South African Psychology and Racism

• South African psychology actively contributed to racist ideologies, particularly during apartheid.
• Critical psychology examines power relationships within psychology and aims to critique how it perpetuated racism in South Africa.
• A critical approach involves analyzing the institutional history of South African psychology, including the knowledge produced and its internal conditions of oppression.

Historical Context

• This analysis aims to trace the history of South African psychology, focusing on its ideological alignment with racist conditions.
• It explores the extent to which South African psychology can detach itself from overt racism.
• The chapter discusses establishing a 'new' South African psychology based on equity rather than exclusionary practices.

Defining Racism

• Racism is understood as an ideology that organizes and justifies racial domination and maintains inequalities between races.
• Racism involves skewed power relations across all spheres of social organization.
• Racism benefits the racist while harming the victim.

Psychology Before 1994

• Early psychology was optimistic and aimed to solve human problems.
• Psychology aimed to preserve fundamental human rights and benefit humanity.
• South African psychology supported racism and racialized social asymmetries.
• It played a crucial role in perpetuating racism, including denying its significance and providing academic justifications for it.
• Psychology aided racism through routine denial and justifications.

Historical Actions

• Professional practices were highly racialized.
• The "architect of apartheid," reinforced the idea that black individuals were only suited for certain forms of labor.
• Psychology colluded with racism during the apartheid era.
• A thematic analysis of journals between 1983-1988 revealed almost exclusive focus on white experiences.
• It displayed little mention of racism's impact on black individuals.
• In an extension of this analysis to journals between 1948-1988, racist trends were confirmed.

Racism of Omission

• South African psychology was disconcertingly silent about inadequate training facilities for black psychologists.
• It failed to address psychological implications of apartheid, complicit through omission over commission.
• Evidence indicates psychologists may have been involved with human rights violations.
• Psychologists working outside of law enforcement may have been contracted to perform torture and interrogation.

Racist Diagnostic Systems

• Differential diagnostic systems existed, based on race, activating racist beliefs about black mental health.
• Diagnoses included "bantu hysteria", a "racial condition".

Black Individuals as the "Other"

• During apartheid, psychologists reinforced elements of the ideology of racism.
• Black individuals in South Africa were constructed as "different," "alien," and the "negative Other."

Psychology's Structure

• Professional psychology in South Africa reproduced racism through organizational structures.
• One contribution was in the "scientific" pre-formulation of racist policies advanced by the apartheid state.

The "Poor White" Problem

• South African psychology contributed to the Carnegie Commission of 1928.
• This was a societal marker as it involved South African psychologists who aided key societal problem in South Africa .
• Funding was made available to investigate "poor white problem".
• This inquiry led to the ideological trajectory of South African psychology that seemed to privilege whites over blacks.
• South African psychology at this time helped advance racist policies.

Lack of Resistance

• Factors exerted pressure on psychologists during the apartheid years.
• Psychologists didn't operate in a social vacuum and, like everyone else, were impacted by ideologies.
• Racism permeated facets of life for everyone in South Africa.
• Psychologists in South Africa were predominantly white middle class and among the beneficiaries of racism.
• South African psychology formed part of an international community complicit with racism through theories.

Eugenics

• Eugenics is a genetics argument for racism and states a race of men may be superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races.

Local and International Racism

• Social sciences formed a small system where ideas spread.
• Social scientists around the world form a social group competing through persuasion, communication, and identification.
• Psychology internationally was complicit with racism through racist theories.

Psychology and Blackness

• Herbert Spencer endorsed promoting eugenics to academic psychology.
• Edward Thorndike advocated for sterilizing poor races.
• Arthur Jensen proposed that impoverished black children performed poorly on tasks because they were genetically inferior to whites.

Collusion

• From the 1930s: psychology appeared to provide Nazi Germany with "scientific" justifications for genocidal policies.
• The discipline of psychology thrived under German National Socialism between 1932 and 1942.
• South African psychology was born and established itself in, identifying and encasing itself within, this community.

Potential Dissension

• Psychologists' responses to social inequalities were generally variable and at times conflict with dominant positions.
• While most psychologists in South Africa emanated from apartheid South Africa they could oppose the policies because of ethics.
• The potential threat to prevailing power relations saw many external restraints created by the apartheid state to ensure control.

Training of Psychologists

• As is the case today, apartheid area universities were where most psychologists were trained .
• Most psychological research and knowledge dissemination took place here and the state restricted the climate of universities to reflect state interests.
• Racial hierarchies endemic to broader South African society replicated through universities.
• Allocation was applied to the best facilities predictably provided to whites, poorest for blacks.
• As a "racialised" subject, the state ensured what occurred in South African psychology should be obvious.

Curriculum

• The South African state provided unequal facilities to create university climate .
• South African universities bolstered prevailing relations .
• Often aided attainment of the objective by providing types and contents of courses at these institutions.
• Instead of honest and critical study to correct social problems, courses were typically conservative, lacking substantive issues.

Racism at the Level of Institutional Structure

• The conservative nature of courses was no accident.
• The state ensured to passively accept or to defend rather than to critically address problems.
• Black universities were seen as traditional hubs of political activism but were staffed by conservative graduates.
• Some psychology departments universities were long dominated by members of the racist Institute.
• Black radicals lead to externalized checks to ensure a safe racial population.

The "Career Socialisation" of Racism

• Undergraduate Social Scientists were socialised universities with beliefs.
• It would have been difficult for most of the products not to have participated with universities .

The Effects

• In addition to university harassment and black university conservative whites and conservative whites to prevent the use of key universities .

Legal censorship and censure

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