Abstract
It remains to be seen whether the American Psychological Association’s new apology and resolutions on racism will help redress longstanding inequities in the field. To be sure, critiques of psychological science vis-à-vis racism have been around for decades, despite being ignored by psychological science, even when spoken by Dr. King—in his profound meditation on science, psychology, and racism in a speech delivered to the APA—or by psychiatrist Frantz Fanon—who has had a foundational influence on the broader history of anti-racism scholarship but remains relatively disregarded in his own psy-fields. This article addresses the viewpoints of these and other people of color on psychological science, which have yet to be adequately incorporated into the perspectives of psychological science. We also address traditions of communities of color that have become absorbed or consumed by psychological science but often after their cultural and historical origins are erased, like Buddhism. We locate these racial and scientific dynamics, and associated patterns of neglect and erasure, within a longstanding aversion in and by psychological science—here understood as a collective actor unto itself—to perspectives of people of color. Consequently, the promise not only of diversity, but of desegregation, has yet to be fulfilled within psychology. We conclude by discussing the psychosocial power of social movements—including South Africa’s apartheid-related Truth and Reconciliation process as personally experienced by our second author—to suggest elements of pathways forward.
The American Psychological Association recently issued wide-ranging resolutions addressing psychology’s contributions to systemic racism and racial hierarchy (American Psychological Association, 2021a; 2021b; 2021c). The resolutions examine psychology’s explicit and implicit support of racial injustice in every domain of its activity, from education and health to policy and practice. One of the more striking sections, and arguably one of the more uncertain in terms of whether it will lead to any observable change is with respect to science.
Perspectives on Psychology and Systemic Racism
The resolutions (American Psychological Association, 2021a; 2021b; 2021c) make clear that psychological science has supported racial hierarchy, such as through devaluing research on communities of color, devaluing methods and epistemologies less rooted in positivism and white normativity, and by systematizing resultant patterns of privilege and disadvantage through journal, departmental, funding, publication, and organizational standards and policies. Taken as a whole, this dogmatic and decidedly non-scientific perspective on what science allegedly was, they contend, has helped lead to the neglect of structural oppression and to systemic inequity for scholars of color. As the primary resolution states:
These critiques and sober assessments, we hope, represent a critical step in helping to address these pervasive inequities. However, as even the contributors and authors undoubtedly know, these diagnoses of the field are not new. In the West alone, many of them have been around for 50 years and in some cases longer (c.f., Association of Black Psychologists, 2021). The intractability and endurance of systemic inequities persist in the face of systemic critiques, even when those critiques have come from none other than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Perspectives of Psychological Science
Implicit in the APA resolutions is a clear indication that psychology has possessed a predominant and dominant perspective that has excluded others. In qualitative terms, this is the condition for the possibility of resolutions like these in which a supra-individual actor or entity—for example, APA or “American psychology”—is attempting to take ownership for its collective harms. We have frequently seen this since the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, whereby institutions across the world issue statements about their role in perpetuating racial inequity and neglecting racial equity. Embedded in the very language of these statements is evidence that such institutions are more than just a group of individuals but have been capable of serving as higher-order actors with the power to exclude. In the APA resolutions, for instance, “psychological science” or “psychology” are used as a subject or as subject-like in a sentence. “The structure of this apology focuses on acknowledging the roles of psychology and APA in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, and the harms that have been inflicted on communities of color as a result.” (American Psychological Association, 2021b, emphasis added). Far from being a mere inanimate discipline, psychology, as language reveals, appears here as a subject or actor that is capable of being attached to verbs, that is, to actions (Carr, 2019). The resolutions may be about perspectives on psychology or psychological science, but they are also about the perspectives of psychological science—a higher-order actor that is capable of exclusion, harm, and even speaking through statements.
