#American Psychologcal Association

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Note: the pre-print version has some minor differences. I haven't been able to get hold of the full published version.

If you feel like you just haven't seen enough stupid buzzwords crammed together into the most vacuous ramble you've ever encountered, "No More Building Resiliency" is the paper for you.

APA’s refusal to acknowledge white supremacy in current events is a display of white supremacy that advances its centuries-long arc of white supremacy. Positioning itself as the powerful savior, the magnanimous arbiter of scientific healing, while deleting its white supremacist origin story is yet another manifestation of its whiteness. APA’s statements provide a window into the profession’s history of racism and white supremacy, while capturing its active efforts to refuse and deny it. This paper challenges this refusal, redirecting collective attention back to the past to delineate the patterns shaping our unfolding present. Organized psychology is the foundation for implementing antiracist psychological practices. However, these practices—whether they are APA statements, clinical tools, or research protocols—cannot be reimagined as antiracist until the whiteness overpowering them is revealed. This process requires interrogating contemporary practices and situating them in the histories and systems of oppression that gave rise to them.

“No More Building Resiliency” takes aim at celebrated psychological frameworks that uphold whiteness, thereby bending the moral arc of the universe towards injustice. Encouraging resilience among the nonwhite, marginalized people assaulted by whiteness and its intersecting systems of oppression, rather than condemning the sources causing harm, is an injustice. American psychology’s narrow view and orientation to individual-level change, which renders itself ineffective at best (e.g., Price et al., 2021), is harmful in more subtle ways (Chen et al., 2021; Fadus et al., 2019). Pathologizing minoritized children for attachment deficiencies theorized by white psychologists while sidestepping the violent family separation forced by the legacies of slavery and colonization is another (Causadias et al., 2021; Coard, 2021).  Detouring away from oppressive legacies is the first, most important step in an antiracist journey. However, this sharp turn cannot transpire until American psychology’s sordid history is exposed and its contemporary threads are unraveled (Legha et al. 2022). This antiracist approach to psychological practice, therefore, offers seven historical themes illuminating the whiteness engulfing commonplace psychological practices. This historically oriented approach rejects seeking reductive answers through natural processes born from colonial social order (APA Div 45 Warrior’s Path Presidential Task Force [Warrior’s Path], 2020). There are no boxes to check or competencies to master, as is often the norm for psychological practice. Anchored by CRT, abolition, and decolonization, it, instead, inspires asking better questions that lack immediate answers. Each historical theme, therefore, begins with a question prompt to implicate clinicians in remaking psychology’s white supremacist history into an antiracist future. This prompt also positions the millions of clients receiving psychological services each year to hold their providers accountable by interrogating their clinicians’ practices. Everyone owns the past, present, and future of American psychology. By transparently exposing the past and present manifestations of oppression, this antiracist future becomes closer to being within reach.

There's literally no statistics, no evidence, no data, nothing to actually support the insane ramble of this paper. It's an unhinged mess working overtime to try to connect a dozen different events from the distant past and more recent events together into a single unified conspiracy, with the American Psychological Association at the center of it, based on literally nothing.

White saviorism is the white supremacist assault, thinly veiled by the language of “strengths-based,” “trauma-informed,” and playful acronyms suggesting “we got you.” Saving people from harm rather than eradicating the harm is the strategy to cover up and sustain the harm.

This complete disregard for evidence is thoroughly unsurprising when you encounter passages like the following:

Thus, objectivity, much like race, reveals itself to be a socially constructed weapon leveraged by (white) people in power to advance their (racist) contentions by claiming they are numerical and, therefore, indisputable.

and

The lesson is clear: measurement does not imply truth. “[N]umbers are interpretive, [embodying] theoretical assumptions about what should be counted, how one should understand material reality, and how quantification contributes to systematic knowledge about the world” (Poovey, 1998, p. 12). Data–a manifestation of power, not a construct free of it–demands interrogating what is being measured and what for, who is doing the measuring and to whom are they doing it, and what (personal) agenda they are advancing and what truths they are trying to obscure.

The tweet wasn't kidding when they described it as "Qanon-grade." It's paranoid, presuppositional and basis much of its claims on things that haven't been said or done.

But this is now published, and people can, and have, cited it. So now this deranged screed is "knowledge."

Locating health and pathology within individual psyches and bodies represents an active and deliberate erasure of oppressive histories and racist structures.

So, treating psychology as psychology is wrong, because it doesn't do anything to completely unmake and remake society.

American psychology needs a complete redo.

They call instead to reject everything we know about human psychology and advocate instead for a "historically oriented approach" (i.e. blame everything about today on people who are long dead, and events that nobody alive experienced) in which...

There are no boxes to check or competencies to master, as is often the norm for psychological practice.

That is, put activists in charge, rather than qualified, competent therapists.

The crux of the paper is really embodied in the title. Don't teach black people to be resilient, don't encourage them to build an internal locus of control, that they are largely in control of their own lives. Because when you want to disparage and impugn anything that works against you and your politics, just concoct some mental gymnastics to associate it with "white supremacy" and then say "George Floyd," "whiteness" and "slavery" a lot.

Resiliency, another rigged discourse, suggests that minoritized people have–or should have–a unique ability to live with and thrive in the face of oppression as a sign of wellbeing, rather than a violence they have no choice but to suffer (Wingo et al., 2010). It harkens back to theories of “racial resistance” contending Black bodies, including children’s, were stronger in order to justify their enslavement.

This is eerily similar to Xianity, as exemplified by this quote from a devout Xian pastor.

"Satan doesn’t whisper, 'Believe in me.' He whispers, 'Believe in yourself.'" -- Matt Smethurst

Predators benefit by encouraging people to be vulnerable and fragile, and denigrating anything that would get in the way of them leveraging that helplessness for their own purposes.

This paper wants black people to feel helpless and victimized, because happy people who feel in control of their lives are far less likely to engage in the uprising and revolution the scholars activists are looking to instigate. Marx came to the same conclusion, by the way.