Psychology in black: An analytical concept for centring blackness in psychology

Abstract

The implications of colonisation on the psyche of black people have been a focus of analysis for decades. Black scholars like Frantz Fanon and black psychologists from various regions have developed different interpretations and methods for engaging with the psyche of black people. Their theoretical contributions include examining the phenomenology of oppression, the psychology of oppression, and African conceptions of psychological inquiry. This paper builds on these theories and proposes a new mode of analysis that interprets the psyche as an assemblage of intersecting forms of antiblackness, termed psychology in black. Psychology in black offers a perspective that accounts for the construction of the black psychic structure as a result of antiblack colonial violence. Its mode of analysis and tools of abstraction are rooted in the experience of blackness. Blackness is engaged as an epistemological register of psychic enclosures or scripts. Furthermore, it is understood as constructed by colonial metaphysics, producing a set of ontologies and existential realities that inform the development of the black psychic structure. Thus, psychology in black is presented as a praxis of investigation that aids a systematic mode of thinking that holistically locates black psychic development within the arrangements of colonial power.