Our research suggests that collective, supra-individual entities are indeed capable of exhibiting perspectives, perceptions, and processes, much like individual organisms (Desai, 2021; Desai et al., 2021). Long ago, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenological psychological science, observed that collectives and communities exhibit intersubjective processes, which, in turn, are capable of collectively determining operative reality, including what is considered normal, valued, good, or even objective (Carr, 2019; Husserl and Carr, 1954/1970; McIntyre, 2012). We—and the APA—extend this to what is considered science. We would not be alone within the scientific community in doing this. As Thomas Kuhn (1970), one of the most influential philosophers of science in the last 100 years, precisely observed, science cannot be divorced from the group dynamics of the scientific community. Scientific change occurs not through a linear, zombie-like accumulation of facts but is dependent on messy, human, intersubjective processes. Why do disciplines study some things over others? Why have some ideas been around for a while but it takes a threat to the existing paradigm for these ideas to see the light of day? Kuhn also observed collective perceptual processes being at the core of how science moves forward, that is, via radical and revolutionary paradigmatic shifts in which the scientific community experiences a collective perceptual gestalt switch if or as it embraces a novel paradigm. This problem of, and scientific dependence on, the collective commons does not invalidate the pursuit of valid scientific knowledge, but it deals a striking blow to the fantasy that the mere accumulation of facts, independent of scientific perspectives and positionalities, is what science is or has been solely about. If the latter did not matter, then psychological science would not have struggled as much to investigate, address, and confront systemic racism. Why? Because systemic racism is real and true (Williams et al., 2019), and science, in its essence, often conceives of its mission as understanding what is real and true from what is not. But Psychology may counter: we simply did not know about it, or we simply had not extended analytic attention to these issues. But does this rejoinder not depend on who is being included in the “We” of Psychology?
In this article, we will argue: 1) that key perspectives on psychological science have been neglected, excluded, and—as illustrated by the case of Buddhism—erased of their cultural or historical origins; 2) that these collective dynamics of neglect and erasure suggest that psychological science has functioned as a higher-order actor capable of systematic exclusion and segregation; and 3) that desegregation still remains unfulfilled and therefore a serious imperative.
Perspectives (of People of Color) on Psychological Science
The history of psychology of course includes many who have addressed racism in its varied forms, but its structural and systemic contours have been generally more elusive to the psychological eye, which has tended to be focused on the individual level (American Psychological Association, 2021a; 2021b; 2021c). Two noted activist-intellectuals of color, however, offered much to psychology in this respect in the mid-20th century, but were not listened to or engaged: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frantz Fanon. We explore some of their (neglected) contributions to suggest that, though much of psychological science may have chosen to ignore and segregate these and related perspectives, they could not undermine the validity of their claims, themes which remain pertinent today and central to the APA resolutions themselves, a half-a-century later.
King’s Speech
In a surprisingly rarely remembered moment in psychology’s history, Dr. King spoke, as only he could speak, to psychology, to psychologists, to behavioral scientists of the American Psychological Association (King, 1968). This prescient speech was delivered in the 1960’s and contains one of the most concise and incisive statements on the relation between structural oppression, psychology, and mental health in the discipline’s history, while also detailing the specific role of the behavioral scientist in this struggle. Its message remains vital and “continues to hold meaning 50 years after its original publication” (Comas-Díaz et al., 2019, p. 4). King not only directly addressed psychologists and psychology but, in fact, presented a blueprint for the radical revisioning of psychological science and practice to address oppression.
Why this is not widely considered a canonical document in the field or required reading in psychology textbooks remains unclear. At the time of this writing, Google Scholar places the various article versions as being cited only around 200 times, which pales in comparison to the tens or hundreds of thousands of citations afforded to other articles deemed as foundational. We would place King in the unfortunate list of “people of color who have been left out of traditional accounts of the history of psychology” (as compiled by the APA Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention, and Training in Psychology Task Force Textbook Initiative Work Group, 2004, p. 4). Not only has this historical moment been neglected by psychological science relative to its importance, but what has also been ignored is King's foundational critique of psychology and psychological reductionism, his deep meditation on the nature of systemic oppression, and his bold philosophy of psychological science and practice, placing King as an enduring philosopher of psychological science. We would surmise that few if any introductory psychology textbooks would ever describe King's speech in this way, because he is offering a view of psychology that is markedly different than what has counted as psychological research in introductory textbooks (APA Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention, and Training in Psychology Task Force Textbook Initiative Work Group, 2004). Our aim here is to detail two aspects of King’s speech pertinent to this discussion; one, his profound meditation on science and its responsibility in disclosing truth, and the other his incisive critique of psychologism in mental health.
