Is psychology racist?

As Psychologists, we perhaps like to believe that our work is founded on liberal and progressive values, and is adding to the sum of human happiness. On top of that, we have had numerous initiatives on race, EDI policy documents and all manner of discussions and seminars. But what has all this actually achieved? I believe time's up for the policies and discussions that can effectively push arguments around racism into the long grass. It's time to honestly confront the issues and bring about change.

Racism is perhaps the strongest fault line in our society, and it's very difficult to have a frank discussion about. The question about racism in any discipline or organisation is challenging, and the immediate reaction is to push back. But hear me out before you do that. First, let me clarify what I mean by 'psychology'. I could be referring to the academic structures of the subject; or I could be referring the subject matter, the cannon of psychological knowledge; or I could be referring to the to the practice of psychology. So, to be clear, I am referring to all three, and my answer to the question at the top of the page is a resounding 'yes' for all of them. 

This is not a wind-up piece for The Psychologist to generate clicks. I believe this to be true, and I'll outline what drives me to these conclusions. My position is that our society in the UK is structurally racist and we have a lot of work to do to confront this and make it the haven of freedom and democracy that we sometimes erroneously claim it to be. 

I write this from a position of privilege that includes white privilege: by which I mean a location of structural advantage, a 'standpoint', a place from which White people look at ourselves, at others, and at society, and a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed (Frankenberg, 1993, p.1). Privilege that derives from class, race, gender and other characteristics is rarely acknowledged or challenged by the beneficiaries of that privilege. White people don't and often won't acknowledge the privilege that comes from their whiteness. I suggest that we dare to challenge examples of racism in our own behaviour and that of our colleagues. 

Here, I focus on race and racism while recognising there is a wider context to see this argument in – one which includes class, gender and sexuality. Most significantly for psychology, I think, is the intersection with the concepts of madness which have a long history of being used as a weapon against the poor and the disenfranchised (see Barham, 2023). 

So, here are my best understandings of the issues as they apply to psychology… with the proviso that I am still learning about this, and so welcome comment.

Race and racism

The first thing to consider here is what we understand by the term racism and, indeed, race. For some, racism is a relatively abstract moral and political construct, but for many others it is a daily reality. Political leaders tell us that the UK is a welcoming and friendly society, but visitors don't always see it that way. The United Nations reported that racism in the UK is 'structural, institutional and systemic' (United Nations, 2023).

For brevity let's accept the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct. The next questions are when and why the concept of race developed, and how it impacts us now. The concept of 'race' that is based on place and physical characteristics emerged in the West around the turn of the 19th century. It was invented to 'other' people who were being exploited and subjugated by Europeans. The creation of 'race' provided a rationalisation for the brutal kidnap, transportation, slaughter and enslavement of Black Africans to the Americas between the mid-16th and mid-19th centuries (Curran, 2020).

The very definitions of race and racism are based on racist beliefs. So, when we try to challenge racism we are inevitably drawn into a dialogue that uses the terms and concepts designed by white supremacists. The playing field is already uneven.

Racism in universities

Many people are offended and upset to have their behaviour challenged as being racist, seeing racism as a feature of other people and not themselves. This arbitrary division of the world into racists and non-racists is not helpful. It prevents us reflecting on our own behaviour and masks the behaviours that occur in liberal institutions like universities, who position themselves as anti-racist. These institutions have clear evidence of racism in their student achievement data and also their staff recruitment. Every 20 years or so a new report highlights the problems, there are predictable expressions of shock and horror but no action to bring about change. The chances for a career in academia are dramatically reduced for Black staff compared to their white colleagues (BBC, 2021; Bhopal, 2015).

Data from UK universities show that students from historically marginalised groups are less likely to get good degrees and are less likely to progress on their courses. These students are 13 per cent less likely to be awarded a high degree classification, are less likely to be employed after graduating, and earn significantly less than their White graduating peers. The students from the historically marginalised groups also report racist harassment on campus, isolation and receiving limited support from staff (Jankowski, 2021; TASO, 2023).

