The Erasure of Blackness from Psychology



This ‘Black History Month’ we would like to reflect on the systemic erasure of Blackness from the field of psychology

By Khushi Mehta

February is internationally celebrated as Black History Month. The importance of Black voices is consistently and systemically undermined in academia. We would like to take this moment to encourage our students, faculty, and staff to learn more about the legacy of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia that has been perpetuated by psychology against the Black community.  As the title suggests, blackness has been erased in psychology for a long time. But what is ‘blackness’?

Alysia Harris, an American poet, defines ‘blackness’ as follows:

“Jericho Brown says ‘What you call a color, I call a way.’…There are many blackness-es…The real question is what does it mean to be human? Blackness is simply an exponent.”

Dr. Steven Roberts, an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, looked at more than 26,000 empirical articles published over 44 years for three major areas of psychology: cognitive, developmental, and social – to examine racial representation in psychological research. His data showed that only 5% of publications in the top-tier psychological journals he examined highlighted race. In cognitive psychology, fewer than 0.01% of publications looked at race, compared with 8% in developmental psychology and 5% in social psychology. This may be related to the fact that most of the editors-in-chief in these 40 odd years were white under whose leadership only 4% of the publications highlighted race. However, when editors were people of colour, the publications that highlighted race almost tripled to 11%.

Not only is Blackness erased from sampling, but it is also erased from science. For example, if we were to ask you to name 3 Black psychologists and the work they did, could you do so? If this is difficult, one reason is because academia doesn’t highlight research conducted by Black researchers, nor the important work they have done in the past that continues to affect us today. As we learn about the history of racism within psychology, we would like to highlight the groundbreaking work done by Black psychologists.


 Photograph showing Kenneth and Mamie Clark sitting in their living room

Kenneth and Mamie Clark in their home in Hudson, NY | Picture taken by Charlotte Brooks

Drs. Kenneth & Mamie Phipps Clark were psychologists famous for their ‘doll experiment’. Their findings, that even black children showed preference for white dolls from as early as three years old, played a role in outlawing segregation.

The Clarks testified in the Briggs vs. Elliott case that challenged school segregation in South Carolina in 1952. That case later became one of five that were combined into the more famous Brown vs. Board of Education two years later.

Dr. Mamie Clark was the director of the Northside Center for Child Development for three decades, and Dr. Kenneth Clark was the first Black president of the American Psychological Association.


Dr. Ruth Winifred Howard was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in psychology

One of the first Black women to earn a Ph.D. in psychology, Dr. Ruth Winifred Howard trained Black nurses and worked with children and youth during her long and exemplary career. Dr. Howard launched the most comprehensive study ever done on triplets, studying more than 200 sets ranging in age from birth to their 70s. For reasons yet unknown, it took more than a decade for that research to be published, in 1946 in the Journal of Psychology and in 1947 in the Journal of Genetic Psychology.

With her husband, Dr. Howard opened a private practice where she worked with children and youth, while working as a psychologist at the McKinley Center for Children. She was also the staff psychologist at the Provident Hospital School of Nursing, training Black nurses, and was a psychologist for the Chicago Board of Health until 1972.


Robert Lee Williams II at Washington University | Photo from the Washington University Archives

Famous for three important books, and for coining the word ‘Ebonics’, Dr. Robert Lee Williams II spent his long and influential career combatting the racist stereotype that Black people were less intelligent than White people.

The word ‘Ebonics’ didn’t exist before 1973, when Dr. Lee Williams II took the word ‘ebony’ and the word ‘phonics’, combined the two, and coined a brand new term for “linguistic and paralinguistic features which on a concentric continuum represent the communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean, and United States slave descendants of African origin.” His 1975 book Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks, traced the roots of Ebonics to Africa, arguing against the prevailing prejudiced opinion that Ebonics was just slang, or bad English.


Dr. Inez Beverly Prosser | Image from the August 1933 edition of the Crisis

Very little is known about Dr. Inez Beverly Prosser, a Texas native who taught in segregated schools in the early 1900s. Her state’s universities were segregated, so she travelled to the University of Cincinnati to obtain her doctorate in 1933, making her the one of the first Black woman with a PhD* in psychology.

Sadly, Dr. Prosser was killed in a car accident a year after earning her PhD, but her dissertation was widely discussed for years afterward. She found that Black students in segregated schools had better mental health and social skills than those in integrated schools – in large part because of the prejudicial attitudes of the white teachers in those integrated schools.

*There is some debate as to who was the first Black woman to obtain a Ph.D. in psychology. Some say it was Inez Beverly Prosser, who received her Ph.D. in 1933 from the University of Cincinnati. Others think it was Ruth Winifred Howard, since they consider a psychology Ph.D. to count only if it comes from a psychology program – she graduated in 1934 with a doctorate in psychology and child development from the University of Minnesota. 


Ms. Hooker was almost 30 when she joined the US Coast Guard, the first African-American woman to do so | Image from Getty Images

Dr. Olivia Hooker was six years old when she lived through the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She went on to become the first Black woman in the US Coast Guard, joining during World War II in February of 1945. Through her GI benefits, Hooker gained a PhD. As a psychologist, Dr. Hooker worked to change the unfair treatment inflicted upon inmates at a New York State women’s correctional facility. In 1963 she went to work at Fordham University as an APA Honours Psychology professor, and was an early director at the Kennedy Child Study Center in New York City.


Dr. E. Kitch Childs, an icon

In 1969, Dr. E. Kitch Childs helped to found the Association for Women in Psychology. She was also a founding member of Chicago’s Gay Liberation Front. In addition to being a leader for women in psychology and the LGBTQ+ community, she also owned her own practice in which she provided therapy to LGBTQ+ folks, people living with HIV/AIDS, and other marginalized members of her community. She offered a sliding-scale model for payment, so that she would not have to turn away people who could not afford therapy but needed it. She practiced feminist therapy, and centered her research and work around the experiences of Black women and feminist theory.


Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, an author and scholar

Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum is the author of the renowned book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria And Other Conversations About Race, one of her many works that focuses on racism and the effect it has on the American education system. She argues that the effects of racism, especially in schools, can have a detrimental effect on students’ racial identity formation and emphasizes the urgent need for continued conversations about race. Beverly Tatum’s tireless work on racism, psychology, and the education system earned her the American Psychological Association Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology in 2014.

“It is important to understand the system of advantage is perpetuated when we do not acknowledge its existence.”
Interim president of Mount Holyoke College 22-23

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, professor, author, scholar

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is an esteemed professor of psychology at Stanford University. She is an expert on the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime and has done extensive research on the topics of implicit bias, criminal justice, and the education system, and her work has provided the evidence needed to educate law enforcement officers in implicit bias training. In 2014, Dr. Eberhardt’s work earned her the famous MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship.


“Psychologists are supposed to know about racial bias and how to prevent it from stratifying the world but if we, the so-called experts, have a problem, then society really has a problem.”
Associate Professor of Psychology, Stanford University

Contemporary Black scholars continue to fight to have their voices heard, and as demonstrated throughout history, a lot of us remain unaware of their important and world-changing contributions. So, why aren’t they talked about? Anti-Blackness, racism, and classism are some of the reasons why their work wasn’t preserved then, and doesn’t get brought up now. What is important, today, then, is for faculty to include more scholarly work done by Black researchers in their syllabus. It is also important for UBC students, especially those from more privileged backgrounds, to point out when Black, African-Canadian voices are absent from the class content. Their work is important, and revolutionary.




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