Toward a Black (and Diverse) Psychology: The Scholarly Legacy of Joseph White

Toward a Black Psychology

“It is very difficult, if not impossible, to understand the lifestyles of Black people using traditional theories developed by white psychologists to explain white people” (White, 1970, p. 45).

To fully understand the significance of these opening words in “Toward a Black Psychology,” the article must be historically situated. In 1968, 2 years prior to its publication, the Association of Black Psychologists was created at the American Psychological Association’s (APA) annual convention in San Francisco (Williams, 2008). Black psychologists released a press release that criticized the APA for essentially condoning White America’s racism, and then presented a petition of concerns to the APA. The next year, students from the Black Student Psychological Association attended the APA annual convention and took over the podium during the presidential address. A master storyteller, Dr. White, especially, enjoyed telling this story, which would usually end in individuals erupting in laughter.

These words written by Dr. White challenged the White orthodoxy in psychology and helped empower other non-White racial and ethnic groups to speak their unique psychological and cultural truths. During the many instances when Dr. White would talk about writing “Toward a Black Psychology,” he would often share why he chose to publish the article in Ebony magazine rather than an academic journal. He pointed out the differences in circulation between Ebony and most academic journals, noting that far more Black people would read Ebony than would ever read an academic journal. For Dr. White it was important that his insights on Black behavior be published in an outlet that would be accessible to the masses of Black people. He armed Black people with psychological knowledge they could use to defend themselves against the anti-Black racist discourse of that time.

“Toward a Black Psychology” was the first published article to articulate a non–deficit-based conceptual description toward understanding Black behavior and culture. When one carefully reads the article, one can see that White (1970) was concerned about debunking the pejorative, deficit perspectives that had been promulgated by White psychologists and social scientists. Instead, White was advocating for the creation of a strengths-based psychological perspective. For example, White discussed how the use of traditional White psychological models had been inappropriately applied to an analysis of Black families. A psychologically healthy family unit was considered to have two parents, one male and one female. Because Black males were not always constantly visible to White observers, Black families were characterized as being matriarchal and detrimental for masculine development. White challenged this analysis by arguing for the extended nature of the Black family, which meant that multiple family members could participate in the raising of a Black child. White’s defense of Black families was the precursor of the work of prominent Black psychologists, such as Nancy Boyd-Franklin (1989) and Harriette Pipes McAdoo (2007), whose work built on the notion that Black families were diverse and had cultural strengths.

White (1970) also talked about how paranoia was part of the objective condition of being Black in America. White argued that Black folks have been systematically persecuted and exploited in this country. However, White psychiatrists and psychologists had difficulty working with the hostility and suspiciousness of Black patients. Citing the classic book Black Rage (Grier & Cobbs, 1968), White presented the idea of a healthy Black paranoia, and suggested that White mental health professionals should stop diagnosing Black patients. This premise laid the foundation for later work by Black psychologists, such as Francis Terrell and Sandra Terrell (1981), and Arthur Whaley (1998, 2001a, 2001b, 2002), who extended the idea of a healthy Black cultural paranoia into the construct of cultural mistrust.

The publication of “Toward a Black Psychology” was the first of several significant contributions Dr. White made to the discipline of Black psychology. While a review of all his contributions is beyond the scope of this article, his book The Psychology of Blacks (1984) is noteworthy for being the first comprehensive articulation of the growing field of Black psychology.

The Psychology of Blacks

The Psychology of Blacks (White, 1984) created a watershed moment for the discipline of psychology and specifically the field of Black psychology. The book’s impact is akin to what The Souls of Black Folks (Du Bois, 1903) did for race and (double) consciousness and to what The New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2012) did for race and mass incarceration. Its publication was not simply the release of another book. For many Black psychologists, scholars, and community members, it was required reading. Like the recently released Black Panther film, The Psychology of Blacks masterfully captured the concerns of the community, provided counternarratives and corrective guidance, and encouraged widespread conversations about important communal issues such as the Black family, Black identity, and pan-African ancestral principals that influence modern day Blackness. Indeed, the Psychology of Blacks is the seminal work that outlined the composition and structure of the field of Black Psychology.

