Racism in Psychology

Challenging Theory, Practice and Institutions

Craig Newnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000382228
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

Racism in Psychology examines the history of racism in psychological theory, practice and institutions.

The book offers critical reviews by scholars and practising therapists from the US, Africa, Asia, Aoteoroa New Zealand, Australia and Europe on racism on the couch and in the wider socio-historical context. The authors present a mixed experience of the success of efforts to counter racism in theory, institutions and organisations and differing views on the possibility of institutional change. Chapters discuss the experience of therapists, anti-Semitism, inter-sectionality and how psychological praxis is part of a colonialist project.

The book will appeal to practising psychologists and counsellors, socially minded psychotherapists, social workers, sociologists and students of psychology, social studies and race relations.

Part I

Institutional racism

Chapter 1

Race, racism and the psy project

Craig Newnes

Summary

This chapter examines some of the racist and colonialising history of psychology. It highlights the ways in which psy practitioners are professionaliaed into narrow forms of theory and praxis that can neglect culture, religion and diversity. The outcome is an impoverishment of experience for practitioners and a lack of relevance for service recipients.

Cross-cultural studies of so-called depression by researchers in the industrialised regions presuppose a dichotomy of mind and body and related theory of emotion. Emotions are, however, not constituted the same way in different cultures; the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, for example, regarded ideas and emotions as cultural artefacts (Geertz, 1973).

Anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists argue that affects are inseparable from cultural systems of meaning. It has been suggested that culturally informed models of what might be described as depression should investigate indigenous or ethno-psychological models of dysphoric affects. Themes include factors such as indigenous categories of emotion, the predominance of particular emotions within societies and ethno-physiological accounts of bodily experience of emotions (Jenkins et al., 1991). Conceptions of emotion are embedded within notions of self, characterised as varying along a continuum between egocentric and socio-centric. Individuals with a more socio-centric sense of self are considered to be more relationally identified with others than those with a more egocentric sense of self, who try to function as individuals. The former have often been associated with non-Western/indigenous cultural traditions, the latter with traditions attuned to post-industrial materialism.

An understanding of emotions as intrapsychic events, feelings or introspections of the individual (rather than the individual, community or ancestors) is predominantly a Western conceptualisation. The Ifaluk of Micronesia don’t conceptualise thoughts and emotions solely within the individual. Rather, these can be found in relationships between persons or within events and situations. The Pintupi peoples of Australia have a kin-based conception of self in contrast to people following more westernised traditions where self is seen as constituted by individuality. For example, in White, middle-class, affluent, communities it tends to be individual children who are marked as depressed rather than families or communities, although there is an increasing acknowledgement amongst psychology practitioners that poor housing, persistent assaults on one’s character and sense of self due to a system of institutional racism, decrepit infrastructure and poverty create environments where the experience of oppression is frequently identified as depression, albeit depression identified as individual distress.

Whether attempting to heal individuals or communities some 80% of the world’s population includes herbs, dance, incantation and prayers to ancestors or gods and different forms of spirituality. Since 3000 BCE Ayurvedic medicine has emphasised the importance of three doshas: Vata, Pitta and Kapha (tripartite systems are also integral to Western notions underlying, for example, psycho-analysis and cognitive behaviour therapy; see Chapter 8, this volume). In Ayurveda, disease and illness originate from an imbalance in the three energies and a disconnection from nature (again, the notion of imbalance can be found in Western traditions from humoral theory to the metaphor of ‘brain biochemical imbalance’). Amongst other ills Ayurveda is used for: Alzheimer’s disease, fear and being overwhelmed, asthma, cancer, dementia and high blood pressure.

African psychology uses the best of African culture, thinking, practices and rituals in constant exchange with the world for betterment (Karenga, 2010). The philosophies of the Nile Valley and ancient Egypt feature prominently (Browder, 1992; Nobles, 2006) in addition to an abundance of diverse African cultural principles with contemporary derivatives (Parham, 2002). These raise spiritual, emotional and physical resonances for dispersed intergenerationally oppressed people, potentially enabling self-understanding, endurance, betterment, progression and transformation (Akbar, 2017; Akbar, 1998; Nobles, 2006; Parham, 2002). Becoming inspired by traditional African culture during therapy conversations can include reflecting on proverbs or sayings familiar to particular families or communities, which represent strategies for dealing with life situations and traditional wisdom. This can include the use of Ananse stories (Ananse is a folktale character taking the form of a spider with the spirit of wisdom and all knowledge of stories) and traditional West African wisdom concepts such as Adinkra symbols as tools for wellness (Adom et al., 2016) (see Chapter 3, this volume).

The 7,000-year-old history of Judaism involves prayer and the role of rabbi/rebbe who counsels after the gabai (rebbe’s assistant) has met with people and then: ‘After interviewing the supplicant about his family, his background and his troubles, the gabai delivers the kvitl [written description of the presenting problem] and an oral report to the rebbe’ (Zborowski & Herzog, 1995, 172). This might be seen as analogous to a psychiatric intake session or psychological assessment carried out in the first session (see Chapter 8, this volume).

These early paragraphs cannot do justice to the wealth of understanding and healing represented within cultures different from the overwhelmingly white hegemony to be found in theories and practice underlying much of modernist psy in Northern industrial global regions. The consequences for people not fitting the arbitrary norms of a psychology dominated by individualism and capitalism have been considerable.

