Psychology, race, and “the politics of truth”.

Abstract

In October 2021, the American Psychological Association issued a statement apologizing for its complicity with systemic racism and the coinciding failure in its mission to benefit society (American Psychological Association, 2021a). What accounts for the persistence of racism in the field despite decades of disavowals and stated commitments to work against it? In this article, we describe our analysis of the resilient operations of racism and whiteness within foundational dimensions of contemporary psychological paradigms—dimensions that are so foundational that they represent taken-for-granted tenets of how research in psychology is done. This article presents a critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 1993) of a fourteen-article corpus representing the post-2020 psychological health disparities literature, a subset of psychological scholarship whose focus explicitly concerns race-related dimensions of mental health. Its discursive characteristics were found to include the practice of partial to full decontextualization of historical and present-day systemic injustices, the effective creation of race as an individual-level variable, and the production of ignorance regarding the operations of racism and whiteness. We interpret the operations of this discourse to reproduce racism in psychology via the existence of a Foucauldian truth regime, and we explore the implications for psychological research and authorship.

Exploring preferences for multicultural workshop formats: Does the race of the trainer matter?

“…Racial categories and nomenclature are themselves artifacts of Western colonialism; they were developed to enable global hierarchies of power and subordination (Roche & Passmore, 2023). In particular, whiteness is understood not only to refer to the phenotypical characteristics associated with a White identification; rather, it signifies a cultural context that normalizes (and thereby supports) White social domination (L. Smith et al, 2023).…”

Inaugural editorial for Journal of Counseling Psychology.

“…For us, positionality is an ongoing process that humanizes our research. As authors, we need to address who we are in relation to the communities we study and serve (Smith et al, 2023), how we understand our roles with respect to institutional and cultural power, and our privileges and complicities. This practice of positionality is ever developing and should never be perfunctory or just an exercise or statement.…”