Within the text, White (1984) draws from the works of multiple scholars to challenge the discipline of psychology’s tendency to disparage African American life for not aligning with or assimilating into European American norms. White highlighted why mainstream psychology needed to abandon the maleficent practice of casting African American behavior into models that suggested inferiority or deficiency. He advanced a rationale to situate Black behavior in the relevant and specific cultural context. White identified topics that are cornerstones of modern-day Black psychology, such as the Black family, Black identity, Black mental health, Black linguistic patterns, and Black educational achievement. A prominent theme throughout each chapter in the book is how the African Worldview has guided and continues to guide African Americans. Furthermore, reductive stereotypes were challenged in each area and replaced with White’s (1984) even-handed and expanded synopsis of Black experiences, which avoided both idolizing and condemning Black culture. It is no surprise that The Psychology of Blacks is incorporated into many Introduction to Psychology, Black Psychology, and Multicultural Psychology courses.

During a time when the field of psychology was known for experimentally testing laboratory rats, White (1984) created space to amplify important Black thought and scholarship. The Psychology of Blacks filled a void in the field of psychology and became required reading for the field of Black psychology. If Dr. White’s only contributions were his seminal written scholarship in Black psychology, his legacy would be intact. However, what is equally significant about his scholarship is how he applied his knowledge of Black psychology. He used his knowledge as a Black psychologist to influence positive social change for racial and ethnic minorities. Arguably his greatest impact was his use of Black psychology as a bridge to build multicultural alliances and to support the professional development of students and young professionals across race and ethnicity. In this regard Dr. White embodied what it meant to be a scholar-activist. He accomplished this role through a process that he referred to as The Freedom Train.

Joe White’s Freedom Train

Over the course of a 56-year career in psychology, Dr. White built more than a legacy of scholarship. He built a self-sustaining organization of colleagues and mentees, which functions as an educational support program, a professional training program, an outreach network, and a research lab. Dr. White’s first mentee, Dr. Michael Connor, was 76 when Dr. White transitioned. At age 84, Dr. White’s most recent mentees were still in the process of completing their degrees. Dr. White accomplished this act through a dedication and commitment to a strengths-based paradigm in his work.

Through the Freedom Train, Dr. White put this strengths-based approach into practice. It is well-known that if one placed a student or professional within proximity of Joseph White the person would come away with a clear directive that was tailored to his or her situation. Dr. White worked with the assumption that if a person wants to achieve, one need only help the person see a path and make a connection. Then that person would move forward and build that success. No matter one’s race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, or religion, Dr. White would happily take someone under his wing, or place the person under the wing of someone that he trusted.

A Strengths-Based Practice

Once on board the Freedom Train, one could be expected to be pushed to stretch one’s boundaries, in terms of building a fully realized professional identity. Dr. White would often provide opportunities to his mentees that would usually be reserved for more advanced professionals. These opportunities would manifest in an invitation to write a chapter for one of his books or to join him on a consultation trip or a speaking engagement. Attention should especially be drawn to the way Dr. White used professional conferences to organize his work with students. This pattern is most evident in his tendency to include his mentees on professional panels that he chaired, or when he would unexpectedly invite a mentee to move from the seat in the audience and to join him at the front of the room.

Dr. White would commonly point out one of his mentees, explain that the person had worthwhile thoughts on the topic at hand, and invite the group to attend to his mentee’s words. Dr. White was able to do so, trusting that the mentee was ready, through his deep engagement with his mentees. As he conducted the Freedom Train, all that he supported believed that they were his most focused-upon mentee. The way that Dr. White was able to recall the smallest details of the narratives that one would share with him was uncanny. He would ask specific questions about the family, friends, academic progress, and how the person was doing. Whether it was a month or 2 years since their last contact, he would not only remember what was said but also have a plan for how the mentee could enhance his or her situation.

When students joined Dr. White on a stage, they may not have known it, but they were ready. If they struggled, he provided a scaffold for support and a witty yet cutting retort for any professional foolish enough to try to take a rhetorical swipe at one of his mentees. That is not to say that Dr. White would not let his mentee experience failure. In fact, he would regularly share some of his mantras around resilience, explaining that one must become adept at “making something from nothing” and that we all must “get strong in the broken places.” Dr. White did not coddle his mentees or take paternal attitude of ownership. Instead he made it clear, through his actions, that he trusted his mentees.

