The Colonial Archive, Stereotypes, and the Practice of Psychological Assessment

Abstract

In this chapter, I wish to argue that the very notion of “racial difference” within psychometric testing norms is problematic and often says more about racial stereotypes and the conditioning of clinicians than it does about the client’s personality or lived experience. What is most neglected in the assessment literature is a more detailed theoretical investigation of diagnostic and clinical bias as it relates to unconscious formulations of racial identities that may be understood “as existing ‘indivisibly between’ the subject and the apparent ‘social objectivity’ of language, symbolic structures, prevailing ideological norms, and political conventions of society” (Hook, 2012, p. 102). Similarly, uses of language, semiotic processes, and discourse analyses are domains that have been greatly undertheorized within the field of psychological assessment and in regard to the written reports of a client’s performance and behavior. What is required in the unpacking of stereotypes and unconscious bias in clinical judgment is what Derek Hook (2005, 2012) calls a “critical psychology of the postcolonial,” which accounts for the embeddedness of racist desires and assessment as a psychopolitical process. Building on the work of scholars such as Spivak (1988), Bulhan (1985), Bhabha (1994), and Fanon (1967), Hook suggests that if newer psychological theories are to be generated regarding the trauma of oppression, they need to include the subversive histories that have implications for political practice. In his article “A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial,” Hook (2005) writes, Confessions without consequences are displacements that sustain inequalities by hiding them in plain sight, where they are left unredressed, unrepaired, and unrequited. (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012, p. 36). What does it cost to let the Western archive go? Or can we put it into service for something else? (Achille Mbembe, lecture at Harvard University, 2016)