Find Your Way Back: Black Colleagues Return to the Erotic

This paper provides an analysis of the effects anti-Black violence have had on the return of Black colleagues (administrators, faculty, and staff) to higher education after the the 2020 murder of African American citizen George Floyd at the hands of now former Minneapolis police officers. Riffing off of R&B singer Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s song of return, “Find Your Way Back” and using it as a loose organizational rubric—each section is titled from the song’s lyrics—I ask what answers we might find between return and resignation. The analysis starts with the question of return: How in the hell do Black colleagues return to the university after a collective trauma? The essay centralizes the concerns of Black colleagues in higher education, positioning us between resignation and return. It seeks to consider (pending a return) to what are we returning. To explore this liminal dilemma—resignation or return—the essay will trace the lineage of racism located in higher education to slavery and the violent exclusion of African Americans from gaining access to knowledge. Briefly tracing American education’s lineage to White supremacy, I aim to frame our possible return against an institution that parodies its paternal line. The essay will show that the racism characteristic of American history morphed into an insidious, invisible source of oppression termed microaggressions. To address the consequences of racial microaggressions, I draw on psychotherapeutic clinical research on the effects of racial microaggressions on Black workers. Mirroring clinicians’ approach to addressing the race-based problems of higher education, I call on the Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde’s notion of “the erotic” as a spiritual power source. I look at how Lorde explored Black psychology and trauma within higher education in her poem “Blackstudies.” Mining this and her other triumphant essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” I look to establish “the erotic” as a comparable counterpunch to microaggressions in higher education.

Black Psychology and Whiteness: Toward a Conceptual Model of Black Trauma through the Prism of Whiteness

The main objective of this article is to introduce and examine whiteness as a source of trauma for Black people. We explore Black psychology scholarship to conceptually ground whiteness as the impetus for racism, while identifying it as an interpersonal, psychosocial, and contextual phenomenon that informs the race-based traumatic experiences of Black people. The primary factors constituting whiteness are ethnocentric monoculturalism, White standardization, ontological expansiveness, White emotions, attitudes, reactions to race, and White privilege. While racism operates through oppression and exclusion to produce trauma among Black people, we argue that whiteness operates similarly to produce race-based traumatic stress. With this premise, we offer and explain a conceptual model to promote empirical research that identifies and operationalizes whiteness and its components as observable contributors to the traumatic experiences of Black persons.

“The Awesomeness and the Vastness of Who You Really Are:” A Culturally Distinct Framework for Understanding the Link Between Spirituality and Health for Black Sexual Minority Men

Despite health inequities, many Black sexual minority men are resilient and often utilize spirituality as a culturally distinct self-protective and self-enhancing resource to maintain their health. However, little is known about how spirituality impacts health within a cultural framework that is specific to Black sexual minority men. We conducted 10 individual in-depth interviews, reaching code saturation, with Black sexual minority men across the USA. Our study was guided by grounded theory and a Black psychology theoretical framework. Seven themes were discovered and revealed that participants’ level of spiritual consciousness influenced their engagement in psychological and behavioral processes that were related to mental and physical health. These themes were: (a) suboptimal worldview, (b) emotional revelation, (c) emotional emancipation, (d) emotional regulation, (e) health motivations, (f) health behaviors, and (g) links between spiritual consciousness, mental health, and physical health. Implications of these findings for clinicians and researchers are discussed.

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.

"One foot on the other side" : suicideality in contemporary African diaspora fiction

