Liberating South African Psychology: The Legacy of Racism and the Pursuit of Representative Knowledge Production

Abstract

The mobilization of black voices and hands towards a more equitable production of psychological knowledge at the tipping point of South African history is paving the way for a more critical psychology, a space in which the discipline is increasingly being compelled to acknowledge its erstwhile complicity with racism and apartheid, as well as reflect on its potential to anchor a psychology of liberation. It is through such authorship initiatives that South African psychology is now fashioned by South African rather than white hands, suggesting that the systematic barriers to full participation in the knowledge economy can be collectively engaged and ultimately overcome. However, as recent trends in the discipline in reclaiming various "race-ist" constructs (such as ethnicity, as a new and covert marker for "race") and methodologies for patently conservative or regressive ends indicate, a psychology of liberation will inevitably remain merely an ideal in contexts of institutionalized inequality. So, rather than harnessing a psychology of liberation toward any Utopian vision, our South African example demands that we cast it as an ideological platform from which oppression in its inevitable multiplicities should be perpetually engaged. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (chapter)