The Set

Professional conferences were the outlets where Dr. White’s scholar-activism was particularly visible. Whether attending a local symposium, a regional conference, or a national or international convention, if Dr. White was in attendance, there was going to be a “Set.” The Set was what Dr. White would call the nightly informal mentoring session that would seem to spring up spontaneously wherever he would choose to grab dinner and get a drink that evening. If observant, one would be best served to find out if there was a Marriott hotel nearby, as it was Dr. White’s favorite brand, and as he would say “you’ll know where to find me.”

During the Set, Dr. White and his wife Lois would usually commandeer a large section of the hotel bar. They would proceed to order food and drinks for his mentees and begin to tell stories. As the night moved forward, he would usually choose a mentee and ask the person to tell one of Dr. White’s stories (as others had heard them all many times), and he would begin the real work of the night. Dr. White would move through the 15 or more mentees and soon-to-be mentees as the night progressed. He would get updated and make plans, which would serve as the marching orders for the mentees until their next contact. He would also connect more advanced mentees to new ones, modeling how to build a supportive and mentee-centered relationship.

Though most mentees believed that the Set was merely an opportunity to have contact with Dr. White, in reality it was a way for his mentees to build community. We learned how to network, develop future projects, and what a diverse, healthy, and vibrant community of scientist-practitioners could look like. For some, the Set was the only place that felt safe at the larger, Whiter conferences. For others, this context was a time to reconnect and engage with the academic family that we chose.

The Future of Black Psychology

One might ask, “What does mentorship have to do with scholarship?” One of Dr. White’s foundational talks, which he would give to organizations that experienced a particular kind of difficulty around issues of multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusion (read most schools, businesses, professional organizations, government bureaucracies, and universities), was a presentation of the “Browning of America.” During this talk, he would walk a community through the steps that would need to be taken in order to prepare for and cope with the inevitable change in demographics from predominantly White to traditionally marginalized racial and ethnic groups.

Dr. White would provide coaching on building more multiculturally competent policies and procedures and developing knowledge, skills, and awareness of multiculturalism and diversity for individual community members, and would explain the necessity of opening the ranks of the organization to professionals that shared experiences with the diverse populations they served. With each workshop or symposium, he would help these organizations to understand that holding on to White supremacist attitudes was an existential threat to the long-term viability of their community.

Dr. White was not a man who merely spoke a message. This understanding of the inevitability and the necessity of a browning America was at the core of Dr. White’s philosophy. From his framework of Black Psychology, to building professional networks, Dr. White not only published scholarly work, he also produced scholars, practitioners, and scholar-activists. In a deeply intentional way, Dr. White significantly contributed to mainstream, multicultural, and most especially Black psychology.

Conclusion

Dr. Joseph L. White had a vision of what it would take to build a psychology that worked for Black people and everyone else. During his life, he promoted a strengths-based approach to working with people. He trained some of the most respected psychologists in our communities, and they trained some of the most promising psychologists in our field. He structured his scholarship so that in his practice, he would be able to make evident the truth of his assertions. In that way, the Freedom Train and all of its junior conductors became part of a grand longitudinal design.

Dr. White built the Freedom Train to keep chugging along, even after its first conductor disembarked. To ensure that the long-term experiment in “browning psychology” was to continue, he asked only one thing from his mentees. It was a mandate that was as simple and simultaneously as complex a task as one might make. In those moments, whether it was a time of triumph or a quiet moment of support, when mentees would attempt to thank Dr. White for the time and energy he had dedicated to their development and well-being, he would look over his glass at them and fix them with an intense stare. Then he would simply say, “There’s no need to thank me.” “Just promise that you’ll go out there and do the same for five more people.” Then he would smile, a warm and fully genuine smile, and say “Ok!” and move on to the next mentee waiting for his time.

As we reflect on the legacy of Dr. Joseph White, we are humbled and inspired by the impact of his scholarship, his mentorship, and his commitment to Black people and all racial and ethnic minorities. Dr. White did not get entangled in the ideological tensions that understandably and necessarily exist when creating and defining a field. While he has been categorized as being part of the Reform School of Black psychology because he believed in the existence of a unique Black psychology (Karenga, 1993), it can be argued that the very articulation of a Black psychology was in fact a revolutionary and radical idea during its time. Dr. White was a trailblazer and will be remembered as one of the most influential figures of Black psychology. His name will be forever etched in the annals of history. His legacy lives on.