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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 9, No. 3

Publication Date: March 25, 2022

DOI:10.14738/assrj.93.12035. Steinmetz, C. H. D. (2022). Psychology of Coloured People: A Critical Note to the Dominance of Euro-American-Oriented Psychology

over the Psychology of Non-Western Countries. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 9(3). 179-198.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

Psychology of Coloured People: A Critical Note to the Dominance

of Euro-American-Oriented Psychology over the Psychology of

Non-Western Countries

Carl H. D. Steinmetz

Managing director of Expats & Immigrants B.V.

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

Whether psychology is universally or regionally determined is examined in this

article. Implicitly, this question is about the general validity of statements of

psychological research, theories and practices (such as testing, therapy,

recruitment, etc.). If psychology is culturally and regionally rooted, statements

based on psychological research, theory and practice are not universally valid.

Moreover, once it is established that psychology is cultural and regional in nature,

the underlying question arises: is there a psychology of coloured and white people?

The findings of this article are based on a reasoned literature review. First of all, the

origins of Western psychology are in broad terms mapped out. In the period

between and after the first and second European and Asian World Wars, American

and European psychologists made psychology big and important. Psychology had

the wind in its sails because the American defence put an immense amount of

money into test, social and clinical psychology. This was necessary to be able to

select soldiers, maintain an army and take care of veterans. The Americans then

used this Psychology to colonise the world (especially the non-Western world).

With that, the original psychology from the non-Western world has gone into the

'dustbin'. Only now the non-Western world is rediscovering that their millennia-old

psychology needs to be taken out of the ‘dustbin’. That ancient non-Western

psychology rooted in philosophy is mapped out in this article for China, India and

Africa. The tentative conclusion is that psychology is regionally and culturally

determined. We could call this psychology holistic psychology. After all, we humans

represent and are humanity as a whole, our ancestors, born and unborn children,

gods and spirits, mother earth (fauna and flora) and the cosmos. In this psychology

there is also room for spirituality and consciousness. In fact, there is a psychology

of and for people of colour anywhere in the world. It is not clear whether this also

applies to the research methods.

Keywords: universal psychology, regional psychology, psychology of people of colour,

western dominance, China, India, Africa, Ubuntu, and holism.

INTRODUCTION

The proposition that psychology is universal is open to question. The core of the discussion

runs along many lines. The first line is the observation that psychological knowledge, insights,

research and practices are regional in nature, thus rejecting the claim that psychology is

universal. The opposite idea is that this psychology is 'colour-blind', i.e. it assumes that it applies

to all people everywhere. A painful example is the psychiatric diagnostic manual DSM-5 that

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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 9, Issue 3, March-2022

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

Americans and Europeans have imposed on the world as universally valid. Opponents call this

diagnostic manual a colonisation tool with which the United States and Europe want to enforce

their view of unhealthiness on the rest of the world.

“Racial and linguistic homogeneity has serious consequences for the discipline. Among other

concerns, as a result of colonial and apartheid psychology, the majority of South Africans cannot

access therapy in their home language, which could be seen as a human rights issue, since the

medium of therapy is language and Europe are trying to colonise the world, even now in the

twenty-first century (Ratele, et al., 2018).”

Between regional and universal psychology, there is also a midway. Colour-blind/ universal

psychology shows that it does not close its eyes to injustice in society. Fortunately, psychology

itself (especially the American APA) expresses its concern about racism of one group of people

against another and of one individual against another. The APA (2021) does so in an

amendment: ‘APA Resolution on Harnessing Psychology to Combat Racism: Adopting a Uniform

Definition and Understanding.’ While this may be regarded as a huge moral step forward, it

should not be concluded that psychology has overnight rid itself of colour-blind scientific views

and practices:

“WHEREAS, the field of psychology has historically contributed to the belief in human hierarchy

through allowing—or not challenging—racial bias throughout the discipline and profession,

such as in peer review, publishing, research motivated by racism, racial disparities in

psychological research, and the valuation of certain types of research), as well as in Eurocentric

models of clinical practice, including psychological assessment, while largely ignoring the

contributions of, and adversities facing, BIPOC (APA, 2019; Roberts et al., 2020) (APA, 2021, p.