First, King described science’s important role in helping to draw attention to the deeply “systemic” (King, 1968, p. 184) nature of racism in this country; he was seeking companions among scientists in the march for justice, for, up until then, it was the Black community and social movements that had been doing the arduous work of revealing the truth and scope of racism to the masses. “The social scientist played little or no role in disclosing truth,” he stated. The Black action movement, “with raw courage did it virtually alone,” leading to profound structural change (King, 1968, p. 180). This is a critical point because King is stating: 1) that social science does not hold a monopoly on social or psychological truth disclosure; 2) that other collective actors—social movements—had done so with great clarity and effect; and 3) that social and psychological science could better fulfill its own role of disclosing truth by setting its attention on racism. The latter, to a great degree, did not occur, and APA’s neglect of the civil rights movement was so stark, that it led to many Black psychologists leaving to form the Association of Black Psychologists, ABPsi (Bowleg et al., 2021; Williams, 1974). Further, it is worth reminding ourselves that Dr. King’s assassination was the very spur for the formation of the ABPsi, and that the petition of concerns it submitted to the APA clearly stated that the latter did not seem interested in the experiences and needs of Black people, in improving their life circumstances, or in researching and eradicating racism with the energy it needed; exploited Black people; failed to examine the biases of its own research and measuring instruments; and did nothing to enlist and recruit Black psychologists to the field (Williams, 1974). In the years since, this critique—of both field and institution—has been supplemented and enhanced with epistemological and methodological analyses, and the exploration of various alternative theoretical and applied paradigms beyond the ones typically held up as the only psychology.
The main of the field of psychology did not follow the path of active desegregation and racial justice (Bowleg et al., 2021). They also did not follow the path of heeding the warning of King and others that promoting psychological interventions focusing on individual “adjustment” came with great risks when the society around the individual is “poisoned to its soul” (p. 180) with racism and other systemic ills. The notion of adjustment cannot be divorced from the social structure to which one is being encouraged, implicitly, by clinicians to adjust. For, as King (1968) declared:
I am sure that we all recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. (p. 185).
King’s statements find resonance, over 50 years later, in several focal points of the recent APA resolutions. In addition to its sweeping critiques of psychological science, the APA (2021c) resolutions state that a way in which psychology has promoted inequity is through excessive focus on individualizing and a neglect of socio-institutional processes. The APA is now apologizing for an adjustment of their own, that is, the adjustment to, and promotion of, racial hierarchy and injustice (American Psychological Association, 2021b). There are indeed great risks in adjustment.
Fanon’s Writings
Some of the earliest and most foundational influences on the conceptual understanding of systemic racism in this country can be traced to the pioneering work of activist-intellectuals Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and colleagues (Ture & Hamilton, 1967). Ture and Hamilton are often credited with the very phrase “institutional racism,” which has had an impact or influence on contemporary accounts of systemic and structural racism (e.g., Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Feagin & Bennefield, 2014; Henricks, 2016; Metzl & Hansen, 2014; Ray, 2019).
Ture drew on the work of several intellectuals of his day, including the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who will be discussed shortly, and the psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose own work, and pioneering collaborations with Mamie Phipps Clark that helped end school segregation, have been insufficiently highlighted in psychology, as evidenced, for instance, by a recent APA Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention, and Training in Psychology Task Force Textbook Initiative Work Group (2004) on Introductory Psychology textbooks. Frantz Fanon is increasingly considered the founding figure of a genuinely anti-racist and decolonial psychology (Adams et al., 2015; Bulhan, 1985; Burman, 2017; Gaztambide, 2021; Hook, 2005; Laubscher et al., 2022; Maldonado-Torres, 2017; Turner & Neville, 2020; Utsey et al., 2001; Watkins, 2015), and of the entire field of global health, the latter designation being offered by the editor of the influential medical journal, The Lancet (Horton, 2018). And yet Fanon’s most lasting influence up to this point may be on social movements, community groups, and intellectual domains outside of psychology and psychiatry, from political science and philosophy to literary theory and African American studies. But Fanon was a psychiatrist, deeply engaged psychology, and retained a psychiatric or psychological eye even as he became more involved in political activities (Gibson & Beneduce, 2017). Bulhan (1985), in one of the most influential examinations of Fanon’s psychology, characterizes disciplinary psychology’s neglect of Fanon’s insights as “curious indeed,” given that his writings “either had psychology as their major point of departure, or they incorporated psychological dimensions to complement, illustrate, and concretize the macro-social experiences he sought to unveil and transform” (p. 6).