Universities commonly refer to the disparities in student outcomes as an achievement gap, but it would be better termed as an ignorance gap (Bell, 2021). The term 'achievement gap' puts the focus on the individual students and looks to explain why they don't do as well as their white co-students. The better question is to look at what the staff and the university structures are doing that holds back the achievement of these students. I know from unpublished data from my own university that these differences in performance do not occur on all courses or in all modules, so it is possible to make changes to remove these barriers to success. The common response is to change reading lists to include a more diverse range of authors and ideas, though, not surprisingly, this does not seem to have affected the ignorance gap (Campbell, 2024).

Challenging colonial influences

'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four)

One of the challenges to colonial influences is to revisit and, commonly, remove the statues and artifacts of the colonialists. Yet consider Cecil Rhodes, the Victorian colonialist whose activities caused untold suffering in southern Africa and systematically plundered the wealth of that region. In 1877 he wrote, 'I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.' Despite all this, Oxford University resists attempts to remove the statue of Rhodes. 

We remove statues and traces of people and events that we now understand to be brutal, oppressive. Imagine a university keeping its statue of Jimmy Saville. What level of outrage would there be? And yet our institutions protect statues for white supremacists. This makes the work of decolonists very difficult: a few smiling faces on the front of a university prospectus is not going to cut it.

Such statues create a climate of acceptance of racist ideas which exists within psychology as well. We ask students to accept without comment the work of psychologists such as Pearson and Spearman, whose support in eugenics made them proponents of white supremacy. Until 2021, the highest award of the British Psychological Society was the Spearman Award; the BPS retired the award with acknowledgment of Spearman's connections to eugenics. The statistical tests named after them were design to show the superiority of white British people over all others. This process of categorising and ranking people is still the main activity of the field of individual differences.

Make no mistake about it, the colonial past of the UK is a horror story. The European colonies enslaved millions, transported them across the world and created conditions that caused unimaginable destruction and death. They developed the techniques for dominating people that we now see as the hallmarks of fascism. Our nation looks back fondly to the Second World War with pride and without any sense of shame, as if this was our finest hour. Much of the war, however, took place outside of Europe and was not defending the country but maintaining the empire. For example, at its height over one million people were fighting under the union jack in Myanmar (then known by its colonial name of Burma). But they were not fighting for democracy, they were fighting against it. They were not fighting against fascism, they were fighting to maintain fascist control over the colonies (Cesaire, 1972), and their natural resources of rubies and teak oil.

It is possible to fill book after book with the many outrages of the colonialists. The enduring problem is that our society (and the societies of other colonial powers) do not face up the historic actions of their governments, and hence do not recognise the enduring suffering that exists even when much of the structure of empire has been dismantled. 

If we reflect on our history as psychologists then one of the key issues for us is to try and understand 'the mentality of a people that could continue for over 300 years to kidnap an estimated 50 million youth and young adults from Africa, transport them across the Atlantic with about half dying unable to withstand the inhumanity of the passage, and enslave them as animals' (Linda James-Myers, 1988).

One of the key ideas of decolonial thinking is that the violence of colonialism was not confined to a period of history but persists today in coloniality which we can define as ways of knowing, power and being, formed during colonial occupation, that persist after the end of colonial rule (Gómez-Ordóñez et al., 2021). But my view is that in a society that basks in moral superiority despite empires and wars that in fact maintained fascist control around the world rather than eliminating it, it is near impossible to have a frank discussion about decolonising our society and decolonising psychology.

Racism in the literature

There exists a sentiment for the most part quite unreasonable against the gradual extinction of an inferior race. (Francis Galton, 1883, cited in Rose et al., 1984, p.30)

The history of race science is well documented and there seems little value in repeating it here (for a review, see Richards, 2012). Let's cut to the chase and acknowledge that there has been a line of research in psychology that has generated and propagated racist ideas for over a century. These ideas have been furthered by a minority of psychologists, but they have been tolerated and hence colluded with by the majority. 

Beyond the realms of race science, mainstream psychology homogenises the people it studies and effectively ignores their individual experiences. One effect of this is to whitewash the data so that the default is about the dominant white communities. This is compounded by psychology's narrow view of humanity that focuses on the behaviour and experience of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and allegedly Democratic) people: Henrich et al., 2010). The behaviour and experience of these WEIRD people have come to be seen as the norms against which everything is judged. One way to challenge this colonial thinking is to assert the value of other ways of being, and de-normalise the WEIRD ways of being.

