our sexuality, taking back our lives.  NY:  Wiley.

Editor’s Discussion Questions

1. What aspects of Africana Psychology do you find most interesting? Most surprising?  Most disappointing?
2. What are the most salient/important differences between White Psychology and Africana Psychology?

How might Africana Psychology address the concerns of people in different parts of the African Diaspora?

[1] During his confirmation hearings, Clarence Thomas had an “Encounter” experience that he termed a “high tech lynching.”