Exploring racism in psychology through an exploration of the undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum

In this article, I aim to provide a brief overview of the state of systemic racism within psychology and outline the challenges psychology faces, as a discipline that all-too-often serves to reinforce and uphold the racist status quo. I attempt to demonstrate this by exploring racism in the psychology curriculum at undergraduate and postgraduate level, through which we should view the psychology curricula as both a direct reflection of wider dominant, psychological knowledges, and as the knowledge through which future psychologists, and indeed those practicing today, are educated and trained.

My colleagues and I conducted a focus group study with students on undergraduate and postgraduate psychology (BPS-accredited) and psychology-related (British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy; BACP-accredited) courses at a UK university (Gillborn et al., 2021). Through 6 focus groups with 22 students from minoritised ethnic backgrounds, we aimed to uncover the ways in which whiteness is privileged in the curriculum and the ways in which racism appears. Although it is outside the scope of this article to discuss our analysis in detail, there are several important takeaways from this analysis.

The first of these is that racism, in psychology as well as in society, is systemic in nature. To those privileged by the white curriculum, this racism may be regarded as 'subtle' if noticed at all. While mainstream psychology itself tends to view racism as the pathological behaviour of prejudiced individuals (e.g. through dominant Social Psychological theories of prejudice; Tuffin, 2017), this reductionist understanding fails to acknowledge the ways in which racism is woven into the everyday structures and workings of institutions and knowledge; including the psychology curriculum. At once, the psychology curriculum both fails to provide contextualised and thorough understandings of racism while itself operating in racist ways.

The curriculum, and psychological knowledge more broadly, produces and reproduces racism in several ways. Those that our study's participants called attention to were, first, the overwhelming whiteness of the curriculum. While apparently 'subtle' to some, participants highlighted how the curriculum presents psychological theories as globally generalisable while clearly being based upon white, Western and, often, middle-class conceptualisations of health and behaviour. For example, one Black African participant highlighted how the theories of child development she learned were not at all reflective of the 'beliefs and ways of bringing up children' that she recognised from her own culture, but that these White knowledges were presented as the right knowledges without any acknowledgement that these theories have arisen from very specific contexts. In contrast, studies focusing on families in the Global South are frequently highlighted as 'ungeneralisable' if included in the curriculum at all.

Our psychological knowledge is based overwhelmingly on white, middle-class Westerners, yet presumed to represent 'the scientific study of the mind and how it dictates and influences our behaviour' (BPS, n.d.) across humanity. Paired with this normalised absence of minoritised groups is a pathologised presence when the curriculum does include them (Phoenix, 1987). Participants in the study highlighted, for example, how the Global South was represented as extreme and brutish in comparison to the benevolent and rational West (Ali-Faisal, 2020).

This curriculum fails to support students in developing an understanding of the nature of racism and inequality that they will undoubtably encounter in work informed by psychology. Our participants highlight how, when psychology curricula do include modules and content related to inequality, these are almost always provided as 'option modules'; providing such content as an option, to be chosen by those who already have an interest, constructs this knowledge as unimportant in developing effective practitioners (Hobson & Whigham, 2018) and, furthermore, positions the white curriculum as the only fundamentally necessary aspect of a psychological education.

This white and racist psychological curriculum is not only a problem in the UK or in the West more generally. Makkawi (2015, p. 417) highlights, for example, how "Psychology was introduced to the Arab World through Egypt by colonial powers of the time and since then Arab universities have been uncritically importing, reproducing, and teaching Western mainstream psychology".

Psychology's whiteness is, therefore, a global problem. At best, it provides a reductionist and limited understanding of the nature of racism while ignoring historical and contemporary contexts of power, providing oppressed groups and those dedicated to social justice with few tools to challenge systemic inequalities. At worst, it actively reproduces racism, privileging whiteness as the 'right' way of doing and knowing, and pathologising those deemed to not fit these standards.

Dr Sarah Gillborn is a critical psychologist in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham. Sarah's research focuses on analyses of discourse, voice, and knowledge construction to understand how social issues are officially constructed and re/negotiated by those implicated by them. In particular, Sarah's work takes a critical look at the role of psychology as a discipline in reproducing and challenging racism through research, knowledge, and practice.