Igniting Collective Freedom: An Integrative Behavioral Model of Acceptance and Commitment towards Black Liberation

Racism continues to reveal disastrous effects for the Black community. There exists no behavior analytic literature with a specific focus on ending Black psychological suffering due to continual acts of violence perpetrated against the community. The author presents a behavioral model to promote Black psychological liberation, infusing pre-established frameworks of Black Psychology and cultural healing practices with acceptance and commitment therapy. The model addresses behaviors observed within systemic and internalized racism.

A Fallacy of the World Health Organization's Mental Health Gap Action Programme and Intervention Guide: Counseling and Psychotherapy Are Also (Western) Indigenous/Traditional Healing Methods

This article will argue that, rather than being objective and universal treatment appro-aches, counseling and psychotherapy are indigenous/traditional (i.e., cultural) healing methods of the Euro-American West. Therefore, the World Health Organization's Mental Health Gap Action Programme (MHGAP), designed to provide increased access to reportedly highly effective Western mental health treatment services in many low- and middle-income countries, is likely to falter. It can be argued that culturally adapted counseling and psychotherapy will be most effective for individuals in non-Western countries who endorse or are somewhat acculturated to Western understandings and ways of living. Therefore, Western psychological interventions should not be at the forefront of the MHGAP in non-Western countries. Supportive evidence for this perspective is summarized and alternative approaches to promoting global mental health that draw on non-Western indigenous healing practices are presented.

Healing through Connection: An Aboriginal Community Designed, Developed and Delivered Cultural Healing Program for Aboriginal Survivors of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse

The wrongs experienced by Aboriginal people have caused life-long and intergenerational impacts that demand culturally grounded healing approaches, yet this is not experienced by Aboriginal people in mainstream services. This article details a culturally informed approach by sharing the findings of a Cultural Healing Program (CHP) designed, developed and delivered by an Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation. The program was for Aboriginal survivors of institutional child sexual abuse who had also experienced cultural abuse having been forcibly removed from their families as children and in the process disconnected from their communities, culture and land. This study of the development, implementation and evaluation of the CHP included a review of literature, interviews with survivors and facilitators, pre- and post-participant surveys, facilitator journals, participant–observer reflections and short films exploring impacts. The study drew upon the experiences of the survivors and facilitators to identify outcomes of the program. Connection with culture and the collective approach were key to healing for all survivors. The paper identifies key learnings that can inform social work practice and discusses implications regarding program design and implementation.

Electronic Inspirations

Cold War electronic music—made with sine tone and white-noise generators, filters, and magnetic tape—was the driving force behind the evolution of both electronic and acoustic music in the second half of the twentieth century. Electronic music blossomed at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR [West German Radio]) in Cologne in the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for cultural healing was great. Building an electronic studio, West Germany confronted the decimation of the “Zero Hour” and began to rebuild its cultural prowess. The studio’s greatest asset was its laboratory culture, where composers worked under a paradigm of invisible collaboration with technicians, scientists, performers, intellectuals, and the machines themselves. Composers and their invisible collaborators repurposed military machinery in studio spaces that were formerly fascist broadcasting propaganda centers. Composers of Cold War electronic music reappropriated information theory and experimental phonetics, creating aesthetic applications from military discourses. In performing such reclamations, electronic music optimistically signaled cultural growth and progress, even as it also sonified technophobic anxieties. Electronic music—a synthesis of technological, scientific, and aesthetic discourses—was the ultimate Cold War innovation, and its impacts reverberate today.

The Entanglements of Cultural Victimization and Cultural Healing within the Dominant White Apparatus: Tayo in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony and Bigger in Richard Wright’s Native Son

The dominant white culture in the United States of America has always assumed the role of supremacy that victimizes other ethnicities and minorities and looked upon them as inferiors and unworthy of the privileges white people enjoy. Although the maltreatment of the Other-the non-white- differs from one ethnicity or minority to the other, it has always had sheer negative impacts on individuals as well as communities. This paper aims to show the victimization of African Americans as a community in America represented by the atrocity of Bigger and the victimization of Native Americans represented by trauma of Tayo. This paper will tackle the issue of victimization of the two communities-African American and native American-in general through the tough life journeys of the two protagonists of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Leslie Silko’s Ceremony and will try to show two different faces of maltreatment by the mainstream culture, but eventually same negative effects on both communities, African Americans and Native Americans. Thus, many Native Americans are subject to the mainstream culture instrumental policies that convince underprivileged ethnicities that they are integral part of the texture of the American society in time of national need. The irony is that such attitude is only meant to recruit non-whites to fight for the interest of the white supremacist apparatus. Silko eloquently displays patriotism and loyalty as the citizen who is eager and willing to fight and die for his people and country, and in that sense many Native Americans enlisted in the military so as to assert their masculinity. This, in fact, shows the negative effects of the pressure of white supremacist ideologies practiced against non-whites that they choose to act against their desires and choices in the hope that they will be accepted within the American social fabric. Finally, this paper explores some of the solutions available for the victimization and the atrocities of ethnic Americans, such as the communal support and the reconnection to one’s heritage and cultural roots to heal the damaged self-image and psyches of ethnic Americans.