Psychology and racism

Between 1900 and 1939 British eugenicists included the psychologists Burt, Spearman and Pearson (holder of the inaugural Galton chair in eugenics at University College, London). Writing on Beyondism, the eugenics movement he founded, the US psychologist Cattell (progenitor of Cattell’s 16 PF Personality Inventory) claimed:

The vast majority of humans on the planet are ‘obsolete’ and … the earth will be choked with the more primitive forerunners unless a way is found to eliminate them … Clarity of discussion … would be greatly aided if genocide were reserved for a literal killing off of all living members of a people … and genthanasia for what has been above called ‘phasing out,’ in which a moribund culture is ended, by educational and birth control measures.

(Cattell, quoted in Mahler 1997)

Cattell was writing just over 60 years ago, some 27 years after the Holocaust. Intellectuals such as the socialist Webbs, Havelock Ellis and George Bernard Shaw as well as the black shirts of Oswald Moseley were all eugenicist.

Notions of unbounded ‘spectrum disorders’ and ‘family histories’ of madness can be positioned alongside the eugenic thrust of the first half of the last century. ‘Risk’ of inheritance of certain so-called disorders is now a standard assumption in psychiatry and underlies UK protocols for tests and scans of potentially Down’s Syndrome foetuses carried out in ante-natal clinics. In combination with the idea of a disorder spectrum and the desirability of ‘health’ (for the purposes here defined as a comfortable life and the absence of debilitating illness) screening foetuses is equivalent to screening children and, where deemed necessary, inscribing then prescribing to those children (Newnes, 2016).

Although Terman developed the Terman-Merrill Index (an early measure of IQ) as a means of offering specific schooling to ‘less educable’ children, he was less sanguine in his approach to race: ‘Dullness seems to be racial – psychologists and their IQ tests are the beacon light of the eugenics movement.’ (Terman, 1930).

Tasked with selecting suitable military entrants, the psychologist Brigham had this to say, ‘Our data indicate clearly the intellectual superiority of the Nordic race group’ (Brigham, 1923). Fears of ‘degeneration’ of the gene pool led, in the US, to forced sterilisation of thousands of – frequently poorly educated – African Americans who scored poorly on the Binet-Simon tests of intelligence. As recently as the 1970s, black people were argued to be intellectually inferior to white people by scientists in the USA such as William Shockley (Shockley 1971).¹

Colonizing psychology

In 1858, Forbes Winslow, editor of the Journal of Psychological Medicine, protested that asylums and their inmates could be ‘brought into the market and offered for sale, like a flock of sheep, to the highest bidder’ (Winslow, quoted in Parry-Jones, 1972, 88). Changes in asylum management in Britain in the nineteenth century (a ‘takeover’ of public and private institutions by qualified medical personnel) were matched in India. The subcontinent had seen a form of institutional psychiatry based on the profit motive. Run by the East India Company, asylums catered for European woman, soldiers and sailors, as well as the Indian and Eurasian insane. The latter were kept in conditions described as ‘abominable’. The officials insisted on separation by race, class and gender, leading to considerably better living conditions for Europeans. By the turn of the century, an assistant surgeon, Valentine Connolly, ran a private madhouse in Madras while W. Dick owned Bengal’s private asylum (for Europeans). By the 1840s the Madras asylum was structurally unsound and Connolly made a fortune from its sale (and, de facto, the sale of its inmates). In the Calcutta asylum the quality of provision was entirely based on social standing and racial background. For over 50 years the purchase and sale of asylums (and their inmates) in India made handsome profits for those in similar positions to Connolly.

Despite the conditions within the company’s asylums, ‘cure rates’ bear comparison with those claimed in England at the time. The lowest rate claimed, for example, for Calcutta in the 1840s was 12%, while English and Welsh military and naval asylums were claiming 11%. Mortality was a different matter: by 1850 the mortality for the Bengal asylum had reached 18% whereas in England the rate was half that (Ernst, 1991). Conspicuous by its absence was any acknowledgement or use of Indian healing practices predating by millennia the European method. Europeans were the elite so, by definition, indigenous medicine was inferior.

Founded in 1916, the first Indian psychology department opened in Calcutta University and the Indian Psychological Association was formed in 1925. Indian academic psychology was influenced by early British Psychological Society praxis and structure. According to Clay (2002), ‘Convinced of the universal applicability of Western psychology, many Indian psychologists tried to keep the discipline free of any Indian traditions.’

‘India Education’, a website promoting careers in the humanities positions psychology in an exclusively westernised way, with no acknowledgement of the diversity of spiritual and cultural customs within a population exceeding a billion people. The following paragraph would be familiar to any UK clinical psychologists training in the 1960s:

Psychology is the study of human behavior and mental processes. Psychologists study a person’s reactions, emotions, and behavior, and apply their understanding of that behavior to treat the associated behavioral problems. Treatment is focused on therapy and counselling … Psychologists are therefore responsible for identifying psychological, emotional, and/or behavioral issues, as well as diagnosing any specific disorders, by using information gleaned from patient interviews, patient’s tests and records, and medical reference materials. Clinical psychologists … may act as therapists for people who are experiencing normal psychological cris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Part I Institutional racism
• Part II Race, theory and practice
• Name index
• Subject index