2);”

Examples of a midway are Racism-Related Stress (RRS): ‘Navigating Coping From Racism- Related Stress Throughout the Lifespan of Black Americans1 (2020) and COVID-19 Anti-Asian

Racism: A Tripartite Model of Collective Psychosocial Resilience (2021).

The idea behind the debate on the first claim (that psychology is universal) is that psychology

cannot be seen separately from the context in which people live. This psychology is therefore

also called cultural psychology.

“Cultural psychology is an interdisciplinary field that unites psychologists, anthropologists,

linguists, and philosophers for a common pursuit: the study of how cultural meanings,

practices, and institutions influence and reflect individual human psychologies. It is not a

freestanding area within psychology, and most cultural psychologists would like to keep it that

way. Rather than cordoning it off as its own subfield, cultural psychologists want to benefit from

the breadth of expertise of its sundry practitioners, and to have a broader impact on all areas

within psychology and across the social sciences (Snibbe, 2003).

Mainstream psychology is really cultural psychology, dealing with a very particular cultural

context,” said social psychologist Virginia Kwan, Princeton University. That particular cultural

1 In this article, Black American refers to individuals from the African diaspora (e.g., African American, continental

African, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latinx) residing in a U.S. context.

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Steinmetz, C. H. D. (2022). Psychology of Coloured People: A Critical Note to the Dominance of Euro-American-Oriented Psychology over the

Psychology of Non-Western Countries. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 9(3). 179-198.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.93.12035

context is the middle-class, college-educated, predominantly Protestant European-American

milieu from which the vast majority of psychological researchers and research participants

hail.”

A distressing observation is that psychological theories have been and are being developed

primarily by old white men whose research population consists mainly of white students. This

challenges the generalisability of psychological theories to other countries, continents and

peoples on earth outside the Euro-American continents. Furthermore, there is no structural

place in psychology for the consequences of (neo)colonisation and slavery when developing

theories, doing research and conducting psychological reflection. In other words, psychology

has no structural place for the psychological and physical consequences of the user mentality

of mainly westerners of services, bodies and products of non-western peoples anywhere in the

world. These consequences affect victims, perpetrators and witnesses (Steinmetz, 2021). This

creates the risk of alienating psychology from the institutional abuse of people of colour and

their bodies, biasing its research, theorising and treatment practice.

This article discusses the proposition that psychology is universal. This is done on the basis of

the (scientific) social science literature. First, we will start with the Western grandfathers of

psychology. This will show that there was hardly any focus other than the Western world in

developing the main psychological theories. Secondly, attention will be paid to the 'known'

psychological ancient old theories of non-Western psychology, in particular China, India and

Africa. Between the lines, the criticism of "white" mainstream Western psychology by

psychologists of colour is discussed.

HISTORY OF WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology (Pickren et al. 2010) is primarily known as a European and later North-American

(neo) colonial centric Western science where one or more scientists study one or more

individuals or one or more groups of people. Many scholars, such as Albert Einstein and Ingrid

Franck, left Germany in early 1933 after the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor

(the scientific exodus from Nazi Germany2).

“As the threat of Nazism spread throughout Europe, Jews were faced with a difficult decision,

whether to leave their homeland or remain in the face of oppression. Many scientists made the

decision to leave. In fact, between 1930 and 1941, twelve Nobel prize winning scientists came

to the United States because of the threat of Nazi Germany. Seven of these twelve Nobelists

were Jewish. These Jewish scientists included physicists Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, James

Franck, and Eugene Wigner, and biologists Otto Loewi, Otto Meyerhof, and Otto Stern. The other

five non-Jewish Nobelists were the physicists Enrico Fermi, Wolfgang Pauli, and Viktor Hess,

chemist Peter Debye, and biologist C.P. Henrik Dam. Of this group of immigrant Nobelists, Pauli,

Stern, Dam, and Wigner would win their prizes after coming to the United States. Upon arriving

in the United States, the majority of the scientists worked on the east coast, at universities such

as Princeton, New York University, Cornell, Fordham, Carnegie Institute of Technology, and the

University of Pennsylvania (Schlessinger, 1996). Bohr, who had been forced to flee Denmark,

Pauli, and Dam spent the war years in the United States but left America and conducted their

2 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20180926a/full/