The idea for this book emerged in a singular moment. During the third year of my doctoral program in psychology, I worked as an intern for an African American agency in the inner city of Portland, Oregon, where I primarily conducted psychological evaluations. In my mind’s eye, I can still see Ron, my supervisor, sitting behind his desk, legs crossed, with the top of his head peeking out above the 25-page psychological report I had just written. It had taken me weeks to write the report; I had combed over every piece of data and synthesized every important detail of this young man’s life, drawing on information from a comprehensive psychological assessment battery. In my review of the results, I was careful to consider the test scores from a “cultural perspective,” especially regarding the normative data for African American performance on psychometric measures.
Ron was tough and never minced words; he demanded that I continually find ways to account for my social and political position as a White clinician. I assumed from his silence that, once again, I had failed to meet that standard. He wanted a clear recognition that I worked within what Spivak (1988) calls the “European hallucination.” He wanted me to acknowledge that my standpoint “not only discloses the world to participants, it also conceals it, and for the ruling class and those in positions of power their partial view of the world corresponds to their own interests and obscures the operations of the very power they benefit from” (Harding, 2003, as cited in Parker, 2015, p. 724). What Ron asked of his interns went far beyond the notion of “cultural competence”; he demanded a more Foucauldian (1970) stance. He wanted evidence, in the written language of the report, of how truth, knowledge, and power were brokered during the assessment process. As I sat across from him, I could feel his unspoken commentary brewing, and I prepared myself to become unseated from the comfort of professional authority.
In Ron’s office were rows of beautiful African masks carved out of metal and wood. Some of the faces were fierce, some serene, and others appeared to stare right through one’s body to the core of one’s being. Over the course of the two years I worked with Ron, we had many discussions about where the masks were from and the archetypes they evoked. Ron often took my interest in the masks as an opportunity to teach me about how the masks spoke their own language and what they might mean in the context of their creation. During one of our conversations, I suggested that the masks stood in opposition to the linguistic violence and oppression of the colonial order imposed on Africa in the late 1800s and throughout the 1900s. He rapidly shot back in an angry tone, “No. This is the mistake you keep making. You compare Africa to the West as if Africa only had something to say in its resistance or in relationship to the West. Your interpretation only justifies you and your perspective.” As Achille Mbembe (2001), who has articulated a similar point, writes in his book On the Postcolony,
Implicit in this quote are the traumatic repercussions and complications of the entangled relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, a relationship whose complex dynamics ultimately go beyond their original binary positions. Through continued discussions with Ron, I began to view the entire enterprise of psychological assessment as grounded in some of the same assumptions I had made about the African artwork on his office walls.It [Africa’s inaccessibility] flows from there being hardly ever any discourse about Africa for itself. In the very principle of its constitution, in its language, and its finalities, narrative about Africa is always pretext for a comment about something else, some other place, some other people. More precisely, Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity. Thus, there is no need to look for the status of this discourse; essentially, it has to do at best with self-deception, and at worst with perversion. (p. 3)
I discovered that the mainstream discourse within psychology, and within psychological testing in particular, was a self-referential system that assumed nothing could truly exist beyond its prescribed boundaries—that local sociopolitical knowledge as it related to the construction of selfhood was seen only in comparison to dominant psychological systems. The encounter with difference or the Other was immediately reduced and adopted into the metanarratives and master frameworks set forth by acceptable models of diagnosis, treatment, and experimentation already established in the literature by Eurocentric researchers and institutions. To paraphrase Mbembe (2001): What did the discourse of the inner city have to say for itself? What kinds of knowledge had been produced creatively and in a life-affirming manner right from the city sidewalks and the people who lived there? Was psychological testing a new form of colonial discourse that extended established forms of structural violence, racism, and oppression? And if these questions were to become the clinical starting point, would we not produce more accurate assessments and therapeutic interventions to begin with?