Fanon’s early major work, Black Skin White Masks, is nothing short of a foundational treatise on structural racism and psychology (Bernasconi, 2019; Fanon & Philcox, 2008; Fanon et al., 1964/1967, 1952/1967). Fanon engages key psychological paradigms of that era to systematically show how each fails to account for the lived experience and lived world of the Black person, due in part to an excessive individualizing impulse within these fields and a near total avoidance and neglect of racism and colonialism. Such denial of anti-Blackness and racial hierarchy is also shown to be a feature of various Western philosophies, whose claims towards neutrality blur the fundamental embeddedness of racialization within the world.
Fanon’s work serves as a blueprint for how, in investigations of racism and colonialism, the psychological register can still be utilized but must necessarily be related back to the world around it, especially if it can avoid the pitfalls of psychologism and denial of racism (Bernasconi, 2019; Desai, 2014; Hook, 2005). Through uncanny intellectual breadth and precision, engaging worlds of—and evidence from—science, philosophy, literature, and beyond, Fanon showed how purely psychological explanations—without meaningful and direct connection to socio-economic structures—will inevitably miss structural racism and also be at risk of failing to see how the social structure is often the source of much suffering in the first place. A related point was put forth around the same time in Fanon's (1967) prescient work on the “North African Syndrome,” which detailed how patients of color who faced considerable socioeconomic deprivation were pathologized for their reactions to this deprivation, by healthcare providers, collectively. These works were written in the 1950’s.
Shades of these points—as well as other of Fanon’s works that deal with an almost unimaginable array of topics that the field is still grappling with—are directly imbricated in the APA (2021a, 2021b, 2021c) resolutions, including the importance of highlighting the lived experiences of people of color, challenging disciplinary and institutional standards based implicitly on White and Western perspectives, confronting systemic oppression, promoting community engagement in health and mental healthcare, including via what might now be considered an early form of people-centered healthcare. Fanon’s social psychiatry program, also developed during this time, not only emphasized that the clinical institution must itself be healthy, egalitarian, and self-critical of its cultural presuppositions to promote optimal individual healing but also that the healer must radically take into account the total social, cultural, and political context of the person’s suffering and recovery, deeply preceding contemporary developments along these lines (Gibson, 2022).
Had psychology and psychological science systematically incorporated the insights and truths shared by King, Fanon, and others—and embraced them in the We—perhaps the time since then would have looked differently. They predominantly chose a different direction, and we now see the apologies and, sadly, the long march of continued pain, exclusion, and oppression in the field.
Perspectives (of People of Color) on Psychology
The scope of the problem does not end there. The above two sections describe instances of activist-intellectuals who directly approached and confronted psychology’s doorstep, or rather, its walls. These were accounts of those who had keenly observed the truth and workings of systemic racism, in rigorous, analytical, and radically empirical ways (when empirical is understood in the broader, less exclusionary sense of direct experience, observation, and experimentation; Online Etymology Dictionary, 2021). They had tried to transform psychological science and practice as early as the mid-20th century but were ignored by the field and mostly not considered as science, practice, or even psychology. Thus, King and Fanon are two notable instances of those who have been excluded from being considered a perspective of psychology, by psychology.
To add to this, there are also those whose transformational work, thought, or practices become included but historically, culturally, and existentially erased during the inclusion. One tradition may represent this latter category as much as any other: Buddhism. Buddhist teachings and institutionalized practices have led to healing and transformation for millions of people for millennia. Buddha’s methods were radically empirical and founded on direct experience, observation, and experimentation. Buddhist approaches have led to the reduction of deep psychological suffering and, even further, to the reduction of deep social, political, and economic suffering by inspiring liberation movements around the world. Buddha is invoked in Gandhi’s ashram in India; the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher, and scholar Thich Nhat Hanh’s tireless teachings and actions inspired Dr. King to nominate him for the Nobel Prize only three years after he won it himself (King, 1967); everyday people nourished by Buddhist practice and community attempt to bring clarity and compassionate action to their own corners of the world.
