ABSTRACT
In the foregoing chapters we have seen the way in which psychological discourses have construed black people, and the relationship between these discourses and the dominant regimes of truth which prevailed during the history of slavery and colonialism. I focused on the role played by the emergent science of psychology, a role which has predominantly operated in the direction of upholding and legitimising the practices of slavery and colonisation. I observed that since independence, psychology in Africa has become increasingly reductionist in its concepts and methods, and has failed to address the social and psychological transformations that accompanied the emergence of independent nation-states. I ended that section by looking at the responses of western-based black psychologists to the racist functioning of psychology, seen in their efforts to appropriate psychological concepts and methods, and to apply psychology in the service of the black American community. Such initiatives have aimed to use psychology to counteract racist stereotypes instead of reaffirming them, and to generate more complete knowledge on and about the psychology of black people. Instead of psychology being used solely by advocates of racism and anti-racism, black psychology has sought other reference points in black cultural and political life, as was exemplified through my discussion of the close and recursive relationship between 1950s’ and 1960s’ self-concept research and the civil rights movement, and the psychological study of nigrescence in the context of the post-1960s black movement.