Ron finished reviewing the report and tossed it onto his desk as I held my breath and waited for him to speak. He stared off into the distance in a silent pause and then said one word: “Identity.” He continued, “You have everything in this report, including the kitchen sink and all kinds of stuff you don’t need, to explain this young man’s life. But what you don’t have is any mention of how he thinks about who he is in the world and the development of his identity as a young African American man.” Summing up, he added, “This young man’s life is filled with social agency and movement but you write his life as though he is one-dimensional; a postcard would have more to say.”
From that point forward, I realized that in order to heal or even conceptualize psychological wounds, their political counterparts would also need to be taken into account. In the format of the psychological report, I wondered how I could explore psychological, social, and political themes as they related to an individual within their own developmental trajectory. How could the test data give one a greater understanding of the ways in which social, political, and cultural systems interface with the psychological trauma of oppression and how, in turn, this impacts notions of human identity, cultural memory, suffering, and freedom? These are tricky questions because one may conclude that their answers imply that a more reflective and sensitive kind of psychology is required or that there needs to be more connection to political realms and more community engagement. However, what I argue in the following chapters is not that we need a different methodology but that we need to become more aware of how psychology enters what is already political (Parker, 2015, p. 721). If taken seriously, this concept leads to a reorganization of what is thought of as the domain of “psychology,” and the recognition that psychology may not be the answer at all (Parker, 2015, p. 720). In many ways, I am advocating for a psychology of the postcolonial as set forth by Derek Hook (2005, 2012), where the conditions that produce racism and oppression are taken into account and where psychology “should thus be concerned both with analysis of oppressive uses of psychology and with enabling potentially transformative psychological forms that disrupt the balances of power and have social equality as their goal” (Hook, 2012, p. 16). As the field engages cultural matters more explicitly, particularly in diverse settings, what is required is a critical approach that accounts for the relationship between culture and power.
Scholars and researchers are typically well aware that the history of the United States is that of a racialized state and that the discourse of race is intricately interwoven with the experience and memory of dispossession, displacement, and impoverishment (Bhatia & Ram, 2001; Bhatia, 2002). Clinicians may also be aware of the power differential within a therapeutic relationship and the biases that may emerge from this uneven distribution (Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2002). However, when it comes to redressing oppressive histories in the context of case conceptualizations, psychological evaluations, or diagnosis and treatment, there is an enormous gap in both research and practice (Parham, 2002).
In particular, psychological assessment in the form of a community-based practice has been almost completely neglected in the literature (Mercer, Fong, & Rosenblatt, 2016). First, although there has been a great deal of literature produced on the perils of cross-cultural psychiatry (Kleinman, 1977) and psychotherapy (Cushman, 1995, 2013; Hook, 2004; Layton, 2006; Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2010), very little of the research has focused on the actual practice of psychological testing from a community-based perspective. In addition to the lack of sociopolitical perspective in this area, there is also an extreme shortage of theory that examines the practice of assessment beyond Freudian, Lacanian psychodynamic, and cognitive-behavioral models. In order to address these issues, this volume explores deeper questions of human existence, such as the construction of realities by those in power (Fanon, 1967, 1986) as well as discovered truths and the idea of community work as a form of relational ethics.
Thus, the overarching purpose of this book is to engage the practice of community-based psychology through case analyses, vignettes, and ethnographic descriptions. I draw upon cross-fertilized theoretical ideas and disciplines to demonstrate that clinical practice, in particular psychological assessment, requires the clinician to express more affirmative psychopolitical agency in the face of racial injustice within the urban environment. One of the major goals of this project is to engage the often-neglected postcolonial theory—domains of difference and displacement (Bhabha, 1994) and the voices of the subaltern (Chakrabarty, 2000; Spivak, 1988)—in conversation with psychological testing practices.
Each chapter offers nuanced, rich, and textured descriptions of an on-the-ground community practice that largely took place in the inner cities of the United States within communities where African American people are the majority. Through the cultural phenomenologies and critical theoretical explorations, I aim to highlight how “subject and object, self and other, psyche and culture, person and context, figure and ground, practitioner and practice, live together, require...