When this dissertation first began to take shape, it was in response to a period of wide reading of African diaspora fiction--my comprehensive exam preparations-- wherein I began noticing the sheer number of suicides I was encountering. After some preliminary research, I was further struck by how little criticism confronted this literary trope in African diaspora texts. In the beginning, I assumed that this phenomenon was the manifestation of the contemporary focus on mental health and mental illness, which while largely a product of Western medicine, neoliberal discourses of self-reliance and Capitalist "self-care" branding, has certainly been circulating globally for a number of years now. Thus, I expected this dissertation to be a discussion of Africana writers' efforts to resist, revise, combine or consolidate these discourses with the cultural, political, and ontological concerns of Blackness, ultimately offering a new, more Africanized method of thinking through mental health and mental illness. In some ways, this proved true; in particular, I believe this is evident and legible through the Ogbanje and abiku fiction discussed in chapter four of this dissertation. However, over time this project outgrew that framework, and efforts to link Black literary suicides to the real world experiences of suicidality and mental illness became at best, specious, and at worst pathologizing. Thus, with mere months before my planned defense, I reconceived of what the work of this project actually is. The primary points that I hope this project makes are as follows: 1. Suicide is a foundational and constitutive trope of what we might call Anglophone African diaspora literatures. 2. Suicide in these texts is experienced on the level of community: by their nature, these suicides subordinate the individual's "right" to life to the collective's hopes for survival. 3. These representations of suicide reflect an Afrocentric, nonlinear conception of time and space. Often, suicides occur because of the belief that another simultaneous reality exists and is accessible through the death of the body. 4. Western, neoliberal tropes of the individual as improvable and perhaps even perfectible through introspection and work have throughout the 60-year scope of this project put pressure on the Afro-centric, collective literary meaning of suicides. 5. Contemporary African diasporic fiction is marked by its willingness to engage with 3 and 4 simultaneously, as ideas that are in tension, but not conflict, and which therefore do not require resolution. 6. Ultimately, African literature operating under what I term suicideality offers radical political potential because it constructs modes of collaboration and coalition across boundaries, especially boundaries between life and death/living and dead. Therefore, rather than significant emphasis on the sociological or medical discourses of suicide, this project will be focused on interrogating the imaginative act of suicide and its implications within African diaspora literature; particularly, I am interested in the ways the imaginative act of suicide articulates ontology, space-time, and the body. Therefore, I will draw from Black psychology as well as literary theory, political manifestos, Black Atlantic theories and Black feminist theories of assemblage. [DIACRITICS NEEDED]

From Psychological Humanities to African Psychology: A Review of Sources and Traditions

The purpose of the article is to trace the intellectual history of the new postcolonial discipline of African psychology. African psychology as currently conceptualized in universities in the South and other regions of Africa is a proud heir to a vast heritage of sound and extensive intellectual traditions and psychological scholarship on Africa and its peoples found scattered in the multiple disciplines of the humanities (anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, religion, etc.). Even before and after the critical evolution that led to the emergence of African psychology as a new discipline situated in the departments of psychology in some forward-thinking African universities, the different fields of the humanities offered legitimate research and writings on the nature of the life of the mind and culture in pre- and postcolonial Africa. The article reviews the variety and changing psychological themes that occupied the attention of the African and Western humanists and intellectuals within and outside Africa. However, the great limitation of all psychological research and writings which constitute psychological humanities is that they could not and, indeed, are not meant to replace the legitimate role being played by African psychology as a fledgling postcolonial discipline and center of thought and scholarship. This fledgling discipline came into being to argue against and partner with Western psychology and the black psychology popularized in North America, with a view toward the enrichment of both Western and black psychological knowledge with new perspectives for understanding the psychology of Africans in continental Africa. The purpose of the article is to elaborate on these issues.

American Negritude

This chapter contextualizes Malcolm X’s interventions about black feelings in the contemporary psychological literatures that framed and circulated about blackness to understand how new black psychology informed Malcolm’s emotional and rhetorical repertoire. Then, in excavating Malcolm’s performances of black rage as an easily identifiable feeling and an intended goal of his rhetorical corpus, Corrigan argues that Malcolm’s psychological strategy articulated what she calls “American Negritude.” Marrying black psychology to the work of African and Caribbean intellectuals theorizing postcolonial black subjectivity, Malcolm’s rhetorical skills hinged on his ability to resituate black political and social consciousness around black pride and disidentification from whites. Malcolm’s American Negritude, particularly as it embraced rage, was at odds with the affective orientation and the racial liberalism of the integrationists and created both tension and opportunity for a global blackness. Still, while Malcolm reconceptualized feeling and being black, his enactment of black rage was often confused with hatred, which fueled white opposition to Malcolm and the NOI and fed white fragility in the early 1960s. Malcolm’s critique of black loyalty to white civil religion hinged on his relentless exposure of faulty black identifications, which he saw as a form of modern slavery.

Toward a Psychological Framework of Radical Healing in Communities of Color

Advancing beyond individual-level approaches to coping with racial trauma, we introduce a new psychological framework of radical healing for People of Color and Indigenous individuals (POCI) in the United States. We begin by providing a context of race and racism in the United States and its consequences for the overall well-being of POCI. We build on existing frameworks rooted in social justice education and activism and describe a form of healing and transformation that integrates elements of liberation psychology, Black psychology, ethnopolitical psychology, and intersectionality theory. We briefly review these conceptual foundations as a prelude to introducing a psychological framework of radical healing and its components grounded in five anchors including: (a) collectivism, (b) critical consciousness, (c) radical hope, (d) strength and resistance, and (e) cultural authenticity and self-knowledge. We conclude with a discussion of the applications of radical healing to clinical practice, research, training, and social justice advocacy.