To Be African or Not to Be:    

The ancestors, through Dr. Hilliard’s genius, had directed African Psychologists to deal with “the real deal.” Can we Be and not be African? While this level of question frightened many of us and made most of us uncomfortable, I think it is the only place for us, as African Psychologists, to begin. Accordingly, I would like to address the question of African American identity development from the framework of what is fundamental to our “Be” ing.

This question To be African or Not to Be becomes even more complex when one factors in the context of African people living in a non-African and/or anti-African society. Given such a context, I have suggested that the understanding of what it means to be African must be informed by what I have defined as the Triangular Law of Knowing, Being and Doing for Africans living in an anti-African reality. The three laws are (1) the law of (mis)knowing; (2) the law of (non)being; and (3) the law of (un)doing. These laws note that “if you don’t understand White supremacy, then everything else you think you know will simply confuse you” - law of (mis)knowing; “If you don’t exist according to your cultural essence (nature/spirit) then everything that you think you are will only be a diminishment” - law of (non)being; and “the experience of one generation becomes the history of the next generation and the history of several generations will become the tradition of the people - law of (un)doing. Several scholars ( Carruthers, 1972; Nobles, 1978; Akbar, 1984; Banks, 1992) have suggested, the psychological understanding of African people, must be informed by the extent to which we understand the impact of white supremacy, the retentions, residuals, and radiance of the African nature/spirit and the reverberating power to reinvent ourselves.

In discussing the falsification of African Consciousness as it relates to Psychiatry and the politics of White Supremacy, Amos N. Wilson also noted specifically note that, “In the context of a racist social system, psychological diagnosis, labeling and treatment of the behavior of politically oppressed persons are political acts performed to attain political ends. For oppression begins as a psychological fact and is in good part a psychological state. If oppression is to operate with maximum efficiency, it must become and remain a psychological condition achieving self-perpetuating motion by its own internal dynamics and by its own inertial momentum” Wilson, 1993: 3)”. The Eurocentric mental health establishment, he rightly suggests, is a participant and beneficiary of the white domination of African peoples. Psychology and the mental health industry is a very important cog in the self-perpetuating machine of African dehumanization, mental disfunctioning, and dehumanization.

The discipline of Western Psychology's reason for being is, to a great extent, to nurture and sanction the imperialist and racist political regime which fathered it. In this regard, Wilson concludes that the explanatory systems and...  next page