Buddhist teachings have entered psychology and psychological science most prominently through the broad focus on mindfulness. Yet, people may never come to know this, for any semblance of awareness of this background in Asian or Buddhist tradition has been or is slowly being removed, excised, eliminated. The de-Asianification process is so thoroughly underway that one can read book after book on the topic without ever seeing an Asian person or tradition being mentioned or credited. De-Asianification continues the collective acts, described above, of exclusion and neglect, as well as of erasure. To be embraced by the higher-order organism psychology or psychological science has come with a cost, and that cost is eviction.
Many practitioners of mindfulness undoubtedly have great respect for the Buddhist tradition, and it is something to celebrate when sentient beings are able to benefit from these universally accessible practices. Yet the point is that there is a larger system that promotes exclusion, neglect, and erasure for minoritized groups, as they did above in the case of King and Fanon, while simultaneously privileging majoritized groups. The origin story of mindfulness-based stress reduction or MBSR (Kabat-Zinn, 2011) may shed further light on these systemic dynamics by revealing how the predominant groups of American society, science, and healthcare essentially demanded de-Asianification.
Kabat-Zinn's (2011) original intention was to introduce the predominantly Asian practices with which he had extensive experience and knowledge into the American healthcare system, knowing the scores who may benefit if they moved beyond their aversions and blinders. However, in order to do this, Kabat-Zinn stated that he had to remove almost every Buddhist or Asian mention within these practices, offering “Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism” (p. 294), knowing that “mainstream America,” including any prejudices therein, would not be open to it. “Recontextualizat[ion]” (p. 288) was needed.
My intention and hope was that [my] book might embody to whatever degree possible the dharma essence of the Buddha’s teachings put into action and made accessible to mainstream Americans facing stress, pain, and illness. This is plainly stated in the Introduction, where I did not shy away from explicitly stating its Buddhist origins. However, from the beginning of MBSR, I bent over backward to structure it and find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, “New Age,” “Eastern Mysticism,” or just plain “flakey.” To my mind, this was a constant and serious risk that would have undermined our attempts to present it as commonsensical, evidence-based, and ordinary, and ultimately a legitimate element of mainstream medical care. This was something of an ongoing challenge, given that the entire curriculum is based on relatively (for novices) intensive training and practice of meditation and yoga, and meditation and yoga pretty much defined one element of the “New Age.” (p. 282)
Scores have since benefited from these practices, wonderfully so. Yet, in order for this to occur, accessibility for “mainstream” America and healthcare meant removal of anything that sounded “foreign” (Kabat-Zinn, 2011, p, 287). The irony is that the original foreigner here, Buddha, Siddharta Gautama, if he were walking in America today, would not be allowed to enter the doors of the tradition he started, or if allowed to enter, would be sent back out or forced to change his dress and appearance. What does this, then, also mean about who or what is genuinely allowed to be a part of collective entities like healthcare, psychology, and psychological science, and who ultimately benefits from their patterns of inclusion and exclusion? Of course, the Asian diasporic community regularly experiences the pain and alienation of the latter, in the midst of repeated de-Asianification, discrimination, and invisibility in Western society—as the recent social movements against anti-Asian racism again brought to the fore (May We Gather, 2022).
For the broader field of psychology, Buddhist practice, to be sure, may offer elements of a pathway forward in this tale, through supporting the clear seeing and collective action necessary to dismantle the structural origins of racial suffering, as well as through its radical approach to healing (here understood in the Audre Lorde, 1988, sense of care as political action). It is to the first domain, that of collective action, to which we will now turn.
Collective Perspectives and Actions towards Psychology
Though the preceding discussion referred to figures of great historical note, it should be mentioned that their efforts were often not singular but a part of larger collectives, collectives whose power and impact on the world has often similarly been neglected by an individuating disciplinary psychology. For instance, Buddha, like Gandhi and King after him, helped initiate or became a part of movements for liberation. These were social movements that did not only feature those referred to as leaders but included many others vying for liberation, on the basis of compassion, and, as Dr. King mentioned above, the disclosure of truth. Though rarely discussed in psychological science, the benefit for psychosocial well-being of such collectives has been undeniable (Bailey et al., 2021; Desai, 2018; King, 1958; Williams et al., 2008). Collective disclosure of truth also featured heavily in the South African anti-apartheid movement and the ensuing truth and reconciliation process. Our second author experienced these firsthand, as witness and subject to a therapeutics writ large, perhaps even a cultural therapeutic. Televised and broadcast on the radio live for months, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission traveled all across South Africa, collecting testimonies of a people’s traumas, which, by its communal and collective witness provided a means for a shared wrestling with the very psychological struggle of catharsis and breakdown, of guilt, shame, anger, but also of responsibility, resolve, reintegration, and reconciliation. Even of hope, another of psychological science’s neglected notions.
