User:Darien Suria/sandbox

The concept of scientific racism has been present throughout history and often manifested itself in different ways. Historically, psychology has been influenced by other fields, such as anthropology and biology. Beginning with the idea that people could be classified based on race, this quickly gave way to psychological and biological theories regarding a natural hierarchy among the different races; on the very bottom of this hierarchy was Black people and other marginalized people. Entire fields arose from these views, such as phrenology, which was the study of cranial shape and size and their relationship to mental abilities. These studies concluded that Black people's skulls and brains were smaller than those of Westerners. In addition, other scientists like Isidore Saint-Hilaire studied facial structures and concluded that Black people's facial structure were more ape-like. Pseudosciences like these led to the belief that Westerners were physically, mentally, and intellectually superior compared to Black people. Psychology has also adopted many prominent nativist approaches, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, Galton’s theories of hereditary intelligence, Mendel’s theory of inheritance, and Mcdougall’s instincts theory. This led psychology as a discipline to place a lot of emphasis on the idea that both physical and psychological traits are inherited, thereby perpetuating the negative beliefs and stereotypes about Black people. Among these stereotypes, one of the most frequently studied area was intelligence. Psychologists like George Oscar Ferguson and Peterson concluded that Black children had deficits in abstract thinking and were overall less intelligent than White children. Importantly, this approach also takes away the importance of understanding other factors, such as stereotype threat, that could influence intelligence and other psychological traits, which is important in studying Black psychology and psychology in general.

Along the same lines, Black Psychologists like Guthrie argue that the discipline of psychology was also developed from a predominantly White framework. The theories and findings that originate from this framework is then applied to non-Western populations. The issue with this is that because Black psychology stems from a completely different framework, that is from an African philosophy, many of these findings end up creating norms that are inapplicable to Black people. Moreover, psychological research is often done on samples drawn from Westernized populations. Findings from these studies skew generalizations towards these populations, thereby creating norms which only account for 12% of the world's population. Both the White framework and the creation of Western norms tend to pathologize attitudes and behaviors that are not typical to Black people. This pathologization of Black people in turn has negative consequences on their livelihood and wellbeing. Hence, scientific racism motivated many notable Black psychologists, such as Joseph White, Robert Guthrie, and Wade Nobles, who all helped found the Association of Black Psychologists, to explore psychology through different lenses and develop Black psychology as a field.