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South African Psychology and Racism: Historical Background and Future Prospects

• Organized professional psychology has mirrored socio-historical developments in South Africa and acted as a microcosm of South African society at different times.
• Critical psychology examines power relationships constituted by psychology as a form of knowledge and practice, especially how it perpetuates racism in South Africa.
• The chapter traces the history of South African psychology and its ideological complicity with racist conditions and discourses of apartheid.
• It explores how South African psychology might be extricated from the racism overtly identifiable in its formative years
• Aims at establishing a 'new' South African psychology as a discipline of equity and liberation, not exclusion.

Understanding Racism

• Racism involves ideology through which racial domination is organized and justified.
• It is an ideology through which the domination or marginalization of certain 'races' by another 'race' or 'races' is enacted and legitimated.
• Racism is a set of ideas and discursive and material practices aimed at (re)producing and justifying systematic inequalities between 'races' or racialized groups.
• It is tied to processes of social, political and economic domination/marginalization.
• Racism involves skewed relations of power in all major spheres of social organization.
• Any act of racism has a victim and a beneficiary.
• The ideology of racism operates 'to the benefit of the racist and to the detriment of his/her victims' (Memmi, 1982).

Psychology's Early Role and Asymmetrical Power

• Early psychology viewed itself as solving human problems, preserving human rights, and benefiting humanity.
• South African psychology also played a pivotal role in the perpetuation, elaboration, and reproduction of racism
• It reproduced racism through denial and academic justifications, evident in racialized disciplinary and professional practices (Magwaza, 2001).
• Psychology aided the reproduction of racism not only through its routine denial of the centrality of the phenomenon in South African society but also through to the academic justifications or 'authorisation' that it provided for the phenomenon.
• During apartheid, S.A. Psychology aided in not addressing issues of institutionalized racism

Psychology's Involvement in Apartheid

• The collusion of psychology with racism during the apartheid period has been widely documented (e.g. Baldwin-Ragaven et al, 1999; Cooper et al, 1990; Duncan, 2001; Durrheim & Mokeki, 1997; Magwaza, 2001; Nicholas, 1990, 2001; Seedat, 2001; Suffla et al, 2001).
• South African psychology was silent over racism, focusing on white experiences and not the negative impact of racism on black people (Seedat, 1990; Durrheim & Mokeki, 1997).

Racism Through Omission and Racist Diagnostic system

• Psychology submissions to the TRC implicated psychology in perpetuating apartheid racism through racially skewed knowledge production and training (Magwaza, 2001).
• Serious human rights violations were committed in service of the apartheid state and its racist policies.
• Perpetuation of apartheid ideology included differential diagnostic systems for whites and blacks (Baldwin-Ragaven et al, 1999).
• "Entire racist language and terminology" and racist beliefs about “mental health of black people”.
• "Bantu Hysteria:" stress as an indication of a "racial condition" only found in black Africans

Blacks as "Negative Other:' and Organisational Structure

• Psychologists reinforced the ideology of racism by constructing black people as 'different', 'alien', and negative Other' (Duncan, 2001; Guillaumin, 2002).
• Nicholas (1990, 2001) details psychology's reproduction of broader South African racism in its organizational structures.

The "Poor White" Problem

• Involvement in the Carnegie Commission of 1928 laid foundations for privileging whites over blacks.
• Racial prejudice evident in recommendations like severe penalties on interracial sexual intercourse and preventing blacks from competing with whites (Wilcocks, in Nicholas, 2001).
• No qualms about advancing the fundamentally racist policies of the social order in which it was located (Cooper et al, 1990; Nicholas, 1990, 2001).

Factors Influencing Psychology's Response

• Psychologists were socialized by and into the prevailing dominant ideologies, including racism, which impacted their views (Dawes, 1985; Savage, 1981; Essed, 1987; Katz, 1976; Van Dijk, 1991).
• Psychologists' social class positions, predominantly white middle class, meant they were among the principal beneficiaries of apartheid racism.Less than 2% of registered psychologists in South Africa were black at the end of the 1970s (Ebersohn, 1983).
• South African psychology was part of an international psychology community that historically colluded with racism (Holdstock, 2001; Howitt & Owusu-Bempah, 1994).

Exclusion Internationaly

• Spencer advocated for 'selective breeding' to eliminate 'unfit' 'races' (Howitt & Owusu-Bempah, 1994).Black people were not as worthy as even "the least worthy white person"
• Arthur Jensen proposed genetically black children did not learn as well not because of discrimination, but genetics.
• South African psychology identified within international Community.

Collusion with Nazi Germany

• Nazi Germany used psychology for genocidal decisions- "final solution"- (Howitt & Owusu-Bempah, 1994).
• European psychology supported inhumane actions that was of brute racism, genocide and misanthropy.

Internal Factors

• Not all South African psychologists succumbed to apartheid racism.
• Social scientists' responses conflict with prevailing ideologies (Van Dijk, 1987; Therborn, 1980).
• Apartheid state created external restraints and checks to control dissident psychologists (Baldwin-Ragaven, 1999; Savage, 1981; Seedat, 1990; Welsh, 1981).

The World We Lived in

• The type and content of courses typically offered at S.A. universities aided in racism at these institutions in that type and content of courses.
• The state created research and training at universities which would bolster policies that related to the "power", what would aid the state.
• Racialized relations of domination for institutionalized hierarchies for racial privilege.

Legal Censorship, Avoidance and Regulation

• Legal censorship and laws like the Publications act and Suppression of Communism Act meant that many books related to racism were restricted (Kuper, 1974; Oakes 1988; Welsh 1981).
• Scholars were harassed when academic works threatened apartheid state and racist policies- Barend Van Niekerk's research with racism in South African courts (Welsh 1981).
• Academics were unlikely to produce work that would create attack on the state's racist policies (Savage 1981).
• Apart from legal censorship, South Africans had internal censorship which could limit critical manner when responding to issue of racism (Baldwin-Ragaven et al 1999).

Social Class Matters

• Funding for research in the HSRC (Human Sciences Research Council) had restrictions to scholars (Welsh 1981).
• Publications from the HSRC only benefitted people guided by Christian Nationalist philisophy (in Savage 51).
• Academics who blatantly criticized racist policies faced funding and criticism (as suggested by Savage in 1981).

Maintaining the Status Quo

• There were many instances in which the HSRC refused to publish any works that were considered a potential for critic and/or a threat to existing system.
• Government gave heavy pressure on private sector to NOT fund those against it (Savage 1981).
• Not to say the private sector had over the years needed much of this type of encouragement, because for a very long period in the history of this country it had been a very active and willing supporter of government policies, and this by virtue of the fact that these policies were inordinately well suited to its needs (Baldwin-Ragaven et al, 1999; CAL, 1987; O'Meara, 1983).

Limited Challenges

• It is essential that the 3 organizations did not have any challenges to the south African government, the organisations had two similarities- which was it´s failure to not make psychology accessible to blacks, and to openly challenge what would be described as racism. (Magwaza 2001)
• Organizations would even contribute, via the research and training programs to justify what the academic problems were. ( Robbertse 1967.)

Past Racism's Present-Day

• Although the vicious actions from apartheid are gone, now is the goal for better sociopolitical reform that are fair and just ( 1994. ) Now , after all of that the new and social divisions are now present , it is a challenge that must face forward. South African psychology as a science cannot forget what it was, because if it does then it cant see what can be accomplished in the next generations