Social movements may not view themselves as doing psychological science or practice—there would be no need to, and much may be lost in doing so. The question is whether psychological science would recognize the psychological brilliance of these practices and actors as “effective interventions” of their own. Social movements are precisely the key drivers that have led to the current moment of psychology and psychological science’s apology. APA and psychology would not have come to it on their own, nor would they have come to it via their preferred scientific toolkit, as is made very clear in the apology: “The governing body within APA should have apologized to people of color before today. APA, and many in psychology, have long considered such an apology, but failed to accept responsibility” (American Psychological Association, 2021b). The need has been there since the dawn of Western psychology, but it took a powerful and collective challenge to the existing paradigm by social justice movements to realize this advancement. Science is a messy human affair.
Disclosure of truth, and its many sides, is not the sole domain of science, as it is foundational to nonviolent methods in general (Gandhi, 1927, 1928; Mantena, 2012). King, in his address to APA, stated as much but also implored behavioral science to join the collective effort of disclosing the truth of racism, segregation, and exclusion in more substantial ways. He was not listened to, and the imperative of desegregation remains.
Desegregating the Perspectives, the We’s
In a recent widely attended public lecture at Yale on race and psychiatry, noted historian Matthew Jacobson (2021) stated that, with regard to institutions, he is encouraging movement away from the language of diversity and more towards the language of desegregation. This pronouncement came after an expansive lecture in which Jacobson carefully traced the historical evidence of race and racism in the US directly back to early governmental exclusionary policies towards people of color—which continue to shape American institutional life. Segregation is still alive, and the evidence is there for all to see in nearly every American sector.
In psychology, we see this too in all of organizational life, from local groups to national bodies. In the APA, ethnic and racial affairs are relegated to a few divisions or committees—staffed often by people of color—and have only recently made their way into subsections of other divisions—staffed again by people of color. Drawing on the sociologist Ray’s (2019) observations, we can observe how even diversity initiatives, in organizations of all kinds, are an implicit acknowledgment that the broader umbrella group features racial hierarchy and inequitable distributions of resources. The organization is racialized in a manner that implicitly is shaped by and better supports the concerns and life experiences of the majoritized, leading to experiences of exclusion, inequity, or discrimination for the minoritized. The need for diversity programs then arises. Psychology is not race neutral, suggest recent observers; psychology is not only not race neutral, but it is not desegregated either, as evidence from every sphere of disciplinary life reveals (Dupree & Kraus, 2021; Roberts et al., 2020). As the formal historical chronology and review that informed APA’s apology stated: “Throughout our work, we were repeatedly confronted by the fact that the entire narrative of psychology—from textbooks to histories to journal articles—often excludes people of color and their voices” (American Psychological Association, 2022).
For further evidence, we again observe the language of the apology which stated that “APA is profoundly sorry, accepts responsibility for, and owns the actions and inactions of APA itself, the discipline of psychology, and individual psychologists who stood as leaders for the organization and field.” APA and psychology, on the one side, are apologizing to people, psychologists, scholars, practitioners, and communities of color, on the other. The language construction suggests one of two things: that the latter groups, who have technically been a part of APA and psychology, are not, in reality, a part of them; or that though they might technically be a part of it, they are a part of it in a segregated way. We, the psychologists. Not you. Although diversity is of course important, it likely will not, by itself, prevent the inequitable distribution of power, privilege, and possibility that marks segregated spaces.
For generations, Black, indigenous, and people of color communities have battled colonialism, racism, and segregation. Will contemporary psychology, all of psychology, do the same?
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Pioneering Ideas Award.
Authors’ Note
The first author’s research supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pioneering Ideas Award helped informed this paper. The manuscript’s contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official view of RWJF.