Jankowski and colleagues (2017) describe how most of our journals are edited by Westerners, written by Westerners and use Westerners as participants. They examined their own teaching, and after coding the ethnicity, nationality and gender of every author of every reading they set from the module handbooks of their psychology course, discovered that of the 215 readings they set, written by 380 authors, 96 per cent were white, 99 per cent were Western and 64 per cent were male. The authors note that their own modules were no better than any other in this regard. Their disarming honesty and willingness to address this is in stark contrast to the general air of defensiveness that many of us display when challenged.

Psychology professions and racism

Psychologists are employed in education, the prison service, the health service and beyond. All of these professions report a low proportion of staff from historically marginalised groups, and difficulties in dealing with issues of race. The people these professionals deal with such as children excluded from schools, people with mental health difficulties and people confined to prisons, disproportionately come from these historically marginalised groups. The issues for the professions are starting to be discussed (Gill, 2020; Fazir-Short, 2020), as are the issues for counselling psychology (Charura & Lago, 2021) and clinical psychology (Memon et al., 2016), but given how long there has been literature on this, the current state of the psychology professions is difficult to understand.

During the 1960s Black people in the USA and the UK were increasingly diagnosed with DSM inspired conditions such as schizophrenia. It is argued that these diagnoses were used to pathologise direct and organised responses to structural racism (Frazer-Carroll, 2023). US psychiatrists Bromberg and Simon went so far as suggest that Malcolm X and the civil rights movement had initiated a wave of schizophrenic symptoms and paranoid 'racial antagonism' in Black Americans (Metzl, 2009).

A quick look at some of the current available data will illustrate how issues of race are still very much in play in our mental health services. For example, data from the UK government shows that Black people in the UK are more likely to experience mental distress and are therefore more likely to encounter mental health services. The 2017 Race Disparity Audit found that Black men are ten times more likely than White men to experience a disorder that is categorised as being psychosis (IRR, 2021). And in the year to March 2020, Black people were more than 4 times as likely as White people to be detained under the Mental Health Act (GOV.UK. 2021). Wherever you look you find the same story of differential diagnosis and differential treatment, and it is always to the detriment of the people from historically marginalised groups.

Time's up!

As I write this, I realise there is nothing new here. Most of this information has been there for all of us to see for years. Hiding in plain sight. The occasional hand-wringing and EDI action plan notwithstanding, there has been very little movement. So here is my challenge and check list:

• If you look at your doctoral students and see a different complexion to your undergraduates (and also a different gender distribution) then there is something about your selection processes that is discriminatory.
• If there are some modules on your courses on which white students do consistently better than students of colour, then your staff and curricula are creating obstacles for students of colour that are discriminatory.
• If you look around your university staffroom and see a very different complexion of faces to that of your students, then something about your recruitment procedures is discriminatory.
• If your university requires students to enter a college by walking under the statue of a white supremacist colonialist, then your university is racist.
• If your professional courses are recruiting a profile of trainees for psychologist posts that does not match the client base for this profession, then you are colluding with discriminatory practice.

There seem to me to be two broad alternatives. One is to commit to changing all recruitment plans and to review all courses with, say, a three-year maximum to achieve substantial and defendable change. The other alternative is to front up and accept the white supremacist narrative, retreat into avoidance and denial and carry on as we are. 

But one thing is for sure in my mind. This has gone beyond committees and fact-finding reports. The problem is staring us in the face. 

• To share your views on the issues raised in this article, email [email protected]. We will be considering the article and the responses it generates for a future print edition (including any reply from British Psychological Society representatives). 

References

Barham, P. (2023). Outrageous Reason. Monmouth: PCCS Books 

BBC (2021a).  Black scientists say UK research is institutionally racist. 

BBC World Service website. The story of Africa. 

Bell, D. (2021). Resuturing being and knowing. In Dutta, U. (Session organizer), The (Im)Possiblities of a Decolonial Project in Higher Education: Praxis of Entanglements and Radical Hope. Panel discussion (virtual) held on November 8, 2021. 

Bhopal, K. (2015). The experiences of black and minority ethnic academics: Multiple identities and career progression. Runnymede Trust. 

BPS Ethics Committee, Challenging Histories. 

Campbell, P.I., (2024). Decolonising the curriculum hasn't closed the gap between Black and white students – here's what might. The Conversation.

Cesaire, A. (1972). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

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United Nations (2023). UK: Discrimination against people of African descent is structural, institutional and systemic, say UN experts.